It Was A ‘Vaccine Strategy’ From The Start
Ideological zealots wanted jabs in arms
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | March 11, 2023
Our recent “Null Hypothesis” article postulates and evidences a succinct summary of the happenings of the last three years: “The hypothesis that will likely stand the test of time goes like this: a nasty — if not particularly unusual — respiratory disease season was turned into a catastrophe by human misadventure, and this catastrophe was compounded by efforts to save face and justify the unjustifiable”.
In answering the question ‘what happened’, we did not attempt to tackle the obvious follow-up question (apart from a brief discussion about social contagion): ‘why did it happen’?
The sceptical community – living up to its decentralised worldview – is not short of opinions and theories, robustly debated. These are too numerous to cover in detail in this short piece: it suffices to say that they cover a wide spectrum ranging from calamitous ineptitude (and innumeracy) of politicians and civil servants, deceitful and underhand sales & marketing by nefarious global corporations, efforts by the elite to enrich themselves by impoverishing the middle classes and the digital enslavement of the masses, through to some more esoteric beliefs covering depopulation agendas, eugenics and long-in-the-planning Satanic plots… the list just goes on and on.
As many of the most ardent supporters of both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions (PIs and NPIs) begin to wake up to the collateral damage they helped bring about, it is instructive to stand back and observe tried-and-tested Biblical precedent being re-enacted. Few are not enjoying seeing the pantomime villain Matt Hancock being hoist by his own self-promoting petard via the Oakeshott WhatsApp trove. After all, who does not take some satisfaction from the fall of a petty tyrant? But much like the goat that gets bestowed with the sins of the community in Leviticus (“the goat will carry on itself all their iniquities” ) before being cast out into the wilderness (thus avoiding a full and frank ‘lessons learned’ exercise), the demonisation of this preening ’cock (or monkey) does not necessarily get us much further in terms of identifying whodunnit — who was the organ grinder? After all, a self-promoting chancer whose self-confessed epidemiological education is based on a studious viewing of the film ‘Contagion’ is demonstrably not an evil Blofeld mastermind. Indeed, some sceptics have attempted to use the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files to scotch any discussion of conspiracy and underscore their belief that the disastrous events of 2020-2022 were ‘merely’ a cock-up.
But that simplistic take assumes that the former Secretary of State for Health was more than just a bumbling low-grade chaos agent intent on filling his boots via fast-track procurement channels. Loathsome though he might be, Hancock and his cronies are a symptom – not a cause – of the pit we find ourselves in. Why did he – and the Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson – get themselves into such a pickle such that they were not able to navigate a more rational – and less damaging – course through the crisis?
The answer is probably to be found somewhere within what one might term the ‘pandemic preparedness industry’ as outlined a few months ago in the Daily Sceptic :
“The response to the COVID-19 pandemic represented the triumph of a pseudo-scientific biosecurity agenda that emerged in 2005 and has been pushed ever since by a well-organised, well-funded and well-embedded network of ideologues. These fanatics promote and perpetuate the ideas underpinning the draconian new approach by publishing them in leading journals, planting them in public policy and law, pushing them in the media and smearing those who dissent, however eminent or well-qualified.
This avenue of investigation is, we believe, more likely to lead to the source of our misadventure than attempting to rationalise ‘scorched earth’ attempts at containment, suppression and eradication of a killer virus. There was only ever a warped logic to these actions, unless – one way or the other (perhaps for the ‘greater good’ or simply for old-fashioned crony capitalist ends) – you wanted to create a favourable backdrop for a new set of medical interventions that might otherwise have met with limited take-up or even downright opposition. CMO Chris Whitty advised government ministers in February 2020 (!) that covid was not deadly enough to justify fast-tracking vaccines. Put another way, earth could not have been scorched in this way if seasonal respiratory disease had not been given a name such that scariants could be ‘deployed’ to ‘frighten the pants off’ the general populace.
Whether the driving force behind these fanatics is saintly goodwill, pure greed, corruption – or even a Luciferian conspiracy for that matter – is beside the point: what is essential to understand is how a nasty seasonal respiratory disease season was weaponised to drive one of the greatest policy failures of all time. There does not necessarily need to be a single cartoon villain masterminding events to avoid multiple parties conspiring (“breathing together”) to create a great evil.
With this backdrop one does not even need to ferret around in the weeds to find out more. Last summer’s detailed POLITICO/WELT Special Report sheds plentiful quanta of light on the matter:
Four [supra-national] health organizations, working closely together, spent almost $10 billion on responding to Covid across the world. But they lacked the scrutiny of governments… While nations were still debating the seriousness of the pandemic, the groups identified potential vaccine makers and targeted investments in the development of tests, treatments and shots.
The four organizations had worked together in the past, and three of them shared a common history. The largest and most powerful was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in the world. Then there was Gavi, the global vaccine organization that Gates helped to found to inoculate people in low-income nations, and the Wellcome Trust, a British research foundation with a multibillion dollar endowment that had worked with the Gates Foundation in previous years. Finally, there was the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, the international vaccine research and development group that Gates and Wellcome both helped to create in 2017.
… The World Health Organisation (WHO) was crucial to the groups’ rise to power. All had longstanding ties to the global health body. The boards of both CEPI and Gavi have a specially designated WHO representative. There is also a revolving door between employment in the groups and work for the WHO: Former WHO employees now work at the Gates Foundation and CEPI; some, such as Chris Wolff, the deputy director of country partnerships at the Gates Foundation, occupy important positions. Much of the groups’ clout with the WHO stems simply from money.
… “They’re funded by their own capabilities and or endowments and trusts. But when they step into multilateral affairs, then who keeps watch over them?” a former senior U.S. official said. “I don’t know the answer to that. That’s quite provocative”.
Consider this small early 2020 cameo featuring senior executives from one of these four organisations:
“When it first became clear that this disease was appearing, Richard [Hatchett] and I sat down and said, we know what happened with the last swine flu pandemic, where wealthy countries bought up all the doses [of Pandemrix] that were … available for the developing world, we have to try to do something different about that…”.
Most normal people draw entirely different conclusions from the swine flu saga, not least the absolutely devastating tale of Pandemrix, a giant swindle involving misuse of taxpayer funds to purchase these doses in the first place, the substantial human damage that they then caused, a subsequent cover-up and then further cost to the taxpayer compensating those affected.
Contrast this with CEPI’s ‘mission’: “Vaccines are one of our most powerful tools in the fight to outsmart epidemics. The development of vaccines can help save lives, protect societies and restabilise economies”.
There you have it: the ‘saviour vaccine’, a sacred cow extolled with messianic zeal. It seems that one of the world’s greatest policy failures happens to neatly coincide with the stated aims of the Fantabulous Four. Food for thought given that there is no example of a vaccine ever defeating a sudden onset viral epidemic, let alone a ‘pandemic’ (there is also the question of whether viral pandemics are in any way even a hypothetical threat to modern societies — unless, of course, one incorrectly pins the blame for iatrogenic collateral damage on said virus).
Following the money, therefore, it is not that much of a surprise what came next: while — as pointed out above — “nations were still debating the seriousness of the pandemic” (i.e. correctly monitoring the possibility of a slightly-more-serious-than-usual respiratory disease season), the Fantabulous Four were busy setting the scene with targeted investments to create fertile ground to fulfil their aims. Consider then:
- Who might have benefitted from a social media campaign showing those faked ‘deaths in the street’ in China?
- Who might have considered funding a social media ‘bot army’ to promote lockdowns, interventions that as per Neil Ferguson’s ‘seminal’ fear-mongering 16 March 2020 paper could only conceivably make any sort of logical sense if they were followed in short order by a ‘saviour vaccine’, as explicitly stated by Ferguson and co-authors in that paper (“these policies will need to be maintained until large stocks of vaccine are available” )?
- Who might have benefitted from squashing an early ‘lab leak’ theory that might have implicated some of the Fantabulous Four and the justification for a fast-track vaccine roll-out?
- Conversely, once said roll-out had been successfully funded and procured at eye-watering expense, who might have benefitted from re-floating the ‘lab leak’ theory to help justify future ‘pandemic preparedness’?
- Who might benefit from tightly controlling media output and censorship (after all, “true content … might promote vaccine hesitancy”)? Who was writing this script?
- WHO might wish to publish — in 2022 — detailed recommendations about how those in authority should respond to a ‘vaccine crisis’ (defined as any occurrence that ‘will most likely or has already eroded public trust in vaccines … and may create uncertainty’)?
- Why only the vaccine ‘pillar’ of the WHO’s wish list, the ACT-A (Access to Covid Tools Accelerator), received the funding that was sought? And why did all others on that ACT-A list — most notably cheap therapeutics that might have saved many lives (while of course competing with lucrative vaccines) — remain well short of their funding targets?
This congruency of the categorical trinity — means, motive and opportunity — is difficult to explain away. It is true that much that happened from March 2020 was anarchic, uncontrolled, panicked and unscripted. But there was method to the madness, an ultimate aim to the chaos, namely to make way for a ‘saviour vaccine’ that would only be accepted if the intended recipients had had ‘the pants frightened off them’, i.e. were sufficiently afraid of the alternatives to risk such an unproven medical intervention.
It may conceivably be that many people involved in the Fantabulous Four believe that this collective action was necessary. But collective action – however well meaning – that is dictated by a group and imposed on everyone else is tyranny, pure and simple. It gets worse if authorities are sufficiently captured by this tyranny such that they deploy subversive psychological weaponry on their citizens and suppress any dissent.
These are grave misdeeds that led to great harm, both in terms of bad outcomes and collateral damage from unnecessary non-pharmaceutical interventions, but also from the utterly unnecessary coercion used to foist pharmaceutical interventions on those that did not need them.
Even if we presuppose that there are no evil Blofeld-types standing behind all of this, it is beyond doubt that a fanatical ideology has inspired an evil tyranny. As per the Daily Sceptic :
“This ideology is the enemy, and seeing it for what it is is the first step to defeating it”.
This process has begun.
Bill Passed by House and Senate to Declassify COVID Origins Documents May Be Attempt to ‘Frame’ China
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 13, 2023
Lawmakers and media misrepresented a bill requiring the declassification of documents related to the origins of COVID-19, according to several experts who warned that contrary to what the public was told, the legislation limits the types of documents the government must declassify — raising questions about the bill’s real intent.
According to the sponsors of the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 — which sailed through the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives and is awaiting President Biden’s signature — the bill requires the government to declassify all documents pertaining to COVID-19.
But experts interviewed by The Defender said the bill requires the declassification only of documents related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China — the epicenter of the “lab leak theory.”
They suggested the limitations may be intended to reduce the culpability of U.S. and private actors in the potential leak of — or development of — COVID-19, by placing full blame on China and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Bill’s backers made ‘false claims’
Independent journalist Sam Husseini said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the Senate’s co-sponsor of the COVID-19 Origin Act, made “claims about the bill which are false.”
Hawley, on March 1, tweeted:
Speaking to Fox News March 2, Hawley made similar claims, saying, “My bill … will declassify all of the information the federal government has on COVID origins.”
Hawley later followed up his statements with a letter addressed to Chinese President Xi Jinping, informing him of the bill’s passage. This prompted a response from the Chinese government, according to The Gateway Pundit.
Another of the bill’s Senate co-sponsors, Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), said in a statement:
“The American people deserve transparency, free from censorship or spin. It’s time to declassify everything we know about COVID’s origins and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, now.”
Braun also tweeted:
Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, told the House:
“The American public deserves answers to every aspect of COVID-19 pandemic including how this virus was created, and specifically whether it was a natural occurrence or was the result of a lab related event.”
Statements like these led media outlets, including The Defender, to report that if passed, the will would trigger the release of all documents — not just those related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Bill ‘dubiously named’
On his blog, Husseini said the COVID-19 Origin Act is “dubiously named” and instructs Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines only to:
“Declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), including (A) activities performed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology with or on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army [of China].”
“This means that information not related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology is not being requested and would almost certainly therefore remain classified,” Husseini wrote.
The bill also states:
“There is reason to believe the COVID-19 pandemic may have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology …
“… the Director of National Intelligence should declassify and make available to the public as much information as possible about the origin of COVID-19 so the United States and like-minded countries can —
“(A) identify the origin of COVID-19 as expeditiously as possible, and
“(B) use that information to take all appropriate measures to prevent a similar pandemic from occurring again.”
The bill requires Haines to turn over the declassified evidence “no later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act” and to submit to Congress an unclassified report containing all the documents requested in the bill, with “only such redactions as the Director determines necessary to protect sources and methods.”
Husseini noted that parts of the bill are unusually specific, focusing “on one strain of alleged evidence” by calling for Haines to turn over classified documents pertaining to “researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in autumn 2019.”
“Now, that could be very important,” Husseini wrote. “But why is this legislation limiting disclosures?”
A ‘classic Nixonian limited hangout’?
Husseini suggested some members of Congress may not have been fully aware that the bill they were voting for does not appear to, in fact, fully declassify all documents related to the origins of COVID-19.
“I have no idea if members of Congress have actually read the legislation and realize how limited it is,” wrote Husseini, who, in another post, called Hawley’s public rhetoric regarding the bill “false and misleading.”
Husseini told The Defender the bill may be acting as a “limited hangout” with the purpose of acknowledging the “lab leak theory” on the one hand, but via legislation that “makes us accept half of the truth.”
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender, “I’m afraid this [bill] is going to be a classic Nixonian limited hangout” that “does not call for the declassification of all those sources [that] should be declassified and/or released.”
Boyle said any information that is declassified “is going to be helpful,” but that the bill’s provision allowing redactions raises concern.
“Who knows what Avril Haines is going to knock out of this report,” he said.
Husseini noted that the bill also makes no provisions for providing information that several groups, including U.S. Right to Know and some media organizations, have requested — but not yet received — via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) submissions. Husseini said this information “is not classified but is being withheld.”
Husseini cited Gary Ruskin, executive director and co-founder of U.S. Right to Know, who said:
“Much of the federal government’s information related to the origins of Covid-19 is not classified, or likely not classified. We just haven’t been able to access much of it yet via FOIA/FOIA litigation.
“The NIH’s [National Institutes of Health] conduct in stonewalling FOIAs is especially outrageous. It’s time for the Biden administration to tell NIH to comply with the FOIA.”
At a March 9 U.S. Department of State press conference, Ned Price, the agency’s spokesperson, appeared to stonewall Husseini when he asked why the government hasn’t responded to U.S. Right to Know’s FOIA requests related to government funding of bioweapons agents’ discovery research, including the funding of such research in China.
“We can respond in writing on a question that specific,” Price replied. When further pressed by Husseini, Price said, “I would ask that you be respectful of your colleagues.”
An attempt to blame the virus exclusively on China?
There has been a flurry of news reports in recent weeks originating from various branches of the U.S. government indicating broader acceptance of the “lab leak theory.”
The U.S. Department of Energy said it now believes COVID-19 most likely emerged from the Wuhan lab — a position subsequently adopted publicly by FBI Director Christopher Wray.
On March 8, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic heard the testimony of experts who also accepted the “lab leak theory.”
“All this — the recent hearings, the Hawley legislation, the WSJ piece — seem part of a coordinated effort on the part of the ‘intelligence community’ to own the pandemic story and use it for their purposes,” Husseini wrote.
Boyle shared similar concerns with The Defender :
“I am concerned that this [bill] is only going to get a part of the truth. Certainly not the full truth of what really happened here with COVID-19, which we need to get at.
“My concern is that all that’s going to get out of this report … will implicate the Wuhan BSL4 [biosafety level 4 lab] in COVID-19. Well, that’s fine with me. But what about the American involvement here?
“And this was funded by Tony Fauci and Francis Collins at NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] and NIH. Those should be in this legislation too, if we really wanted to get to the bottom of what happened here.”
Boyle and Husseini told The Defender there are numerous government and private entities whose classified documents should be declassified.
Boyle said these include the University of North Carolina, the National Center for Toxicological Research, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School, the U.S. Agency for International Development, EcoHealth Alliance and the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick.
Husseini noted that state governments and private institutions also are likely to possess important information that the COVID-19 Origin Act does not cover. These include Scripps Research, Tulane University and the Wellcome Trust.”
The Wellcome Trust is headed by Jeremy Farrar, now chief scientist for the World Health Organization. “Farrar played a central role in disseminating the propaganda line that COVID could not have lab origins in early 2020,” Husseini said.
U.S. Right to Know sued the University of North Carolina, which is publicly owned, after it failed to respond to the watchdog group’s FOIA requests.
Husseini said the COVID-19 Origin Act “doesn’t even instruct the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] to declassify what it knows about other Chinese government institutions like the Chinese CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].”
Husseini told The Defender :
“Since [Fauci] retired, the system has seemingly skillfully tried to put the deranged stance of the last three years into the rearview mirror hoping people will forget the massive propaganda.”
Boyle told The Defender that “from this legislation, it does appear they’re trying to pin it all on China.”
Husseini, noting that “China may well have major culpability,” said this is not the same as full or exclusive culpability, which is what the U.S. government may now be attempting to establish.
Husseini wrote that “a general anti-China agenda, has taken primacy and is part of a dynamic which ‘ultimately lets’ U.S. institutions and ‘U.S. biowarfare off the hook.’”
He told The Defender :
“There are two pillars of the U.S. establishment here — one wants to polarize at some level with China and the other wants to ensure the U.S. government continues its discovery of bioweapons agents.
“For the establishment to be maintained, both those strains need to be maintained.”
According to Husseini, this may explain why the bill passed both houses with seemingly little debate. It passed the Senate with “unanimous consent,” and subsequently passed the House in a unanimous vote.
Husseini noted that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a member of the House Rules Committee, even put forth a rule “to ensure passage of Hawley’s bill.”
Husseini said Biden, who hasn’t yet said if he will sign the bill, has a few options he may be considering, telling The Defender :
“I see no sign of actual opposition from the Biden administration and I suspect this is all being done in coordination with the director of National Intelligence, as were the reports in the Wall Street Journal that drove this narrative.
“It’s possible Biden wants to appear reluctant on this and I suppose Biden could veto it and get an override so he could pose as being conciliatory to the Chinese or the like.”
Husseini said that “with the collapse of the completely fictional Daszak narrative in the late Spring and Summer of 2021 … a backup narrative has been put forward, especially through the Wall Street Journal,” whose report on the Department of Energy pivoting toward the “lab leak theory” was co-written by Michael Gordon, “who with Judy Miller perpetrated the Iraq weapons of mass destruction fraud on the U.S. public.”
He also blamed wide swaths of the independent media, particularly left-leaning outlets, for going along with establishment efforts to discredit the theory that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“Much of ‘the Left’ has basically done everything to kill lab origin — and effectively made it a right-wing issue,” Husseini said.
According to Husseini, those who long promoted the Chinese response to COVID-19 and who now are supporting the push to frame China, are pushing for a world “that combines the worst aspects of the U.S. — corrupt corporate capitalism — with the worst aspects of Chinese society: explicit authoritarianism.”
“The pandemic, it can hardly be ignored, helped isolate people from one another, helped restrict borders, was an excuse for massive civil liberties restrictions — all things useful to the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ agenda,” said Husseini. “This is another reason that intentional release should be seriously examined.”
Lab leak or lab origin?
Husseini said he prefers the term “lab origin theory” over “lab leak theory.”
“I see no good reason to make assumptions,” Husseini said. “‘Leak’ assumes a mistake. It could have been a mistake, but why presume it?”
Boyle adopted a similar view, although he noted that the language of the COVID-19 Origin Act does not mention either term.
“It does not refer to a lab leak,” he said. “It doesn’t say ‘leak’ at all. It says ‘originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’ Obviously, there could be different interpretations of why it originated there. I still believe it was a leak, but this does leave open why it might have originated there.”
Boyle reiterated his longstanding belief that “COVID-19 is an offensive biological warfare weapon with gain-of-function properties” and called for the halting of gain-of-function research.
According to Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, Congress’ reluctance to declassify documents that may implicate U.S. government entities in the origins of COVID-19 is reflective of the massive amounts of federal money spent on biological weapons research.
“They’re not doing that because the U.S. government agencies and scientists involved in the development of COVID-19 [have received] massive sums of money,” Boyle said. “We’ve been devoted to developing offensive biological warfare programs since after Sept. 11, 2001 … I’ve been speaking out about this publicly for years.”
Husseini told The Defender :
“Biowarfare is a deniable weapon, which makes disclosure of documents key. Another reason why the Hawley bill limiting disclosure may well signal a massive coverup in plain sight.”
In a pair of tweets Sunday, British Member of Parliament Andrew Bridgen said he received information from U.S. government sources indicating that the U.S. Department of Defense and the Fort Detrick research facility “were responsible for both the virus and the vaccines” and that “criminal proceedings” may follow.
Bridgen did not clarify which sources provided him with this information or who might face such criminal proceedings. At the March 8 Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Robert Redfield said COVID-19 was “engineered” and blamed gain-of-function research for “the greatest pandemic our world has seen.”
However, Redfield stopped short of explicitly calling for a full ban on such activities, calling instead for a moratorium.
Boyle told The Defender “all this gain-of-function so-called ‘research’ has to be terminated immediately with legislation by Congress … The only way to protect ourselves is to terminate it immediately. No moratorium.”
“There was a moratorium” during the Barack Obama presidency, said Boyle, “and Fauci undermined the moratorium by outsourcing the work through the EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan BSL4 [laboratory]. So, a moratorium is worthless. We have to terminate all gain-of-function research everywhere. It has to be prohibited, to be made criminal.”
The Defender reached out to the offices of Hawley and Braun, Turner and Bridgen for comment, but did not receive a response as of press time.
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.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
‘Beyond Dystopia’: Is a Mad Scientist Set to Become Chief Scientist at the WHO?
Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 30, 2023
The World Health Organization (WHO) last month named Dr. Jeremy Farrar its new chief scientist. Farrar will step down Feb. 25 as director of the Wellcome Trust, the largest funder of medical research in the U.K. and one of the largest in the world.
Farrar and the Wellcome Trust are less well-known relative to similar global public health giants, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — and that’s “to people’s detriment,” investigative journalist Whitney Webb told journalist Kim Iversen on a recent episode of “The Kim Iversen Show”:
“If what is essentially a power grab by the World Health Organization gets put into force, then Jeremy Farrar will have essentially total authority to impose upon member states what medical responses they would have to implement in the event of another pandemic.”
Webb referred to proposals in the works to transform the WHO from an advisory organization to a global governing body whose policies would be legally binding for member states in the case of a global health emergency.
While at Wellcome Trust, Farrar was the architect of several key WHO COVID-19 pandemic policy directives, including lockdowns, masking and mass vaccination.
“What we see with Farrar is a recipe for disaster when it comes to imposing experimental medical technology on the population during public health crises. This is a guy who was very much invested in this stuff,” Webb said.
It’s something out of ‘Brave New World’
Iversen asked about links between the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.
While there is no direct link, Webb said, “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a lot of these other organizations, including the Wellcome Trust, are very much pushing an agenda that I would argue is sort of the fusion of Big Pharma and Big Tech.”
“Essentially Big Pharma is looking for new markets and new products and Big Tech can help them accomplish that,” she said.
Over the last several decades, Big Pharma and “billionaire philanthropists” have come to dominate the WHO, Webb told Iversen. They are the ones, “in my opinion, executing this power grab more than the WHO itself,” she said.
There are also key ties between Big Tech and national security agencies, Webb said.
Farrar has connections to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, Webb said.
His philosophy of scientific innovation is best exemplified by the organization he created as an offshoot of the Wellcome Trust — Wellcome Leap, “a global health equivalent of DARPA” — to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, she said.
Wellcome Leap’s programs focus on “transhumanist” research. For example, one project seeks to map infants’ brain development to create a “perfect child brain model” to use as the basis for creating AI-based interventions in infants and toddlers that seek to make children cognitively homogenous.
Webb said:
“I mean it just sounds like mad scientist stuff and per Wellcome Leap, which again is an organization with a lot of influence, they’re hoping to have 80% of kids subjected to that by 2030.
“So if Jeremy Farrar as chief scientist of the WHO is willing to sign off on a program like that, with those kinds of insane ambitions … I mean it’s just like something out of Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World.’”
In fact, Huxley’s brother, Julian, was president of the British Eugenics Society, which later became the Galton Institute — and whose archives, to this day, are housed by the Wellcome Trust.
Webb said mainstream media and alternative media already have traditionally underreported on the Wellcome Trust.
Now, she said:
“The guy that’s been at the helm of that [Wellcome Trust] and signing off on a lot of these honestly hellish programs is due to have an insane amount of power when it comes to the sovereignty over your own body and your children’s bodies …
“I really think that Jeremy Farrar needs to be talked about a lot more, particularly by outlets that are rightfully covering the World Health Organization’s efforts to expand its influence and power.”
‘Beyond dystopia’
Iversen said that it sounded “beyond dystopia,” and because of that, people likely imagine they would never allow something so unthinkable to come to pass.
But, she said:
“Actually, people would let that happen, people have let [things like] that happen in the past, and we’re just human just like everybody else.
“I think what is important for people to understand is they incrementally push us in this direction using fear,” Iversen added, pointing to the example of the draconian COVID-19 public health measures that gained widespread support.
Webb agreed, noting that the COVID-19 emergency made possible changes to regulatory frameworks that authorized technologies like the mRNA vaccines that simply couldn’t get approval before the crisis.
She cautioned that new arguments saying wearable technology is necessary for healthcare are opening space for Big Tech companies to collaborate with the government “to surveil very intimate parts of our lives.” She cited Amazon’s wearable that can detect people’s emotional state, as an example.
Author Yuval Harari described this kind of technology at the World Economic Forum as something that will be used “‘to wipe out dissent because even if you outwardly act like you agree with leadership and are supportive of certain agendas and policies, but you’re internally not, the government will know’ … That’s his interpretation of that stuff and it’s just totally insane,” Webb concluded.
Watch here.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
WHO’S DRIVING THE PANDEMIC EXPRESS?
By Dr David Bell and Emma McArthur | PANDA | September 4, 2022
Sceptics of the growing ‘pandemic prevention, preparedness and response’ (PPR) agenda celebrated recently, heralding a perceived ‘defeat’ of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) controversial amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR). Although the proposed amendments would have undoubtedly expanded the WHO’s powers, this focus on the WHO reflects a narrow view of global health and the pandemic industry. The WHO is almost a bit-player in a much larger game of public-private partnerships and financial incentives that are driving the pandemic gravy train forward.
While the WHO works in the spotlight, the pandemic industry has been growing for over a decade and its expansion accelerates unabated. Other major players such as the World Bank, coalitions of wealthy nations at the G7 and G20 and their corporate partners work in a world less subject to transparency; a world where the rules are more relaxed, and a conflict of interest receives less scrutiny.
If the global health community is to preserve public health, it must urgently understand the wider process that is underway and take action to stop it. The pandemic express must be halted by the weight of evidence and basic principles of public health.
Funding a global pandemic bureaucracy
“The FIF could be a cornerstone in the construction of a truly global PPR system in the context of the International Treaty on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, sponsored by the World Health Assembly.” (WHO, 19 April 2022)
The world is being told to fear pandemics. Ballooning socio-economic costs of the COVID-19 crisis are touted as justification for increased focus on PPR funding.
Calls for ‘urgent’ collective action to avert the ‘next’ pandemic are predicated on systemic ‘weaknesses’ supposedly exposed by COVID-19. As the WHO steamed ahead with its push for a new pandemic ‘treaty’ during 2021, G20 members agreed to establish a Joint Finance & Health Task Force (JFHTF) to ‘enhance the collaboration and global cooperation on issues relating to pandemic prevention, preparedness and response’.
A World Bank-WHO report prepared for the G20 joint task force estimates that US$ 31.1 billion will be required annually for future PPR, including US $ 10.5 billion per year in new international financing to support perceived funding gaps in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Surveillance-related activities comprise almost half of this, with US $4.1 billion in new funding required to address perceived gaps in the system.
In public health terms, the funding proposed to expand the global PPR infrastructure is enormous. By contrast, the WHO’s approved biennium programme budget for 2022-2023 averages US $3.4 billion per year. The Global Fund, the main international funder of malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS – which have a combined annual mortality of over 2.5 million – currently dispenses just US $ 4 billion annually for the three diseases combined. Unlike COVID-19, these diseases cause significant mortality in lower income countries and in younger age groups, year in, year out.
In April 2022, the G20 agreed to establish a new ‘financial intermediary fund’ (FIF) housed at the World Bank, to address the US $10.5 billion PPR financing gap. The FIF is intended to build upon existing pandemic funding to ‘strengthen health systems and PPR capacities in low-income and middle-income countries and regions’. The WHO is predicted to be the technical lead, landing them with an assured role irrespective of the outcome of current ‘treaty’ discussions.
The establishment of the fund has proceeded with breathtaking speed, and it was approved on June 30 by the World Bank Board of Executive Directors. A short period of consultation precedes an expected launch in September 2022. To date, donations totalling US $1.3 billion dollars have been pledged by governments, the European Commission and various private and non-government interests, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. The initial areas for the fund are somewhat all-encompassing, including country-level ‘disease surveillance; laboratory systems; emergency communication, coordination and management; critical health workforce capacities; and community engagement’.
In scope, the fund has the appearance of a new ‘World Health Organization’ for pandemics – to add to the existing (and ever-expanding) network of global health organisations such as the WHO; Gavi; the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); and the Global Fund. But is this increased expenditure on PPR justified? Are the escalating socio-economic costs of COVID-19 due to a failure to act by the global health community, as is widely claimed; or are they due to negligent acts of failure by the WHO and global governments, when they discarded previous evidenced-based pandemic guidelines?
COVID-19: failure to act or acts of failure?
In the debate surrounding the growing pandemic industry, much attention is being directed towards the central role of the WHO. This attention is understandable given the WHO’s position as the agency responsible for global public health and its push for a new international pandemic agreement.
However, the WHO’s handling of the response to COVID-19 creates serious doubts about the competency of its leadership and raises questions about whose needs the organisation is serving.
The WHO’s failure to follow its own pre-existing pandemic guidelines by supporting lockdowns, mass-testing, border closures and the multi-billion-dollar COVAX mass-vaccination program, has generated vast revenue for vaccine manufacturers and the biotech industry, whose corporations and investors are major contributors to the WHO. This approach has crippled economies, damaged existing health programs and further entrenched poverty in low-income countries. Decades of progress in children’s health are likely to be undone, together with the destruction of the long-term prospects of tens of millions of children, through loss of education, forced child marriage and malnutrition. In abandoning its principles of equality and community-driven healthcare, the WHO appears to have become a mere pawn in the PPR game, beholden to those with the real power; the entities who are providing its income and who control the resources now being directed to this area.
Corporatizing global public health
Recently established health agencies devoted to vaccination and pandemics, such as Gavi and CEPI, appear to have been highly influential from the beginning. CEPI, is the brainchild of Bill Gates, Jeremy Farrar (director of the Wellcome Trust), and others at the pro-lockdown World Economic Forum. Launched at Davos in 2017, CEPI was created to help drive the market for epidemic vaccines. It is no secret that Bill Gates has major private financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, in addition to those of his foundation. This clearly places a question mark over the philanthropic nature of his investments.
CEPI appears to be a forerunner of what the WHO is increasingly becoming – an instrument where individuals and corporations can exert influence and improve returns by hijacking key areas of public health. CEPI’s business model, which involves taxpayers taking most of the financial risk for vaccine research and development whilst big pharma gets all the profits, is notably replicated in the World Bank-WHO report.
Gavi, itself a significant WHO donor that exists solely to increase access to vaccination, is also under direct influence of Bill Gates, via the Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation. Gavi’s involvement (alongside CEPI) with the WHO’s COVAX program, which diverted vast resources into COVID-19 mass-vaccination in countries where COVID-19 is a relatively small disease burden, suggests the organisation is tied more strongly to vaccine sales than genuine public health outcomes.
Pandemic funding – ignoring the big picture?
At first glance, increased PPR funding to LMICs may seem a public good. The World Bank-WHO report claims that ‘the frequency and impact of pandemic-prone pathogens are increasing.’ However, this is belied by reality, as the WHO lists only 5 ‘pandemics’ in the past 120 years, with the highest mortality occurring in the 1918-19 H1N1 (‘Spanish’) influenza pandemic, before antibiotics and modern medicine. Apart from COVID-19, the ‘Swine Flu’ outbreak in 2009-10, which killed less people than a normal flu year, is the only ‘pandemic’ in the past 50 years.
Such a myopic focus on pandemic risk will do little to address the most serious causes of illness and death, and it can be expected to make matters worse for people experiencing the most extreme forms of socio-economic disadvantage.
Governments of low-income countries will be ‘incentivised’ to divert resources to PPR related programs, further increasing the growing debt crisis. A more centralised, top-down public health system will lack the flexibility to meet local and regional needs. Transferring support from higher burden diseases, and drivers of economic growth, has a direct impact on mortality in these countries, particularly for children.
The WHO-World Bank report states that the pillars of the global PPR architecture must be built on the ‘foundational principles of equity, inclusion and solidarity’. As severe pandemics occur less than once per generation, increased spending on PPR in LMICs clearly violates these basic principles as it diverts scarce resources away from areas of regional need, to address the perceived health priorities of wealthier populations. As demonstrated by the damage caused by the COVID-19 response, in both high and low-income countries, the overall harm of resource diversion from areas of greater need is likely to be universal. In failing to address such ‘opportunity costs’, recommendations by the WHO, the World Bank, and other PPR partners cannot be validly based in public health; nor are they a basis for overall societal benefit. .
One thing is certain. Those who will gain from this expanding pandemic gravy train will be those who gained from the response to COVID-19.
The pandemic gravy train – following the money
The new World Bank fund risks compounding existing problems in the global public health system and further compromising the WHO’s autonomy; although it is stated that the WHO will have a central ‘strategic role’, funds will be channelled through the World Bank. In essence, it financially side-steps the accountability measures at the WHO, where questions of relative worth can be raised more easily.
The proposed structure of the FIF will pave the way for organisations with strong ties to pharmaceutical and other biotech industries, such as CEPI and Gavi, to gain even greater influence over global PPR, particularly if they are appointed ‘implementing entities’ – the operational arms that will carry out the FIF’s work program at country, regional and global level.
Although the initial implementing entities for the FIF will be UN agencies, multilateral development banks and the IMF, plans are already underway to accredit these other international health entities. Investments are likely to be heavily skewed towards biotechnological solutions, such as disease surveillance and vaccine development, at the cost of other, more pressing, public health interventions.
Protecting public health rather than private wealth
If the world truly wants to address the systemic weakness exposed by COVID-19, it must first understand that this pandemic gravy train is not new; the foundations for the destruction of community- and country-based global public health began long before COVID-19.
It is unarguable that COVID-19 has proved to be a lucrative cash cow for vaccine manufacturers and the biotech industry. The public-private partnership model that now dominates global health enabled vast resources to be channelled into the pockets of corporate giants, through programs they directly influence, or even run. CEPI’s ‘100 days Mission’ to make ‘safe and effective’ vaccines against ‘viral threats’ within 100 days – to ‘give the world a fighting chance of containing a future outbreak before it spreads to become a global pandemic’ – is a permit for pharmaceutical companies to appropriate public money on an unprecedented scale, based on their own assessments of risk.
The self-fulfilment of the ‘increasing frequency of pandemic’ prophecy will be ensured by the push for increased disease surveillance – a priority area for the FIF. To quote the World Bank-WHO report:
“COVID-19 highlighted the need to connect surveillance and alert systems into a regional and global network to detect zoonotic transmission events, raise the alarm early to enable a swift public health response, and accelerate the development of medical countermeasures.”
Like many claims being made about COVID-19, this claim has no evidence base – the origins of COVID-19 remain highly controversial and the WHO’s data demonstrate that pandemics are uncommon, whatever their origin. None of the ‘countermeasures’ have been shown to significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19, which is now globally endemic.
Increased surveillance will naturally identify more ‘potentially dangerous pathogens’, as variants of viruses arise constantly in nature. Consequently, the world faces a never-ending game of seek and ye shall find, with never-ending profits for industry. Formerly once per generation, this industry will make ‘pandemics’ a routine part of life, where rapid fire vaccines are mandated for every new disease or variant that arrives.
Ultimately, this new pandemic fund will help to hook low- and middle-income countries into the growing global pandemic bureaucracy. Greater centralisation of public health will do little to address the genuine health needs of people in these countries. If the pandemic gravy train is allowed to keep growing, the poor will get poorer, and people will die in increasing numbers from more prevalent, preventable diseases. The rich will continue to profit, while fuelling the main driver of ill-health in lower income countries – poverty.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a member of the Executive Committee of PANDA.
Another Scientist Who Publicly Dismissed Lab Leak Gave It Credence in Private Email
By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | April 27, 2022
When it comes to the lab leak theory of Covid origins, there’s a lot of inconsistency between what scientists have announced in public and what they’ve revealed in private.
First, there was Professor Kristian Andersen, an American virologist. Writing to Anthony Fauci on 1st February 2020, he said of the virus that “some of the features (potentially) look engineered”, adding that he and several colleagues “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”.
Mere weeks later, Andersen co-authored a paper stating, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.
Next, there was Professor Jeremy Farrar, head of the UK’s Wellcome Trust. He wrote in his book Spike that he initially believed there was a 50% chance the virus had leaked from a lab, and that other scientists to whom he’d spoke had put the percentage even higher.
Yet Farrar signed the infamous Lancet letter, which referred to claims that “COVID-19 does not have a natural origin” as “conspiracy theories”.
A new freedom of information request, made by the group U.S. Right to Know, has revealed that another author of the Lancet letter gave credence to the lab leak in a private email. Professor Charles Calisher, an American epidemiologist, said he did not see how “anyone could definitively state that the virus could not possibly have come from that lab”.
Interestingly, Calisher’s email was sent one month after the Lancet letter’s publication, which means he either changed his mind or was not expressing his true beliefs when he co-signed the letter.
According to a March 2021 article in the MIT Technology Review, Calisher said the “conspiracy-theory phrase” was “over the top”. However, the article doesn’t make clear whether Calisher believed this at the time he co-signed the letter, or whether he subsequently came to believe it.
In any case, calling the lab leak a “conspiracy theory” is a pretty strong statement. So if Calisher did change his mind about it, he could have let the public know – for example, by removing his name from the letter, or clarifying his position in some other public forum.
What’s more, in September of 2021, Calisher told The Telegraph that “the letter never intended to suggest that Covid might not have a natural origin, rather that there was insufficient data.” But this doesn’t make sense.
If the letter’s purposes was merely to suggest “there was insufficient data”, it wouldn’t have used the phrase “conspiracy theory”, or else it would have dismissed both the natural origin and the lab leak as “conspiracy theories”. For example, it might have said, ‘We stand together to strongly condemn unfounded speculation about the origin of COVID-19’.
There’s much about the official narrative on the lab leak that doesn’t add up. The public has a right to know why so many scientists made blatantly unscientific claims that contradict their private correspondence.
They Are Still Defending Lockdowns
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | February 13, 2022
Fifteen years ago, writers schooled in computer science began to imagine various totalitarian schemes for pandemic control. Experienced public health officials in 2006 warned that this would lead to disaster. Donald Henderson, for example, went through
Still, a decade and a half later, governments all over the world tried lockdowns anyway. And sure enough, since April of 2020, scholars have observed that these lockdown policies haven’t worked. The politicians preached, the cops enforced, citizens shamed each other, and businesses and schools did their best to comply with all the strictures. But the virus kept going with seeming disregard for all these antics.
Neither oceans of sanitizer, nor towers of plexiglass, nor covered mouths and noses, nor crowd avoidance, nor the seeming magic of six feet of distance, nor even mandated injections, caused the virus to go away or otherwise be suppressed.
The evidence is in. Restrictions are not associated with any particular set of virus mitigation goals. Forty studies have shown no connection between the policy (egregious violations of human liberty) and the intended outcomes (diminishing the overall disease impact of the pathogen).
You can forget about “causal inference” here because there is an absence of correlation of policy and outcomes at all. You can do a deeper dive and find 400 studies showing that the impositions on basic freedoms did not achieve the intended result but instead produced terrible public-health outcomes.
The two years of the hell into which hundreds of governments simultaneously plunged the globe achieved nothing but economic, social, and cultural destruction. Very obviously, this realization is shocking, and suggests a crying need for a reassessment of the power and influence of the people who did this.
This reassessment is happening now, all over the world.
A major frustration for those of us who have denounced lockdowns (which goes by many names and takes many forms) is that these studies have not exactly rocked the headlines. Indeed, they have been buried for the better part of two years.
Among the ignored studies was a December 2020 examination of light and voluntary measures (discouraging large gatherings, isolating the sick, generally being careful) vs. heavy and forced measures. This piece by Bendavid et al. observes some effects on spread from light measures but nothing statistically significant from heavy measures such as stay-at-home (or shelter-in-place) orders.
We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay- at-home orders and business closures. The data cannot fully exclude the possibility of some benefits. However, even if they exist, these benefits may not match the numerous harms of these aggressive measures. More targeted public health interventions that more effectively reduce transmissions may be important for future epidemic control without the harms of highly restrictive measures.
The most recent meta-analysis from Johns Hopkins University (Jonas Herby of the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark, Lars Jonung of Lund University, and Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins) seems to have achieved some measure of media attention. It focuses in particular on the effects of heavy interventions on mortality, finding little to no relationship between policies and severe disease outcomes.
The attention given to this meta-analysis seems to have annoyed the small cabal of academics who still defend lockdowns. A website called HealthFeedBack blasted the methods of the study while citing biased sources and not seriously grappling with the results. This lame effort has been thoroughly smashed by Phil Magness.
Also seeking to reverse the bad press against lockdowns, the Science Media Centre, a project that appears mostly funded by The Wellcome Trust (Britain’s major funding source for epidemiological studies), published a rebuttal of this paper by top lockdown proponents.
Among the comments were those of Oxford’s Seth Flaxman, a major figure in this realm, who is not trained in biological science or medicine but computer science with a specialization in machine learning. And yet it has been his work that has most often been cited in defense of the idea that lockdowns achieved some good.
In opposition to the JHU study, Flaxman writes:
Smoking causes cancer, the earth is round, and ordering people to stay at home (the correct definition of lockdown) decreases disease transmission. None of this is controversial among scientists. A study purporting to prove the opposite is almost certain to be fundamentally flawed.
See how this rhetoric works? If you question his claim, you are not a scientist; you are denying the science!
These sentences are surely penned out of frustration. The first time in modern history or perhaps all of history when nearly all governments undertook “ordering people to stay home” (which amounts to a universal quarantine) to “decrease disease transmission” was in 2020.
To say that this is not controversial is ridiculous, since such policies had never before been attempted on this scale. Such a policy is not at all like an established causal claim (smoking increases cancer risk) nor a mere empirical observation (the earth is round). It is subject to verification.
There are plenty of reasons one might expect disease transmission to be higher in enclosed spaces with sustained close contact, such as homes, versus shops or even well-ventilated concert settings. As Henderson himself said, it could result in putting healthy non-infected people in close settings with infected people, worsening disease spread.
Indeed, by December of 2020, the governor’s office of New York found that “contact tracing data shows 70 percent of new COVID-19 cases originate from households and small gatherings.” It was also true with New York hospitalization: two thirds of them had contracted Covid at home.
“They’re not working; they’re not traveling,” Cuomo said of these recently hospitalized coronavirus patients. “We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percent of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work — that these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers. That’s not the case. They were predominantly at home.”
That Flaxman would still claim otherwise after all experience shows that he is not observing reality but inventing dogma from his own intuition. Flaxman might say that he is sure that transmission might have been higher had people not been ordered to stay home, and there might be settings in which that is true, but he is in no position to elevate this claim to the status of “the earth is round.”
In addition, even under ideal conditions, reduction in disease transmission might only be short-term, kicking the can down the road. A glance at the wild infection increases of Winter 2021 suggests that. The orders might result in worse outcomes overall, due to all that such an order implies for people’s lives. Turning people’s homes into their own jails, in other words, has a downside for the quality of life. And surely that must factor into any social welfare analysis of pandemic policies.
Finally, it is not possible to order everyone to stay home, not even for a day or two. The groceries have to get to the store or be delivered to homes and apartments. People have to staff the hospitals. The electrical plants still need staff. Cops still have to be on the beat. There is literally no option available to “shut down” society in real life as versus in computer models.
Stay-at-home orders in real life become a class-protection scheme to keep high-end laptop professionals shielded from the virus while imposing the burden of exposure on people who have no option but to be out and about. In other words, the working classes are effectively forced to bear the burden of herd immunity, while the rich and financially secure stay safe and wait for the pandemic to pass.
For example, early in the pandemic, the messaging of the New York Times was to instruct its readers to stay home and get their groceries delivered. The paper knows its reader base well: it did not suggest any of them actually deliver groceries! As Sunetra Gupta says, “Lockdowns are a luxury of the affluent.”
And what, in the end, is the point of the stay-home orders? For a widespread virus such as this one, everyone will eventually meet the virus anyway. Only once the winter wave of 2021 finally swept the Zoom class did we start to see a shift in media messaging that 1) there is no shame in sickness, and 2) perhaps we need to start relaxing these restrictions.
The dogma that ordering people to stay home – for how long? – always reduces the spread comes not from evidence but from Flaxman-style modeling plus a remarkable capacity to ignore reality.
Lockdown policies are easily marketed to political players who might get a power rush from the exercise. But, in the end, Henderson’s prediction was correct: these interventions turned a manageable pandemic into a catastrophe.
It’s a sure bet, however, that lockdown proponents will be in denial at least for another decade.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
Forget China, was it CEPI’s bio-spooks who locked down the West?
By Paula Jardine | TCW Defending Freedom | December 15, 2021
IT is nearly two years since the world turned upside down and a sequence of unprecedented lockdowns and quarantines in the name of public health and safety were imposed across the West.
The narrative of the still unfolding story of Covid-19 is familiar to all of us, with China the chief bogeyman of the tale. But is that right?
In this drama has something really important been overlooked? Namely, the role of a powerful, self-appointed supranational organisation, set up 2017, called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).
Members of CEPI’s board and scientific advisory committee have been, and still are, key actors in global and national responses to the Covid-19 virus. Its mission? To ‘create a world in which epidemics are no longer a threat to humanity’.
At the start of 2020, all eyes were glued on China. The communist government had dutifully notified the World Health Organisation (WHO) on New Year’s Eve 2019 of its concerns over a small cluster of cases of ‘pneumonia of unknown origin’.
Three weeks later, when the death toll stood at 17, the CCP was sufficiently alarmed to order the home confinement of nearly 12 million mostly healthy people who were unfortunate enough to reside in the outbreak city, Wuhan.
Having fingered as the culprit a relative of the SARS virus that claimed 774 victims in 2003, the Chinese determination to contain the self-evidently nastier 2019 co-variant at all costs was made plain to the world.
The scenes broadcast out of China nightly on the TV news were surreal, but strangely familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with vintage sci-fi. A nightmare amalgamation of The Andromeda Strain and The Hamburg Syndrome was unfolding in real life, right before our eyes.
Here, a man falling down dead in the street. There, men in white hazmat suits walking through empty Chinese thoroughfares equipped with Ghostbuster-esque backpacks blowing smoke in a desperate attempt to fumigate the invisible peril out of existence.
Knowing that the Queen’s own men at the Porton Down chemical and biological defence establishment long ago discovered that fresh air and sunlight, two commodities already in short supply in Chinese cities, are the most potent of disinfectants, it seemed a strangely futile spectacle. What on Earth were they trying to do? Death apparently lurked around every corner.
As the Wuhan lockdown was being imposed on January 23, 2020, the global elite were busy congregating at their annual networking fest, the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland (where CEPI had been founded three years earlier by the governments of Norway and India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust global charity organisation, and the World Economic Forum).
Next day, a little-noticed press conference was convened in Davos to discuss the SARS-like, closely-related, but definitely novel, SARS Wuhan coronavirus.
Appearing in front of about 30 reporters were Sir Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust and board member of CEPI; Richard Hatchett, chief executive of CEPI, and Stephane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna, one of three companies being funded to develop a coronavirus vaccine. A Chinese reporter asked the panel if there was any historical precedent for the lockdown.
Hatchett said: ‘One thing that is important to understand, is that when you don’t have treatments and you don’t have vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions are literally the only thing that you have, and it’s a combination of isolation, containment, infection prevention and control and then these social distancing interventions.
‘There is historical precedent for their use. We looked intensively and did an historical analysis of the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions in US cities in 1918 and what we found was that cities that introduced multiple interventions, early in an epidemic, had much better outcomes.
‘The challenge of course is that it is very difficult to sustain these interventions, as they impose enormous cost and they also can produce enormous anxiety among the affected population.’
The ‘we’ Hatchett was referring to was the US Department of Homeland Security where, as an official, he had helped develop the US pandemic preparedness plan in 2005 and 2006 during the H5N1 avian influenza outbreak, which Farrar had discovered in Vietnam.
Hatchett continued: ‘At that time, we looked at how could you have those interventions implemented in a way that maximised their benefit and minimised the cost and we developed an approach that we called “community mitigation” interventions and CDC (the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) published guidance on this several years ago.
‘There is a literature which I would certainly encourage Chinese authorities to review and certainly I would be happy to talk to them about that, although that’s not my current job.’
There was no need to encourage the Chinese authorities to review the literature. CEPI already had a man in Beijing, Dr George Gao, the director of China’s Centre for Disease Control, but also member of the CEPI scientific advisory panel. The community mitigation approach the Chinese adopted in Wuhan was straight out of the 2006 US Homeland Security pandemic playbook.
Gao, like Farrar, completed his PhD at Oxford University before conducting post-doctoral work under Sir John Bell, the controversial Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, holder of several extranumerary positions and multiple interests, not least as chair of the global health scientific advisory board of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
An expert on coronaviruses, Gao served on CEPI’s first scientific advisory committee in 2016 and was a player in Event 201, the pandemic simulation hosted in October 2019 by the World Economic Forum, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health – discussed here by Robert F Kennedy Jr.
In all probability, Gao is the old friend Farrar was referring to when he said on Desert Island Discs that he had had a phone call on December 31, 2019 – the day the Chinese authorities reported the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak to the WHO – to alert him that China would release the genome of the new virus on January 10. As things stood on New Year’s Eve, the virus had yet to cause any deaths, although it was making a few people very ill.
By January 17, another CEPI scientific adviser, Dr Christian Drosten, had conveniently developed a PCR test from the genetic sequence posted online by the Chinese, which the WHO advised laboratories could be used as a diagnostic test for Covid-19.
This was almost two months before the WHO declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Following a visit to Wuhan by the WHO in February 2020, led by its assistant director-general Dr Bruce Aylward, the world was being encouraged to adopt what were now being called Chinese measures.
‘China didn’t approach this new virus with an old strategy for one disease or another disease,’ said Aylward. ‘It developed its own approach to a new disease and extraordinarily has turned around this disease with strategies most of the world didn’t think would work.’
The Chinese government, with its own Big Brother infrastructure, had its own reasons for going along with that. But the response plan is in reality far more complex, and has a much darker background in the West.
The Yellow Brick Road that passes through CEPI and Beijing leads right back to the US Department of Homeland Security, and its 1998 Pentagon strategy paper.
The response plan is in reality an American scheme, with its origins more than decade and a half earlier and against a backdrop of bioterrorism concerns. Uncle Sam is the wizard behind the curtain, not acting in the West’s interests at all.