Day: February 1, 2023

• In January 2022, House Oversight Committee Republicans released a batch of emails sent to and from the National Institutes of Health. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by Jimmy Tobias at The Intercept also forced the release of unredacted NIH correspondence

• The emails reveal there was great concern among NIH leadership, as SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be a genetically engineered virus that somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China

• The emails show they were nervous about the possibility that they’d funded the creation of this virus, and that they were determined to suppress questions about its origin

• A group of scientists convened by Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, published a paper in which they claimed the virus was decidedly not the result of intentional engineering. They did admit accidental creation in a lab could not be ruled out, but that natural evolution was the most likely scenario. Some of these same scientists had previously shared details indicative of genetic engineering in emails to Fauci

• The “Proximal Origin” paper, which was edited by Fauci and “debunked” the lab leak theory without any evidence, became the most-read published paper in history. More than 2,000 media outlets have cited it to support their propaganda

In January 2022, House Oversight Committee Republicans released a batch of emails sent to and from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by Jimmy Tobias at The Intercept

also forced the release of unredacted NIH correspondence in late November 2022, just as Dr. Anthony Fauci prepared to retire from his position as director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

The emails reveal what many had suspected all along, namely that SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be a genetically engineered virus that somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. (In a January 17, 2023, Twitter thread,

molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., summarized the lab-origin hypothesis.)

The correspondence also reveal that a) NIH leaders were nervous about the possibility that they’d funded the creation of this virus, and b) they were determined to suppress questions about its origin.

As reported by the House Oversight Committee:

“Excerpts of emails released today reveal the following:

• January 27, 2020: Dr. [Anthony] Fauci knew NIAID [National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] had funded EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV was a subgrantee of EcoHealth, and EcoHealth was not in compliance with its grant reporting, in particular a grant that NIAID knew had gain-of-function potential on novel bat coronaviruses.

• February 1, 2020: Dr. Fauci, [then-NIH director] Dr. [Francis] Collins, and at least eleven other scientists convened a conference call to discuss COVID-19. On the conference call, Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from the WIV and may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.

• February 4, 2020: After speaking with Drs. Fauci and Collins, four participants of the conference call abandoned their belief the virus originated from the Wuhan lab and authored a paper

  entitled ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.’ Prior to final publication in Nature Medicine, the paper was sent to Dr. Fauci for editing and approval.

• April 16, 2020: More than two months after the original conference call, Dr. Collins emailed Dr. Fauci expressing dismay that the Nature Medicine article — which they saw prior to publication and were given the opportunity to edit — did not squash the lab leak hypothesis and asks if the NIH can do more to ‘put down’ the lab leak hypothesis.

• April 17, 2020: After Dr. Collins explicitly asked for more public pressure, Dr. Fauci cited the Nature Medicine paper from the White House podium likely in an effort to further stifle the hypothesis COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan lab.”

January 31, 2020, Fauci received an email from Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, asking him to call Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., an evolutionary biologist and professor in the department of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. As reported by The Intercept January 19, 2023:

“Fauci had his phone call with Andersen that night, and what he heard clearly disturbed him. In an email to Farrar after the call, he wrote the following:

‘I told [Andersen] that as soon as possible he and Eddie Holmes should get a group of evolutionary biologists together to examine carefully the data to determine if his concerns are validated. He should do this very quickly and if everyone agrees with this concern, they should report it to the appropriate authorities.

I would imagine that in the USA this would be the FBI and in the UK it would be MI5′ … What were Andersen’s concerns? And why were they so dire they might merit a call to the FBI?

Andersen laid them out plainly in an email to Fauci that same evening. ‘The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,' Andersen wrote in the email.

‘I should mention,’ he added, ‘that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.'”

The following day, February 1, 2020, at 2 p.m., Fauci, Farrar, Collins, Andersen and several other virologists had their conference call, and Andersen clearly wasn’t the only one who had noticed tell-tale signs of genetic engineering. Farrar himself wrote “On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release — I am honestly at 50!”

According to The Intercept,

Fauci spent that morning “brushing up on what sorts of grants and collaborations his agency was involved in with research institutions in China.”

In all likelihood, he discovered (if he was somehow previously unaware, which seems doubtful) that the NIH had provided research grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn subcontracted coronavirus experiments to the WIV — including an experiment involving humanized mice that were infected with chimeric hybrids of SARS-related bat coronaviruses.

According to The Intercept, it’s highly unlikely that these experiments resulted in SARS-CoV-2, as the viruses are too dissimilar, “but it does raise questions about what other kinds of experiments were going on in Wuhan and haven’t been disclosed.”

February 2, 2020, Farrar circulated a set of notes summarizing the discussion, which he said was to be treated “in total confidence.”

Michael (Mike) Farzan, Ph.D., an expert on the entry processes of enveloped viruses, was bothered by the presence of a furin cleavage site — a novel feature that allows SARS-CoV-2 the ability to infect cells in the human airways.

According to Farrar’s note, Farzan “has a hard time explain[ing] that as an event outside the lab.” Farrar’s summary goes on to state that:

“… the likely explanation could be something as simple as passage SARS-live CoVs in tissue culture on human cell lines (under BSL-2) for an extended period of time, accidentally creating a virus that would be primed for rapid transmission between humans via gain of furin site (from tissue culture) and adoption to human ACE2 receptor via repeated passage …

So, I think it becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature — accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.”

A note from professor and microbiologist Robert (Bob) Garry, Ph.D.,

reveals he had similar concerns:

“… I aligned the nCoV with the 96% bat CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD [receptor binding domain] the S proteins are essential [sic] identical at the amino acid level — well all but the perfect insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds [sic] the furin site.

S2 is over its whole length essentially identical. I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide [sic] that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function — that and you don’t change any other amino acids in S2?

I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level — its [sic] stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.

Another scenario is that the progenitor of nCoV was a bat virus with the perfect furin cleavage site generated over evolutionary times. In this scenario RaTG13 the WIV virus was generated by a perfect deletion of 12 nucleotides while essentially not changing any other S2 amino acid [sic]. Even more implausible IMO [in my opinion]. That is the big if.”

In other words, in the earliest days of the pandemic, the general consensus among virologists in communication with the NIH was that a WIV lab leak was not only plausible, but perhaps the most likely. The correspondence also leaves no doubt about the fact that Fauci and Collins wanted to silence this theory.

In a February 2, 2020, email, Collins stated that he was “coming around to the view that a natural origin is more likely,” and warned that “voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate” lest they convene a panel of experts to address the matter, and that such conspiracies could do “great potential harm to science and international harmony.”

Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier, who participated in the call, also warned his colleagues that continuing the discussion about a lab leak “would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”

Fauci, for his part, appears to have made the decision to suppress the lab leak theory that same day (February 2). In an email, he wrote:

“Like all of us, I do not know how this evolved, but given the concerns of so many people and the threat of further distortions on social media, it is essential that we move quickly.”

According to The Intercept, Fauci, Farrar and Collins alerted officials at the World Health Organization in the hopes they’d convene an expert panel to investigate, but “WHO apparently declined to do so at the time.” The group was well aware of the risks involved, though, were the lab leak theory to gain legs, so a plan to discourage further “accusations” was apparently hatched. 

Just two days later, on February 4, 2020, Fauci and Collins received the first draft of the article, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” later published in Nature Medicine.

Three of the authors, Andersen, Robert Garry of Tulane University and Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney, were on the February 1, 2020, conference call. Andersen, Garry, and another “Proximal Origin” author, W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University, have also received large NIH grants in recent years,

so this paper was not written by uninterested and independent parties.

The original draft is still secret. All we have is an email reply from Fauci, in which he appears to flag the inclusion of serial passage through humanized mice. This suggests the issue of animal passage was raised, but then immediately scrapped.

The Nature Medicine article roundly dismissed the idea that the virus was the result of deliberate engineering, proposing instead that, despite a dearth of evidence, it most likely evolved naturally. (Two potential natural-evolution theories were described.) They didn’t conclusively dismiss the possibility of a lab leak, though — only the idea that it was “deliberately” engineered. As noted in the paper:

“Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here.

However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

The “other theories of its origin” described in the “Proximal Origin” paper was the possibility that it might have been the result of “selection during passage,” which is a routine laboratory practice. In other words, it seems they were most concerned with dispelling any rumors about it being intentionally created, which would place it in the category of a bioweapon.

As reported by The Intercept, Farrar, Fauci and Collins certainly had not ruled out the possibility of a lab origin altogether:

“The scientists seem by this point to have made a sharp distinction between a scenario in which the virus was deliberately engineered in a lab and a scenario in which the virus was generated during serial passage experiments in a lab.

‘Eddie would be 60:40 lab side,’ Farrar added. ‘I remain 50:50.’

‘Yes, I’d be interested in the proposal of accidental lab passage in animals (which ones?),’ Collins wrote.

‘?? Serial passage in ACE2-transgenic mice,’ Fauci responded.

‘Exactly!’ Farrar replied.

‘Surely that wouldn’t be done in a BSL-2 lab?’ wrote Collins, referring to biosafety level 2 labs, which do not have the most stringent safety protocols.

‘Wild West…’ was Farrar’s response, an apparent reference to lab practices in China or possibly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology itself.

In the above exchange, the health officials seem to be contemplating the possibility that the repeated passage of a coronavirus through genetically modified mice in an insufficiently secure lab could have resulted in the accidental emergence and release of SARS-CoV-2.

In a later email exchange, Farrar, quoting Garry, noted that serial passage in animals had been proved to result in the appearance of furin cleavage sites in other viruses, specifically the H5N1 flu virus. ‘There are a couple passage of H5N1 in chicken papers — the furin site appears in steps.'”

Similarly, there’s this exchange between Christian Drosten, Ph.D., and Andersen on February 8.

Drosten wrote:

“Can someone help me with one question: didn’t we congregate to challenge a certain theory, and if we could, drop it? Who came up with this story in the beginning? Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?”

Andersen’s reply read:

“Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered.

As to publishing this document in a journal, I am currently not in favor of doing so. I believe that publishing something that is open-ended could backfire at this stage.”

Andersen’s reluctance notwithstanding, the paper was accepted for publication a month later, March 17, 2020 — and the possibility of the virus being the result of serial passage remained.

The influence of the “Proximal Origin” paper cannot be overstated. As reported by The Intercept,

it’s been accessed more than 5.7 million times and cited by more than 2,000 media outlets, making it one of the most-read papers ever published. It’s fair to say this propaganda piece was “milked for all its worth” to uphold the illusion of a natural evolution consensus.

Most media outlets also overstated the paper’s conclusion. While it did not present any actual evidence to support the natural evolution theory, and admitted it might have been created through serial passaging in a lab, outlets like ABC News boldly declared, “Sorry, Conspiracy Theorists. Study Concludes COVID-19 ‘Is Not a Laboratory Construct,'”

as if the issue had been conclusively settled based on the scientific evidence at hand.

The Nature Medicine article didn’t stem the flow of questions, though, a fact decried by Collins in a mid-April 2020 email to Fauci:

“Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy, with what seems to be growing momentum … I hoped the Nature Medicine article on the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would settle this. But probably didn’t get much visibility. Anything more we can do? Ask the National Academy to weigh in?”

Fauci replied, “I would not do anything about this right now. It is a shiny object that will go away in times [sic].” He was wrong, of course, and the reason questions didn’t go away was because emerging evidence kept strengthening the lab leak theory, while there is nothing with which to support natural evolution.

As Sergei Pond, a computational virologist at Temple University, told The Intercept,

“there was no data then, and there is no data now, that would definitively indicate that a lab origin like the one contemplated in ‘Proximal Origin’ is not at least plausible.”

Having read the unredacted emails, David Relman, a professor of microbiology, immunology and medicine at Stanford University, added:

“When I first saw it [the Proximal Origin paper] in March 2020, the paper read to me as a conclusion in search of an argument. Among its many problems, it failed to consider in a serious fashion the possibility of an unwitting and unrecognized accidental leak during aggressive efforts to grow coronaviruses from bat and other field samples.

It also assumed that researchers in Wuhan have told the world about every virus and every sequence that was in their laboratories in 2019. But these [unredacted emails] actually provide evidence that the authors considered a few additional lab-associated scenarios, early in their discussions.

But then they rushed to judgment, and the lab scenarios fell out of favor. It appears as if a combination of a scant amount of data and an unspoken bias against the [lab origin] scenario diminished the idea in their minds.”

As reported by The Washington Post,

virologists are now under the microscope like never before, and the NIH is said to be “preparing an overhaul of the policies on government-funded research.” Draft recommendations

from the biosecurity advisory board were released January 20, 2023.

Clearly, paranoia is high, and there’s good reason for that. Not only do we have the unredacted NIH emails showing there were grave concerns about COVID-19 being the result of a lab leak, and that those concerns were “allayed” by passing propaganda for “science,” but researchers have also published research showing they’re now conducting gain-of-function research on SARS-CoV-2.

“If gain-of-function research contributed to COVID-19, then clearly we need to make sure it cannot happen again.”

Who in their right mind would think that was a good idea? The fact that reckless dual-use research into dangerous pathogens is taking place on the daily is precisely why getting to the bottom of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is so important. If this kind of research contributed to COVID-19, then clearly we need to make sure it cannot happen again.

I believe one of the primary reasons why the lab leak theory is being so heavily disputed is because acknowledging it as true would force Congress to rein in the research industry. But we cannot afford to ignore it, because gain-of-function research capabilities pose a truly existential threat to mankind as a whole.

Interestingly, January 25, 2023, the U.S. Office of Inspector General released a report

detailing the NIH’s failure to properly monitor and review potentially hazardous coronavirus research. As reported by the Daily Mail:

“EcoHealth Alliance was awarded $8 million in Government research grants between 2014 and 2021, which it subcontracted to research facilities. The WIV was one of eight teams awarded grants at that time.

Today’s audit said there was a lack of oversight by the NIH and EcoHealth at the Chinese facility and other labs that benefitted from Government grants.

The report said: ‘Despite identifying potential risks associated with research being performed under the EcoHealth awards, we found that NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance with some requirements.

‘Although NIH and EcoHealth had established monitoring procedures, we found deficiencies in complying with those procedures limited NIH and EcoHealth’s ability to effectively monitor federal grant awards and subawards to understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas, and take corrective action’ …

Investigators say EcoHealth also did not submit proper progress reports on the use of its fund in a timely manner, with information coming in two years late. It also says the NIH failed to terminate its grant with EcoHealth after the non-profit broke protocols.”

Justin Goodman, senior vice president of Advocacy and Public Policy at the White Coat Waste Project commented on the report:

“This audit confirms what we have been documenting since early 2020 when we first exposed NIH’s funding of the Wuhan lab: EcoHealth Alliance shipped tax dollars to Wuhan for dangerous animal experiments that probably caused the pandemic, violated federal laws and policies and wasted tax dollars.

Yet, the Wuhan lab remains eligible for even more taxpayer money for animal tests and just since the pandemic began, EcoHealth has raked in at least $46million in new federal funds from the DOD, USAID, NIH, and NSF.

As the group that first exposed and ended EcoHealth’s calamitous collaboration with the Wuhan animal lab, we’re calling on Congress to defund these rogue organizations once and for all. Taxpayers should not be forced to bankroll reckless white coats who waste money, break the law and place public health in peril. Stop the money, stop the madness.”

As investigators try to get to the truth, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is doing everything it can to prevent it from coming out. As reported by Gary Ruskin,

executive director and co-founder of U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), in 2022, as the HHS was slammed with FOIA requests relating to COVID-19, they added four extra layers of legal review within the HHS legal department.

These attorneys scoured each and every document to make sure anything potentially incriminating was properly redacted before release. “This plainly appears to be an effort to delay or block release of documents about the origin of COVID-19,” Ruskin wrote. “What is HHS hiding? We hope Congress will investigate.”

The good news is, the Republican House now has the ability to launch such investigations, and I hope they will. The problem is that it would be dangerous to prove a cover-up, as it would turn everything upside-down. Health agencies, universities and any number of other agencies would have to be retooled. So, getting to the bottom of this affair will require people who believe the truth is worth the pain.

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• Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and other billionaires are cashing in big from the COVID-19 pandemic, in a variety of different ways

• The COVID-19 pandemic is being used to usher in highly controversial changes that are unmistakably totalitarian-building, including the private take-over of government through public-private partnerships

• New York governor Andrew Cuomo is partnering with Gates to reinvent the state’s post-COVID reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life

• New York is also partnering with Google. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is leading a new panel to plan the state’s technological infrastructure

• Partners in Health — the group selected by Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker to conduct COVID-19 contact tracing — is funded by Gates and one of the richest men in the world, George Soros. Chelsey Clinton sits is on the board of trustees, and one of its co-founders, Jim Kim, is also president of the World Bank

ℹ️ From Dr. Joseph Mercola

Since COVID-19 first entered the scene, exchange of ideas has basically been outlawed. By sharing my views and those from various experts throughout the pandemic on COVID treatments and the experimental COVID jabs, I became a main target of the White House, the political establishment and the global cabal.

Propaganda and pervasive censorship have been deployed to seize control over every part of your life, including your health, finances and food supply. The major media are key players and have been instrumental in creating and fueling fear.

I am republishing this article in its original form so that you can see how the progression unfolded.

Originally published: May 27, 2020

Bill Gates has built a global empire around his technologies and “philanthropic” endeavors. His sheer wealth has allowed him to become a veritable superpower in his own right, rising to become the unelected global health tsar on COVID-19. Indeed, the World Health Organization and the White House pandemic response team even kowtows to his nonexistent medical expertise.

Life cannot and will not go back to normal until we can vaccinate the entire global population, Gates says, and that same sentiment is being echoed from government leaders and health authorities around the world. Never mind the fact that actual scientists and medical researchers are finding all sorts of simple, inexpensive and safe strategies to address this illness.

But vaccinating the global population isn’t enough, in Gates’ eyes. We must also implement surveillance of infection and vaccination status. Not surprisingly, Gates’ recommendations benefit himself most of all.

As discussed in “Bill Gates — Most Dangerous Philanthropist in Modern History?” the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donates billions to the very same companies and industries that the Foundation owns stocks and bonds in.

Using nonprofit money to advance research for companies you’re invested in is illegal, yet he’s been getting away with this for many years. At the same time, his Foundation gets tax breaks for the charitable donations it makes money from. Remember, he has “donated” tens of billions, yet his net worth has doubled. This is largely because his “donations” are tax deductible investments.

While unemployment has reached a historical high during this pandemic, the financial crush is not felt by some. In fact, Gates and other tech billionaires are cashing in big, in a variety of different ways.

In a May 8, 2020, article

in The Intercept, Naomi Klein reports on how New York is tasking Gates with reinventing the state’s “post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.”

May 6, 2020, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the state is partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop “a smarter education system” focused on online learning. This, despite the fact that the Common Core curriculum — the Gates Foundation’s previous attempt at remaking American education

— has been an abysmal failure.

The state is also partnering with Google, and Cuomo has asked former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to head a new panel to plan the state’s technological infrastructure.

Schmidt joined Cuomo during a briefing, saying “The first priorities … are focused on telehealth, remote learning and broadband …” As noted by Klein:

“It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent pandemic shock doctrine is beginning to emerge.

Call it the Screen New Deal. Far more hi-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future …

It’s a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces, but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails …

It’s a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because, pre-Covid, this precise app-driven, gig-fueled future was being sold to us in the name of friction-free convenience and personalization. But many of us had concerns …

Today, a great many of those well-founded concerns are being swept away by a tidal wave of panic, and this warmed-over dystopia is going through a rush-job rebranding.

Now, against a harrowing backdrop of mass death, it is being sold to us on the dubious promise that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe …

At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants — with public schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies.”

In her article — which is well worth reading in its entirety — Klein reviews how Schmidt and Gates have been working and pushing toward the future that is now staring us square in the face, and how the surveillance apparatus that consumers have been railing against is now being rebranded as the answer to everyone’s health concerns.

In a May 6, 2020, article, Vox’s Theodore Schleifer weighed in on Cuomo’s decision to hand over the proverbial keys to the state to tech billionaires whose philanthropy always ends up benefiting themselves the most:

“Details are scarce about exactly how much power these groups will have beyond issuing recommendations or whether their work will be public. But Gates could suddenly have the ability to recommend what types of things are taught to the state’s students in a ‘reimagined’ system.

Schmidt could encourage the state to significantly embrace remote health care services that could be controversial. While both have been successful business leaders, the concern would mirror the broader criticism of billionaire philanthropy: that this ‘help’ offers a few wealthy people some undemocratic influence over American public policy.”

While less visible than Gates, Schmidt can hardly be trusted any more than Gates. Schmidt Futures — Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s philanthropic initiative, which “seeks to improve societal outcomes through the thoughtful development of emerging science and technologies that can benefit humanity”

— admits that one of its approaches is to “liberate private data with a public purpose.”

Clearly, infection status falls into a category of private data that is now rebranded as having a “public purpose.” As noted on its website:

“There is a tremendous opportunity to use data collected by the private sector to solve societal challenges, and in doing so create the platforms needed to reach people at scale. Examples of data types include mobile, social media, e-commerce, remote sensing/satellite, and sensor data. Advances in data science and machine learning are increasing our capacity to use and interpret these data.”

In a May 14, 2020, Guardian article, Zephyr Teachout and Pat Garofalo comment:

“Even if Schmidt and Gates had good policies, Cuomo’s knighting of them is offensive to American self-government. Nobody voted for them and they are accountable to no one. Cuomo, often accused of being too close to big campaign donors, is tripling down: he is simply allowing billionaires to plan our future directly, taking out the middlemen.

In case you had any doubt that this is a new form of government worming its way into our old democratic ways, Cuomo anointed these tsars at the exact same time that he took vast new powers away from the state legislature,

which has not been holding regular legislative hearings since 1 April …

Turning away from locally-elected representatives, and towards billionaires with no accountability, represents a terrible erosion of democratic decision-making: Cuomo is quite literally replacing elected representatives with private, unaccountable monopolists. And too many other lawmakers across the U.S. are doing the same thing.”

Whether preplanned or not, the COVID-19 pandemic is clearly being used to usher in highly controversial changes that are unmistakably totalitarian-building, including the private take-over of government through public-private partnerships.

Contact tracing serves as a convenient bridge

for this hostile takeover parading as “aid.” Not only is Big Tech offering up contact tracing apps, self-serving billionaires are also funding contact tracing groups that will provide “boots on the ground” services.

For example, Partners in Health — the group selected by Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker to conduct COVID-19 contact tracing using teams of investigators to interview people who test positive — is funded by Gates and one of the richest men in the world, George Soros. The William J. Clinton Foundation has also funded Partners in Health in the past.

Chelsey Clinton sits on its board of trustees, and one of the group’s co-founders, Jim Kim, spent three years at the WHO

and is currently the president of the World Bank. He rejoined Partners in Health’s board of directors in January 2019.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, OpenDemocracy and the tech start-up Foxglove are demanding the U.K. government share the details of its patient data deals with Big Tech. In a May 7, 2020, post, OpenDemocracy.net writes:

“Outside of the horrific death toll, perhaps the most far-reaching global consequence of the pandemic is the rapid expansion of surveillance in our daily lives. In the name of beating back the pandemic, governments around the world are giving tech giants extensive access to valuable stores of health data.

Britain is no different. On 28 March, a blog

quietly appeared on the website of the cherished National Health Service. It announced what might be the largest handover of NHS patient data to private corporations in history.

U.S. tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — plus two controversial AI films called Faculty and Palantir — are apparently assisting the NHS in tracking hospital resources and in providing a ‘single source of truth’ about the epidemic, in order to stem its spread.”

While the amount of British health data being shared with these companies has been described as “unprecedented,” the U.K. government has yet to release the details about the partnership.

Suspiciously, Palantir is reportedly providing its COVID-19 Datastore services to the NHS for just £1.

This despite the fact that its services are estimated to cost around £88,000 a week, and that’s just for salaries.

How and why is Palantir giving away its services for free? The old adage, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” seems applicable here.

OpenDemocracy also questions how the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Faculty has managed to land seven different government contracts worth nearly £1 million in the last 18 months.

“We have laws in Britain which mean journalists and members of the public can access information about such deals, so that they can answer precisely these sorts of questions. But now the UK government is acting as though these laws no longer apply,” OpenDemocracy writes.

Foxglove submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the U.K. government on April 3, 2020. A reply is required within 20 working days, yet no response has been forthcoming. The British Information Commissioner’s Office, the independent regulator responsible for FOIA enforcement, has announced

it has relaxed enforcement for the duration of the pandemic crisis.

That seems suspiciously convenient, considering deals are being made in secret that shouldn’t be, and panic is being drummed up without much real-world data to support the narrative that we’re still in a high-risk situation.

“Although the wording of the announcement was vague, it risks leaving the public with no practical way to hold the government to account — indefinitely,” OpenDemocracy states, adding:

“We have given the UK government until 11 May to release the information requested about these massive COVID data deals. If they fail to do so, we will consider seeking answers in the courts.

The public urgently needs to know not only how their personal information is being traded, and who has access to it. But also whether this pandemic means that our rights to ask questions, and to scrutinize the actions of our leaders, are fundamentally compromised. COVID-19 cannot be an excuse for governments and corporations to avoid accountability.”

Anyone still living under the misguided spell that governments’ responses to this pandemic are simply temporary emergency measures need to rapidly reassess. As reported by Vox,

tech billionaires like Gates and Schmidt are hard at work trying to convince governments and the public at large that only they can save us from another pandemic.

Such is the focus of the Pandemic Action Network, responsible for the #MaskingForAFriend Twitter campaign, pushed by Hillary Clinton and other celebrities.

“… the #MaskingForAFriend campaign … seeks to change personal behavior. But its more important ambition is to change government behavior,” Vox writes.

“This initiative is one of the more forward-looking attempts from philanthropy to shape what the world looks like after the crisis, and one of the few focused on political advocacy. The push is small for now, with just $1.5 million in initial cash from Schmidt Futures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and other backers.

But the Pandemic Action Network aims to lead a pressure campaign that shapes the policy debate, a debate that will be at the fore of the next wave of pandemic response efforts.”

A lead-in to global totalitarianism, predicated on protecting public health and preventing another pandemic, is the issuance of “digital health passports.” According to the British tech magazine Verdict,

coronavirus digital health passports are now being supplied to 15 nations.

The passport is “designed to make it easier for individuals to return to work after the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic” — as if we’ve never been able to return to normal life after any other epidemic or pandemic scare. In a May 11, 2020, article Verdict reports:

“These countries will include Italy, Portugal, France, Panama, India, the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Spain, South Africa, Mexico, United Arab Emirates and The Netherlands, with the goal of supplying 50 million digital health passports … The Covi-pass

will work using a color system of green, amber, red to indicate whether the individual has tested positive or negative for Covid-19 and relevant health information.

Firstly, the user downloads the app and enters key information such as name, address, age and verifies their identity using their fingerprint or a facial scan.

They then take a Covid-19 test, administered by an authorized healthcare professional, and the results are scanned into the Covi-pass. They can then use the digital health passport to authenticate their health status to enable ‘a safe return to work, life, and safe travel.’”

According to Covipass.com,

the app will display “your COVID-19 test history and immunoresponse and other relevant health information.”

As I’ve stated before, a RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) test result is basically worthless, since a) it merely detects the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genetic material, not the actual virus, and b) you can get infected at any time after you get your test results, rendering the “verification” of your infection status null and void.

According to a recent speech by U.S. President Donald Trump, his administration is mobilizing the military to distribute the vaccine once ready, which could be as early as the end of 2020.

At the same time, the U.S. Senate has voted to renew federal surveillance powers that would otherwise have expired,

and an ill-named bill, HR 6666, would put the government in charge of COVID-19 tracking and tracing, costing taxpayers a whopping $100 billion.

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