Brownstone Institute
The Dangers of the Biden Pandemic Plan
From the Brownstone Institute
What if the coronavirus pandemic was not a once-in-a-century event but the beginning of a new era of regular deadly respiratory viral pandemics? The Biden administration is already planning for this future. Two weeks ago, it unveiled a national strategy to develop pharmaceutical firms’ capacity to create vaccines within 130 days of a pandemic emergency declaration.
The Biden plan enshrines former president Donald Trump‘s Operation Warp Speed as the model response to the next century of pandemics. Left unsaid is that, for the new pandemic plan to work as envisioned, it will require us to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research. It will also require cutting corners in the evaluation of the safety and efficacy of novel vaccines. And while the studies are underway, politicians will face tremendous pressure to impose draconian lockdowns to keep the population “safe.”
In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, it took about a year for governments to deploy the jab at scale after scientists sequenced the virus. Scientists identified a vaccine target—fragments of the spike protein that the virus uses to access cells—by early January 2020, even before the WHO declared a worldwide pandemic.
This rapid response was only possible because some scientists already knew much about the novel virus. Despite heavy regulations limiting the work, the U.S. National Institutes of Health had funded collaborations between the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They collected bat viruses from the wild, enhanced their function to study their potential, and designed vaccines before the viruses infected humans.
While there is controversy over whether this gain-of-function work is responsible for the COVID pandemic, there is no question this research is potentially dangerous. Even cautious scientists sometimes accidentally leak hazardous, highly infectious viruses into the surrounding community. In December 2021, for instance, the virus that causes COVID-19 accidentally leaked out of a laboratory in Taiwan, where scientists were researching the virus.
A promising vaccine target would be needed immediately after a disease outbreak for the Biden pandemic plan to work. For that to be possible, there will need to be permanent support for research enhancing the capacity of viruses to infect and kill humans. The possibility of a deadly laboratory leak will hang over humanity into perpetuity.
Furthermore, before any mass vaccination campaign, pharmaceutical firms must test the vaccines for safety. High-quality randomized, controlled studies are needed to make sure the vaccine works. In 1954, Jonas Salk’s group tested the vaccine in a million children before the polio mass vaccination campaign that effectively defanged the threat of polio to American children. Physicians need the results of these studies to provide accurate information to patients.
Operation Warp Speed cut red tape so that vaccine manufacturers could conduct these studies rapidly. The randomized trials cut some corners. For instance, the Pfizer and Moderna trials did not enroll enough people to determine whether the COVID vaccines reduce all-cause mortality. Nor did they determine whether the vaccines stop disease transmission; a few months after the government deployed the vaccines, researchers found protection against infection was partial and short-lived.
Each of these cut corners has since created policy controversies and uncertainty that better trials would have avoided. Because of the pressure to produce a vaccine within 130 days, President Biden’s pandemic plan will likely force randomized trials on future vaccines to cut the same corners.
This policy effectively guarantees that lockdowns will return to the US in the event of a new pandemic. Though the lockdowns did not work to protect populations from getting or spreading COVID—after 2.5 years, nearly everyone in the US has had COVID—public health bureaucracies like the CDC have not repudiated the strategy. Imagine the early days of the next pandemic, with public health and the media fomenting fear of a new pathogen. The impetus to close schools, businesses, churches, beaches, and parks will be irresistible, though the pitch will be “130 days until the vax” rather than “two weeks to flatten the curve.”
When the vaccine finally arrives, the push to mass vaccinate for herd immunity will be enormous, even without evidence from the rushed trials that the vaccine provides long-lasting protection against disease transmission.
This happened in 2021 with the COVID vaccine and would happen again amidst the pandemic panic. The government would push the vaccine even on populations at low risk from the novel pathogen. Mandates and discrimination against the unvaccinated would return, along with a fierce movement to resist them. The public’s remaining trust in public health would shatter.
Rather than pursue this foolish policy, the Biden administration should adopt the traditional strategy for managing new respiratory-virus pandemics. This strategy involves quickly identifying high-risk groups and adopting creative strategies to protect them while not throwing the rest of society into panic.
The development of vaccines and treatments should be encouraged, but without imposing an artificial timeline that guarantees corners will be cut in evaluation. And most of all, lockdowns—a disaster for children, the poor, and the working class—should be excised from the public health toolkit forever.
Reprinted from Newsweek
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Morens implicated Margaret (Marg) Moore, known colloquially as “The FOIA lady” in trying to hide information from the American people, particularly that related to the origins of Covid-19, which is a felony.
A relatively unknown public records officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now at the centre of a burgeoning scandal involving Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
The saga unfolded after subpoenaed emails belonging to David Morens, a former top advisor to Anthony Fauci, revealed that someone had taught him to game the system and avoid emails being captured by FOIA requests.
“i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a Feb 24, 2021, email. “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”
Morens implicated Margaret (Marg) Moore, known colloquially as “The FOIA lady” in trying to hide information from the American people, particularly that related to the origins of Covid-19, which is a felony.
It sparked an investigation by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to expose what Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) called a “cover-up.”
A letter to NIH director Monica Bertagnolli in May suggested “a conspiracy at the highest levels” of these once trusted public health institutions.
“If what appears in these documents is true, this is an apparent attack on public trust and must be met with swift enforcement and consequences for those involved,” Wenstrup wrote.
Wenstrup said there was evidence that a former chief of staff of Fauci’s might have used intentional misspellings — such as “Ec~Health” instead of “EcoHealth” — to prevent emails from being captured in keyword searches by FOIA officials.
Stay Informed with Brownstone Institute
Today, Wenstrup announced a subpoena to compel Moore (The FOIA lady) to appear for a deposition on October 4, 2024, saying that she’d repeatedly resisted these efforts and delayed the Select Subcommittee’s investigation.
“Her alleged scheme to help NIH officials delete COVID-19 records and use their personal emails to avoid FOIA is appalling and deserves a thorough investigation,” said Wenstrup.
“Holding Ms. Moore accountable for any role she played in undermining American trust is a step towards improving the lack of accountability and absence of transparency rapidly spreading across many agencies within our federal government,” he added.
Moore, however, has indicated through her lawyers that she would invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Her lawyers wrote to Wenstrup explaining that she’d cooperated with the Select Subcommittee to find “an alternative” to sitting for an interview, including expediting her own FOIA request for her own documents.
They also explained that Morens’ emails suggesting Moore gave tips “about avoiding FOIA,” were misleading because Morens, under oath said, “That was a joke…She didn’t give me advice about how to avoid FOIA.”
Nonetheless, Moore’s decision to plead the Fifth has only fuelled concern over the lack of transparency and accountability of one of the nation’s top health research institutions.
It’s not over until the FOIA lady sings!
Further reading: The great FOIA dodge
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Mere words cannot restrain our aspiring censors from weaponizing their power to silence dissent. Enemies of the First Amendment vow to “hammer it out of existence,” as John Kerry explained this week, and they are prepared to circumvent legal protections to achieve their aims at all costs.
Kerry, speaking on a panel on climate change at the World Economic Forum, lamented what he regards as insufficient censorship of “disinformation” and called on his allies to “win the ground, win the right to govern” in order to be “free be able to implement change” despite the “major block” of the First Amendment.
But a survey of the dismal state of free speech in the United States shows that Kerry and his allies have already developed means to sidestep the “major block” of our founding documents. Hillary Clinton herself has floated the idea of criminal penalties for the spreading of “misinformation.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has similarly called for “reining in the media environment” so that people cannot just “spew information.”
Earlier this year, journalist Mark Steyn was forced to pay $1 million in “punitive damages” for mocking a climate scientist and comparing him to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.
The prevailing attorney urged the jury to inflict the punishment to demonstrate the ramifications for engaging in “climate denialism,” which he compared to President Trump’s “election denialism.”
In New York, State Attorney General Letitia James has demonstrated the threat that change poses to our foundational freedoms. During her 2018 campaign for office, James proudly broadcasted her antipathy to the First Amendment, pledging to weaponize the justice system against a range of political enemies from President Donald Trump to the National Rifle Association.
Her intolerance for dissent led her to target VDare, Peter Brimelow’s immigration-restrictionist website. Unable to find a crime, James used her office to drown the organization in legal costs until it was forced to cease operations. Despite having never advocated for violence or committed libel, Brimelow and his group were guilty of dissent in a jurisdiction that elected a zealot.
Stay Informed with Brownstone Institute
Steve Bannon, Julian Assange, Douglass Mackey, Roger Ver, and Pavel Durov have undergone similarly brazen persecutions that debunk the supposed safety of free speech protections in the West.
Our Constitution cannot survive Soviet-style justice of “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Brimelow, Assange, and Durov were targeted for their dissent, and the regime reverse-engineered means to punish them.
A similar process occurs in academia. Last week, the University of Pennsylvania announced that it would sanction law professor Amy Wax, a critic of affirmative action, by suspending her for a year and docking her pay. Penn insisted that the sanctions did not implicate freedom of speech and instead concerned “professionalism” standards for its faculty.
But Wax’s sanctions are explicitly based on 26 incidents of wrongthink, including criticizing “anti-assimilation ideas,” “rap culture,” and cities being “run like third world countries” as well as commenting on differences between the sexes and racial groups.
As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression explains, “Penn’s willingness to sidestep academic freedom protections to punish Wax sets a troubling precedent. If scholars with controversial views can lose their academic freedom merely for unspecified ‘unprofessionalism’ concerns, all faculty who hold minority, dissenting, or simply unpopular views are at risk.”
Americans more broadly face the same risk. Neither the First Amendment nor abstract free speech principles will stop the censors in their crusade. They will sidestep legal protections of our freedoms under the guise of ostensibly innocuous sloganeering.
Germany is already showing the way, with a guilty verdict for CJ Hopkins, an American living there who objected to Covid controls. With the documents already in place for “the future of the Internet,” the existing administration has a stated aim to close the Internet to free speech and install censors at all levels. This will necessarily run headlong into a confrontation with Elon Musk, but it will eventually hit Rumble and every other alternative source of information.
The target is the First Amendment but with a precise purpose: securing regime control over the whole population, with a public culture wholly controlled in the interests of protecting the administrative state against populist resistance. Those are the stakes.
Let there be no mistake about this. Your freedom to know the truth is what is at issue.
Author
The FOIA Lady Pleads the Fifth
John Kerry and the Circuitous Assault on Free Speech
TikTok partners with WHO to train influencers, ‘combat misinformation’
Will We Fall For The Same Old PCR Tricks Again?
-
COVID-192 days agoDr. Trozzi expresses optimism after day in court appealing to overturn ban on his medical license
-
Energy2 days agoTMX Pipeline a Success Story – Despite All the Green Battles Against It
-
Daily Caller2 days agoNearly One Million Foreign Nationals Flocked To US For Asylum In 2023, Shattering All-Time Record
-
Alberta2 days ago“It’s Canada’s Time to Shine” – CNRL’s $6.5 Billion Chevron Deal Extends Oil Sands Buying Spree
-
Education1 day agoFired Alberta Professor Largely Vindicated
-
National1 day agoJudge slams Trudeau, media for false claims about deaths, ‘secret burials’ at residential schools
-
Alberta1 day agoAlberta aggressively recruiting resident physicians from across Canada
-
Alberta22 hours agoLawyers ask Alberta court to allow businesses to seek damages from gov’t for COVID shutdown