Brownstone Institute
Sam Bankman-Fried and the Missing Billions for Pandemic Planning
From the Brownstone Institute
Yes, I watched the appalling scenes of Sam Bankman-Fried’s media tour. He repeatedly returns to the theme of his philanthropy: pandemic planning. What does this 30-year-old computer guy know about infectious disease? No more than Bill Gates did when he began his malanthropic crusade through the universities, journals, and nonprofits and imposed his lockdown-and-vaccinate ideology on them, thus compromising a whole generation of infectious-disease scientists.
Bankman-Fried saw how much influence this bought Gates and decided to replicate the experience in a mere few years in the midst of a pandemic. As we’ve documented, he gave millions but promised billions. The promise tends to be even more effective than money in the bank. All the better, he backed his “pandemic planning” support with $40 million (Elon Musk speculates it was far more) for politicians who shared his supposed passion to control infectious disease.
And so Sam of FTX, who seems to have stolen and otherwise misdirected billions from his own crypto scam, was invited to speak at a New York Timesevent called Dealbook. A seat in the audience cost $2,400. He had been booked for the gig long before because he was a darling of the left, having thrown around many millions to back Democrats in the midterms.
He was also loved for running the second-largest crypto exchange in the world while babbling left-wing prattle about effective altruism. He advertised himself as the world’s most generous billionaire at a mere 30 years old! He urged others to do the same, giving to his brother’s charity devoted to pandemic planning, just as an example.
With his disheveled look and halting speech patterns, he struck many as a genius. One would have to let go of all normal intuition to believe that, but here is where we are today.
The interview pitched a series of softball questions with the mask of a tough interrogation. Bankman-Fried replied with a bunch of financial-sounding mumbo jumbo that the interviewer could not really follow, so of course he gave him a pass. In the end, the interviewer and the audience gave the thief a round of applause for his frank answers and accessibility.
Sam claimed that his lawyers advised against this particular appearance. I don’t believe it. I suspect that his lawyers understand something very dark about our times. If you can bamboozle an audience at the New York Times, you stand a better chance of favorable treatment in a court of law. That’s why he is continuing his media rounds. Hey, why not a speaking tour to boot?
How did Bankman-Fried justify himself? Essentially he said that he had downplayed the downside risks in a possible bear market in which his tokens suddenly lost 90% of their value. He had not anticipated this. And, he seemed to imply, had the markets not changed direction, his company would be solvent. Hence, none of this is really his fault. It’s just what happens when the market winds change course.
By comparison, Bernie Madoff’s scam was rather simple. He used the money of new investors to pay a return to old investors. He gradually came to realize that he had better success in business by doing this than relying on market forces themselves. By offering a predictable 9 percent return, he could always attract new money in up markets or down markets. In a sense he was right: his Ponzi scheme lasted 20 years!
When the housing market crashed and the money dried up, and he could no longer find new chumps to pay the old chumps, he admitted it. He said he lied and that he was running a scam. He pled guilty, went to jail, and died. One son killed himself and the other died. His widow today lives a modest life, still reeling from the horribleness of it all.
Sam’s scheme was far more complicated. It involved mixing funds over a huge range of companies that he owned, so his own exchange had an open spigot of customer funds going to his own Alameda Research, which would use those funds to buy the token FTT in which customer funds were held. It was the same scam as Madoff but tokenized in a world that has stupidly come to believe that anyone can create a thing of value with a few mouse clicks and some incantations of the word blockchain.
Crucially, Bankman-Fried paid off all the right people along the way. He paid nonprofits, media companies, and politicians, and made all the right noises about the need to regulate the industry more than is currently the case. As a result, his media darling status persists even now, as the New York Times and MSNBC work hard daily to rehabilitate him, despite his not being able to account for some $20 billion in missing funds.
In the dystopian novel and film The Hunger Games, the elites have divided society into many districts depending on their function and economic status. Only District One truly lives well, and here you find the greatest champions of the system, which is kept alive through top-down tyranny. The games themselves are designed to shore up regime stability by necessitating random sacrifices of the lives of kids forced into a zero-sum game of murder.
The whole thing looks implausible on first viewing. How could the richest of the rich sit by and watch, cheering on this blood-thirsty tragedy? On second thought, the whole thing is wholly believable. Elites socialize themselves to believe whatever it is that protects their wealth and status. That’s exactly why such a large crowd of people gathered at the New York Times to watch the validation and vindication of Sam, and they happily cheered his fake honesty and transparency at the end.
The display was disgusting but entirely predictable if you understand something about how our own hunger games are played. In this decade and a half of easy money, a whole class of people has risen to the top of the cultural echelon not by productive labor but by educational credentials and being part of the corporate float. They have come to believe that the system makes sense simply because it has benefited them.
This is why they so gladly took to pandemic controls when they were at their height. They would “stay home and stay safe” while the proletariat slogged through the streets carrying dinners in bags to drop off at doorsteps. In some extremely strange way, this felt like a utopia for the upper classes. This – and $10 trillion to back the whole scheme – is why the lockdowns lasted as long as they did.
We are nowhere close to getting to the bottom of the whole scam. SBF gave millions away to all sorts of institutions while marketing his grift as altruism. He later admitted that his fake-woke philosophizing was nothing but a cover, as it is for all these people, which is why his admission didn’t really disqualify him from continued membership in the class of media and business elites.
Nothing exposes the economic and financial hypocrisies of our time as much as this FTX caper. We can report some good news however: it is not long for the world. Elon Musk is demonstrating how a competent leader can take over a single company, fire 75 percent of its employees, make the platform work better than ever, and still possibly make a profit. For the sake of civilization, let us hope that the Musk model will inspire many coming corporate upheavals.
District One needs to be thoroughly cleansed and the sooner the better. The cleansing fire in our times takes the most implausible form one can imagine: positive real interest rates. If the Fed sticks to its agenda – and it likely will – we will see every manner of upheaval coming in the next six months. The court dockets will become even more full than they currently are, and there won’t be enough investigators available to unravel this and so many other scandals of our times.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Anthony “I represent science” Fauci can now stand beside Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon in the history books as someone who received the poison pill of a preemptive pardon.
While Nixon was pardoned for specific charges related to Watergate, the exact crimes for which Fauci was pardoned are not specified. Rather, the pardon specifies:
Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong – and in fact have done the right things – and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated and prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.
In other words, the dying breath of the Biden administration appears to be pardoning Fauci for crimes he didn’t commit, which would seem to make a pardon null and void. The pardon goes further than simply granting clemency for crimes. Clemency usually alleviates the punishment associated with a crime, but here Biden attempts to alleviate the burden of investigations and prosecutions, the likes of which our justice system uses to uncover crimes.
It’s one thing to pardon someone who has been subjected to a fair trial and convicted, to say they have already paid their dues. Gerald Ford, in his pardon of Richard Nixon, admitted that Nixon had already paid the high cost of resigning from the highest office in the land. Nixon’s resignation came as the final chapter of prolonged investigations into his illegal and unpresidential conduct during Watergate, and those investigations provided us the truth we needed to know that Nixon was a crook and move on content that his ignominious reputation was carve d into stone for all of history.
Fauci, meanwhile, has evaded investigations on matters far more serious than Watergate. In 2017, DARPA organized a grant call – the PREEMPT call – aiming to preempt pathogen spillover from wildlife to people. In 2018 a newly formed collaborative group of scientists from the US, Singapore, and Wuhan wrote a grant – the DEFUSE grant – proposing to modify a bat sarbecovirus in Wuhan in a very unusual way. DARPA did not fund the team because their work was too risky for the Department of Defense, but in 2019 Fauci’s NIAID funded this exact set of scientists who never wrote a paper together prior or since. In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan with the precise modifications proposed in the DEFUSE grant submitted to PREEMPT.
It’s reasonable to be concerned that this line of research funded by Fauci’s NIAID may have caused the pandemic. In fact, if we’re sharp-penciled and honest with our probabilities, it’s likely beyond reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a consequence of research proposed in DEFUSE. What we don’t know, however, is whether the research proceeded with US involvement or not.
Congress used its constitutionally-granted investigation and oversight responsibilities to investigate and oversee NIAID in search of answers. In the process of these investigations, they found endless pages of emails with unjustified redactions, evidence that Fauci’s FOIA lady could “make emails disappear,” Fauci’s right-hand-man David Morens aided the DEFUSE authors as they navigated disciplinary measures at NIH and NIAID, and there were significant concerns that NIAID sought to obstruct investigations and destroy federal records.
Such obstructive actions did not inspire confidence in the innocence of Anthony Fauci or the US scientists he funded in 2019. On the contrary, Fauci testified twice under oath saying NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research of concern in Wuhan…but then we discovered a 2018 progress report of research NIAID funded in Wuhan revealing research they funded had enhanced the transmissibility of a bat SARS-related coronavirus 10,000 times higher than the wild virus. That is, indisputably, gain-of-function research of concern. Fauci thus lied to the American public and perjured himself in his testimony to Congress, and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has referred Fauci’s perjury charges to the Department of Justice.
What was NIAID trying to preempt with their obstruction of Congressional investigations? What is Biden trying to preempt with his pardon of Fauci? Why do we not have the 2019 NIAID progress report from the PI’s who submitted DEFUSE to PREEMPT and later received funding from NIAID?
It is deplorable for Biden to preemptively pardon Fauci on his last day in office, with so little known about the research NIAID funded in 2019 and voters so clearly eager to learn more. With Nixon’s preemptive pardon, the truth of his wrongdoing was known and all that was left was punishment. With Fauci’s preemptive pardon, the truth is not yet known, NIAID officials in Fauci’s orbit violated federal records laws in their effort to avoid the truth from being known, and Biden didn’t preemptively pardon Fauci to grant clemency and alleviate punishment, but to stop investigations and prosecutions the likes of which could uncover the truth.
I’m not a Constitutional scholar prepared to argue the legality of this maneuver, but I am an ethical human being, a scientist who contributed another grant to the PREEMPT call, and a scientist who helped uncover some of the evidence consistent with a lab origin and quantify the likelihood of a lab origin from research proposed in the DEFUSE grant. Any ethical human being knows that we need to know what caused the pandemic, and to deprive the citizenry of such information from open investigations of NIAID research in 2019 would be to deprive us of critical information we need to self-govern and elect people who manage scientific risks in ways we see fit. As a scientist, there are critical questions about bioattribution that require testing, and the way to test our hypotheses is to uncover the redacted and withheld documents from Fauci’s NIAID in 2019.
The Biden administration’s dying breath was to pardon Anthony Fauci not for the convictions for crimes he didn’t commit (?) but to avoid investigations that could be a reputational and financial burden for Anthony Fauci. A pardon to preempt an investigation is not a pardon; it is obstruction. The Biden administration’s dying breath is to obstruct our pursuit of truth and reconciliation on the ultimate cause of 1 million Americans’ dying breaths.
To remind everyone what we still need to know, it helps to look through the peephole of what we’ve already found to inspire curiosity about what else we’d find if only the peephole could be widened. Below is one of the precious few emails investigative journalists pursuing FOIAs against NIAID have managed to obtain from the critical period when SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have emerged. The email connects DEFUSE PI’s Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), Ralph Baric (UNC), Linfa Wang (Duke-NUS), Ben Hu (Wuhan Institute of Virology), Shi ZhengLi (Wuhan Institute of Virology) and others in October 2019. The subject line “NIAID SARS-CoV Call – October 30/31” connects these authors to NIAID.
It is approximately in that time range – October/November 2019 – when SARS-CoV-2 is hypothesized to have entered the human population in Wuhan. When it emerged, SARS-CoV-2 was unique among sarbecoviruses in having a furin cleavage site, as proposed by these authors in their 2019 DEFUSE grant. Of all the places the furin cleavage site could be, the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2 was in the S1/S2 junction of the Spike protein, precisely as proposed by these authors.
In order to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS-CoV, however, the researchers would’ve needed to build a reverse genetic system, i.e. a DNA copy of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses in having exactly the fingerprint we would expect from reverse genetic systems. There is an unusual even spacing in the cutting/pasting sites for the enzymes BsaI and BsmBI and an anomalous hot-spot of silent mutations in precisely these sites, exactly as researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have done for other coronavirus reverse genetic systems. The odds of such an extreme synthetic-looking pattern occurring in nature are, conservatively, about 1 in 50 billion.
The virus did not emerge in Bangkok, Hanoi, Bago, Kunming, Guangdong, or any of the myriad other places with similar animal trade networks and greater contact rates between people and sarbecovirus reservoirs. No. The virus emerged in Wuhan, the exact place and time one would expect from DEFUSE.
With all the evidence pointing the hounds towards NIAID, it is essential for global health security that we further investigate the research NIAID funded in 2019. It is imperative for our constitutional democracy, for our ability to self-govern, that we learn the truth. The only way to learn the truth is to investigate NIAID, the agency Fauci led for 38 years, the agency that funded gain-of-function research of concern, the agency named in the October 2019 call by DEFUSE PI’s, the agency that funded this exact group in 2019.
A preemptive pardon prior to the discovery of truth is a fancy name for obstruction of justice. The Biden administration’s dying breath must be challenged, and we must allow Congress and the incoming administration to investigate the possibility that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID-supported research caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
This article was co-authored with Mary Beth Pfieffer.
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled, and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media, and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The US and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to-consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky US-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is an outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false storyline that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under the law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Republished from RealClearHealth
Author
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