Brownstone Institute
The WHO Is a Real and Present Danger
From the Brownstone Institute
Our governments intend to transfer decisions over our health, families, and societal freedoms to the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), whenever he or she declares it necessary. The success of this transfer of power depends on public ignorance of its implications, and of the nature of the WHO itself and its recent pandemic policy reversals. When the public understands, then its leaders are more likely to act in their interests rather than against them.
In late 2019, the WHO issued new recommendations for pandemic influenza. Influenza spreads by the same mechanism as Covid-19 (aerosols), with a similar mortality in most people. The WHO stated that it is “not recommended in any circumstances” to undertake contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening, and border closures. They envisioned that in a severe pandemic it may be necessary to close businesses for up to seven to ten days.
The WHO cautioned against strict measures because they would have minimal impact on the spread of an aerosolized respiratory virus while inevitably increasing poverty, especially harming low-income people. Poverty makes people die younger and is a major killer of babies in low-income countries.
A few months later, the WHO advocated for everything they had previously advised against, to combat Covid-19. This reversal in their recommendations had the effect they had predicted; increasing poverty and shortening life expectancy, particularly amongst the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, while having minimal overall impact on virus spread.
While the WHO’s 2019 recommendations were based on the assessment of decades of knowledge by an expert panel, its Covid-19 lockdown recommendations were based solely on reported experience from one city in China. Their new source of knowledge had, a few weeks earlier, stated that the new virus had no human-to-human transmission. This was followed by apparent propaganda taken up by the world’s media of people dropping dead in the streets.
It is vital to understand what drove this reversal of WHO policy, and to detail its harm. International public health priorities are currently being upended with the specific aim of allowing the WHO to do this again, harder and more frequently. In May 2024 our countries will vote to allow a single person to dictate border closures and quarantine, and require medical examinations and vaccination of their citizens. They will agree to censor those who protest. Our governments will undertake to make this individual’s recommendations regarding our rights to family life, work, and school effectively binding.
In promoting lockdowns, the WHO was not only following China, but a group of powerful Pharma-related interests who have been pushing these approaches for over a decade. They have established public-private partnerships such as the Swiss-based CEPI, channeling taxpayer funding to promote their authoritarian approach to public health. In October 2019, a meeting called Event-201 was convened by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, including the WHO, China CDC and others, to run simulations of such approaches for a hypothetical coronavirus outbreak. At this time, Covid-19 virus must already have been circulating well beyond China.
Whilst establishing this influence over public health policy, Pharma and their private investors increasingly funded the WHO itself, now providing about 25 percent of its budget. This funding is ‘specified,’ meaning the funder decides how and where it is spent. Certain governments now also ‘specify’ most of their funding, leading to over 75 percent of the WHO’s activities being determined by the donor. Germany stands out as the second highest national donor after the USA, also being a major investor in BioNTech, Pfizer’s Covid-19 mRNA vaccine developer.
Discarding basic immunology, the WHO then claimed in late 2020 that only vaccination could lead to high community immunity (‘herd immunity’) and became a major proponent of mass vaccination within an epidemic, aligning fully with its private sponsors. Under pressure for obviously lying, they then changed to a preference for vaccination – equally foolish as a general statement since many everyday viruses are obviously mild. While not based on evidence or expertise, this clearly serves a purpose.
Despite there being a clearly identified subset of people at high Covid risk, vaccination-for-all was promoted by Pharma investors as a ‘way out’ of the lockdowns these same people had advocated for. The WHO’s incoherent Covid vax mantra – “No one is safe until all are safe” – is supposed to support this but logically implies that vaccination does not even protect the vaccinated.
In Western countries the results of these policies are increasingly stark; rising inequality, closed businesses and rising young adult all-cause mortality. In low-income countries across Africa and Asia that the WHO once prioritized, its actions have been even more devastating. As predicted in early 2020, malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS are increasing, killing more people and at a far younger age than Covid-19. Over 100 million additional people face malnutrition, up to 10 million additional girls will endure child marriage and nightly rape, and millions more mothers will lose their infants due to the impacts of deeper poverty. UNICEF estimated nearly a quarter million added child deaths from lockdowns in South Asia in 2020 alone. The WHO did this – they stated that it would happen, then encouraged its implementation.
Few gained from the Covid response, but those who did gained; particularly private and corporate funders of the WHO with large Pharma and software assets, gained massively. WHO employees and others working in global health also thrived, and are now securing lucrative careers as the agenda expands. As the old evidence-based public health is pushed aside, it is in the new public health of the software entrepreneurs and Pharma moguls that careers will be made.
So, we have a problem. The WHO, ostensibly leading the show, is deeply conflicted through its private investors, whilst governed by an Assembly including powerful States hostile to human rights and democracy. Its staffing policies, based on country quotas and rules that promote retention rather than targeted recruitment, are not even designed to assure technical expertise.
The recent behavior of these staff – blind, dutiful compliance with the organization’s multiple nonsensical claims – must raise questions regarding their integrity and competency. The expanding pandemic industry has a massive financial war chest aimed at media and political sponsorship, and our politicians fear political oblivion should they oppose it.
Pandemics are rare. In the past century, including Covid, the WHO estimates about one per generation. These cost fewer life-years during their time of spread than tuberculosis or cancer cost every year. No one can rationally claim we face an existential crisis, or that forfeiting human freedom to Pharma and private entrepreneurs is a legitimate public health response should we face one. Our democracies are being eroded through a massive amoral business deal, a structure designed to concentrate the wealth of the many in the hands of the few. Covid-19 proved the model works.
The only real question is whether, and how, this society-wrecking pandemic train can be stopped. The public health professions want careers and salaries, and will not intervene. They have proven that in previous manifestations of fascism. The public must educate themselves, and then refuse to comply. We can just hope some of our supposed leaders will step forward to help them.
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
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