As reviewed in “Why Government Health Care Kills More People Than It Helps,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention couldn’t have botched its COVID response any more if it tried.
August 17, 2022, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky even publicly admitted the agency’s failures, stating, “we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes from testing, to data, to communications.”1,2,3
To save face, Walensky is reorganizing the agency, but considering the extent to which CDC officials have lied, obfuscated and broken laws intended to protect public health, it is highly unlikely that the CDC will ever be able to recover their credibility.
Abolish the CDC
The CDC is corrupted beyond salvage, and as noted by Brownstone Institute founder and president Jeffrey Tucker,4 the only way to fix a captured bureaucracy is to get rid of it:
“Any serious effort to end the crisis must deal with the problem of the administrative state and the bureaucratic power thereof. Without that focus, no reform effort can get anywhere …
The reason is simple: a free and functioning society cannot coexist with an undemocratic beast like this on the loose, making its own laws and running roughshod over rights and liberties with zero oversight from elected leaders. Until the administrative state is defanged and disempowered, there will be no representative government and no hope for change.
It’s obvious that the bureaucracies will not reform themselves … The reform will be … cosmetic without reality. It will not deal with the central problem as plainly stated by Harvey Risch:5 ‘industry subservience and epidemiologic incompetence’ …
After Betsy DeVos left the Department of Education, and observing from the inside what a disaster it truly was, she said what needed to be said. Abolish it. Shut it down. Defund it completely. Forget about it. It does nothing useful. Everything it does can be performed better at the state level or private markets. All true.
What she says about the Department of Education is equally true of another hundred-plus agencies of the administrative state. People have been talking lately about abolishing the FBI. Great, do it. Same goes for the CDC. It’s time. Right now. Pull the plug on the whole thing and sell the real estate.
Truly there is no other option except continuing to do what we are doing now. The status quo is intolerable. If a serious reform-minded Congress comes to power, abolition and not reform and not cuts, needs to be the starting point of discussion …
There needs to be a to-be-abolished list and any federal government institution with the word agency, department, or bureau needs to be on it … Society itself, which is smarter than bureaucracy, can manage the rest.”
The Rise of the American Biosecurity State
To understand how and why the CDC has morphed into an agency that works against, instead of for, the public good, we need to take a look at the history of American biodefense. Two journalists have recently dedicated articles to this issue.
In an August 29, 2022, Unherd article,6 Ashley Rindsberg reviewed how Dr. Anthony Fauci rose to power as the highest paid federal employee, sitting at the “very top of America’s biodefense infrastructure,” with near-unlimited authority, at least as it pertains to science; what gets funded and what doesn’t.
“To understand the rise of Fauci … we must return to the first months of the 2000s, when a hawkish new administration was settling into power,” Rindsberg writes. George W. Bush came into office with Dick Cheney as vice president. Cheney had already served as defense secretary under George H.W. Bush.
According to Rindsberg, the Bush administration “came to power with biological weapons and infectious disease very much top of mind, with Cheney seeking to address the gaping hole in America’s national security left by the country’s lack of a coherent biodefense strategy.”
Biodefense became an even more prominent concern in the aftermath of 9/11, when letters containing anthrax were sent out to members of media and two U.S. senators. Of the 22 people infected with anthrax, five died. According to Rindsberg, Cheney “served as the political engine behind a paradigm shift that would soon take place in America’s biodefense strategy.”
Biodefense for the 21st Century
Just six days before 9/11, Joe Biden, then-chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had led a hearing on the threat of bioterrorism and the spread of infectious diseases.
Subsequent to that hearing, in June 2002, president Bush signed the “Biodefense for the 21st Century”7 directive, the aim of which was to advance a “comprehensive framework” for U.S. biodefense, based on the assumption that America could be devastated by a bioweapons attack.
The directive outlined “essential pillars” of the U.S. biodefense program, including threat awareness and vulnerability assessment, prevention and protection, surveillance and detection, response and recovery. The year before, in June 2001, senior policymakers had also performed a two-day tabletop simulation of a smallpox attack called Dark Winter.
“Intended … to expose vulnerabilities, the operation showed how quickly a public health disaster could lead to widespread chaos and social collapse. This was the stuff nightmares are made of — and, by all accounts, those were the nightmares that Dick Cheney was having,” Rindsberg writes. He continues:8
“Significant as it was, [Cheney’s] transformation of America’s biodefence framework was part of a much larger repositioning of long-term geopolitical strategy, an effort also led by Cheney.
In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the early Nineties, Cheney, then Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, along with Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, began formulating a grand strategy for the post-Cold War era.
This plan, revealed in an infamous leaked memo,9 was rooted in a single strategic objective: America should permanently remain the world’s superpower. Its architects argued the US would do so only by preserving ‘strategic depth’ to ‘shape the security environment.’
The initial leaked memo was later reworked by Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who broadened the concept10 of ‘strategic depth’ to cover not only geographic reach but also an ability to wage war with weapons that could not only cripple an enemy’s military capabilities but disrupt its political, economic and social stability.”
How Biodefense Became Fauci’s Domain
In 2002, the Bush administration quintupled biodefense spending to $317 million. That same year, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), broke out in China, and in 2003, just as SARS was being contained, H5N1 avian influenza emerged.
The back-to-back outbreaks acted as fuel for the erection of a biosecurity state, and in 2003, the Bush administration increased the annual biodefense budget to $2 billion — a staggering sum at the time. Bush also earmarked another $6 billion for the development and stockpiling of vaccines over the next decade.
But funding was only part of the challenge. To truly prepare for a bioweapons attack, research had to be conducted and coordinated, and to that end, Cheney brought all biodefense research programs under the purview of a single entity — the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led by Fauci.
So, since 2003, Fauci has been responsible for “civilian biodefense research with a focus on research and early development of medical countermeasures against terrorist threats from infectious diseases and radiation exposures.”11
What’s more, as explained by Rindsberg, “as far as NIAID was concerned, there was no meaningful administrative distinction between biodefense and scientific research. With the stroke of Cheney’s pen, all United States biodefense efforts, classified or unclassified, were placed under the aegis of Anthony Fauci.”
This, in a nutshell, explains Fauci’s power. As the head of the biodefense infrastructure, Fauci has, for decades, had an open channel straight into the top office of the White House. He’s also exempt from oversight. For all these years, he’s had carte blanche to approve and run whatever biodefense research he wanted, without anyone telling him otherwise.
It also explains why he’s the highest paid employee in the federal government, making more than the president himself. A significant portion of Fauci’s $417,600 annual salary12 is compensation for his biodefense research leadership.
COVID-19 Is Fauci’s Grandest Failure
As top dog of biodefense research, it was Fauci’s job to prevent COVID-19 from devastating the U.S. Instead, in 2017, he confidently announced that then-president Trump would “no doubt” have to face a “surprise infectious disease outbreak,”13 and then went on to issue a never-ending series of conflicting recommendations as head of the White House Coronavirus Response team.
Fauci also led efforts to suppress discussion about the origin of COVID-19, as detailed in “Liars, Propagandists and The Great Reset.”
In January 2022, House Oversight Committee Republicans released National Institutes of Health emails showing Fauci and now-former NIH director Francis Collins spearheaded the effort to bury the lab leak theory, even though the consensus in early February 2020 was that the virus likely leaked from the Wuhan lab — and that it appeared to have been genetically engineered.
February 4, 2020, Fauci and Collins received a draft of the article, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” later published in Nature Medicine.14 The original draft has never been released to the public, but we do have an email reply from Fauci, in which he objected to the inclusion of serial passaging through humanized mice.
In its final form, the Nature Medicine article roundly dismissed the idea that the virus originated in a lab, proposing instead that it must have evolved naturally, even though no actual evidence for that existed.
The Dangers of Biodefense Research Are Obvious
For years, a number of critics have warned that biodefense research could result in the very thing we’re trying to avoid, namely an infectious disease outbreak, as even the highest-security laboratories are prone to leaks and accidents.
One such critic is Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University. In 2003, he warned that the burgeoning biodefense endeavor, while well-intentioned, “may perversely have exactly the opposite effect.”15
Fauci, ever the defender of risky research (and as we now understand, for selfish reasons), dismissed Ebright’s concerns as “spurious.” Today, Fauci’s dismissal rings hollow, as documents obtained through various Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show he and Collins appear to have been more than a little nervous about people discovering they funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.16 As reported by U.S. Right To Know (USRTK):17
“In the earliest days of the pandemic, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins emailed about coronaviruses under study at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and about whether they had steered money to the lab, an email obtained by U.S. Right to Know shows.
Collins … and Fauci … exchanged emails on February 1, 2020, about a preprint18 authored by Zhengli Shi, director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases. The preprint described bat coronaviruses under study at the lab, including a coronavirus 96% genetically similar to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The emails show that Collins and Fauci were concerned about links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and NIH. ‘In case you haven’t seen this preprint from one week ago,’ Collins said in a February 1, 2020, email to Fauci. ‘No evidence this work was supported by NIH’ …
About two hours after the email exchange, Collins and Fauci would join a secret teleconference with a group of virologists who were closely examining the novel coronavirus. The teleconference touched off a high-profile push to discredit the lab leak hypothesis.
The revelation that Collins and Fauci were discussing whether NIH had funded work on coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 at the Wuhan lab in the hours before suggests that politics may have been at play.”
How Cheney Tricked Us Into War
The second article19 to take a deep dive into the links between Cheney and Fauci was published by Sam Husseini, September 7, 2022. Husseini, however, throws his searchlight on the way both of these characters have used lies to further the biosecurity agenda:
“Twenty years ago, the ‘Cheney-Bush junta’ … launched its propaganda campaign to invade Iraq … Sept. 8, 2002, The New York Times ran on its front page the story ‘U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts’ …
That same day, then Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press … hyping the New York Times story as evidence that Hussein was attempting to acquire ‘the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge and the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly-enriched uranium which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb.’ Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice followed Cheney’s lead on other shows.”
The problem, we now know, is that the “anonymous source” quoted by The New York Times lied. Worse, Cheney himself appears to have been that source. In other words, Cheney leaked the false story to the press, and then used that news coverage to support his recommendation to invade Iraq.
“Even the mainstream Bob Simon of CBS would later remark to Bill Moyers about Cheney: ‘You leak a story, and then you quote the story. I mean, that’s a remarkable thing to do,’” Husseini writes,20 adding: “Remarkable is actually an understatement. It’s engaging in a de facto conspiracy to deceive the U.S. public into war.”
Fauci Caught Employing the Same Trick
Taking a page straight out of Cheney’s handbook, Fauci used the exact same trick when, in April 2020, he was asked to address the suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 was manmade.
Fauci went on to cite “a study … where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
That paper was “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”21 that I just discussed above — the paper that Fauci and Collins edited prior to its publication in Nature Medicine. So, Fauci edited the paper22 and then he used that paper as “evidence” to support his irrational stance that the virus occurred naturally.
Just as Cheney engaged in a “de facto conspiracy to deceive the U.S. public into war,” Fauci engaged in a de facto conspiracy to trick the public into giving up our freedoms and livelihoods in the name of biosecurity. So, as noted by Husseini,23 “One thing that should be kept in mind as one parses through the claims and ‘exposés’ is that some are de facto cover stories.”
‘Biodefense’ Has Become a War Machine Against the Public
Now, nearly three years into the COVID debacle, it’s clear that this is indeed a war. It’s a war against the American public, for the purpose of forcing us into a New World Order, a One World Government run by a globalist cabal, where “biosecurity” is the justification for the removal of Constitutional rights and freedoms.
The same war is being waged by governments across the globe, against their own citizens, for the same reason and with the same aim. Fauci like Cheney before him, is responsible for getting us into this war, and for keeping us in it, using lies and propaganda.
The Iraq war — launched under false pretenses — lasted for eight years. No doubt, COVID could be strung out for that long as well, unless the truth is finally recognized by the masses.
And, to circle back to where we started, the institutions that facilitated this war on the American public must be abolished and dismantled, and the individuals responsible within them held to account for their roles. This includes not only Fauci and Walensky, but a host of others as well.
