Anatomy of the Pandemic State

Part 1: The Rise of Fauci: How Dr. Anthony Fauci became the most powerful bureaucrat in American History

Quick Read

While “Never Forget” bumper stickers were everywhere in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, ironically forgotten was the largest bioterrorism event in American history perpetrated at the same time. This event— the anthrax attacks— became the driving impetus for a massive enlargement of the national biodefense apparatus by irrevocably fusing public health infectious diseases with biodefense and made Fauci’s NIAID the de facto biodefense command center of the nation . Every aspect of the COVID pandemic response owes existence in some way shape or form to the sequence of these events set into motion twenty years prior. The architecture of Anthrax “countermeasures” was the precursor of what eventually became the gargantuan national pandemic infrastructure and why early COVID-19 measures were a DOD operation rather than a CDC led public health response (Link). This timeline of events corresponds perfectly with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s rise to the very top of America’s biodefense infrastructure as the most powerful bureaucrat in American history and is discussed in excruciating detail below. Rarely in history can one pierce straight lines through events and see their connections with the clarity of a cloudless summer sunny day. This just might be one of them.

PS: The anthrax used for the 2001 attacks came from the national biodefense’s Fort Detrick lab.

What you are about to read will reward you with uncommon knowledge and a rarified understanding reserved for sages, seekers and savants. As usual, it’s impeccably referenced, conjecture-free and shows primary sources without asking. Whilst I keep opinions to a minimum, I do occasionally succumb to the sins of editorialization. On the bright side, it’s how I know I’m (somewhat) human. If you’d like to support my work, become a paying subscriber or make a one-time donation. If not, you can still subscribe, share and post it on other platforms. Either way, I’m glad you’re reading this, because you dear reader are now part of the growing ranks of a discerning cognoscenti flipping the bird at those who tell you to not to do your own research.

Prologue

There’s no pandemic figure as reviled, respected and revered as Dr. Anthony Fauci. People swear by him, or swear at him. But almost nobody stops to think how or why he came to be the highest paid federal employee earning a paycheck bigger than the president of the United States of America. He gets accused of being a political operative, but people miss that he’s not only survived but thrived under both Republican and Democrat presidents. That’s as bipartisan as you can get.

Like the dark lord Sauron who held complete dominion over the realms of dwarves, elves and men, he holds a strange and inexplicable stranglehold over the triumvirate pillars of science, politics and media. In order to trace Dr. Fauci’s meteoric rise to becoming synonymous with science itself and his mysterious power over generations of elected officials, we must travel back in time and dust off the cobwebs of a long forgotten past.

The Pandemic state is born

In June 2001, a small number of senior policymakers spent two days running a simulation of a bioweapons attack. Called Dark Winter, it was designed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies and based on a hypothetical smallpox bioterrorism event. Its primary purpose was to expose biodefense vulnerabilities and demonstrate how a public health disaster could lead to widespread chaos and social collapse.

I encourage you to visit their web page and read it in its entirety. But the most striking thing about this exercise conducted 19 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic is how eerily their conclusions mirrored the events of 2020. To quote verbatim: “There is no surge capability in the U.S. healthcare and public health systems, or in the pharmaceutical and vaccine industries. This institutionally limited surge capacity could result in hospitals being overwhelmed and becoming inoperable…” and “Dealing with the media will be a major immediate challenge for all levels of government. Information management and communication (e.g., dealing with the press effectively, communication with citizens, maintaining the information flows necessary for command and control at all institutional levels) will be a critical element in crisis/consequence management”

If you think this is some out-of-context delusional tin foil hat conspiracy, it unfortunately gets so much more weirder.

The same Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security that gave us Dark Winter also gave us the October 18, 2019 Event 201 tabletop exercise in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, just a month before the first known case of COVID-19. The scenario, and again, I quote verbatim “..simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.”

Six days before the 9/11 attacks, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee convened a hearing on “The Threat of Bioterrorism and the Spread of Infectious Diseases”. The hearing was led by Joe Biden, then chair of the committee, and included testimony by experts in strategic defense. Incidentally (and purely by coincidence, I’m sure), Joe Biden referred to the COVID pandemic as a “dark winter” 5 days after winning the Nov 2020 elections.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred a few months after the Dark Winter tabletop exercises and just 8 months into the Bush presidency. The Anthrax attacks followed just a few weeks later.

According to journalist, Ashley Rindsberg, then Vice President Cheney was the political engine behind a paradigm shift that would soon take place in America’s biodefence strategy. Cheney was concerned about bioweapons in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and wanted the Bush administration to create a “biodefense strategy.”

I beg to differ. In fact, the coalescing of the public health and biodefense sectors predates 9/11 by a couple of years. In 1998, President Clinton announced a major new initiative to enhance preparedness for biological terrorism, including the creation of a civilian stockpile of pharmaceuticals and stepped-up research on new drugs and diagnostic tools. As a result of this White House initiative, the HHS budget for domestic preparedness exploded from $16 million in 1998 to a whopping $173 million in 1999. In 2000, HHS received $277 million for domestic preparedness activities and requested $265 million for 2001. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala said, “This is the first time in American history in which the public health system has been integrated directly into the national security system.” This sentiment is echoed in the CDC’s strategic plan for countering chemical and biological terrorism: “This strategic plan marks the first time that CDC has joined with law enforcement, intelligence and defense agencies in addition to traditional CDC partners to address a national security threat.”

Post 9/11, the Bush Administration began ramping up biodefence spending, which skyrocketed to $317 million in 2002. That same year, an unusual respiratory disease started to spread in the Guangdong region of China which was eventually classified as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

SARS was contained by the summer of 2003, but the same year an outbreak of avian influenza H5N1, began infecting birds and humans. By 2003, the Bush administration was requesting $2 billion in annual budget for biodefence — a sum that, as the Los Angeles Times noted, exceeded the combined research budgets for breast cancer, lung cancer, stroke and tuberculosis. That year, Bush announced in his State of the Union address that he would propose a further $6 billion for the development and stockpiling of vaccines over the subsequent decade, in addition to baseline biodefence funding.

The Bush-Cheney administration’s first landmark achievement towards establishing a pandemic-biodefense apparatus was the creation of a presidential directive called “Biodefense for the 21st Century“. Signed by Bush in April 2004, it advanced a “comprehensive framework for America’s biodefence” based on the assumption that a bioweapons attack could devastate America. As you can see from the screenshot below, it is poured vast sums of money into funding vaccines, creating new departments and expanding the breadth and scope of the surveillance state, and in doing so became the predecessor template for COVID policy.

Journalist Ashley Rindsberg called this directive vice president Dick Cheney’s ‘masterstroke’ in the transformation of America’s national strategic defense and the restructuring of biodefense. The transformation collected fragmented biodefence research programs from different departments, institutes and centers, and put them under the aegis of one single institute: the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). And who was the director of NIAID since 1984? Of course, Dr Anthony Fauci.

Fauci becomes the most powerful bureaucrat in American history

NIAID explained its shift from a relatively obscure public health agency to the centerpiece of the biodefense state thusly: “In 2003, NIAID was assigned lead responsibility… for civilian biodefence research with a focus on research and early development of medical countermeasures against terrorist threats from infections diseases and radiation exposures. NIAID later assumed responsibility for coordinating the NIH-wide effort to develop medical countermeasures against threats to the civilian population.”

While outwardly tasked with “civilian research,” this transformation elevated the NIAID to the status of central command for all things public health and biodefense, a role that became impossible to ignore during the COVID-19 pandemic. The NIAID explained: “Because new potentially deadly pathogens, such as avian influenza, may be naturally occurring as well as deliberately introduced by terrorists, NIAID’s biodefence research is integrated into its larger emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases portfolio.”

Thus, in one fell swoop and with just the stroke of a pen, the distinction between government funding of biodefense and scientific research in the realm of public health was permanently obliterated and placed Anthony Fauci near the very top of the biodefense hierarchy of the nation. Ashley Rindsberg explains that so important was this new command structure that a representative from the office of Scooter Libby, Cheney’s powerful chief of staff, was physically placed in NIAID headquarters in Washington during the transition to function as “a kind of political commissar” from the vice president’s office. This gave Fauci unparalleled access to not just Cheney, but President Bush, to whom he had an open channel.

This catapulted Fauci from the head of one of NIH’s 27 institutes to being the Director of NIH’s second-largest institute and simultaneously placed under his dominion biodefense, formerly under authority of military or intelligence agencies. It gave him near-autocratic control over the selection and funding of research in the twin realms of infectious diseases and biodefense whilst immune to bureaucratic oversight by virtue of his position at the apex of the food chain. Understanding this demigod-like transformation is imperative to understanding Fauci’s unflinching belief in his own infallibility during the pandemic, his hypnotic stranglehold over top-ranking public officials mindlessly parroting his constant flip-flopping absurdities and his remarkable hubris when he said “I represent science”

From Goldman Sachs

This awe-inspiring transformation from mere man into omniscient deity of science is why Dr. Fauci became the highest paid member of the federal government, out-earning not only the President of the United States, four-star generals, senators, and Supreme Court Justices, but earning more than twice as much as his own boss, NIH director Francis Collins.

In 2004, the year after Fauci’s NIAID became the country’s de facto biodefense agency, NIH deputy director Raynard S. Kingston wrote a formal memo to the agency’s director, Elias Zerhouni “to request that the current retention allowance [amount redacted] for Dr. Anthony S. Fauci be converted… in order to appropriately compensate him for the level of his responsibly in his current position of Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), especially as it relates to his work on biodefence research activities.”

With great power comes great responsibility, or in Fauci’s case, an immense paycheck. However, this salary jump represented something infinitely more important than just Fauci or his outsized paycheck.

From OpenTheBooks.com

It signaled a watershed point in American history, one that permanently syncretized public health infectious diseases with biodefense. Every infectious disease came to be viewed through the lens of biodefense, and, as during every war, the liberties and freedoms of citizens were to be rendered inconsequential and even antithetical to the survival of war machine. Fauci became the equivalent of a four-star general whose mild-mannered demeanor belied the iron grip he held on every facet of the government machine and why none dared question his diktats.

This twisted logic is crucial to understanding the government’s funding of the so-called “gain of function” experiments that subsequently followed. I will dedicate an entire essay to describing this funding. But here is a preview to whet your appetite:

On April 19, 2002 – the Spring before the first SARS outbreak in Asia – Christopher M. Curtis, Boyd Yount, and Ralph Baric filed an application for U.S. Patent 7,279,327 for a method of producing recombinant coronavirus. They sought to patent a means of producing, “an infectious, replication defective, coronavirus.” This work was supported by NIH grant funding. In short, the U.S. government was involved in funding experiments altering and creating coronaviruses between 1999 and 2002 before SARS was ever detected in humans.

(Ralph Baric is the frequent collaborator of Ecohealth alliance’s Peter Daszak who ghost wrote the Lancet Journal article decrying lab leak as conspiracy theory. Both Baric and Daszak co-authored the now infamous DEFUSE proposal which petitioned the Department of Defense for funding to perform gain-of-function engineering of bat viruses to make them uniquely capable of infecting and spreading between humans. If you have no idea what I am talking about, you can start here)

Epilogue

The decades following the fusion of public health infectious diseases with national biodefense became, in essence, a bioweapons arms race thinly disguised as the search for “countermeasures” against diseases that didn’t exist. Take COVID for example: nearly every aspect of COVID-19 therapeutics had been under development years, and in some cases, decade before there was such a thing as SARS COV-2 virus. If this sounds too incredible then you will be shocked to learn that the DOD has been funding the development of Remdesivir and mRNA technology since 2013. Cick on this essay to learn exactly how.

The DOD, not the CDC, orchestrated and funded major elements of the US pandemic response

The amalgamated public health-biodefense sector created incredible opportunities for lucrative public-private partnerships to flourish and came with the added benefit of opaqueness because it bypassed traditional checks and balances reserved for government but not private entities. One such instrument is the Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) deployed to perfection during the COVID pandemic and discussed in the article linked above. The Medical CBRN Defense Consortium (MCDC) united industry, academic, and not-for-profit partners under one umbrella to enable them to engage in these kinds of public-private partnerships insulated from public oversight (also discussed in the above linked article) and required all to supplicate directly or indirectly at the altar of Dr. Fauci. And this, dear reader, is how Dr. Fauci came to hold complete dominion over the triumvirate pillars of science, politics and media.

I sincerely hope this article was as illuminating for you to read as it was for me to research and write. The next article in the “Anatomy of the Pandemic State” Series examines the role of DARPA and how people you’ve never heard of were instrumental in every aspect of shaping the response and the narrative. As always, your support is greatly appreciated. Be sure to read my other articles. Please subscribe, share and comment.