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

The DOD appeared to have advance foreknowledge of an impending public health emergency when the US had barely a few COVID cases and funded mRNA vaccines and Remdesivir years before COVID-19 existed

Quick Read

The pandemic response was defense operation first and a public health response second. The scaffolding of the pandemic response existed as far back as 2013, and the DOD funded a surprisingly large number of COVID “countermeasures,” many predating the pandemic by several years. The DOD appeared to have advance foreknowledge of an impending public health emergency when the US had barely a few COVID cases. These handful cases were used to to activate the full power of the public-private partnership leviathan under the umbrella of the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) and put into motion a multi-billion dollar pharma led, government funded, clinical trial boondoggle that gave us Remdesivir, monoclonal antibodies and mRNA vaccines, all approved in impossibly short timeframes. “Operation warp speed” had three times as many military personnel as civilians.

The DOD has, for decades, been morbidly interested in bat coronavirus research, starting from the time of the original SARS-CoV outbreak in 2003 and MERS outbreak of 2012 or even prior. Take for example this remarkable 2019 paper written by Department of Defense (DOD) scientists at Fort Detrick, Maryland in which they discuss “genetically manipulating” coronaviruses (fancy way of saying gain of function) to probe mechanisms of viral pathogenesis and antiviral drug activity. In addition they wonder if “reverse genetics systems” which synthetically generate viruses from known viral sequences would be more suited for situations where infectious material is unavailable or possesses undue risk.

The timing of this paper is curious for at least three reasons:

• Firstly, it was published the same year as the first cases of SARS-COV-2 (disease later named COVID-19) emerged in humans a few months after and who, by some inexplicable stroke of coincidence, just happened to be 3 Chinese scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab. If you’re shocked by that assertion, you can read all about it here.

• Secondly, we now know that the US Army Medical Research Institute at Fort Detrick—home to the scientists who wrote this paper—reported at least two breaches of containment around June 2019, leading to the Centers for Disease and Control halting its high-level research. The two breaches reported by USAMRIID to the CDC were in biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories—the highest levels of containment—requiring special protective equipment, air flow and standard operating procedures. These breaches remained undisclosed at the time of their happening. The CDC cited “national security reasons” as the reason for not informing the public about its decision. After approximately eight months of closure and restrictions, the USAMRIID BSL-4 lab resumed full operational status by April 2020.

• Thirdly, this wasn’t the first time scientists at the DOD entertained the idea of performing gain of function experiments on bat coronaviruses or synthetically producing them from scratch for that matter. Just one year earlier in 2018, DARPA received a grant proposal entitled “DEFUSE” co-written by American and Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Its applicants 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. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the central research and development organization of the Department of Defense. This proposal described using “reverse genetics” very much like the 2019 paper from Fort Detrick did. However, it went one step further: it contained an actual recipe for producing these frankenviruses from six synthetic pieces of DNA. The actual exposition of the DEFUSE proposal is beyond the scope of this article, but if you’re curious as to how this most shocking proposal dovetails into COVID-19, I’d like to point you in the direction of my full-length, impeccably referenced essay below:

  But, where's the bat?

The DOD was central in orchestrating every element of the US pandemic response, which is hardly surprising given a pandemic is as much a national security threat as it is a public health one. However, there are some unique and inexplicable features to the timing and scope of DOD’s involvement that bear worth mentioning.

The DOD rang the alarm bells of an impending pandemic at at time when the US barely had a handful of cases, zero deaths and at the same time the WHO proclaimed that there was no evidence for human-to-human transmission.

According to Sasha Latyapova—a pharma executive turned whistleblower—AstraZeneca and other pharma companies participating in the DOD Pandemic Preparedness consortium received a phone call from the DOD on 4th Feb, 2020—just 14 days after the first US case of COVID —saying that the novel COVID virus posed national security threat. The number of known COVID cases in the US on Feb 4th, 2020 was a grand total of 11. So, how did the DOD know that 11 cases would quickly mushroom cloud into a full-on public health crisis and constitute a national security threat?

This is even more intriguing when you consider that the WHO had just 2 weeks prior to the 4th Feb, 2020 meeting claimed this virus (which hadn’t been named COVID-19 yet) wasn’t capable of jumping between humans. How then did the DOD know it was going to be a huge problem in the US?

The importance of the 4th Feb 2020 phone call between the DOD and pharmaceutical executives cannot be overstated once you realize what happened on Jan 31st, 2020. According to the Federal Register, then HHS secretary Alex Azar declared a public health emergency just 4 days before the DOD was on the phone asking pharma bosses to come up with novel COVID therapies. On Jan 31st, 2020the US had a grand total of 6 known COVID cases.

The invocation of this public health emergency effectively indemnified from all liability pharmaceutical companies involved in manufacturing COVID therapeutics using the impenetrable shield of the PREP act. The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) is a 2005 tort liability shield that protects pharmaceutical manufacturers from financial risk in the event of a declared public health emergency.

In other words, the Feb 4th, 2020 phone call between the DOD met with Pharma was perfectly timed to leverage the fact that pharma now had carte blanche to start producing experimental therapeutics while facing zero liability for any harms resulting from the use of their products. And they wanted these experimental therapeutics produced under duress of an impossibly short, never-been-done-before timeline.

I say impossibly short timeline because, according to Sasha Latyapova’s substack post, there exists a leaked audio of AstraZeneca executives musing incredulously at the absurdity of DOD’s pandemic preparedness plan, which called for the timeline from discovering new viruses to making new drugs to be a mere 60 days. For people who aren’t familiar with how drug discovery and development works, it takes more than 60 days for contracts to be written and executed (not infrequently 6 months or more) let alone entertaining the possibility of going from zero to done in 60 days, which is nothing short of ludicrous.

You can read the entire transcript of the leaked audio and listen to it here. I will include only the most relevant portions here.

“…There, I met Col. Matt Hepburn, who is actually the architect of the Pandemic Prevention Program or P3, and the goal of P3 was going from the discovering a novel virus to producing drugs in less than 60 days – something that would normally take 6 years at best. To me that sounded more like science fiction than science, but we signed up in a small and committed team of virologists and molecular biologists and engineers and started working in 2018 on new technologies to discover and manufacture antibodies against viruses”

“It wasn’t a surprise to me when I got a call on February 4th from the Defense Department here in the US saying that the newly discovered Sars-2 virus posed a national security threat. We needed to stop everything we were doing on our model system influenza, and put everything onto Sars-2.”

DOD was instrumental in funding the development of novel COVID therapeutics, in many cases long before COVID ever existed

• AstraZeneca received $486 million from the U.S. government as a direct result of the Feb 4th, 2020 phone call to fund two phase 3 clinical trials of a anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody cocktail AZD7442 (eventually named Evusheld). This money came from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, in collaboration with the DoD Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense and Army Contracting Command. Here’s the DOD press release.

• The DOD has been funding the development of Remdesivir since 2013. According to the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), The federal government spent $161 million on the development of Remdesivir. One fourth of this, or almost $40 million, came from the DOD.

• The DOD has been funding the development of mRNA technology since 2013. DARPA Awarded Moderna Therapeutics a Grant for $25 Million to Develop Messenger RNA Therapeutics in 2013, seven years before the pandemic. This screenshot is from Moderna’s own website:

In fact, the template for the “60 Days To Stop A Pandemic” was established in 2017 (not a typo). This screenshot from 2017 shows clearly that the Feb 4th, 2020 DOD-Pharma phone call was based on their 2017 vision of going from detection of pathogen to treatment in 60 days.

And the DOD had, by 2017, decided that conventional therapies were too slow and cumbersome for deployment into the 60 day pandemic timeframe: “Developing means of efficiently delivering nucleic-acid-based protective treatments, since the technologies used to administer conventional vaccines do not readily translate.”

• According to one research paper, in the 35 years before the covid-19 pandemic, the US government directly invested a staggering $337million in research and development of mRNA technology, and 21% or $72million of this funding came from the Department of Defense.

DOD was majority Stakeholder in Warp Speed, and funded Pharma through a strange intermediary

Operation Warp Speed, the $10 billion US government pandemic initiative, was a highly structured organization in which military personnel outnumbered civilian scientists by a ratio of 3 to 1. At its peak, there were roughly 60 military officials — including at least four generals — involved in the leadership of Operation Warp Speed, many of whom had never worked in health care or vaccine development. Just 29 of the roughly 90 leaders on the chart weren’t employed by the Department of Defense. According to the org chart, the CDC was surprisingly missing representation while BARDA and all major Pharma companies had prominent seats at the table.

There was another strange peculiarity: Instead of entering into contracts directly with vaccine makers, Operation Warp Speed funding was routed through a defense contract management firm called Advanced Technologies International, Inc. ATI then awarded contracts to companies working on COVID-19 vaccines. This obscured contracts between the pharmaceutical companies and ATI and made them unavailable through public records requests, and additional documents are exempt from public disclosure for five years.

Most government contracts are governed by a set of rules called the Federal Acquisition Regulation, or FAR. In special cases, the government can use an alternative mechanism, called an Other Transaction Agreement, or OTA, which bypasses an onerous and time consuming system of checks and balances and public transparency inherent in the FAR process and streamlines the contracting process to attract newer, smaller companies and inventors that otherwise might not have the resources or willingness to do so. The Department of Defense, a partner in Operation Warp Speed, already had an overarching OTA with ATI. All they had to do to expand it for the COVID-19 response was add more money and issue a request for proposals concerning coronavirus vaccines and other COVID-19 items.

Vaccine contracts awarded this way included $1.6 billion for Novavax, $1.95 billion for Pfizer, $1.79 billion for Sanofi and $1 billion for Johnson & Johnson. When NPR contacted them, the HHS said it had "no records" for the $1.6 billion contract with Novavax, indicating OTA agreements were not even visible to HHS or other elements of Warp Speed.

In March 2020, the DOD talked with ATI about a consortium of academics and companies that it manages called the Medical CBRN Defense Consortium. "The federal government came to me and said, you know, you already have all the members ... all the industrial organizations that we would want to complete this work with," ATI former Chief Operating Officer Robert Tuohy told NPR. ATI was never explicitly told it was helping with Operation Warp Speed, Tuohy said. "Then they hand us the money and ask us to award essentially a sub-OTA to the team that they have selected within the membership of the consortium," said Tuohy.

The Medical CBRN Defense Consortium (MCDC) is a DoD initiative to do contract work concerning chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense "as related to enhancing the mission effectiveness of military personnel."

According to their website: The Medical CBRN Defense Consortium (MCDC) was formed in response to the Government’s expressed interest to establish an Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) with an eligible entity or group of entities, to include industry, academic, and not-for-profit partners, for advanced development efforts to support the Department of Defense’s (DoD) medical pharmaceutical and diagnostic requirements as related to enhancing the mission effectiveness of military personnel.

The MCDC website boasts seven billion six hundred one million nine hundred seventy-seven thousand fifty dollars in funding for all projects to date. Who can join? Pretty much anybody.

Conclusions:

Major elements of the pandemic response—including mRNA vaccine technology, monoclonal antibodies and Remdesivir—were funded by the DOD and other governmental agencies and existed long before the existence of the COVID virus.

Both the DOD and the NIH were in the business of gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. (NIH approved grants to EcoHealth Alliance with a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan)

The DOD was able to mysteriously divine the incoming onslaught of pandemic catastrophe on US soil when barely a handful of US cases existed and used this to turn on the switch of a gargantuan public-private partnership Ferris wheel that shows no signs of slowing down.

The government-to-private funding channels facilitated by DOD led Operation Warp Speed utilized a strange MCDC/ATI intermediary whose purpose ostensibly on paper was to streamline and expedite processes, but also obscured from scrutiny and public accountability any contractual agreements inked between private entities and the government. This opacity was superimposed on top of the complete immunity from liability afforded to Pharma companies under the aegis of PREP act that came into effect after the declaration of the public health emergency.

This led to ‘state-as-the-entrepreneur’ dynamic in which the boundaries between the state and private entities became indecipherable, and were in effect rendered obsolete and irrelevant. It is why we got DOD funded mRNA vaccines which had been waiting years for their deployment under emergency conditions, but not traditional killed virus ones. It is presumably why the CDC and the FDA arms of the state keep rubber-stamping endless boosters of the mRNA vaccine but pulled the adenovirus vector vaccine off the market for having an unacceptable side effect profile which are in fact remarkably similar.

The fusion of the corporate and state was a defining feature of our pandemic response and ensured this “bureaucratic superstate” enjoyed near-hegemonic stranglehold over every aspect of our lives. (I urge you to read more about it here)

It created the ultimate business model by relieving private corporations from the time-honored tradition of having to persuade prospective consumers and instead used the cudgel of mandates to guarantee record breaking profits. Even better, the taxpayers funding the creation of these products had all manner of legal recourse stripped by the impenetrable indemnity shield granted by a state whose job was to protect the citizen from the corporation and not the other way around. It also means we’re consigned to a future filled with more pandemics and more highly profitable partnerships.

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