MAHA’s “Handpicked” Biosecurity Veteran
As the Trump administration has spent its first few months in The White House constructing the physical and digital infrastructure required for a pre-crime, technocratic police state, little attention has been paid to the ways in which the institutions ostensibly dedicated to “public health” are helping build out this digital control grid. As Unlimited Hangout has been reporting for many years now, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a prominent subgroup of the surveillance state has emerged at the intersection of Big Tech, Big Pharma and the military industrial complex — one that is laying the groundwork to implement the final frontier of mass surveillance: the bio-surveillance apparatus.
During his first term, Trump implemented the notorious Operation Warp Speed, the Pentagon-ran COVID-19 response plan which issued emergency deregulatory measures and massive funding for the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Now, his second administration has successfully managed to become associated with COVID-era dissidence. This was primarily accomplished through Trump successfully securing the endorsements of figures who were skeptical of the official line on COVID-19, most prominently comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan and longtime environmental litigator and founder of Children’s Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Since taking office, however, the second Trump administration has consistently contradicted this unofficial commitment to the spirit of COVID-era dissent and public health institutional overhaul. Just last week, the President touted Operation Warp Speed as one of the “most incredible things ever done in this country.” The week before, he announced an initiative to enable the vast sharing of individuals’ health data across a myriad of “health systems and apps,” in partnership with Pentagon-contracting Big Tech companies. More quietly, however, Trump nominated a seasoned official of the biosecurity apparatus named Susan Monarez to be the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Monarez, whose background is perfectly in line with this technocratic approach to healthcare that the administration has embarked on, was “handpicked” by Kennedy after the previous nominee, Dave Weldon, withdrew his nomination in March. Monarez had been acting director of the CDC for several months and was confirmed at the end of July with little fanfare.
Susan Monarez is a biosecurity veteran who has a long history embedded in what could be described as a gray zone of public governance — one where national security merges with healthcare. These connections and her life’s work suggest that Monarez is a useful tool, knowingly or not, of the biosecurity/surveillance apparatus, a group which has helped expand the sprawling American mass surveillance system under the auspices of wellness, mental health and innovation.
While a lack of a detailed digital footprint makes this exact history difficult to track down precisely, it is likely that her entry into the world of militarized science began at Stanford University when she was carrying out her work as a postdoctoral researcher. The Chair of her department notably boasted deep ties to some of the leading figures in the genetic science boom of the latter half of the 20th century — figures whose research was entangled with the eugenics movement of that era and the increasing securitization of science that occurred in the midst of the Cold War.
From Stanford, Monarez was catapulted into prestigious positions within the domestic parts of DHS, HHS, as well as the White House itself. Notably, the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa emerged during Monarez’s tenure in the Executive Branch, and she played an important role in the government response. That outbreak may have marked one of the first times that the US commissioned the pre-crime, mass surveillance company Palantir with conducting biosurveillance during a public health epidemic. It most certainly established a significant step towards the total transformation of the US public health system into a militarized extension of the surveillance state.
Monarez’s time working in agencies such as the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA) made Monarez a perfect candidate for the position she maintained until she was most recently nominated to be the director of the CDC: the Deputy Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). From its conception, the HHS-housed ARPA-H was meant to serve as a “health” version of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Monarez’s appointment to the CDC, however, indicates further melding of America’s public health institutions with the national security state. While it has been more or less given that most heads of public health agencies in recent years must be supportive of technocratic biotechnology measures, Monarez has presided over significant initiatives and programs that have deepened the militarization of healthcare. She has also been appointed to be the Director of the CDC within the context of the ever-increasing integration of the pre-crime company Palantir, which privatized much of the George Bush-era Total Information Awareness mass surveillance project –– including its “Bio-surveillance” component — into government.
Furthermore, her time as the Deputy Director of ARPA-H may foreshadow the kind of initiatives she will head at the CDC; namely, the blatant digitization of health and acceleration of invasive biotechnology aimed at fracturing the complexity of human biology into observable, consumable and exploitable data points.
As this article will make clear, Monarez’s tenure in government is likely a direct product of the decades-long militarization of academia. Her stints at BARDA, the National Security Council, HSARPA, DHS and most recently ARPA-H are illustrative of the broader technocratic, surveillance-obsessed transformation of public health that has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic. That trend appears poised to persist under the second administration of Donald Trump.
To get a closer look at how Monarez may have entered this world, it is worth first investigating the connections that the Chair of her department at Stanford, Mark M. Davis,1 has to some of the industries and ideologues that, over time, have merged to form the biosurveillance state: eugenicists and the oligarchic technocrats who dominate Big Tech. Davis’s connections capture the biosecurity-focused academic environment where the future CDC director began her professional career as well as the spooky world of military-linked science she subsequently entered.
Stanford University — Where Academia and Defense Meet
Nearly five decades before Monarez attended Stanford’s biology and immunology program, the US military establishment was in a frenzy with its officials trying to figure out how they should respond to the Soviet Union’s successful launch of its small satellite named Sputnik into outer space.
Despite its beach-ball size, Sputnik injected paranoia into the United States, for as Yasha Levine details in his book Surveillance Valley, “[Sputnik] was thrust into orbit by hitching a ride atop the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. This was both a demonstration and a threat. If the Soviet Union could put a satellite into space, it could also deliver a nuclear warhead to just about any spot in the United States.”
The American response to this “threat” launched the Space Race, and along with it the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, which later became DARPA) — the agency that pioneered the now prominent military technological development method of funding universities, private research facilities and defense contractors to develop tech for the U.S. Armed Forces. Stanford — Monarez’s alma mater — was among the most prominent universities that was tapped by ARPA to increase the surveillance power and military might of the US empire, tying at least some of the university’s most consequential research to the interests of the national security state. This relationship has persisted into the present day.
Mark M. Davis — the Chair of Monarez’s department during her time at Stanford, and thus the person that likely hired Monarez’s other professors — is a figure whose connections demonstrate the sprawling dark side of big-moneyed militarized science succinctly, and whose background may provide insight into how Monarez landed herself in the underbelly of the US public health system.
Mark M. Davis and Leroy Hood
Mark M. Davis’ parents divorced when he was quite young. His mother was an architect, but fluctuated between being a stay-at-home mom and working. His father was in the Navy during WWII, and went on to become an executive at the Pentagon-contracting International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) for decades after his service.
During his teen years, Davis was a slightly above average student at a below average high school. He coasted his way through this chapter of his life by relying on his natural wits and expansive literary knowledge, often as a means of avoidingthe studious rigor that would shape his later academic career.
It was in high school, however, that his mom gifted him a copy of The Double Helix by legendary geneticist James D. Watson. The autobiographical account of Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA left a notable impression on a young Davis, though he may have not realized it at the time. Davis later went on to study DNA in 1973 during his time pursuing his bachelor’s degree at John Hopkins University. There, he joined the lab of Michael Beer. Beer was a pioneer of sorts in this terrain as at the time he was attempting to sequence DNA—a mission that had yet to be accomplished.
Indeed, it appears that it was the untreated nature of this subject that allured Davis into the field, for as he put it: “[Beer] made me realize, as he explained…that this was really a central issue that hadn’t all been sorted out by [James D.] Watson and [Francis H.C.] Crick — which would have [hypothetically] made it history and therefore not my concern. But [in actuality,] there really was a lot there that was unknown and could have a lot of significance.”
This eventually led Davis to the lab of Leroy Hood at Caltech. While Beer was a figure at the forefront of DNA research, Hood revolutionized the field in momentous ways that are still felt today. Most notably, he was responsible for the creation of the automated DNA sequencer, which “showed that sequencing data could be collected directly to a computer …[and] developed programs to automatically interpret the data to produce an actual sequence.” In the years leading up to Hood’s automated DNA sequencer, Davis co-authored multiple studies with Hood — including one with The Double Helix author James D. Watson.
This computerized, technological invention of Hood’s made the once tenuous and laborious process of sequencing DNA a more feasible endeavor — which ultimately made it possible to launch The Human Genome Project (HGP), the NIH-funded effort that sought to map the entire human genome.
The Human Genome Project nearly achieved this goal, mapping 92% of the human genome, and went on to heavily influence and expand the field of biotechnology and predictive medicine — a fitting contribution, given Hood’s Caltech lab was the first one to “combine biology and engineering, using biological knowledge to determine which technologies should be developed in order to solve specific biological problems.” In fact, a protein sequencer Hood had developed earlier in his career led to the founding of a company called Applied Molecular Genetics and the creation of its blockbuster drug erythropoietin, which just so happened to be “the first biotech product to reach $1 billion in sales.”
These achievements, correctly or not, are looked back on with reverence and awe by mainstream accounts — but viewing this era of science through rose-tinted glasses disables any onlooker from seeing the darker ideology that quietly rose with, and arguably propelled upward, the study of genetics and biotechnology that was growing at this time.
The initial call for The Human Genome Project was first published in 1986, the same year that Hood’s automated DNA sequencer was invented, by a German-born geneticist named Walter Bodmer. A major contributor to the study of population genetics, Bodmer was elected as a Fellow of the Eugenics Society, rebranded later as the Galton Institute and even more recently rebranded as the Adelphi Genetics Forum as of 1961 (p. 971). The organization was founded with the aim of promoting the study and research of eugenics — a racist pseudo-science based in the study of how to best arrange human reproduction to increase the rate of “desirable” traits within a population. That same year, Bodmer conducted his postdoctoral research in the lab of Joshua Lederberg at Stanford University (p. 3). Lederberg, who inspired biodefense pioneer Robert Kadlec, was also the former president of Rockefeller University and served as a key consultant to the Pentagon on issues of biological weapons, among other things.
Bodmer’s connections to the field of eugenics and national security notably do not exist within a vacuum. As The Human Genome Project and Hood’s and Davis’s later associations exemplify, the meeting of eugenics and genetic science is actually indicative of a symbiotic relationship between the two fields that has persisted into the present day. As Eugenics Society member David Galton noted in his book, Eugenics: The Future of Human Life in the 21st Century, that The Human Genome Project, among other technologies, enabled advancements such as the ability of parents to artificially select which genes their child receives in order to create “designer babies,” and notes that The Human Genome Project, among other advancements, have “enormously expanded the scope of eugenics.”2
Indeed, it was James D. Watson — a racist eugenicist and the author of The Double Helix book that had inspired Mark M. Davis years before — that the NIH chose to head The Human Genome Project in 1990. Watson, who holds beliefs such as the idea that Black people have genetically inferior intelligence than other races, first encountered Leroy Hood at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1967, which Watson went on to head for sixteen years. During his time at Cold Spring Harbor, Watson met with Eugenics Society member Bodmer (p. 986), and even co-authored a research paper with Mark M. Davis and Leroy Hood.
Watson’s leadership at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was quite suitable for a eugenicist such as himself. Nearly sixty years before his time there, the eugenicist Charles Davenport became its director and set up the Eugenics Record Office (ERO). As James Corbett notes in his book Reportage, Davenport envisioned the ERO as a place to store “a comprehensive registry documenting the ‘pedigree’ of every American…”3
According to Davenport himself, the Office retrieved this data through “our numerous charity organizations, our 42 institutions for the feebleminded, our 115 schools and homes for the deaf and blind, our 350 hospitals for the insane, our 1,200 refuge homes, our 1,300 prisons, our 1,500 hospitals, and our 2,500 almshouses. Our great insurance companies and our college gymnasiums have tens of thousands of records of the characters of human bloodlines…”4 While Davenport’s idea had a particularly racist tinge to it, his objective of scouring institutions for health data and uniting them into a single location to be observed under the scrutiny of elite bureaucrats never died — indeed it prevails today in the halls of ARPA-H, and was worked on by Susan Monarez herself.
That, however, will be discussed later in this investigation. In the meantime, let us return to Watson, whose government work extended beyond the National Institutes for Health — specifically involving the Pentagon and biological weapons. President John F. Kennedy, who was a prominent advocate of technological military modernization through his support of DARPA, had Watson serve on his chemical and biological warfare advisory panel from 1961 to 1964.
According to the Harvard Crimson, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh said that Watson “admitted in an open letter to him that he had spent a great deal of time on the panel searching for a ‘satisfactory incapacitating agent.’” Watson’s time aiding the Pentagon in its biological weapons research during the Cold War highlights another element of the revolution taking place at the time within genetic science; the field’s mutually beneficial relationship with the national security state.
As one former high-level Pentagon official told Hersh in his 1968 Chemical and Biological Warfare book, “There’s a revolution in biological sciences, just as there was in the physical sciences in the 1920’s. It [genetics] is analogous to quantum theory. A huge area of science is in ferment — and it may have military implications and advantages for us.“5
Further demonstrative of these converging interests was Hood’s next step after Caltech, when he made a big move to the University of Washington Medical School to found the first cross-disciplinary biology department, the Department of Molecular Biotechnology — a move that was financed to the tune of $12 million by none other than Bill Gates, notably a longtime Pentagon contractor. Gates funded the project because he and Hood shared “a grand vision;” namely, using computer technology to read and manipulate all of the “vast genetic encyclopedia…cover to cover, three billion nucleotides long: The Human Genome Project” (emphasis added).
Gates’ funding is particularly worth nothing because he also has connections to the eugenics movement, though they may not be as outwardly obvious as Watson and Eugenics Society member Bodmer. The Gates Foundation has a history of investing in projects such as global “family planning” initiatives focused on delivering low- and middle-income countries birth control, at times in conjunction with the Rockefeller Foundation. Eerily, before World War II, the Rockefellers were some of the most prominent funders of eugenics research, even funding departments that (albeit after the known time period of Rockefeller-funding) employed figures like Ernst Rüdin in the 1920s,6 who went on to become a key architect of Nazi Germany’s eugenics program and who worked on the Third Reich’s sterilization policy. The flow of Rockefeller money into eugenics research was not contained within Germany, however — along with other robber barons, John D. Rockefeller funded Davenport’s Eugenics Research Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.
James Corbett, who has researched the history of eugenics extensively, told mehow in the aftermath of WWII, the field of eugenics became associated with the Nazis, and “thus had to go underground.” This was “an explicit and conscious decision,” Corbett told me, citing the General Secretary of the British Eugenics Society’s memorandum in 1968. The memorandum suggested that in an effort to deal with the diminishing success of the Society’s recruiting campaign since 1946, it “should pursue eugenics by less obvious means, that is by a policy of crypto-eugenics”7 to, as Corbett put it, “carry on the dream of eugenics under another name.”
An excerpt from a book written by Julian Huxley of the Eugenics Society immediately after the war appears to corroborate Corbett’s claim that eugenicists in this period indeed recognized the political impossibility of their agenda, and the need to revitalize it in some way. The book was written representing the newly created United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which the Rockefellers have been affiliated with since its creation. In the speech, Huxley laments “even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”8
Since that 1968 memorandum, Corbett speculates, eugenics policies were “rebranded” and “sold as a way to help save poor countries and peoples from the scourge of overpopulation.” Given this context, despite whether Gates considers himself a eugenicist or is even aware of these connections himself, some of his “health”-focused endeavors –– such as an implantable birth control device that could “be turned on and off with a remote control,” his idea to ration healthcare based on an individual’s perceived value to society, or his effort to promote long-acting reversible contraceptives in Africa with a company whose initial mission was “improving the biological stock of the human race” –– exist within a darker context than their seemingly benign, technocratic motivations.
Yet, Hood’s time at the University of Washington would not be the last time his professional work received massive funding from Gates. He would later go on to found the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), a spin-off of the work he was doing in his lab at the University of Washington. Like his time at UW, ISB focused on Hood’s shared interest with Gates; bioinformatics, or the “use of information technology to store and analyze genetic information.” Gates has funded ISB to the tune of millions of dollars over the years (see here and here).
And to wrap up this bundle of eugenics- and national security-linked science connecting all the way to Monarez’s time at Stanford, in 2015, Mark M. Davis — Monarez’s Department Chair during her postdoctoral years — was selected to head a new center at Stanford to “accelerate efforts in vaccine development” called the Stanford Human Systems Immunology Center. The way in which this center came to fruition? A $50 million grant from the Gates Foundation. Stanford Report announced that it would “draw upon a repertoire of technologies, many of which have been pioneered at Stanford, to provide a detailed profile of the human immune response” (emphasis added).
Davis, as Monarez’s Department Chair, likely played an important role in cultivating the staff at Stanford’s biology and immunology postdoctoral research program. These professors who Monarez likely encountered or took classes with include figures such as David Relman, a longtime government operator who has sat on the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and who issued a questionable report on Havana Syndrome, and Garry Nolan, a Pentagon contractor and CIA ufologist who has his own strange connections to Havana Syndrome.
These figures demonstrate that the academic environment which preceded her government tenure was rife with links to the shadowy side of academia. Whether or not someone at Stanford helped bring Monarez into the biosecurity apparatus is unclear — yet it was only a few months after her graduation that she began her stint at HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research Projects Agency (BARDA), a newly established government department that emerged in the wake of the Anthrax attacks, and from the minds of biosecurity-obsessed Cold Warriors.
Stockpiling In the Public Sector
BARDA was created in the backdrop of a post-Amerithrax United States. The false flag that associated Iraq with Al Qaeda without evidence injected panic into the American psyche, and it was in this period of trepidation that the HHS head Tommy Thompson began warning of a flu pandemic and vaccine shortages, calling for the funding of an American “stockpile of emergency vaccines for smallpox and anthrax.” Over the next few years, this stockpile funding was achieved, primarily through the Project Bioshield Act of 2004, and eventually managed by BARDA. The history of the stockpile’s and BARDA’s inception, however, ties its origins deeply to the world of national security and the paranoia surrounding the War on Terror.
The stockpile was the result of a years-long effort that had been cooked up by bioweapons-focused and Big Pharma-connected Cold Warriors — namely the Air Force doctor and intelligence officer Robert Kadlec, along with some of his mentors like William Patrick III. Kadlec had been advocating for this stockpile as far back as 1995,9 notably in between the trips he’d taken to Iraq along with Patrick in search of the Iraqi government’s weaponized anthrax program. Though the pair never found any evidence of such a program, throughout the 90s Kadlec was drafting hypothetical scenarios at the National War College of potential ways in which American adversaries could use bioweapons to wage war against the US,10 and Patrick was participating in private meetings with Clinton on biological weapons. In these meetings, Patrick described their use as inevitable and emphasized that a terrorist could make even the most dangerous pathogens in their “garage.”
Head of the Hydra: The Rise of Robert Kadlec
A powerful network of political operatives, a global vaccine mafia and their man in Washington.
With the prospect of terrorist-waged biowarfare marinating in Clinton’s mind, in this period the Arkansas-native President claimed that Saddam Hussein was “developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them,” despite a lack of any intelligence to prove so. Clinton’s fear eventually materialized into legislation when he requested an emergency budget supplement request in 1998. In it was “$51 million for pharmaceutical and vaccine stockpiling activities at CDC.” It soon passed, and the Strategic Pharmaceutical Stockpile (SPS) was born.
A few years later, the fear that the prospect of bioterror instilled in Clinton spread like a virus to the entire American population in the wake of an actual “bioterror” attack; Amerithtrax. While 9/11 showed that an anomaly like a plane-hijacking could destroy critical infrastructure of the normally protected United States, the anthrax attacks made Americans perceive terrorism as a new element of daily life, something that could be covertly unleashed through an item as innocuous as a letter, and wreak havoc and death through invisible spores and contamination.
Sometime before the anthrax attacks in the wake of 9/11, Kadlec became the special advisor on biological warfare to George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. It was that very month that Rumsfeld went on to announce that “he expected America’s enemies would try to help terrorist groups obtain chemical and biological weapons” — echoing Patrick’s concerns of the previous decade. In late November, with Kadlec still in his ear, Rumsfeld and his Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz would draw up strategy for regime change in Iraq, and among the ideas they pondered to launch the effort included the US discovering “Saddam connections to Sept. 11 attack or anthrax attacks?” Indeed, though indirectly and often through hints and nudges as opposed to official statements from the executive branch, a group of Bush-era bureaucrats in Washington made this exact connection in the aftermath of Amerithrax and 9/11.
It was in this climate of mass paranoia and fear of an invisible enemy — be it terrorists in plainclothes or hidden anthrax spores — that the stockpile was expanded and funded with billions of taxpayer dollars. While several pieces of legislation increased funding for this pandemic response measure, the 2004 Project Bioshield Act most significantly authorized $5.6 billion for the “for the advanced development and purchase of security countermeasures for the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS)” — a gargantuan subsidization compared to Clinton’s 1998 legislation. And finally in 2006, the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act of 2006 established the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) to manage the stockpile. With the help of Kadlec, the legislation established BARDA within the ASPR, and made the new agency responsible for granting Big Pharma contracts to create medical countermeasures for pandemics and bioterror attacks (including countermeasures for the stockpile).
It was at Kadlec and company’s brainchild, BARDA, where Monarez entered the public sector in 2006, where she served under the leadership of Carol Linden, a scientist long embedded at the Pentagon who from 1979 through 2000 worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) lab in Fort Detrick as “Chief Research Plans and Programs” — overlapping with William Patrick III’s tenure at USAMRIID as its Plans and Programs Officer.
The following year in 2007, Monarez drafted the first ever HHS Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise Strategy and Implementation Plan which, according to her LinkedIn, “defined the acquisition plan for the Department’s medical countermeasures program using the $5.6 billion Project BioShield Special Reserve Fund.”
In this capacity, Monarez shaped HHS funding for pandemic preparedness for years to come, subtly influencing the responses to future pandemics. She also codified a pledge that made clear what the nature of pandemic preparedness in a post-Amerithrax world would be; namely, a partnership between the world of academia/public health and the Pentagon:
“HHS [will] continue to coordinate medical countermeasure development and acquisition with DoD…”
One of the joint DoD/HHS ventures that this implementation plan set in motion was the funding of Ebola research and medical countermeasures for it. These funds trickled into several places; the USAMRIID lab in Fort Detrick, to members of the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (VHFC) who worked at Fort Detrick — the organization which may have played a role in the 2014 Ebola outbreak — and the pharmaceutical company Gilead. Of the $1 billion that went into Ebola and Marburg virus research from 1997 to 2015, “public sources of funding invested $758.8 million” and “joint public/private/philanthropic ventures accounted for $213.8 million,” accounting for over 90% of total funds.
While the mainstream account of the 2014 Ebola outbreak postulates that the virus broke out zoonotically in Guinea, journalist Sam Husseini and virologist Jonathan Latham wrote a lengthy investigative report in 2022 arguing that the outbreak may have been the result of a lab leak from the VHFC’s only permanent lab in Sierra Leone. Since their report, the case for a lab leak has only become stronger as one VHFC member that has long researched the Ebola virus, Kristian Andersen, admitted that the VHFC lab in Sierra Leone was conducting Ebola research before the outbreak. While this had been suspected by researchers before, it had yet to be confirmed before Andersen’s claim.
If it is true that a leak from the VHFC Sierra Leone lab caused the 2014 Ebola outbreak, then some of the $5.6 billion in investments from Bioshield that Monarez helped define may have indirectly led to the devastation that occurred in West Africa that year. Monarez listed the Ebola virus as a top priority threat in her Implementation Plan, and defined antivirals, diagnostics and filovirus vaccines as the “projected future top priority medical countermeasure programs” to combat Ebola virus.
Based on accounts of Ebola researchers who were members of the VHFC and studied Ebola at Fort Detrick, the funding plan put forth by HHS had tangible effects for Ebola research. Former Fort Detrick scientist Thomas Geisbert, who in 2014 was selected as one of Time Magazine’s “Ebola fighters” of the year, has detailed how Fort Detrick received lavish funding for Ebola research as a result of post-9/11 and Amerithrax hysteria:
“[there] wasn’t money or interest or time to take those products across the finish line. “But after 9/11, everything changed. There was increased funding. It was fortunate for me, because Ebola was my main area of interest. When all the money became available, we started looking at developing a vaccine.”
This HHS funding was detailed further in the book, The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa by Constantine Nana:
“[Geisbert] has studied the Ebola virus for more than two decades and spent several years working with USAMRIID at Fort Detrick. In March of 2014, he was awarded (together with Profectus Biosciences, Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center) $26 million (to be distributed over five years) by the NIH to ‘advance treatments of the highly lethal hemorrhagic fever viruses Ebola and Marburg.’”11
Further, according to Crunchbase, a $15 million contract awarded to Tulane University by the HHS-housed NIAID created the VHFC, and thus led to the incarnation of the Sierra Leone laboratory as a permanent site of VHFC. Importantly, VHFC member Robert Garry is a professor at Tulane university. Just a year before the virus ravaged thousands of West Africans, Garry co-authored a paper on “a novel treatment for Zaire Ebola” along with eleven other authors who all hailed from USAMRIID at Fort Detrick. The study was funded by the Pentagon, including its Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which focuses on countering weapons of mass destruction.
In the aftermath of the outbreak, Andersen, Garry, and others would go on to issue articles that placed the origin of the outbreak in Guinea, providing a convenient scientific consensus for those handling Ebola research at the Sierra Leone lab. Yet, as Husseini and Latham noted, there was considerable overlapping authorship between these papers:
“One or more of just six researchers are represented on all of them: Robert Garry, Andrew Rambaut, Stephan Gunther, Kristian Andersen, Pardis Sabeti, and Edward Holmes are lead authors on almost all of these publications.”
Furthermore, “most of the senior authors of the phylogeny papers (notably, Robert Garry, Kristian Andersen, Pardis Sabeti, Erica Ollman Saphire, Daniel Park, and Stephen Gire) and plenty of less well-known authors, are directly connected to the VHFC and its Kenema lab. These authors in particular, have a career-sized conflict of interest, which they may also think is dwarfed by the possibility of being implicated in 11,000 deaths.” In other words, if the lab leak theory is true, then many of the scientists who penned the papers that allegedly proved the virus originated in Guinea had a direct conflict-of-interest in making those claims. As Husseini and Latham note in their investigation, these authors did not account for a plethora of evidence against a Guinean origin point in order to draw their conclusions.
Notably, Andersen, Rambaut and Garry later became some of the earliest peddlers of the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic emerged as the result of a zoonotic origin, as all of them co-authored the now notorious “The Proximal Origins of SARS-COV-2” paper in March 2020. The paper, published in the prestigious Nature scientific journal, downplayed the potential of a lab leak — a theory that has now become increasingly mainstream since.
Importantly, by virtue of their connections to VHFC and the consortium’s Ebola research, many of these scientists were targets of the government funding that Susan Monarez helped define in the post-9/11 construction of biosecurity infrastructure.
Where there is crisis, however, there is also opportunity. Monarez’s Implementation Plan also seems to have played a role in funding the drug that the pharmaceutical giant Gilead attempted, and failed, to make the antidote to Ebola — remdesivir, the antiviral medication now used to treat COVID-19.
Remdesivir emerged as the result of a collaboration between “Gilead, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).” In 2009, developers saw the drug “as a potential treatment for hepatitis C,” but it unfortunately “didn’t work as hoped.”
Thankfully for Gilead, Susan Monarez was serving on the White House Ebola Task Force at the time of the outbreak in West Africa. There, she was responsible for “evaluating investments in Ebola-related pharmaceuticals and diagnostics.” It just so happened that the failed hepatitis C drug, remdesivir, would be one of the targets of these Ebola-related government investments.
According to Public Citizen, remdesivir’s potential as an Ebola countermeasure began when federal scientists screened “a thousand compounds from a Gilead library in search of a molecule to target Ebola virus.” They identified remdesivir as useful, and soon “U.S. Army scientists worked with the corporation to ‘refine, develop and evaluate the compound.’” This began a years-long public-private venture with the HHS, DoD and Gilead to bring remdesivir to market as a treatment for Ebola.
In 2014, the CDC, DoD and Gilead began “antiviral testing of remdesivir for Ebola and other viruses” and in 2016, the NIH and Gilead began “antiviral testing for coronaviruses and other viruses.” Yet the drug seemingly went nowhere, and by the second Ebola outbreak in 2019 a NIAID study showed the drug to be ineffective and it was ultimately dropped from the trial.12
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It is definitely one of Etienne’s best interviews ever! If you have ever wanted to share Etienne’s work with your friends, family or colleagues, this is the interview for you. You can get a copy of To See the Cage is to Leave It (press release) by “Going Paid” on Substack AND get access to all FOUR of the Art of Liberty’s Substacks: Important News from the Art of Liberty Foundation, The Daily News, The Daily News Digest, and Five Meme Friday. By “Going Paid” you can get access to the full transcript, all the slides, memes, and videos mentioned in the interview: How to Leave the Cage - James Corbett & Etienne de la Boetie2
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Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne's new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.
Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.
Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History... Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne's new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It - 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many + everything else in our "Everything Bundle" of the best in voluntaryist thought delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne @ an event.
