What Happened Today: January 26, 2023
Pfizer employee spills veritas; Bailing out (Hezbollah); F-16's for Zelenskyy
The Big Story
In a video released Wednesday night, a Dr. Jordan Trishton Walker who claims to work for Pfizer says the drug company is currently exploring “directed evolution” experiments on SARS-CoV-2—that is, deliberately creating new COVID-19 variants so it can then create vaccines to treat them in the event that those variants ever emerge in the population. The video was the result of an undercover reporting organization by the right-wing media outlet Project Veritas (PV), run by James O’Keefe.
“As you could imagine, no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f–ing viruses,” said Walker, swearing the undercover reporter to secrecy. He also said that “directed evolution” isn’t “gain-of-function” and added that “we’re not supposed to do gain-of-function with the viruses … but we do these selected structure mutations to try to see if we can make them more potent.”
Some have cast doubt on whether Walker is in fact a director of research and mRNA planning for Pfizer. One of the ways PV corroborates Walker’s role is through screenshots taken from what appears to be an internal company messaging system that lists some of Walker’s colleagues. While The Scroll could not find most of them, one of the colleagues shown, Efraín Cermeño, “director of Pipeline Planning and Initiatives” at Pfizer, is easily discoverable on LinkedIn and has been working for the company since July 2022. Independent journalist Brian O’Shea also did a bang-up job of confirming Walker’s identity on his Substack, “Investigate Everything with Brian O’Shea.” Whether Walker’s words regarding internal company deliberations on experimentation were strictly accurate has not yet been confirmed.
Watch the video and decide for yourself: https://twitter.com/Project_Veritas/status/1618405890612420609
In the Back Pages: A Plague on Both Our Houses
The Rest
→ Chart of the Day:
Lebanon had the second-highest inflation rate in the world, at 171% last year, and now it can’t even afford to pay its soldiers. The United States and the United Nations announced Wednesday that they’re stepping in with a stopgap fund of $72 million to make sure Lebanese soldiers get $100/month—down from the pre-inflation $800 but up from the $50 they’re making now. The Lebanese government has been taking increasingly desperate measures to keep the army paid, including removing meat from their meals in 2020 and offering helicopter rides to tourists for a fee in 2021. But the United States is aiding the Lebanese military for the second time in two years, after a payment of at least $67 million last January. “The administration has finally set up its scheme to pay the salaries of the LAF even though U.S. law prohibits direct salary payments to a foreign military,” Tablet’s Levant analyst Tony Badran told The Scroll.
“The administration was initially rebuffed by Congress but sent its lawyers to work, and they came up with a single half-baked precedent of dubious legality to proceed with their plan, using the U.N. as a mechanism to disburse the funds, in cash, to about 100,000 unvettable soldiers who function as Hezbollah’s auxiliary force, in a market thoroughly penetrated by Hezbollah, with high risk of miring the U.S. in terrorism financing.”
Read Badran’s 2022 piece on U.S. scheming in the Middle East for a fuller understanding of where the money is going, and why: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/america-regional-integration-scheme-benefits-iran-deal-obama-biden
→ The Biden administration is updating the guidance on housing to require local governments that receive federal funding (meaning, essentially all of them) to produce equity plans that will be subject to public input and annual approval from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The plan builds on the 2015 Obama administration rule that sought to more stringently enforce fair housing regulations enshrined in the 1968 Civil Rights Act. Ben Carson, who served as former president Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, wrote in a 2015 op-ed that the Obama-era rule “would fundamentally change the nature of some communities from primarily single-family to largely apartment-based areas by encouraging municipalities to strike down housing ordinances that have no overtly (or even intended) discriminatory purpose.” Supporters of the revised Biden policy counter that the radical overhaul and threat of rescinded funding is needed to increase affordable, desegregated housing options.
→ The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Google in a Virginia federal court on Tuesday in an effort to break up the tech giant’s domination of the digital advertising market. Along with seeking damages, federal prosecutors aim to force Google to sell its Ad Manager program because it allows Google to exercise an unfair advantage in the marketplace it controls, giving its own products better ad placement, among other abuses. In 2021, Ad Manager accounted for 12% of the company’s revenue. The analogy would be “if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE,” said an unnamed Google executive quoted in the complaint. On an entirely unrelated note, former Speaker of the House and all-around market whiz Nancy Pelosi dumped her 30,000 shares of Google in December, just weeks before the Justice Department filed its suit.
Read More: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/doj-files-second-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google.html
→ Ukraine is getting American-made tanks, and now President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is looking for long-range missiles and fighter jets, he said in his nightly address on Wednesday. Confident the new round of military aid would come Ukraine’s way, a member of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, Yuriy Sak, told CNBC Thursday, “We will get F-16s.” The comment might have sounded like a verbal order to military contractor Lockheed Martin, which said it’s standing by to provide replacement planes for any countries that end up sending theirs to Ukraine. Already, Lockheed Martin has distributed many of the weapons sent to Ukraine, including high-mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS), Javelin missiles, and the Patriot system. The contractor has seen its stock increase from $395 on the day of Russia’s invasion last year to $461 today, so one imagines the transfer of more F-16s would not be unwelcome for the company.
→ Number of the Day: $1 million
That’s the penalty charged by Morgan Stanley against some of its employees for using WhatsApp and other non-internal messaging apps to conduct company business, in contravention of SEC regulations. The company had to pay $200 million in fines to the government last year for failing to preserve messages regarding trades.
→ As previously reported in The Scroll, California has passed a bill, AB 2098, which would punish physicians who shared “disinformation” about COVID-19—aka information that goes against current scientific consensus—with their patients. Now, a group of doctors who filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the law have won a small victory, as a California judge has granted an injunction against the law while the case is being tried. “In safeguarding Americans’ rights to free speech and expression, the First Amendment applies not only to expression of majority opinions, but to minority views as well,” the complaint argues, adding that scientific consensus is ever-changing. Dr. Aaron Kheriaty—the former chief of ethics at UC Irvine who was fired for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine after contracting the disease and recovering—who is a co-plaintiff, wrote in a Tweet that the ruling was a very positive development and “bodes well for our case.” Speak freely, doctors! (For now.)
→ Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2018 diversity gamble in Brooklyn’s District 15 seems to have been a complete failure, at least according to the latest metrics. The program, which altered admissions policy to create more “diverse, inclusive” schools, has seen a decline in seventh-grade math proficiency scores at formerly prestigious M.S. 51, the William Alexander School, and alma mater of the DeBlasio children, from 81% in 2019 to 48% in 2022. While some research indicates that similarly precipitous declines in academic performance at other schools have been the result of the education policies instituted during the pandemic, it appears that District 15’s scores still lagged when compared to a similarly high-achieving school district in Manhattan, District 2, over the same period. A Tuesday report in Chalkbeat New York about William Alexander noted that two-thirds of faculty have “no-confidence” in the school principal and that the school has lost 12 teachers since June.
→ Genaro García Luna, the former head of Mexico’s drug war, is on trial in Brooklyn for apparently making millions of dollars off his collaboration with certain cartels he was supposed to be taking down. Government witnesses are the main evidence, and they accuse Luna of accepting massive bribes from the Sinaloa cartel in exchange for looking the other way on their cocaine shipments and even sometimes giving the cartel intelligence on their rivals. For Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who ran on a commitment to cleaning up corruption, a lot is riding on this trial—so Luna’s lawyers’ opening statement couldn’t have been music to his ears. “No money. No photos. No videos. No texts. No emails. No records,” the defense attorney intoned. “No credible, believable, plausible evidence Mr García Luna helped the cartels.”
→ Rumor Radar™
In The American Conservative on Wednesday, editor Micah Meadowcroft makes the argument that the departure of Democratic party stalwart Ron Klain from the role of Biden’s chief of staff portends bigger changes afoot. Namely, that the president himself might be ushered out of office after his document scandals and that his new chief of staff, Jeff Zients, a “private equity guy,” reflects the direction the party wants to take going forward.
→ Tweet of the Day:
It appears that a Hasidic angel was onboard an NYC to Ft. Lauderdale (surprise, surprise) JetBlue flight early this morning and helped save one of the passengers. (If you scroll through the comments, there’s a nearly just-as-great tweet, by user Amichai G.: “Good thing he wasn’t kicked off the flight …” IYKYK.)
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Struggle for Israel’s Democracy by Gadi Taub
Faced with the prospect of judicial reform, Israel’s progressive elite and its American allies are threatening to tear the country apart
The Minyan: Holocaust Survivors by Abigail Pogrebin
A roundtable discussion about the rise of antisemitism in America, the importance of education, and who will pass on the lessons of the Shoah when the last survivors are gone
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
A Plague on Both Our Houses
Growing indications that viral enhancement research gone awry is still in play as a possible cause of the pandemic
The World Health Organization officials investigating the origins of the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, otherwise known as COVID-19, were finally let into China on Jan. 14, and spent two weeks “investigating.” The most contentious question was, did the virus that supposedly first infected people in a Wuhan wet market originate in one of the two virology labs close to the markets, at least one of which specialized in such viruses? The delegation discounted that, saying it was “extremely unlikely”—so unlikely that the WHO would end additional study of the matter. But the delegation revealed no evidence, or explanation, as to why they were so certain the case must be closed. The idea of a lab leak wasn’t wild speculation, it was proposed in February 2020 by two Chinese researchers when they saw that one of the Chinese virus labs was eight miles from the wet market, and another, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, a mere 300 yards away. Mysteriously, their article “disappeared” from the internet (though it was retrieved using the Wayback Machine.) The other leading hypothesis was that the virus (the nearest relatives of which were known to be in bat caves about 1,000 miles away from Wuhan) jumped from an animal to human. To these two possibilities, the WHO added two more favored by the Chinese government: That it was introduced into China by people from outside the country, or that it arrived in frozen food from elsewhere, but provided little evidence for these.
Thus, the investigation went well for the Chinese government, and they made sure it did: It was delayed for a year, during which time viral evidence and witnesses disappeared. It only lasted two weeks (the committee was in quarantine two weeks), only several hours were spent in the lab in question, asking questions, not looking at samples or doing forensics, and the itinerary was controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, as, for that matter, was the committee composition, which included 17 Chinese members. “International members” included the very high profile researcher Peter Daszak, who himself closely collaborated with, and passed funding to, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and who was thus basically investigating and absolving himself. He praised those there for allowing a “Frank, open discussion.”
The Chinese participants were of course aware of what happened to physicians and researchers who spoke their minds on the issue. Chinese physicians who had sounded the alarm during the original outbreak were threatened with prison for sharing information with medical colleagues and the world. They were not interviewed. Dr. Ai Fen, head of the Emergency Department at Wuhan Central Hospital, saw many of the first cases and would have known where her patients might have been prior to getting sick. She dared to publish an article on the topic in China’s People. But the article disappeared, within hours, and then she disappeared. Censoring speech, and erasing brave people often go hand in hand. On news of the outbreak, public health officials in other countries wanted access to the original virus samples to develop therapeutics. But key samples from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were also “disappeared” over a year ago. Chinese officials even admitted to destroying some of them—as a precaution to protect the public, of course—lest the coronavirus escape from the lab. (Was there ever a more superfluous precaution taken, considering the virus was already out and about in China and had infected tens of thousands?) The WHO committee made no comment on these forensic mysteries. All this raises two questions: Why would a government eliminate evidence and witnesses, stall for a year, curate every detail, and stack the WHO investigating delegation, if a fair investigation would have shown the virus had an innocent, “natural” origin, had been introduced into China by a foreigner, or had arrived in a package of frozen food from another country? And why would the WHO go along?
There is, arguably, another way to approach this matter, which involves sorting through some of the most likely reasons the samples were destroyed and witnesses to the origins were silenced; an approach which may also help explain the WHO’s aiding and abetting such an obvious sham. It is to take into account that, among other things, the WIV lab was performing a form of research called “gain-of-function.”
If you can’t quite figure out what the term means, that is intended, because, GoF is a euphemism for a practice that might seem rather Dr. Strangelovian, and the furthest thing from forethought or prudence, or preventative medicine. It involves deliberately making viruses much more dangerous, to the point that they will cause a pandemic. “Gain-of-function” is the perfect term if you need a grant from a scientifically illiterate public composed of nervous types who, for some reason, don’t like or trust the idea of experts making invincible killer germs. “Viral-deadliness enhancement” would be a turnoff, but gain-of-function sounds like the title of a promising self-help fad. To call it a “euphemism” is a euphemism, because it is really doublespeak, like those military obfuscations such as “pacification,” which mean almost the opposite of what they appear to.
Know thine enemy is the premise underlying GoF research. Thus, in the case of viruses, it involves taking a relatively but not totally deadly one, and augmenting its lethality and its contagiousness, not just between humans, but also increasing the number of animals that might carry it and then pass it on to humans. The point is to increase its deadliness by a quantum leap, so that it could cause a pandemic. Then one studies the deadly monster in a flask, to discover its molecular Achilles heel, and get a head start, in the lab, on developing therapeutics or vaccines should a microbe “out there” mutate to become like the monstrous microbe one has created.
GoF goes on in many “advanced” countries. Science, after all, is often a collaborative effort. Thus, Newsweek reported, “The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.” The United States was not the only other donor that funded or collaborated with the civilian research going on at the lab.
Once the pandemic broke out in the very same city as that lab, the obvious question was whether or not that lab, which specialized in coronaviruses, somehow leaked, or through GoF, created the SARS-Cov-2 virus that was causing the catastrophe? That lab had already been cited by the U.S. State Department for its inadequate biosafety.
Once it became known that the United States, through Daszak’s New York-based organization, EcoHealth Alliance, which he heads, was funding WIV research, the Trump administration cut the funding. 60 Minutes ran a segment called “Pandemic Politics,” critical of the administration for cutting off his funding. It interviewed Daszak, emphasized that he was a heroic virus hunter, and made no mention that he was involved in supporting GoF research. He is also a co-author of a paper on it with Shi Zhengli, chief virologist of the WIV. A paper by Shi Zhengli and GoF researcher Dr. Ralph Baric described how they were the first to create a GoF “chimera”—i.e., an engineered bat SARS virus that could infect a human; something many scientists criticized as very dangerous. Daszak has described doing GoF research with Baric, and how it can be done “pretty easily.” That means that these scientists have also made biowarfare easier. There indeed seems to be an intimate link between the WIV and the People’s Liberation Army as well, and according to The Wall Street Journal, when talk of leakage occurred, China’s chief bioweapons specialist, Major General Chen Wei, was dispatched there to investigate. For obvious reasons, there is a major crossover between GoF and bioweapons research throughout the world, and some of the “experts” who comment on it are actually “bioweapons” experts. The first GoF research appears to have been done for various militaries (more below). Daszak, for instance, is funded not only by the NIH, but the U.S. Department of Defense as well.
But why would America fund this work in Wuhan and not do it on American soil? Because the bat caves that the viruses allegedly come from are in China. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had sent scientists to them, and assembled the world’s largest collection of bat viruses to study, in the hope of preventing an outbreak of some new version of SARS 1. So far, so good.
However, it is the case that GoF research is also the meat and potatoes of germ warfare, the manufacture of biological weapons and—perhaps—measures to counter them. On Jan. 15, the U.S. State Department stated:
“The United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
Militaries could be interested in this research for offensive or defensive purposes, or for both. The United States funds “anti-terror” research through a health budget. As New York magazine reports, after Sept. 11, “Fauci’s anti-terror budget went from $53 million in 2001 to $1.7 billion in 2003.”
GoF has been controversial from the start. In 2011, two research groups, one led by Ron Fouchier from the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, and one led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, announced they were working on the H5N1 avian flu virus. The virus is believed to be closely related to the one that caused the 1918 pandemic. It has a 60% mortality rate if one catches it, but this rarely happens because it is usually transmitted by direct contact with infected poultry and is not very transmissible to, or between, humans, since it can’t be passed on through the air. So the researchers decided to see if they could reengineer it into one that could cause a pandemic—and ultimately they did.
Some scientists argued this “transmission enhancement” was reckless, and could lead to an accidental pandemic. Indeed, SARS-CoV-1 had leaked several times from Chinese labs, and there have been hundreds of dangerous leakages from American labs too, including anthrax in 2014. Deadly pathogens, including active Ebola, have been shipped to insecure locations by American research labs 21 times. Others have been lost or stolen. The Cambridge Working Group, a group of American scientists who study pathogens, pointed out that accidents and leakages of deadly pathogens like anthrax, avian flu, and smallpox “have been accelerating and have been occurring on average over twice a week.”
At such a rate, calling them “accidents” is a stretch; it is not as though these researchers were trying to be sloppy with lethal microbes. A more apt phrase might be that such leakages are “to be expected.” Jumping from one cell to another is what viruses do for a living.
Read the rest in Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/plague-on-both-our-houses
Project Veritas....really lololol