Behind a veil of corporate media PR, the Gates Foundation has served as a vehicle for Western capital while exploiting the Global South as a human laboratory. The coronavirus pandemic is likely to intensify this disturbing agenda.
by Jeremy Loffredo and Michele Greenstein
Part 11 - Operation Warp Speed immunizes Big Pharma from lawsuits
In mid-May, the Trump administration unveiled its new coronavirus vaccine project: Operation Warp Speed. While announcing the new project, President Trump boasted that his administration “cut through every piece of red tape to achieve the fastest-ever, by far, launch of a vaccine trial.”
Like the Trump administration, Bill Gates is advocating for the acceleration of Covid-19 drug approval timeline. He writes that “governments will need to expedite their usual drug approval processes in order to deliver the vaccine to over 7 billion people quickly.” He says “there is simply no alternative” to this agenda.
In March, the U.S. passed federal regulations granting liability immunity to corporations producing coronavirus drugs, including vaccines. It also provided liability immunity to any entity distributing the drugs.
With more than 100 Covid-19 vaccines currently in development, this means products will be indemnified against lawsuits, even if they produce harmful effects.
If vaccine makers are indeed exempted by governments around the globe from legal penalties, these companies have little incentive to protect people from harmful side effects. As in the past, it seems that citizens of the world’s poorest countries are set to become “guinea pigs for the drug makers.”
Bill Gates’ advocacy for legal immunity for drug manufacturers dates back to at least 2015, when he lamented during the Ebola outbreak that there was no clear process for “providing indemnity against legal liability.” He suggested that during a “global epidemic,” drug companies should be indemnified to “avert long delays.” Now, his proposal is coming to fruition.
Gates justified his position on the grounds that companies will need to produce drugs as fast as possible to save lives, and these new drugs may not always be safe. “Understanding safety… is very, very hard,” he said to CBS. “There will be some risk and indemnification needed before [getting a vaccine out] can be decided on.”
Normally, a drug goes through a phase of animal testing before it gets tested on small (phase I), medium (phase II), and large numbers of people (phase III). But with Covid, Gates wants to “save time” by conducting tests on humans and animals at the same time.
Today, the U.S. is “compressing what is typically 10 years of vaccine development,” according to the head of the National Institute of Health (NIH).
This may produce some troubling effects. For one, a successful coronavirus vaccine has yet to be produced, and a new one could trigger lethal reactions. Tropical disease specialist Dr. Peter Hotez, who worked on a failed vaccine for another coronavirus (SARS), said that during experimental tests of the drug, animals fell victim to what he calls “immune enhancement.” The animals that were given the shot developed more severe (and often fatal) versions of the virus when compared with unvaccinated animals.
Hotez told Reuters, “The way you reduce that risk [for humans] is first you show it does not occur in laboratory animals.” The medical expert stated that while he understands “the importance of accelerating timelines for vaccines in general, but … this is not the vaccine to be doing it with.”
Without performing the initial phase of animal testing normally required to bring a vaccine to market, a biotech company named Moderna is now conducting human trials for its Covid-19 vaccine. Moderna’s vaccine is an mRNA type which has never been approved by the FDA for use on humans.
This technology, which contains genetically engineered cells that can permanently alter human DNA, was developed with grants from both the Gates Foundation and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Moderna says it has a “strategic alliance” with DARPA, which gave the company $25 million in total.
Moderna’s mRNA technology has been singled out by Bill Gates as “one of the most promising options for COVID.” Gates even has a “global health project framework agreement” with Moderna to give it up to $100 million for the development of its mRNA technology, in exchange for receiving “certain non-exclusive licenses.”
Moderna’s co-founder Robert Langer has partnered with Gates in the past on projects such as the contraceptive microchip implant that can be activated wirelessly.
When Moderna announced the completion of its phase 1 safety trial May 18, corporate news outlets parroted Moderna’s “good news.” But the fine print in the release revealed that three of the 15 participants injected with the highest dose of the vaccine developed grade three systemic symptoms, which the FDA defines as “severe,” “disabling,” and requiring “hospitalization,” although “not immediately life-threatening.”
On May 15, President Trump appointed Moncef Slaoui, a board member of Moderna who until May 19 held more than $10.3 million in Moderna stock, as chief scientist of the nation’s effort to find a Covid-19 vaccine.
Slaoui, who calls himself a “venture capitalist,” is also on the board of directors at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), a “public-private partnership” organization that has received more than $359 million from the Gates Foundation.
Slaoui also held leadership positions at GSK. While heading the company’s Research and Development, GSK pleaded guilty and paid $3 billion in what the U.S. Justice Department referred to as the “largest healthcare fraud settlement in U.S. history.” The fraud included the coverup of the link between the drug Paxil and suicidal and depressive side effects (predominantly in children), the coverup of the link between the drug Avandia and heart attacks, which the FDA estimated lead to 83,000 excess heart attacks, as well several bribery and illegal kickback schemes.
While he was GSK’s chairman of vaccines, Slaoui oversaw the development of the swine flu vaccine named Pandemrix, which was rushed to market without proper testing during the swine flu outbreak. The result was an unsafe shot that left at least 800 people with brain damage, 80 percent of them children. Since GSK only agreed to give governments the vaccine on the condition that it be indemnified from liability, U.K. taxpayer money was used to pay millions of pounds in compensation to the victims.
Slaoui was hired to be the Trump administration’s “vaccine czar” as a private contractor, not a government employee. This means, as Public Citizen explained, that Slaoui can “maintain an extensive web of conflicting financial interests without the need to divest of, recuse from, or disclose those conflicting interests.”
The corporate media likes to paint the Covid-19 response as a tug of war between anti-science blowhards like Donald Trump and “champions of science” like Bill Gates. However, Slaoui’s appointment to co-direct “Operation Warp Speed” indicates that, here, the Trump administration and the Gates Foundation are on the same team.
After entering his new Trump administration role, Slaoui declared that Moderna’s clinical trial data made him confident “we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine by the end of 2020.”
Although the U.S. government has picked Moderna as one of its five coronavirus vaccine “finalists,” financial moves by some company executives suggest Moderna’s best days might be behind them.
According to SEC filings, the company’s Chief Financial Officer Lorence Kim sold 214,000 Moderna shares on the day of the press release, immediately profiting more than $16 million.
Thomas Lys, a professor of accounting at Northwestern University, was quoted by Stat News saying this could simply be a financial decision by Moderna to get some liquidity, but that “there’s always that other possibility – that these guys really know the whole thing is bogus and they’re selling while the selling is good.”
Chief Medical Officer Tal Zaks, who held close to 100,000 shares of Moderna stock at the beginning of the year, started dumping shares a few days before Moderna announced its vaccine was ready for human testing, has profited more than $18 million in 2020, and now owns zero shares.
Slaoui also held leadership positions at GSK. While heading the company’s Research and Development, GSK pleaded guilty and paid $3 billion in what the U.S. Justice Department referred to as the “largest healthcare fraud settlement in U.S. history.” The fraud included the coverup of the link between the drug Paxil and suicidal and depressive side effects (predominantly in children), the coverup of the link between the drug Avandia and heart attacks, which the FDA estimated lead to 83,000 excess heart attacks, as well several bribery and illegal kickback schemes.
While he was GSK’s chairman of vaccines, Slaoui oversaw the development of the swine flu vaccine named Pandemrix, which was rushed to market without proper testing during the swine flu outbreak. The result was an unsafe shot that left at least 800 people with brain damage, 80 percent of them children. Since GSK only agreed to give governments the vaccine on the condition that it be indemnified from liability, U.K. taxpayer money was used to pay millions of pounds in compensation to the victims.
Slaoui was hired to be the Trump administration’s “vaccine czar” as a private contractor, not a government employee. This means, as Public Citizen explained, that Slaoui can “maintain an extensive web of conflicting financial interests without the need to divest of, recuse from, or disclose those conflicting interests.”
The corporate media likes to paint the Covid-19 response as a tug of war between anti-science blowhards like Donald Trump and “champions of science” like Bill Gates. However, Slaoui’s appointment to co-direct “Operation Warp Speed” indicates that, here, the Trump administration and the Gates Foundation are on the same team.
After entering his new Trump administration role, Slaoui declared that Moderna’s clinical trial data made him confident “we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine by the end of 2020.”
Although the U.S. government has picked Moderna as one of its five coronavirus vaccine “finalists,” financial moves by some company executives suggest Moderna’s best days might be behind them.
According to SEC filings, the company’s Chief Financial Officer Lorence Kim sold 214,000 Moderna shares on the day of the press release, immediately profiting more than $16 million.
Thomas Lys, a professor of accounting at Northwestern University, was quoted by Stat News saying this could simply be a financial decision by Moderna to get some liquidity, but that “there’s always that other possibility – that these guys really know the whole thing is bogus and they’re selling while the selling is good.”
Chief Medical Officer Tal Zaks, who held close to 100,000 shares of Moderna stock at the beginning of the year, started dumping shares a few days before Moderna announced its vaccine was ready for human testing, has profited more than $18 million in 2020, and now owns zero shares.
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