patrick.net

In the decade after 9/11, as biodefense enjoyed an increasing portion of national security attention and spending, the field attracted many more scientists, academic institutions and nonprofits into the study of pathogens and countermeasures. Naturally, many of these non-military entities came from fields including virology, immunology and epidemiology, whose work is used – among other purposes – for pandemic preparedness. The civilian side of the research was mostly funded by public health agencies and mega-nonprofits interested primarily in vaccine development.

It was not long before the two fields merged into one “dual use” entity – conveniently defined as a crucial aspect of national security – called simply “biodefense” or “health security.” In 2006, a new sub-agency was even created to cement the merger: ASPR – a military/intelligence-run entity within HHS – the umbrella civilian public health body. This symbiotic military/civilian enterprise could then attract a great deal more funding, and exert influence over a much vaster array of research institutions, nonprofits and NGOs than either biodefense or pandemic preparedness could have done separately.

Another impetus for the merger of the two fields was their shared private partners: pharmaceutical companies, whose job it was to help design, research and ultimately produce whatever countermeasures were deemed necessary for protection, either from bioweapons or naturally occurring pathogens. Ideally, the countermeasures for one type of disease outbreak would also work for the other.

This is why, in the decades after 2001, the biodefense field became obsessed with finding a “platform technology” that could provide protection from any conceivable bioweapon, while the public health/pandemic preparedness field pushed for a “universal flu vaccine” that could provide protection from any naturally occurring, respiratory-disease-causing virus. And, by 2019, both arms of the biodefense complex had invested a huge amount of funding and hype into a specific technology called “mRNA vaccine platforms” – thought to be the sought-after miracle countermeasure to all engineered viral bioweapons and all flu-causing viruses. ...

Along with the backing of the international banks and the support of the censorship and propaganda industrial complex (shortened in this article to “psy-op complex”) and multinational consulting firms, all of the components of the biodefense GPPP represent hundreds of billions of dollars in funding and financing, thousands of national and international companies, agencies, academic institutions and NGOs in dozens of countries, and hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of jobs all over the world. Its sheer size and control over people and resources make this an entity that is “too big to fail.”

Yet without a viable threat of a bioweapons attack or a catastrophic pandemic, this behemoth cannot continue to sustain and grow itself.

For that reason, as it ballooned in the two decades before Covid, the biodefense GPPP had to keep the threat of a catastrophic bioterror attack or global pandemic front and center. And it had to prepare all of its components to respond to the threat when it predictably, if not inevitably, occurred. ...

But the traditional business model for private pharmaceutical companies does not lend itself to such a project. No private company can survive, let alone thrive, by devoting significant resources to building and maintaining manufacturing capacity for countermeasures against a hypothetical threat that might never happen. Furthermore, the oversight and regulation of medical products will almost inevitably delay the availability of novel countermeasures until after an attack or outbreak is over. And, finally, even if the countermeasures can be manufactured and approved quickly enough, what if they cause unexpected outcomes (e.g., injury or death) for which the companies could be held liable?

All of these obstacles were overcome by the biodefense GPPP through under-the-radar legislative and legal maneuverings and regulatory capture in the decades leading up to Covid:

Regulatory barriers lowered to zero or near-zero

Over several decades, important loopholes in countermeasure regulation were introduced into the legal code, most notably Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). Internationally, defense treaties and biodefense agreements can lower regulatory barriers such that emergency authorization in one country could be applied to others. The WHO Emergency Use Listing (EUL) accomplishes this globally. EUL was first used for the Covid vaccines.

Liability removed from anyone working on, distributing, or administering countermeasures

The PREP Act was a necessary additional legal measure to ensure that anyone who did anything with EUA products would not be liable in case the unregulated countermeasures went awry. The liability shield is extended by governments and regulatory bodies internationally along with EUA.

The Novel Coronavirus Trigger

By 2019 all of these preparations for a catastrophic global pandemic were in place, but the civilization-ending pathogen/bioterror attack had not yet materialized.

Then, in late 2019 a propitious public health emergency in Wuhan, China ended the very long dry spell in biodefense disasters: Clusters of patients exhibited severe symptoms of a respiratory disease that could not be attributed to any known pathogen. Analysis of the body fluids of the patients was performed, and a novel coronavirus was identified.