The threat of the biopharmaceutical medical industrial complex

OPINION:

This week, in his testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci delivered an accusation against unvaccinated Americans, asserting they are responsible for an additional 200,000 to 300,000 COVID-related deaths.

This accusation was partly an effort to exonerate the federal government of its overreach and the unconstitutional actions it took as the pandemic progressed. More broadly, this accusation speaks to the threat posed by the biopharmaceutical medical industrial complex and its nexus with U.S. national security and public health officials — an entity that is increasingly being turned against the American people.

Dr. Fauci’s recent testimony before Congress contained a series of disclosures about the handling of COVID-19 that highlighted the corruption and lack of “science” that framed the United States’ response to COVID-19. For example, Dr. Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, disclosed that the 6-foot social distancing rule was not based on any science but was instead a rudimentary guideline.

In addition, private emails that were brought up in the hearing showed Dr. Fauci acknowledging that masks do little to prevent the transmission of COVID-19 while he was issuing federal guidelines for mask mandates.

Dr. Fauci’s claim that unvaccinated Americans caused over 250,000 deaths in the U.S., however, was a uniquely pernicious accusation as it demonstrates the ongoing threat that the scientific elite poses to Americans’ constitutional rights, a threat that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about over 60 years ago.

In his 1961 farewell address to the nation, Eisenhower famously warned about the military-industrial complex and the risk of it having an “undue influence” over U.S. foreign policy. He also conveyed a lesser-known but equally important warning in this speech: the growing risk of the pharmaceutical and medical industrial complex influencing and controlling U.S. public policy.

He said, “Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Eisenhower’s primary concern was that increased federal funding of scientific research programs could transform government-funded science into partisan rather than objective research, with public policy ultimately beholden to this partisan science.

This issue of public policy being beholden to a government-funded partisan science and establishment made up of public health and national security officials was displayed in full effect as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold.

Through the pandemic, a nexus between U.S. national security and public health officials alongside news agencies and Big Tech was formed to convey a singular narrative over the virus’s origins and offer support behind the U.S. government’s pandemic response while suppressing competing reports and targeting Americans who did not comply with these mandates — with Dr. Fauci playing an intricate role.

For example, last September, the House Select Subcommittee on COVID-19 origins released an open letter detailing a whistleblower allegation that the CIA paid off six analysts to change their assessment that the COVID-19 virus originated in Wuhan, China, to instead assert that the virus evolved naturally.

This  intelligence report was subsequently used by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to assert that the intelligence community could not determine the origins of COVID-19. The Biden administration elevated this assessment to dismiss claims that COVID-19 was a man-made rather than naturally occurring virus.

The reason behind this allegedly doctored intelligence report was a U.S. intelligence assessment that determined that the COVID-19 virus originated at the Wuhan lab would implicate the U.S. government in funding gain-of-function research through grants from the Fauci-led NIAID and the Pentagon to the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. biotech firm. This would also contradict Dr. Fauci’s claims before Congress that the U.S. has never funded gain-of-function research.

The same nexus between public health and national security officials was subsequently used to censor “vaccine disinformation” as the Biden administration directed Big Tech companies to censor reporting on adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine or reporting that analyzed the efficacy of the vaccine — while the Biden administration was simultaneously issuing federal mandates related to the COVID-19 vaccine and the wearing of masks. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later ruled that the Biden administration ultimately engaged in illegal censorship efforts in its efforts to combat COVID-19 “disinformation.”

Equally troubling is that in October 2019, three months before the release of COVID-19 became public knowledge, Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security, in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum, held a roundtable exercise on how to handle “an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic.”

The event aimed to demonstrate “areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe pandemic” and issue policy guidance on how governments and private organizations should manage a global coronavirus pandemic.

The consensus of this roundtable was that during pandemics, governments and private organizations needed to “flood the zone” of media outlets with governmental health guidance rather than independent reporting while relying on social media platforms to censor misinformation to ensure a unified governmental response to pandemics. Avril Haines, President Biden’s director of national intelligence, was present at this roundtable.

The actions taken by the U.S. in response to COVID-19 were, therefore, a manifestation of Eisenhower’s warning over U.S. public policy becoming beholden to a scientific elite.

Relative to today, many Americans understand firsthand the dangers of this scientific elite and how it was turned against them. Over 8,300 service members were discharged from the military for not complying with the Department of Defense’s unconstitutional vaccine mandate, an estimated 200,000 small businesses in the United States have been permanently closed due to the lockdowns, and over 80 million Americans faced the prospect of either taking the vaccine or losing their job as the administration attempted to use the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to enforce vaccination mandates before the Supreme Court intervened to strike down this order.

Dr. Fauci’s recent accusation that unvaccinated Americans are responsible for the deaths of 200,000 of 300,000 Americans is not only void of scientific backing, but it more broadly shows little accountability for the unconstitutional guidance perpetrated by him. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated, “The framers of the Constitution did not put a pandemic exception in the Constitution.”

Dr. Fauci’s bypassing that principle should bear more scrutiny, not unvaccinated Americans.

• Gloria McDonald is a graduate of Liberty University with a degree in international relations and a master’s degree in global security from Johns Hopkins University. She also has previous work experience with the State Department.