All peace advocates know that the military industrial complex needs people to live in fear in order for their propaganda to work, in order to get people into a warring mood. Well, Glenn Greenwald recently described how government officials are stoking the current Sinophobia, which could get the U.S. into a very hot war with a superpower:
…whenever state officials start trying to increase the fear that the population has about some threat, foreign or domestic, it’s always in the way of insisting that they need more power to protect you from that threat that they’ve got you to fear, and that is precisely when skepticism should be at its highest point since that’s always the tactic that states use to gain more authoritarian power. Putting the population in fear of some threat, and then telling them that only greater powers on the part of the state can protect you from the threat. That is precisely what is happening here, with TikTok performing the role of Iraqi WMD’s, or Kremlin disinformation, or Trump’s insurrection. (Clip starts at 11:30).
Part of the fear about China has been the assumption of guilt for some vaguely-defined kind of crime, where they were said to be directly or indirectly responsible for the COVID-19 disaster, but this racist assumption should be more easily thrown into doubt now, when we know that our understanding of COVID-19 was manipulated through a filter of censorship by the U.S. “national security state.” This has been known for many months, but recently the U.S. House Judiciary Weaponization Committee has investigated the censorship, even to the benefit of the Left and we have learned that the Global Engagement Center was using artificial intelligence (AI) to censor Americans during the “2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic”; the Atlantic Council has been using “weapons of mass deletion” on us with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the State Department; and the Virality Project once flagged a tweet from Rep. Tom Massie for the non-crime of citing research “showing that natural immunity provided the same effectiveness as the Pfizer vaccine.”
Here, I would like to propose to you, someone who cares about peace, that people who tell us that we need to invest more in “biosecurity” or “biodefense,” or tell us that we need censorship in order to be protected from the dangers of misinformation are exaggerating the threat of natural viruses, bioweapons, and bioterrorists, and that our fear about such threats provides the military industrial complex with further power and control over our lives. As I argued in March 2021, ever since the 9/11 attack, the governments of the U.S. and Japan have engaged in fearmongering in order to establish “states of exception.” First, for both countries, there was the state of exception that came in the aftermath of 9/11. The second, for Japan, was after “3/11,” i.e., the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that occurred on the 11th of March 2011, sparking the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster. And the third, in my view, was the COVID-19 crisis that began in 2020: a period of violations of the Constitution of Japan, state-sponsored lawlessness, and violations of human rights. In February 2022 I warned about people getting into a warring mood over SARS-CoV-2.
From the beginning, back in March of 2020, the public health measures for the virus were described in terms of a war. On the 11th of that month, when the World Health Organization (WHO) officially announced the global pandemic, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the organization, himself described what we must do in terms of fighting: “So every sector and every individual must be involved in the fights,” he said.
Admittedly his “fightin’ words” were relatively mild, but on the same day, then U.S. President Donald Trump, pugnacious as always, announced a suspension of travel from Europe, saying, “We have been in frequent contact with our allies, and we are marshaling the full power of the federal government and the private sector to protect the American people. This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history.” On the 13th, when he announced the national emergency, he said, “Today I’d like to provide an update to the American people on several decisive new actions we are taking in our very vigilant effort to combat and ultimately defeat the coronavirus.”
Similarly, President Emmanuel Macron on the 16th in an address to the nation of France, declared, “We are at war… the enemy is invisible and it requires our general mobilization.” And on the 25th, the U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley, said during a conference call to troops, “We are at war… It’s a different type of war, but a war nonetheless.”
Many government officials around the world described their measures, or countermeasures, in such terms, and their actions were consistent with their words. They directed government officials, scientists, doctors, etc. to approach the efforts for health as if we were at war.
China was blamed for COVID-19 right from the beginning in 2020 just as Iraq was initially blamed for the anthrax attacks of 2001. Typically, they blame first and investigate later. In the words of a journalist writing for the China Daily,
US economist Jeffrey Sachs, who heads the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, said that once the outbreak began, Washington blamed China entirely, and even refused to cooperate with China to stop the pandemic. In 2020 Trump repeatedly attacked China and even withdrew from the WHO after accusing the body of favoring China. Since the early 2010s, the US has been escalating its containment efforts against China by taking unilateral trade measures, imposing technology barriers, investment and financial barriers, and other sanctions, and by forging military alliances such as AUKUS, Sachs said.
Regardless of who sparked fear of anthrax in the hearts of Americans when we were still reeling from the shock of the 9/11 attacks, one could argue that what kickstarted the U.S. biodefense industry was, more than anything else, this one case of the anthrax attacks.
Robert Kadlec
A primary beneficiary of the anthrax attacks was Robert Kadlec. Many years before serving as the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) from 2017 to 2021, Kadlec had worked as a U.S. Air Force physician for 26 years. After the anthrax-tainted letters killed 5 people, infected 17 or 18, and put 30,000 on antibiotics, beginning only one week after 11 September 2001, he played a central role in spreading biodefense hysteria. “The 2001 attacks created a huge new market for biodefense and the [U.S.] government began filling the stockpile with treatments for anthrax and smallpox.”
Kadlec “served two tours of duty at the White House Homeland Security Council, first as the Director for Biodefense then as Special Assistant to President Bush for Biodefense Policy from 2007 to 2009.” Three years later, in the summer of 2012, he formed the small biodefense company East West Protection with two others. Records show that he was managing director and a part-owner of the firm.
He also worked as a “self-employed biosecurity consultant,” which earned him more than $451,000 in 2014. “Kadlec reported that 13 clients had each paid him more than $5,000 for consulting work between 2013 and 2014, including a pharmaceutical trade group, an industry lobbying organization and companies such as Emergent [BioSolutions] and Danish pharmaceutical company Bavarian Nordic. He promoted the companies’ medical products overseas, said a senior [Health and Human Services] official with knowledge of Kadlec’s work, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.”
Emergent BioSolutions was originally called BioPort. In 1998 they were producing an anthrax vaccine called BioThrax for U.S. soldiers. That vaccine caused some severe side effects. BioPort was the sole producer of the BioThrax vaccine. The company was founded by Fuad El-Hibri, a Lebanese-German businessman, and Admiral William J. Crowe Jr., a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Bill Clinton’s Ambassador to the U.K.
In August 2017, Kadlec was hired by Trump as the Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response (ASPR), President Trump’s top official for public health preparedness. After he gained this position, he “began pressing to increase government stocks of a smallpox vaccine. [Kadlec’s] office ultimately made a deal to buy up to $2.8 billion of the vaccine from a company that once paid [him] as a consultant, a connection he did not disclose on a Senate questionnaire when he was nominated.”
Even mass media reports indicate that Kadlec’s office has rewarded his former employer Emergent handsomely for their many millions of dollars of investments in lobbying, including “$535 million to supply a product that treats side effects caused by smallpox vaccinations in a small percentage of patients,” $260 million for an anthrax vaccine, $67.1 million for cyanide exposure, and $22 million for developing a covid-19 therapy.
The Washington Post has “identified at least 18 projects that won funding [from the U.S. National Institutes of Health or ‘NIH’] from 2012 to 2020 that appeared to include gain-of-function experiments… Funding from NIH for the 18 projects totaled about $48.8 million and unfolded at 13 institutions.” And,
From 2017 to 2020, no more than “three or four” projects were forwarded to the review committee, said Robert Kadlec, who oversaw the panel and served as the Trump administration’s assistant HHS [i.e., United States Department of Health and Human Services] secretary for preparedness and response. “They were grading their own homework,” Kadlec said.
In the expert opinion of the whistleblower Andrew Huff,
Several US-based scientists and US academic institutions received funding from numerous federal government agencies and private non-governmental organizations to complete the gain of function work on SARS-CoV-2. The work was completed domestically and abroad in partnership with several countries for sample collection, analysis, and laboratory work, including gain of function work, which was performed at Columbia University, the University of North Carolina, and at the Wuhan institute of virology, in China. (Andrew G. Huff, The Truth about Wuhan [Skyhorse Publishing, 2022], Chapter 16).
Unlike Huff, the FBI only blames China, alleging that covid-19 “most likely” originated from a lab incident in Wuhan.
In an interview with Sky News Australia on 27 November last year, Kadlec admitted that he downplayed the lab leak theory in order to gain cooperation from China in the early days of the outbreak. But he said, “I wake up at usually about 2 or 3 AM and think about it honestly, because it’s something that we all played a role in.” Speculating about Dr. Fauci’s motivation for diverting attention away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, he guessed that Fauci was probably worried about his reputation, what would happen if people found out that “gain of function” research had resulted in an outbreak, saying, “That would be a natural reaction of him or anybody, particularly I think, for him saying, what could this do to me and to our institute as a consequence if we were found to have some culpability or some involvement in this?”
Experts on biodefense history, Jeanne Guillemin and the above whistleblower Andrew Huff, have downplayed the threat of bioweapons being used as a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) with statements such as the following:
1) “The rarity of actual use of biological weapons raises the question of their battlefield utility. Conventional weapons allow much more precision and immediate devastation.”
2) “Virtually all the major world powers have investigated the weapons potential of anthrax. Yet the most important fact to remember about all biological weapons (BW) is that they have almost never been used.”
3) “… a program was inaugurated to prepare 120 major U.S. cities for potential bioterrorist attack. Yet a review of domestic bioterrorism incidences in this century has shown that they have virtually never occurred…” (Jeanne Guillemin, “Soldiers’ Rights and Medical Risks: The Protest Against Universal Anthrax Vaccinations,” Human Rights Review 1:3 [2000] 130, 129, 132).
And more recently, in 2022, Andrew Huff wrote, “There is no tactical situation where [the use of bioweapons] will reach a desired goal, even from the perspective of a rational terrorist who seeks to obtain social dominance through fear, unless the person deploying them is a madman who is willing to kill all life, including their family and themselves.” (Huff, The Truth about Wuhan, Chapter 15, paragraph 16).
Probably the worst case of a bioweapon actually being used against Americans was the anthrax attacks of 2001, only a week after the 9/11 attacks. Letters with the deadly bacteria inside them were sent to members of Congress and the media. This terrified many people and brought a huge amount of money into the anthrax vaccine program. Profits and power flowed to Kadlec and others in biodefense.
Conclusion
Robert Kadlec’s career is just a microcosm, one tiny window through which we can peer into the dark, inner workings of the biodefense/biosecurity complex. In their book The COVID Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (2023), Thomas Fazi and Toby Green outline how public health policies that were aimed at protecting our health worsened poverty and made billionaires even wealthier. The COVID Consensus also emphasizes how women “lost massively,” through domestic abuse, prostitution, the poverty gap between men and women in the Global South, etc. (The COVID Consensus, “Introduction”). If it is true that the “worst form of violence is poverty,” as Gandhi said, then this should give us pause.
In 2021 Geoff Shullenberger wrote a thought-provoking essay entitled, “How We Forgot Foucault.” Michel Foucault (1926-84) used to be one of the most cited philosophers in the world. Shullenberger reminded people about one of Foucault’s main points, that the “logic of protecting life is a primary mode of legitimating violence on the part of the state.” Foucault pointed out that this logic of protecting life often provides an excuse for war as well as the death penalty.
With the perception of the threat of bioweapons, what we may be seeing now is a relatively new and clever way to create a state of exception. Decades ago, Foucault and Giorgio Agamben saw it coming. The military establishment can claim that our country is under attack by a virus. Whether it escaped accidentally from a biolab that aimed at protecting human health, or is a bioweapon (however unlikely that may be), or it was an accident of nature does not really matter from their perspective. What they need is our fear of the virus and our suspicion of those irresponsible voices who criticize the biosecurity industry and downplay the threat of the virus.
This was a lesson that we all could have learned after the anthrax attacks of 2001, in fact. In the aftermath of 2001, Agamben, who has to some extent followed in Foucault’s footsteps, “raised similar concerns about the post‑9/11 security state and the War on Terror. The demand for security at all costs, he argued then, can become the pretext for the imposition of a ‘state of exception’ in which laws and rights are indefinitely suspended.” Now might be a good time for Australians and Japanese to question the claim that they need their very own “DARPA” (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
Theodor Rosebury, who was in charge of the Airborne Infection project at Fort Detrick, Maryland during World War II wrote a book entitled Peace or Pestilence? Biological Warfare and How to Avoid It (1949). His last words about the history of the institution for which he labored are telling:
Camp Detrick was born of fear. It now helps to generate more fear and is thereby itself regenerated. While fear remains Camp Detrick and its sister stations throughout the world must go on storing up destruction. If we had peace, these places could show us how to abolish influenza and the common cold, tuberculosis, malaria, and all the other natural plagues of man, as well as those of animals and plants. There is no reason to doubt that these things could be done; but first we must abolish the unnatural plague of war.