The Bio-insecurity Complex
A critical review of RFK Jr's The Real Anthony Fauci
Writing a critical review of Robert F Kennedy’s bestseller, The Real Anthony Fauci, is a daunting task. I felt the need for such a review because you can’t find one anywhere. None of the established media outlets will touch the book, which is unsurprising but unfortunate. By maintaining a policy of total avoidance mingled with derision when it comes to anti-establishment views of Covid policies and the vaccines, the establishment media is not helping its case. In fact, it creates more reason for thoughtful people to mistrust and reject the mainstream consensus.
By not subjecting Kennedy’s book to scrutiny, The New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, etc, only intensify our polarization and inability to find common ground. The Real Anthony Fauci is extensively footnoted and fact-checked and has sold over 500,000 copies already. At the very least, this is a media phenomenon that should be analyzed by the establishment gatekeepers, but they won’t touch it with the proverbial ten foot pole. The (mainly liberal, Democratic) establishment’s failure to address Kennedy’s views on the pandemic will push the country further toward the Right.
Kennedy sees Fauci as the public face of a vast conspiratorial web of military, intelligence, financial, corporate-pharmaceutical interests who, “Shock Doctrine” style, made use of the current pandemic crisis (and, he strongly implies, may have engineered it) to bring about a new social and political reality: An anti-democratic global coup d’etat. According to Kennedy, Fauci’s near half-century reign as the director of America’s public health sector has coincided with a steep decline in our well-being. This is, he argues, a direct result of Fauci’s policy decisions:
The “J. Edgar Hoover of public health” has presided over cataclysmic declines in public health, including an exploding chronic disease epidemic that has made the “Fauci generation”—children born after his elevation to NIAID kingpin in 1984— the sickest generation in American history, and has made Americans among the least healthy citizens on the planet. His obsequious subservience to the Big Ag, Big Food, and pharmaceutical companies has left our children drowning in a toxic soup of pesticide residues, corn syrup, and processed foods, while also serving as pincushions for 69 mandated vaccine doses by age 18—none of them properly safety tested. When Dr. Fauci took office, America was still ranked among the world’s healthiest populations. An August 2021 study by the Commonwealth Fund ranked America’s health care system dead last among industrialized nations, with the highest infant mortality and the lowest life expectancy.
It is startling to realize this. Yet Kennedy goes too far in indicting Fauci as directly responsible for America’s public health catastrophe, which is the result of many factors. On the other hand, Fauci has held his position as the front man for public health for a very long time. It is extraordinary that he hasn’t been held to account for the negative long-term trends. Kennedy has an unfortunate tendency to exaggerate, as evident in the comment, “none of them properly safety tested.” This telegraphs his bias against vaccinations as a whole (I was shocked by this when I interviewed him).
Kennedy’s personal animus against Fauci – he approvingly quotes questionable journalist Celia Farber, who calls Fauci “evil,” “revolutionary,” “Jesuit,” a “globalist” – weakens and delegitimizes the book. Kennedy sees Fauci as an opportunist who thrives off vaccine patents and pharmaceutical company profits. But the mainstream media considers Kennedy a glorified ambulance chaser who profits from vaccine hesitancy and Right Wing bloviations. Both caricatures are overly simplistic.
We seem to be surrounded by opportunists of various stripes. Some of them long for power, some for money, some for public acclaim, some for vigilante justice. A few months ago I was ready to reject Kennedy entirely when I read that he hosted a party at his house in California that required proof of vaccination. He weakly explained, at the time, that his wife insisted upon this. Long ago, when Kennedy branded himself as an environmental crusader, he fought to stop wind turbines off the coast of Nantucket, where they might disrupt the pristine view that he and his family enjoy. Unfortunately, Kennedy seems to crusade for causes as long as they have zero impact on his comforts as a lifelong member of the privileged elite.
Everybody, in their own way, is an opportunist with a distorted perspective. Any perspective can only be trusted to the extent that this is kept in mind. I recently watched Joe Rogan interview Dr Robert Malone, and found myself initially impressed by Malone, who presents himself as the inventor of the mRNA technology and a truth-seeking outsider with no personal agenda. Yet Malone’s claims that he “invented” mRNA technology and also contributed substantially to the development of an Ebola vaccine are unsupported by evidence.
If Malone presented himself as one of many scientists who added a bit to the development of mRNA technology, he would be more trustworthy. As it is, it seems an egomaniac trying to inflate his historical importance while furthering Right Wing interests. I admire Rogan, but Rogan is also an opportunist. He expertly maintains his huge platform. He does this by choosing who to spotlight and what trending controversies to fan.
Still, Malone raises some good points in his interview that support the themes of Kennedy’s book. For example, Malone draws attention to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which has been given the critical role of policing Facebook and Twitter for fact-check errors. This includes removing posts and contributors who support “vaccine hesitancy” and “anti-vax” conspiracy theories, such as Malone himself, who was recently thrown off Twitter. But the Thomson Reuters Foundation is directly connected to Pfizer at the directorial level:
Pfizer is a profit-driven corporation — no different from Phillip Morris or British Petroleum — on track to make $65 billion from Covid vaccines by the end of 2022. Pfizer should not control criticism of its own products. The power of the pharmaceutical corporations is dangerously out of control.
Kennedy also makes many compelling points. I am not going to go through the long chapters on AIDS, AZT, and experiments on children. I honestly don’t know enough about this history to have a balanced view. Kennedy seems to support the HIV denialist Peter Duesberg, a Berkeley scientist whose ideas have been forcefully debunked by the scientific establishment. I don’t have the energy for the requisite twenty hours I need to go down the Duesberg rabbit hole and make my own determination. At this point I trust the establishment when it insists that HIV causes AIDS, and I believe some vaccines (Polio, Small Pox, Chicken Pox) were amazing breakthroughs in medicine.
Viruses, Vaccines, and the Biosecurity Complex
Kennedy argues that government-funded studies of new vaccines and “gain of function” experiments on viruses provided cover for military research seeking to discover new bioweapons. Research into biowarfare had been outlawed by global treaties. This secret alliance started before the post 9/11 Anthrax scare, which was, Kennedy notes, most likely a “false flag” operation. The military’s desire to find new bioweapons fused with publicly funded medical research, particularly the study of potential pathogens as well as the development of prophylactic treatments and vaccines against them.
In his last chapter, Kennedy meticulously reviews the history of modern scenario planning for a global pandemic or bioweapon attack, including the Pentagon’s anthrax simulation (1999) the intelligence agency’s “Dark Winter” (2001), Atlantic Storm (2003, 2005), Global Mercury (2003), Peter Schwartz’s “Lockstep” Scenario (2010), MARS (2017), Clade X (2018), Crimson Contagion (2019), and Event 201 (2019), which preceded Covid-19 by a few months. Given his personal history, Kennedy has a unique vantage point on military-intelligence collusion to hatch deadly plots that subvert Democracy and thwart the public good.
Given his personal history, Kennedy has a unique vantage point on military-intelligence collusion to hatch deadly plots that subvert Democracy and thwart the public good.
Such scenario planning exercises, Kennedy argues, were incubators for new policies. They functioned as “a potent brainwashing technique for creating and fortifying anti-democratic orthodoxies among key political leaders, the press, and the technocracy, and preparing the nation to tolerate a coup d’état against its Constitution without resistance.” He makes a persuasive case that the simulations prepared the infrastructure for an anti-democratic biosecurity super-state:
Each of these Kafkaesque exercises became uncanny predictors of a dystopian age that pandemic planners dubbed the “New Normal.” …. Each rehearsal ends with the same grim punchline: the global pandemic is an excuse to justify the imposition of tyranny and coerced vaccination. The repetition of these exercises suggests that they serve as a kind of rehearsal or training drill for an underlying agenda to coordinate the global dismantlement of democratic governance.
…
The “global war” against infectious diseases provided the rationale for oppressive government and corporate interventions. The arsenal for this war is the endless batteries of mandated vaccines to combat the diseases weaponized by gain-of-function experiments and marketed by sophisticated government/corporate propaganda. [Emphasis mine]
This is utterly Orwellian, if true. Kennedy examines the 2017 SPARS simulation, funded by Bill Gates, which envisioned a respiratory virus spreading quickly across the planet, requiring a rapid synchronized response. The militarized tactics adopted in the simulation were exactly the ones used on us during the COVID-19 pandemic, including suppression of civil liberties, social distancing, quarantining, censorship, and a rapid project to create a mandated vaccination named “CORONOVAX,” which caused neurological side effects:
The Gates simulation focused on deploying the usual psyops retinue of propaganda, surveillance, censorship, isolation, and political and social control to manage the pandemic. The official eighty-nine-page summary is a miracle of fortune-telling—an uncannily precise month-by-month prediction of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as it actually unfolded. Looked at another way, when it erupted five years later, the 2020 COVID-19 contagion faithfully followed the SPARS blueprint.
Organized by Bill Gates as the virus began to spread in Wuhan, Event 201 was another strangely accurate exercise. As part of Event 201, participants explored techinques to suppress the theory that a viral pandemic might have originated in a laboratory, using censorship, propaganda, and spin control. “Everyone voiced their urgent concerns that authorities must instantly squelch and discredit any speculation that someone deliberately or accidentally released a lab-made bug,” Kennedy writes. “The fundamental assumption of all participants was that censorship and propaganda are legitimate exercises of Federal power.” Many of the core participants in Event 201 became central figures in the COVID-19 pandemic as it unfolded, including the Director of the Chinese version of the CDC, an Australian Health Minister, and the leading technologist in facial recognition.
Kennedy insinuates, but doesn’t state outright, that COVID-19 was engineered in a lab and (intentionally?) released. Emails between Fauci and a number of leading virologists and foundation directors – unearthed by a Right Wing nonprofit, Project Veritas – make it clear that these experts initially suspected COVID-19 was manufactured at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The emails also suggest that Fauci and his inner circle organized a cover-up of this thesis. They rushed to publish an article in Nature Magazine in February, 2020, which strongly rejected the “lab leak hypothesis” and argued that COVID-19 was a natural pathogen. It remains plausible, if not highly likely, that Wuhan “gain of function” research into bat Coronaviruses unleashed COVID-19. This research was funded by grants authorized by Fauci, through the National Institute of Health.
Personally, I don’t see Gates and Fauci as arch supervillains working with military intelligence and organizations like Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum to deliberately orchestrate a global takeover, or to sterilize and depopulate the world. I suspect their conscious intentions are basically decent. Of course I could be naive, but my assumption is they are technocrats, data-driven rationalists and reductive materialists.
However, as we all know, the conscious mind is only a tiny part of the Psyche. The much larger part of the Psyche is hidden and unconscious. Both Fauci and Gates seem unconsciously driven by a desire to control, combined with a great deal of arrogance and superiority. They are intelligent enough to mask this superiority for the most part, appearing genial, affable, even humble at times. They believe that unfettered science and technology drive human progress.
Our problems go much deeper than any individual personality, no matter how much wealth or power they may possess. Our crisis is embedded in the logic of late-stage Capitalism as it morphs into totalitarian technocracy. This crisis is the natural extension of Enlightenment Reason, as 20th Century philosophers such as Georges Battaile, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno warned us.
Bataille, for example, challenged the vision of a solar Enlightenment that saw itself opposed to the darkness of night and the irrational. The light of the Sun traditionally symbolizes Enlightenment — the triumph of reason and logic — but when you stare into the noonday Sun for too long, as Van Gogh did, you meet the opposite of reason: You go insane. Bataille wrote about the “rotten sun” or the “Solar Anus” to symbolize this breakdown of reason and order when we confront the Sun’s merciless incandescence.
Instrumental reason and scientific progress show themselves Janus-faced, turning into their opposites. It as if our government/ corporate/ technocratic/ pharmaceutical/ media/ military/ intelligence complex is staring into the Noonday Sun right now and has lost its moorings. Without a new direction, we splinter into the abyss.
New Book Out Now
Great parsing and writing, Daniel. The pandemic planning of emerging infectious diseases was bound to happen, and the predictions of scenarios which ultimately came to pass would not be hard to foretell. What’s interesting is how the materialist rationalist colonial capitalist system is just doing what it does—this isn’t about nefarious actors etc (I worked a few days on the NIAID ward with Dr Fauci during my clinical fellowship at NIH—he was a caring and expert physician who spoke well with patients and trainees. I also saw his conference where he presented the nurse with Ebola from TX that he and his team successfully treated). If you don’t have a system/structural level critical understanding, it can appear that the individual actors are malevolent, when it is simply the best we can expect with a broken public health and corporate media system. Nobody is really minding the store. Thank you for helping to heal the split. And for the record, I want folks to get vaccinated if they can AND work on breaking the patent monopolies around the technology for the good of public health.
It seems your review is a review of characters from Fauci to RFK and really didn't focus on the specifics of the book and its studies which I found way more interesting than he said she said of the political arena. Clearly the book made its focus around Fauci as the main character, who seems to me just another cog in the wheel. However this review prefers to play up that aspect rather than focus on the very real scientific information that is presented. I feel like we all need to step away from our obsession with the characters of the plot and engage in the substance of what is being said rather than our current culture myopic obsession with personality.