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.
RFK comes across to me often like a bar-room drunk, filled with righteous ire, and determined to project the whole of his negativity onto one agency in an act of total blame.
Yes, he gets a bunch of similarly minded blamers to worship his words. But the real live issues get covered over still further and actually, nothing changes.
Malone is a has been who worked on the mRNA vaccines 20 years ago, early in their development. Has his name on one published paper on the vaccine research and listed on another, from 20 years ago. Why is anyone taking this old bitter liar seriously?
Also, in defense of Fauci, Larry Kramer the AIDS activist initially did the whole accusatory blame game that Kennedy copies - Kramer accused Fauci of orchestrating AIDS and being a murderer. That changed when Fauci began working closely with the activists. He and Larry became best of friends. Look it up.
From a recent article: "But many AIDS activists would later hail Fauci as a powerful mediator between them and the international scientific community. He has been credited by both advocates and scientists alike with increasing the amount of patients with access to experimental treatments for HIV and AIDS by amending the way the government conducts clinical drug trials."
No one is free of blame here - but Fauci is no devil and Kennedy, in making serious money off of his conspiracies, might be.
Solidarity with life against capital and you're seemingly on the wrong side. I can't even get past your first few sentences of this one. Pharma is a cartel. Faucci is a cog in the wheel. Global capital is systematically destroying life on earth for the benefit of a few. Did you not read the Rockefeller Paper Scenarios for Technology and Future Development? You should it will sober you up a bit.
Hi Dan, I think your emotions are running a bit high. I agree that pharma is a cartel and global capital is destroying the planet, etc. Read a bit closer please!
Thank you Daniel. You are the only one I can think of who is so expertly walking the sense-making tight-rope we find ourselves on--a lone voice in the wilderness like John The Baptist. If only we had more thinkers like you instead of so many grifters and opportunists. I agree that the failure of mainstream gatekeepers to engage with voices like Kennedy's will only make our problems worse. Because of that, people like Joe Rogan then become the ones who broadcast their message. While Rogan is a smart dude, it is also very apparent that he does not have the savvy to really thread these needles in an ultimately helpful way. His tool-kit appears to only have either naive credulousness or reflexive contrarianism--and the result is just more confusion.
A very fair review. However - Kennedy did not 'brand himself an environmental crusader'. He earned that title through decades of unglamorous work in legal advocacy. Along with Erin Brockovich, he is widely considered to be the most decorated and important environmental justice lawyer in the history of the States. Waterkeeper Alliance, where he is the founder and director, is the blue-chip water protection coalition on Earth. They are not a political organization, and in a better world, his long campaigns for vaccine and pharmaceutical safety would not be considered a political issue.
His long and lonesome trek to hold toxic industries accountable is, to me, clearly motivated by a deep love of humanity and America. But because corprocratic neoliberalism has subsumed rational thought on the so-called "Left" (just watch these fools fanboying the draconian and unconstitutional mandates that have so little to do with science and so much to do with profit, getting played by the world-scale-criminal Clinton-Biden gang for yet another election cycle, and falling for the nonsense FUD around decentralized technologies), people conveniently forget that RFK Jr. has made his perspective abundantly clear.
Though it's hard to know if every single one of his postulations is true, I for one know that they are coming from a place of deep love and concern for the children, for the future, and for the planet. I wish I could say the same about Fauci, the CDC, the NIH, the WHO, and the government in general. But they've shown their hand. They are in it for the money and control, at best, and a truly mind-bogglingly ugly conspiracy at worst. The fact that I haven't been able to dismiss the latter even 24 months into this pandemic, as much as I wish I could, says a lot.
I commend you for stepping out to review this book. You have shown more courage than most. Although I agree with some of your points, I think you may paint Fauci’s motives as a bit too rosy. Not sure I believe in the whole global conspiracy scenario either, but Fauci clearly lied to Congress under oath about gain of function research. Plus I am not sure how much his motives actually matter. The results, the climate of scientific censorship and economic devastation he has fostered (I am science!) are atrocious. The statistics alone have been so manipulated as to impute bad intentions to anyone who has presided over them.
We can debate intentions, personalities and motives for eternity but one thing that cannot be denied is that the level of restrictions, mandates, censorship and division being stoked between people is leading us to a future where all of us are reduced to chattel to be managed and exploited to the extreme. Why is everyone not more alarmed that our governments are basically declaring an endless state of emergency and giving themselves unfettered power which they will never relinquish? I appreciate your writings and your review, but I don't think it illuminates the serious issues raised in this book enough. It will turn away people who are starting with a negative opinion of RFK Jr. based on years of character defamation by the mainstream media. I don't agree with everything RFK states or how he states it, but the 2000+ footnotes which link to a variety of sources are enough to raise valid concerns of the dark times we are entering. We do need a new SANE direction, as you touch upon, but with all the division in our world I'm not feeling very hopeful that we, as a species, will find it.
It’s always so far behind now though, like RFKs book, almost everything in it has already been debunked. New psyops have started since he wrote it. I’m glad you are doing these, because at least you can get them out in “real time”, already Joe Rogan is being deplatformed and held to account by a bunch of doctors and scientists as a total public health menace. The people who will actually buy and read the RFK book are already indoctrinated and devote, (and unvaccinated!) their minds are made up (reinforced by continuous far right propaganda!) and they will only use it for confirmation bias, and to dismiss anyone who hasn’t read it. I say it’s a fascist mania taking hold. Look out for “operation SET” coming as well. Like the coronavirus, there are new variants all the time.
I have not read Kennedy's book (having enough difficulty keeping up with your prolific posts and books, Daniel!), but I've listened to enough interviews with him to feel confident in agreeing with your key points in this essay.
The attempt to coordinate a global health response and seize opportunity to enact new technologies has ultimately proven to be considerably disruptive to nearly every faction of human life all over this planet. As the American side is determined to play out their own politics, they have often forgotten that major decisions and actions made by certain U.S. citizens are having direct and dire consequences for those of us in other countries.
Here in Canada, our Prime Minister, the previously mild-spoken Justin Trudeau, is sounding like a psychotic tyrannical dictator. Most of us cannot believe this is happening in the "true north strong and free." The media here (led by CBC) is tied in to the global, tech-led, "Trusted News Initiative" which was formed in September 2019 to combat COVID misinformation. That was four months before the pandemic was publicly announced. It has become obvious that censoring "misinformation" has grown a bevy of young, enthusiastic journalists from the tech sector who, knowing nothing about medicine, but following a pre-determined narrative, have been fuelling bizarre and hateful divisions among friends and families. I feel that this is an epic tragedy in itself.
When the pandemic began, I read a couple of papers that have helped me stay sane, albeit still concerned, as I watch the official narrative begin to go down in flames (the result of staring directly at the sun, as you've eloquently pointed out.) One was the Rockefeller Foundation/GBN four-part document; Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development, which includes the Lock Step scenario that specifically relates to a pandemic. The other paper is a little-known document published in 2006; MJ-12: The Technocratic Thread (Paul Collins and Phillip D. Collins).
In looking forward, I'm hoping this mash-up of mandates, restrictions on movement, freedom of choice, censorship of practical information, and monopolizing by big pharmaceutical companies can be converted to a much better future. I'm disappointed that the digital passports have been centered around vaccines instead of good health. It is a technology that could be used for empowering individuals to self-check, take care of themselves, and learn how to respond to the world around them in a healthy, holistic sense instead of hating others and shaming them for making choices that do not comply with authoritarian controls.
There are many documents and datasets now surfacing that are telling a broader story of this pandemic, but the real question is where are we going to be six months from now? Given that the phylogenetic tree of coronaviruses is massive, and there are many animal reservoirs, it is likely to be a shifting scenario that will be impossible to resolve with vaccines alone. It needs to be more multifactorial, with sensible debates. My biggest concern is what comes next in the Rockefeller Foundation/GBN scenarios, which have been following a relatively coherent timeline to our current situation. Worth a re-read or a first read if you haven't already gone through these: Lock Step, Clever Together, Hack Attack, Smart Scramble.
Nice analysis. The book is a little to big for me to read (I bought two copies!). I was looking for someone to cut though partisanship and gave a meta analysis. I agree with you that each party has its faults and shortcomings. I think I'll spread this review around 👍
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.
Love this comment, thank you
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.
So Noami, feel free to express more of what you think I missed. It is a long dense book and any review can only cover parts.
Good article!
RFK comes across to me often like a bar-room drunk, filled with righteous ire, and determined to project the whole of his negativity onto one agency in an act of total blame.
Yes, he gets a bunch of similarly minded blamers to worship his words. But the real live issues get covered over still further and actually, nothing changes.
Malone is a has been who worked on the mRNA vaccines 20 years ago, early in their development. Has his name on one published paper on the vaccine research and listed on another, from 20 years ago. Why is anyone taking this old bitter liar seriously?
Also, in defense of Fauci, Larry Kramer the AIDS activist initially did the whole accusatory blame game that Kennedy copies - Kramer accused Fauci of orchestrating AIDS and being a murderer. That changed when Fauci began working closely with the activists. He and Larry became best of friends. Look it up.
From a recent article: "But many AIDS activists would later hail Fauci as a powerful mediator between them and the international scientific community. He has been credited by both advocates and scientists alike with increasing the amount of patients with access to experimental treatments for HIV and AIDS by amending the way the government conducts clinical drug trials."
No one is free of blame here - but Fauci is no devil and Kennedy, in making serious money off of his conspiracies, might be.
Solidarity with life against capital and you're seemingly on the wrong side. I can't even get past your first few sentences of this one. Pharma is a cartel. Faucci is a cog in the wheel. Global capital is systematically destroying life on earth for the benefit of a few. Did you not read the Rockefeller Paper Scenarios for Technology and Future Development? You should it will sober you up a bit.
Hi Dan, I think your emotions are running a bit high. I agree that pharma is a cartel and global capital is destroying the planet, etc. Read a bit closer please!
Thank you Daniel. You are the only one I can think of who is so expertly walking the sense-making tight-rope we find ourselves on--a lone voice in the wilderness like John The Baptist. If only we had more thinkers like you instead of so many grifters and opportunists. I agree that the failure of mainstream gatekeepers to engage with voices like Kennedy's will only make our problems worse. Because of that, people like Joe Rogan then become the ones who broadcast their message. While Rogan is a smart dude, it is also very apparent that he does not have the savvy to really thread these needles in an ultimately helpful way. His tool-kit appears to only have either naive credulousness or reflexive contrarianism--and the result is just more confusion.
Thank you for saying that!
A very fair review. However - Kennedy did not 'brand himself an environmental crusader'. He earned that title through decades of unglamorous work in legal advocacy. Along with Erin Brockovich, he is widely considered to be the most decorated and important environmental justice lawyer in the history of the States. Waterkeeper Alliance, where he is the founder and director, is the blue-chip water protection coalition on Earth. They are not a political organization, and in a better world, his long campaigns for vaccine and pharmaceutical safety would not be considered a political issue.
His long and lonesome trek to hold toxic industries accountable is, to me, clearly motivated by a deep love of humanity and America. But because corprocratic neoliberalism has subsumed rational thought on the so-called "Left" (just watch these fools fanboying the draconian and unconstitutional mandates that have so little to do with science and so much to do with profit, getting played by the world-scale-criminal Clinton-Biden gang for yet another election cycle, and falling for the nonsense FUD around decentralized technologies), people conveniently forget that RFK Jr. has made his perspective abundantly clear.
Though it's hard to know if every single one of his postulations is true, I for one know that they are coming from a place of deep love and concern for the children, for the future, and for the planet. I wish I could say the same about Fauci, the CDC, the NIH, the WHO, and the government in general. But they've shown their hand. They are in it for the money and control, at best, and a truly mind-bogglingly ugly conspiracy at worst. The fact that I haven't been able to dismiss the latter even 24 months into this pandemic, as much as I wish I could, says a lot.
Thanks for that very even handed review Daniel. It was very helpful in cutting through all of the noise on both sides of this debate.
Great piece, Daniel! Thank you!
Frustratingly helpful. I’d like the world to be simpler.
And nice use of womba!
I commend you for stepping out to review this book. You have shown more courage than most. Although I agree with some of your points, I think you may paint Fauci’s motives as a bit too rosy. Not sure I believe in the whole global conspiracy scenario either, but Fauci clearly lied to Congress under oath about gain of function research. Plus I am not sure how much his motives actually matter. The results, the climate of scientific censorship and economic devastation he has fostered (I am science!) are atrocious. The statistics alone have been so manipulated as to impute bad intentions to anyone who has presided over them.
We can debate intentions, personalities and motives for eternity but one thing that cannot be denied is that the level of restrictions, mandates, censorship and division being stoked between people is leading us to a future where all of us are reduced to chattel to be managed and exploited to the extreme. Why is everyone not more alarmed that our governments are basically declaring an endless state of emergency and giving themselves unfettered power which they will never relinquish? I appreciate your writings and your review, but I don't think it illuminates the serious issues raised in this book enough. It will turn away people who are starting with a negative opinion of RFK Jr. based on years of character defamation by the mainstream media. I don't agree with everything RFK states or how he states it, but the 2000+ footnotes which link to a variety of sources are enough to raise valid concerns of the dark times we are entering. We do need a new SANE direction, as you touch upon, but with all the division in our world I'm not feeling very hopeful that we, as a species, will find it.
It’s always so far behind now though, like RFKs book, almost everything in it has already been debunked. New psyops have started since he wrote it. I’m glad you are doing these, because at least you can get them out in “real time”, already Joe Rogan is being deplatformed and held to account by a bunch of doctors and scientists as a total public health menace. The people who will actually buy and read the RFK book are already indoctrinated and devote, (and unvaccinated!) their minds are made up (reinforced by continuous far right propaganda!) and they will only use it for confirmation bias, and to dismiss anyone who hasn’t read it. I say it’s a fascist mania taking hold. Look out for “operation SET” coming as well. Like the coronavirus, there are new variants all the time.
I have not read Kennedy's book (having enough difficulty keeping up with your prolific posts and books, Daniel!), but I've listened to enough interviews with him to feel confident in agreeing with your key points in this essay.
The attempt to coordinate a global health response and seize opportunity to enact new technologies has ultimately proven to be considerably disruptive to nearly every faction of human life all over this planet. As the American side is determined to play out their own politics, they have often forgotten that major decisions and actions made by certain U.S. citizens are having direct and dire consequences for those of us in other countries.
Here in Canada, our Prime Minister, the previously mild-spoken Justin Trudeau, is sounding like a psychotic tyrannical dictator. Most of us cannot believe this is happening in the "true north strong and free." The media here (led by CBC) is tied in to the global, tech-led, "Trusted News Initiative" which was formed in September 2019 to combat COVID misinformation. That was four months before the pandemic was publicly announced. It has become obvious that censoring "misinformation" has grown a bevy of young, enthusiastic journalists from the tech sector who, knowing nothing about medicine, but following a pre-determined narrative, have been fuelling bizarre and hateful divisions among friends and families. I feel that this is an epic tragedy in itself.
When the pandemic began, I read a couple of papers that have helped me stay sane, albeit still concerned, as I watch the official narrative begin to go down in flames (the result of staring directly at the sun, as you've eloquently pointed out.) One was the Rockefeller Foundation/GBN four-part document; Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development, which includes the Lock Step scenario that specifically relates to a pandemic. The other paper is a little-known document published in 2006; MJ-12: The Technocratic Thread (Paul Collins and Phillip D. Collins).
In looking forward, I'm hoping this mash-up of mandates, restrictions on movement, freedom of choice, censorship of practical information, and monopolizing by big pharmaceutical companies can be converted to a much better future. I'm disappointed that the digital passports have been centered around vaccines instead of good health. It is a technology that could be used for empowering individuals to self-check, take care of themselves, and learn how to respond to the world around them in a healthy, holistic sense instead of hating others and shaming them for making choices that do not comply with authoritarian controls.
There are many documents and datasets now surfacing that are telling a broader story of this pandemic, but the real question is where are we going to be six months from now? Given that the phylogenetic tree of coronaviruses is massive, and there are many animal reservoirs, it is likely to be a shifting scenario that will be impossible to resolve with vaccines alone. It needs to be more multifactorial, with sensible debates. My biggest concern is what comes next in the Rockefeller Foundation/GBN scenarios, which have been following a relatively coherent timeline to our current situation. Worth a re-read or a first read if you haven't already gone through these: Lock Step, Clever Together, Hack Attack, Smart Scramble.
https://www.academia.edu/43023323/Scenarios_for_the_Future_of_Technology_and_International_Development
Nice analysis. The book is a little to big for me to read (I bought two copies!). I was looking for someone to cut though partisanship and gave a meta analysis. I agree with you that each party has its faults and shortcomings. I think I'll spread this review around 👍
Glad I'm not in Melbourne.