Zaitchik offers a devastating indictment of Gates: “Gates is certain he knows better. But his failure to anticipate a crisis of supply, and his refusal to engage those who predicted it, have complicated the carefully maintained image of an all-knowing, saintly mega-philanthropist. COVAX presents a high-stakes demonstration of Gates’s deepest ideological commitments, not just to intellectual property rights but also to the conflation of these rights with an imaginary free market in pharmaceuticals—an industry dominated by companies whose power derives from politically constructed and politically imposed monopolies.”154
After describing how Gates pushed back ruthlessly “defending the status quo and running effective interference for those profiting by the billions from their control of COVID19 vaccines,” Zaitchik offers a glimmer of hope for humanity’s most downtrodden third fighting for their lives against this “vaccine monster”: “There are signs of overdue scrutiny of Gates’s role in public health and lifelong commitment to exclusive intellectual property rights.”155
Blacks to the Front of the Line
At the February 2021 press conference, Francis Collins said that NIH’s new generation of HIV vaccines will specifically target Africans and African Americans, “to make sure everybody, everywhere, has the opportunity to be cured, not just those in high-income countries.”156 Such sympathies were a consistent preoccupation along the Gates/NIH nexus. Melinda Gates lamented on CNN, April 10, 2020, that she was “kept up at night” worrying about vulnerable populations in Africa.157, 158 In June 2020, she told Time Magazine that, in the United States, Black people should get the COVID19 vaccine first.159 The idea that Blacks should be first in line for the vaccine—and official anxieties that many Blacks would resist this privilege—were persistent themes in pronouncements by the leading health agencies during the pandemic. As we shall see in Chapter 12, Gates, Fauci, and the intelligence agency and pharmaceutical company partners repeatedly wargamed strategies for overcoming anticipated Black resistance in many of the dozen pandemic simulations leading up to COVID19. Once the pandemic was underway, HHS recruited Black preachers, HBCU college deans, civil rights leaders, and sports figures like Hank Aaron to soften jab hesitancy in the Black community. They staged press conferences and highly publicized celebrity vaccination confabs and extravagantly financed government advertising campaigns targeting Blacks in both the United States and Africa. In December 2020, Dr. Fauci scolded resistance in the Black community, saying, “The time is now to put skepticism aside.” Without citing any studies demonstrating the vaccine was safe, he said that “The first thing that you might want to say to my African brothers and sisters is that the vaccine you’re going to be taking was developed by an African-American woman—and that’s just a fact.”160
When Cicely Tyson, Marvin Hagler, and rapper Earl Simmons—a.k.a. DMX— all died soon after taking COVID vaccines, the medical community and CDC rushed in to assure the African American community that the deaths were not vaccine related. Social media and mainstream outlets censored or removed stories that suggested a vaccine association. Gates-funded “fact checker” organizations “debunked” any link. The desperation to discredit such talk inspired many “respectable” media outfits to simply lie. When home run king Hank Aaron, whom I knew, died seventeen days after receiving a vaccine at a staged press conference at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, I wrote that his death was among a wave of deaths in older people following vaccination. (I never said the vaccine caused Aaron’s death.) The New York Times, CNN, ABC, NBC, Inside Edition, and a hundred news organizations across the globe rushed to castigate me and rebuff my article as “vaccine misinformation,” assuring the public that the Fulton County Coroner had declared Aaron’s death “unrelated to the vaccine.” When I called the Fulton County Coroner, the office informed me that they had never seen Hank Aaron’s body and that Aaron’s family had buried him without autopsy.161 After I published this embarrassing fact, not a single news organization posted a retraction.
Federal law requires that every injury or death following vaccination during clinical trials—or, by logical extension, with emergency use products—must be attributed to the vaccine unless proven otherwise. Nevertheless, as of August 2021, the CDC officially took the Pollyannaish view that not one of the 13,000-plus deaths162 reported to VAERS following vaccination as of August 20, 2021, was vaccine related.163 Not one. As was the case with Hank Aaron, CDC apparently did nothing to actively investigate any of those deaths, exonerating the vaccines, instead, by fiat.