The same weapons that NIH used to silence Dr. Morris—enforced isolation, disgrace, prohibiting him from publishing papers, presenting at conferences, or talking to the press, changing his laboratory locks to prevent further research—were already pieces of an established Soviet-style template for silencing dissident scientists at NIH. The agency first unsheathed those weapons in the 1950s to destroy the career of its award-winning virologist, Dr. Bernice Eddy, the discoverer of the poliomyelitis virus—who later found a cancer-causing monkey virus in the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines. When her research disclosed problems with vaccine safety, NIH officials banned Dr. Eddy from her lab, changed her office locks, and ordered her to refrain from interviews and speeches. After silencing Eddy, NIH gave the contaminated vaccine to 99 million baby boomers, who suffered a tenfold increase in soft tissue cancers, resulting in a public health disaster that dwarfs the harms of polio.24,25 Dr. Fauci and government health regulators later used these same techniques to muzzle a parade of in-house scientists, including Dr. Judy Mikovits, NIH contract researcher Dr. Bart Classen, and CDC’s varicella (chicken pox) vaccine researcher Dr. Gary Goldman, who dared to tell hard truths about vaccine safety and efficacy.
The 1976 swine flu event was the first time that the federal government agreed to serve as pharma’s insurer. The episode taught the public an important lesson: tort immunity incentivizes dangerous and ineffective vaccines. Industry and the magisterial class learned an entirely different morale from the tragic episode. In 1986 they made swine flu vaccine template the model for the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which shielded all mandated vaccines from liability.
At the dawn of Dr. Fauci’s career, he learned that both pandemics and fake pandemics provide an opportunity to expand the bureaucracy’s power and to multiply the wealth of its pharma partners.
2005 Bird Flu
In 2005, Dr. Fauci revived NIAID’s script from the 1976 debacle. This time the villain was an avian flu, H5N1. Like an agitated Chicken Little, Dr. Fauci had been warning the world about the imminent bird flu pandemic since 2001. That year, in a paper, “Infectious Diseases: Considerations for the 21st Century,” Dr. Fauci balefully forecast a bird-to-human transmission of an influenza scourge that would decimate global populations, beginning with Hong Kong.26 He predicted unprecedented carnage from this “new strain of influenza A virus entering a population that is relatively na?ve for the microbe in question.”
In 2004, a Vietnam-based Oxford University Clinical Research Unit Director, Jeremy Farrar—who would later rise to both knighthood and to command of the powerful Wellcome Trust—and his Vietnamese colleague, Tran Tinh Hien, identified the reemergence of the deadly bird flu, or H5N1, in humans. “It was a little girl. She caught it from a pet duck that had died and she’d dug up and reburied,” Farrar told the Financial Times.27
The Wellcome Trust heavily funded Oxford’s Vietnam project. Drug developer Sir Henry Wellcome established Wellcome Trust with a donation of his stock in Burroughs Wellcome, the British pharmaceutical behemoth. In 1995, the Trust sold its stock to Burroughs Wellcome’s chief competitor, GlaxoSmithKline,28 to facilitate the merger of England’s two pharmaceutical giants. Wellcome Trust’s $30 billion endowment29 makes it the world’s fourth-largest foundation and the globe’s most prodigious financier of biomedical research. Like the Gates Foundation, Wellcome targets its donations to promote the interests of the pharmaceutical industry.
In 2007, British medical journalist John Stone raised the issue of phony pandemics in a letter to BMJ online as part of the swine flu postmortem: “There always remains the issue of whether scares are being promoted because of sober assessment of risk or because they constitute another bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry. We need better institutional means to spot the difference, but so far pandemic flu has been disappointing for the horror merchants. . . . Does anyone recall the moral of the story of the little boy who cried wolf? Well, it is what the industry does all the time.”30
In 2020, Farrar would partner with Bill Gates to fund modeler Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist who produced the wildly exaggerated COVID-19 death forecasts that helped ratchet up the COVID-19 fear campaign and rationalize draconian lockdowns.31 As Schwab mentions, Farrar was at the heart of the earlier fiasco involving avian flu, generated around the delusory fear that the virus would cross the species barrier.32
Ferguson is the modeling impresario at drumming up phony pandemics. His curriculum vitae includes:
In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu.33 In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.34
In 2001, a published Imperial College projection by Ferguson sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. In 2002, he projected human deaths of 136,000 in the UK from mad cow disease. The UK Government slaughtered millions of cows. The actual number of deaths was 177.35
In 2009, Ferguson’s projected that the swine flu would kill 65,000 Brits. Swine flu killed 457 people in the UK.36
In 2020, Ferguson famously predicted up to 2.2 million COVID-19 deaths in the United States in 2020 alone.37,38 Dr. Fauci, in many Western countries, used Ferguson’s projection to justify lockdowns and other draconian mandates.39
Farrar played a key role in Dr. Fauci’s campaign to cover up evidence of government involvement in the potential lab generation of COVID-19.40, 41
In 2005, Dr. Fauci crowed that his long-awaited bird flu had finally arrived. Using data from Ferguson, he warned it would kill “millions of people” worldwide42 unless he and his pharma partners could deploy a vaccine to derail the approaching holocaust. Political and medical establishment cheerleaders mobilized for the now-familiar drill boosting pandemic panic.
Parroting Dr. Fauci’s bird anxieties, government ministries of countries like the United States, Canada, and France, and the World Health Organization bewailed that H5N1 was “highly contagious” and deadly. The World Health Organization and the World Bank screeched that the plague could cost the world $2 trillion!43 Anthony Fauci prophesied that H5N1 is “a time bomb waiting to go off.” Klaus Stohr, then coordinator of the influenza program at the World Health Organization (WHO), amplified Dr. Fauci’s augury, predicting that between 2–7 million people would die, and that billions would fall ill worldwide.44 In September 2005, Der Spiegel quoted the United Nations’s Chief Coordinator David Nabarro that the new flu pandemic “can kill up to a hundred and fifty million people.”45 The New Yorker offered overwrought bodements of millions of deaths from “one of the greatest dangers facing the United States.”46 Pandemic expert Robert Webster invoked military vernacular that had become de rigueur for loosening public purse strings in the post-9/11 biosecurity era: “We have to prepare as if we were going to war—and the public needs to understand that clearly. This virus is playing its role as a natural bioterrorist.”47
In response to Dr. Fauci’s lathered forecasts, the White House unveiled a Christmas list for the Bush family’s favorite medicine man, including $7.1 billion to protect Americans from his avian plague.48, 49 President George W. Bush warned that “No country can afford to ignore the threat of avian flu.”50 Dr. Fauci trotted out his reliable old chestnut that the new version of bird flu could be as lethal as the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic that killed 50–100 million people.51