Dr. Ralph Baric, the gain-of-function guru, was the American darling of both NIAID and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). His lab at UNC–Chapel Hill received $726,498 from the Gates Foundation for using recombinant dengue viruses to advance dengue vaccine development. Originating in February 2015, the three-year grant was scheduled to conclude early in 2018.116
In July 2014, Lance Gordon, the BMGF’s director for Neglected Infectious Diseases in its Global Health Program, released news that the Sanofi Pasteur experimental dengue vaccine that Gates and Dr. Fauci funded was showing positive clinical results. Amidst his sunny forecast, Gordon made an ominous allusion that would have sounded DEFCON 1 to anyone decoding its implication. NIAID’s clinical trials in Brazil, he acknowledged, showed signals of “pathogenic priming.” That foreboding phrase describes an enhanced immune response that can trigger system-wide inflammation and death when the vaccinated individual is reexposed to the wild virus.
Infectious disease experts and health regulators had recognized the deadly potential of pathogenic priming since the 1980s, when one study showed that “more severe responses were found to be 15–80 times more likely in secondary dengue infections than in primary infections.”117 In 2004, an experimental MERS vaccine had produced robust antibody response in children during an NIH trial and then catastrophic illness and death when researchers exposed the children to wild virus.118 Similarly in 2012 and 2014, a collaborative of Chinese and US researchers had developed coronavirus vaccines that produced antibodies in ferrets and cats, and then killed them when they encountered the actual wild coronavirus.
But Gordon’s admission didn’t set off an alarm. The WHO, under Gates’s firm control, was bent on accelerating development of the Gates/Fauci dengue project. Dr. Fauci was also undeterred. Omitting any mention of the danger signals, Dr. Fauci proclaimed in January 2016 that the project would proceed: “Researchers in NIAID’s Laboratory of Infectious Diseases spent many years developing and testing dengue vaccine candidates designed to elicit antibodies against all four dengue virus serotypes.”119
An article published in the American Ethnologist bore a curious title: “Chimeric globalism: Global health in the shadow of the dengue vaccine” (April 2015).120 The piece described the NIAID effort: “A laboratory-engineered, ‘chimeric’ dengue fever vaccine entered late-stage clinical trials in the late 2000s.” The article asked readers to consider the implications when vaccine development is not entirely driven by a public health aspiration, but by “the divergent logics of pharmaceutical capital, humanitarianism, and biosecurity.”
The dengue venture didn’t proceed smoothly for Sanofi Pasteur. With Gates Foundation support,121 the French pharma company spent twenty years and some $2 billion to develop Dengvaxia, testing the vaccine in several large trials on over 30,000 children globally.122 When Dr. Scott Halstead, who studied dengue for more than fifty years with the US military, read the clinical safety data trial in the New England Journal of Medicine,123 he immediately knew something was very wrong. Some children who caught dengue after receiving the vaccination experienced dramatically worsened symptoms. For kids never before exposed to dengue, Dengvaxia also appeared to increase the lifelong risk of a deadly complication known as plasma leakage syndrome, which catapults a person into profound shock before killing them. Dr. Halstead was so worried that he raised alarm bells in six separate editorials for scientific journals.124 He even made a video warning the Philippine government, which was about to start a mass vaccination campaign.125 Gates, Dr. Fauci, and Sanofi ignored Halstead’s frantic warnings.
Sanofi responded by publishing a rebuttal to Dr. Halstead and promising more studies. Without waiting for the research, in April, 2016, Bill Gates’s minions at WHO moved to recommend Dengvaxia for all children ages 9 to 16.126 Already the previous December, the Dengue Vaccine Initiative—supported by Gates Foundation funding— had announced that the Philippine government would soon become the second country (after Mexico) to approve Dengvaxia shots.
A year and a half later, Sanofi announced that it had new information about the vaccine’s safety. Confirming Dr. Halstead’s fears, the company made the alarming admission that Dengvaxia did indeed increase the risk of hospitalization and cytoplasmic leakage syndrome.127 By this time, health officials had already inoculated some 800,000 Filipino children. At least 600 had died.128
The WHO eventually changed its recommendation, saying that Dengvaxia was safe only for kids who’d had a prior dengue infection and admitting that 100,000 should not have received the shot. Following autopsies on 600 deceased children, the Philippine Public Attorney indicted fourteen Philippines government officials and six Sanofi executives for criminal homicide.129
Accustomed as he was to this sort of collateral damage in his war against the bugs, Dr. Fauci put a sunny face on the dead children, telling the Wall Street Journal in January 2018, “We do not think this is going to be a showstopper in any way or form.” Although, he added, “clearly there’s going to be not as smooth a trip.” Operating on his consistent strategy that the best defense is a good offense, Dr. Fauci announced full speed ahead in Dengvaxia trials in Brazil—pathogenic priming be damned! He boasted that “NIAID’s dengue vaccine candidate is in a late-stage clinical trial involving 17,000 participants in Brazil” and it had “induced an immune response in tests against all four dengue types.” NIAID’s vaccine “has been licensed to several companies, including Merck, which said it plans to start its own trial this year.”130
In December 2018, Merck and the Instituto Butantan—the main producer of vaccines in Brazil—announced a collaboration agreement after licensing “certain rights from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)” to develop live attenuated tetravalent vaccines for dengue. The nonprofit Instituto Butantan “will receive a $26 million upfront payment from Merck and is eligible to receive up to $75 million for the achievement of certain milestones related to the development and commercialization of Merck’s investigational vaccine as well as potential royalties on sales. . . . It acts in partnership with various universities and entities such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the achievement of its institutional objectives.”131