The Birth of the Biosecurity Agenda
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1988–1991, the military-industrial complex began rummaging about for a more reliable enemy to permanently justify its hefty share of the GDP. While most Americans eagerly awaited the ballyhooed “peace dividend,” Pentagon mandarins and their emporium of contractors may have considered with dismay that someone else would be spending money that was rightfully theirs. The peace dividend never materialized. Beginning with the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and culminating in 9/11, Islamic terrorism replaced the Soviets as the essential adversary in US foreign policy. It may have provided solace to the military and its contractors that “terrorism” was a more reliable long-term foe than the Soviets. Since terrorism is a tactic, not a nation, an imprecisely defined “terrorism” had the allure of an enemy that could never be vanquished. We can imagine the defense contractors’ relief when Vice President Dick Cheney declared the “Long War”7—one, he promised, would last for generations—with battlegrounds “scattered in more than 50 nations.”8
Military contractors held tight to their gravy train with the mission of building an expensive new arsenal of anti-terror technologies. But terrorism had its own shortfall, namely, the challenge of sustaining public fear sufficient to justify spending substantial portions of GDP to meet a threat that killed fewer Americans annually than lightning strikes. By 1999, some farsighted Pentagon planners were already looking ahead to the more exuberant and sustainable prosperity that would come with a war on germs.
Most historians date the nativity of the modern “Biosecurity Agenda” to the October 2001 anthrax attacks. But years earlier, military and medical industrial complex planners were already conceptualizing biosecurity as a potent strategy for leveraging potential pandemics or bioterrorism into vast funding increases, and as a device for metamorphosing America, the world’s exemplary democracy, into a national security state with global dominance.
Robert Kadlec: “Let The Games Begin”
Bioweapons expert Robert P. Kadlec9 is an American physician and retired Colonel in the United States Air Force who served as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response from August 2017 until January 2021, and who managed the COVID-19 crisis during the Trump administration. Second only to his longtime crony and comrade in arms Anthony Fauci, Robert Kadlec played an historic leadership role in fomenting the contagious logic that infectious disease posed a national security threat requiring a militarized response. Since the 1993 World Trade Center terror attack, Kadlec had been evangelizing about an imminent anthrax attack that would doom the American way of life. In the mid-1990s, Kadlec served as part of an elite Air Force operations unit of UN weapons inspectors fruitlessly hunting the Iraqi desert for Saddam Hussein’s suspected stores of anthrax and botulism following the first Persian Gulf War.
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At 2:47 in the early morning of February 1, 2020, four hours after his loyal grantee, virologist Kristian Andersen, informed Dr. Fauci that he and other leading biologists believed that the genetic sequence responsible for the “furin cleave” on the virus's “spike protein”—the peculiar structure that allows the organism to bind tightly to, and infect cells with the ACE-2 receptor—was highly unlikely to be the product of natural selection, Dr. Anthony Fauci fired a carefully worded email to Kadlec. Dr. Fauci’s other emails from that evening suggest that he was intensely worried that the Chinese experiments that may have created this striation in the novel coronavirus would bear his fingerprints. If Dr. Fauci’s gain-of-function research had indeed minted COVID-19, then Kadlec would also be implicated. Kadlec served on the small so-called P3CO Committee charged with approving NIH’s gain-of-function experiments, and it is clear from Dr. Fauci’s email that the subject was also on Kadlec’s mind. Dr. Fauci attached an article10 to his email to Kadlec. It was “Bat Lady” Shi Zhengli’s deceitful effort to downplay the laboratory leak hypothesis. “Bob: This just came out today,” Dr. Fauci told his gain-of-function confederate. “Gives a balanced view.”11 Subsequent events proved that the author of that article was deliberately lying to conceal the Wuhan lab’s manipulation of coronavirus pathogens that were nearly identical to the microbe that caused COVID-19. Both Kadlec and Fauci had been involved, for over a decade, in promoting and funding these dangerous experiments through NIAID and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the biosecurity funding agency that Kadlec had helped create, including funneling millions of dollars in US funding to Zhi, the hapless writer of the exculpatory article. Dr. Fauci’s email shows these two technocrats, and others, patching together evidence for the dubious official story that they would tell the world. Over the next few weeks, Dr. Fauci would pull the reliable old levers that he had manipulated for decades to transform convenient canards into official orthodoxies. The contrived cosmologies he thereby constructed would hold for a full year before they finally began to unravel.
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Kadlec is a Dr. Strangelove knockoff with deep ties to spy agencies, Big Pharma, the Pentagon, and military contractors who profiteer from the spread of bioweapons alarmism. Intelligence agency historian and journalist Whitney Webb describes Kadlec as a man “enmeshed in the world of intelligence, military intelligence and corporate corruption, dutifully fulfilling the vision of his friends in high places and behind closed doors.”12 In 1998, Kadlec created an internal strategy paper for the Pentagon, promoting the development of pandemic pathogens as a stealth weapon that the Pentagon could deploy against its enemies without leaving fingerprints:
Biological weapons under the cover of an endemic or natural disease occurrence provides an attacker the potential for plausible denial. Biological warfare’s potential to create significant economic losses and consequent political instability, coupled with plausible deniability, exceeds the possibilities of any other human weapon.13
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