O’Toole is a biodefense enthusiast, cofounder of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, and executive vice president at the CIA’s investment arm, In-Q-Tel. That shady firm is the vector by which US intelligence services infiltrate start-up firms on the cutting edge of technological innovation. O’Toole, like her longtime confederate Kadlec, juggles deep and disturbing relationships with the same retinue of rapacious pharmaceutical industry and military contractors that Kadlec also cultivated.
In 2009, when President Obama nominated O’Toole for undersecretary for Science and Technology at the Department of Homeland Security, Sen. John McCain criticized her for concealing her role as strategic director of a pharmaceutical industry lobbying outfit, Alliance Biosciences.30 Alliance is an unincorporated corporate front group created by Ibrahim El-Hibri and his partner, former Joint Chiefs Chair Admiral William Crowe, and funded by other bioweapons firms. Alliance has no tax filing and operates out of a K Street influence shop. The Congressional Record shows that the Alliance is a so-called “stealth lobbying” firm that spent $500,000 over 2005 to 2009 pitching Congress and the Homeland Security department for greater biodefense expenditures, and particularly for anthrax vaccines. Alliance’s other funders include Pfizer; the International Pharmaceutical Aerosol Consortium; and Sig Technologies, a biodefense military contractor.31
O’Toole’s nomination to undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security also prompted objections from more mainstream bioweapons experts, including the preeminent Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright: “She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of government, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security.” Ebright added, “She makes Dr. Strangelove look sane. O’Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush Administration. O’Toole is as out of touch with reality, and . . . paranoiac. . . . It would be hard to think of a person less well-suited for the position.”32
During those same 2009 confirmation hearings, Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan added to the voices of skepticism: “Dr. O’Toole fell short of the strict adherence to scientific principles when she was the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies.” Noting that “Dr. O’Toole was one of the principal designers and authors of the June 2001 Dark Winter exercise that simulated a covert attack on the United States by bioterrorists,” Levin faulted O’Toole for using the exercise to promote her biosecurity agenda with hyperbolic pandemic fantasies: “But many top scientists have said that the Dark Winter exercise was based on faulty and exaggerated assumptions about the transmission rate of smallpox.”33
Dr. James Koopman of the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan made the ungenerous assessment that O’Toole’s enthusiasm for germ warfare had clouded her scientific judgment. Koopman, an expert at modeling the transmission rates of infectious diseases who participated in the smallpox eradication program, complained that Dr. O’Toole “has not sought balanced scientific input in her thinking, that she shows a lack of analytic orientation to scientific issues, and that she has generated hype about bioterrorism that she will feel obligated to defend rather than pursue a balanced approach.”34
Dr. Michael Lane, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control Smallpox Eradication Program, likewise condemned O’Toole for padding her assumptions about smallpox transmission rates in Dark Winter, which he characterized as “improbable” and even “absurd.”35
Ironically, even Dr. Fauci, who by then was already the king of embellishing and fabricating pandemics, voiced his disapproval of O’Toole and Kadlec’s extreme Dark Winter exaggerations, which Dr. Fauci declared “much, much worse than would have been the case” in real life.36
The transmission rate of smallpox was not the only area where Dr. O’Toole and Kadlec ignored facts. On February 19, 2002, O’Toole wrote that “Many experts believe that the smallpox virus is not confined to these two official repositories [one in the United States and one in Russia] and may be in the possession of states or subnational groups pursuing active biological weapons programs.” O’Toole cited a June 13, 1999, New York Times article as the source for her alarming assertion that “subnational groups” controlled smallpox stocks. But that article included no reference to any non-state group actors possessing any biological weapons.37
Another key Dark Winter planner and participant was Ruth David, a former deputy director at the CIA. In 1998, David became president of ANSER, a nonprofit corporation with deep ties to the CIA. ANSER played a key role in pushing the government toward “homeland security” post-9/11 and became a primary promoter of biometric and facial recognition software for US law enforcement agencies. Among other functions, ANSER funds a mysterious defense contractor from South Carolina called Advanced Technology International.38 ATI somehow became the vector through which the government arranged at least $6 billion of secretive Operation Warp Speed vaccine contracts with Pfizer, Bill Gates’s Novavax vaccine, Johnson & Johnson, and Sanofi.39 Those contracts, comprising the majority of Operation Warp Speed’s $10 billion budget, suggest a deep CIA involvement with the COVID-19 vaccine enterprise’s cozy deals with Big Pharma. As assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response with HHS, Robert Kadlec personally signed off on those sweetheart deals. The terms allow Operation Warp Speed to completely “bypass the regulatory oversight and transparency of traditional federal contracting mechanisms,” as NPR put it.40
In a January 2021 exposé, the New York Times dug into Kadlec’s secretive vaccine contracts, observing that “available documents . . . suggest that drug companies demanded, and received, flexible delivery schedules, as well as patent protection and immunity from liability if anything goes wrong. In some instances, countries are prohibited from donating or reselling doses, a ban that could hamper efforts to get vaccines to poor countries.”41
Dark Winter Aftermath