On August 3, the Senate confirmed Kadlec, and, sure enough, although the US taxpayers were now paying his salary, Kadlec never really stopped working for the El-Hibris. And that year, Christmas arrived early for the Lebanese arms dealers. Immediately after his appointment, Kadlec maneuvered deftly to move management of the Strategic National Stockpile, which he had conceived and created, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to his own office, giving him authority over all acquisitions for the $7 billion contents.107
As soon as Emergent completed its acquisition of the Sanofi smallpox jab, Kadlec moved to increase the government’s stockpile of these worthless and dangerous vaccines. Sanofi Pasteur had been charging the stockpile $4.27 per dose and had five years remaining on a ten-year government contract worth about $425 million. The El-Hibris initially sought only a modest price increase, but Kadlec generously finalized a sweetheart deal with his friends and former business partners, doubling the five-year term that the El-Hibris had requested to ten years. Kadlec also doubled the number of doses per year—from 9 to 18 million—and gave the El-Hibris twice the price per dose that Sanofi received. Kadlec’s new contract for the El-Hibris promised Emergent $9.44 per dose in the first year, with that figure rising annually throughout the contract term. In the end, Kadlec awarded the El-Hibris a 10-year, $2.8 billion no-bid contract to purchase their smallpox vaccines.108
The stockpile was already overflowing with smallpox vaccines in 2018. The CDC reported on its website in June 2019—and continues to say—that the stockpile already had sufficient smallpox vaccine for every American. Kadlec explained that his large purchase was necessary to “keep the production base warm”109—another way of saying, to keep the El-Hibris fat. Kadlec wrapped his gift with a red ribbon, Kadlec’s brazenly corrupt announcment that the stockpile would no longer fund Emergent’s competitors.
Emergent BioSolutions received more than $1.2 billion in contracts from Kadlec during the Trump years, with millions more coming from NIAID and DARPA.110
Kadlec’s brassy approach inspired awestruck admiration within the pharmaceutical industry; in March 2020, President Donald Trump’s HHS secretary, Alex Azar, former Eli Lilly President and Pharma lobbyist, designated Kadlec to lead the department’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Kadlec’s appointment was a signal to Big Pharma of the impending orgy of ransack, pillage, and plunder. Naturally the El-Hibris would enjoy the king’s share of booty. That same year, Kadlec invoked the Emergency Use Authorization to purchase $370 million worth of the El Hibris’ licensed and unlicensed anthrax vaccines. 2020 was the year with the largest sales of Emergent’s anthrax vaccines to date.111
After the FDA authorized Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use in February 2021, Kadlec pressured the pharmaceutical giant to sign a $480 million contract with the El-Hibris to perform the manufacturing of J&J’s COVID-19 jabs. Forbes headlined: “Little-Known Publicly Traded Company Given Massive Deal to Manufacture One-Shot Covid-19 Vaccine.”112
By June, Kadlec’s BARDA upped the ante with another $628 million gift to Emergent BioSolutions, for scaling up production of targeted vaccine candidates. Emergent signed separate deals worth hundreds of millions with AstraZeneca and Bill Gates’s Novavax to manufacture vaccine doses at its Gaithersburg, Maryland, factory.113, 114
A March 7, 2021, New York Times exposé about Emergent’s crooked relationship with the government reported that a billion dollars in payments to the company for anthrax and smallpox vaccines took up almost half the Strategic National Stockpile’s budget..115 Emergent had become the #1 vendor to the stockpile.
To finance these windfalls for the El-Hibris, Kadlec needed to short other stockpile supplies. By the time the novel coronavirus emerged, the stockpile had only 12 million N95 respirators. Kadlec also scuttled an Obama-era initiative to spend a relatively trivial $35 million to build a machine that could produce 1.5 million N95 masks per day. To rationalize their inventory gaps, Kadlec pled poverty.116 The New York Times reported shocking shortfalls in protective gear for health care workers, ventilators, and masks just as the COVID-19 crisis called for them. Well aware of the situation, Kadlec “was unwilling to free up money by reducing the supply of anthrax vaccines.”117
The El-Hibris’ second sugar daddy, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was also raining down manna on Emergent.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Emergent signed a development deal with NIAID for a plasma-derived therapy. Dr. Fauci aimed to incorporate the company’s COVID-HIG product into one of NIAID’s clinical studies, with initial funding of $14.5 million coming from Kadlec through BARDA. In turn, Kadlec supported Dr. Fauci’s pet project, Moderna, the mRNA jab caper that Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates considered their Holy Grail. In mid-April 2020, Kadlec arranged for BARDA to provide Moderna up to $483 million to accelerate the Fauci/Gates vaccine’s development and manufacturing. That amounted to about half of what BARDA doled out to all of Moderna’s competitors combined, including Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca.118
Kadlec was also generous to Bill Gates, arranging a $1.6 billion grant—the largest to date—from Operation Warp Speed to Gates’s biotech selection, Novavax. Although the company, based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, had never brought a vaccine to market in its thirty-three-year history, and was then on the verge of collapse, Gates and his obedient minions at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI) had placed a bet on Novavax’s technology, which uses moth cells to pump out crucial molecules at a faster rate than typical vaccines.119 Kadlec’s generosity with his Warp Speed wampum caused Novavax’s stock to surge 30 percent. John J. Trizzino, Novavax’s chief business and financial officer, said the company did nothing inappropriate but acknowledged that it used its connections to Gates to help win the deals.
In September 2019, less than a month before COVID began circulating, the Gates Foundation made a $55 million pre-IPO equity investment in BioNTech. The company also had never brought a single product to market.120 Soon afterward, the German government followed Gates with a $445 million infusion into BioNTech.121 On July 21, 2020, when Robert Kadlec committed Operation Warp Speed to a $2 billion purchase of 100 million doses of BioNTech/Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine,122 the company’s stock value soared, with Bill Gates’s equity shares increasing to an evaluation of $1.1 billion.