On April 27, Gates told the Washington Post that he had warned President Trump about “the increasing risk of a bioterrorism attack.”203 Emphasizing his frequent contacts with the president and military advisers, he publicly disclosed having regular meetings with H. R. McMaster, Trump’s former national security advisor.
Gates was simultaneously building bridges with social media tycoons, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose support he would need for his master plan. Like all totalitarian capers, Gates’s gambit would require some book burning, and Bezos would be there to oblige. Beginning in March 2020, Amazon would outright ban or throttle the delivery of entire categories of books and videos that questioned official orthodoxies—including the scientific basis for the lockdown that would multiply Bezos’s wealth by tens of billions. In the finest Operation Mockingbird tradition, Bezos’s Washington Post also pitched in, including a shrill yet adoring propaganda tract under the headline “Bill Gates calls on US to lead fight against a pandemic that could kill 33 million.” That month Gates announced a $12 million Grand Challenge, in partnership with the family of Google’s cofounder Larry Page, to accelerate developing a universal flu vaccine.204 Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was already heavily investing in vaccine manufacturing startups and had signed a $76 million partnership with GlaxoSmithKline. Apparently anticipating rich returns to Big Tech from the lockdown he would orchestrate, Gates was, by then, among the largest shareholders of Amazon, Google, Facebook, and, of course, Microsoft.
The day after the Post story ran, a board member of the EcoHealth Alliance emailed zoologist and bioweapons expert Peter Daszak: “Any connections with Bill Gates we could [re]-activate given this perfect alignment in mission?”
Daszak responded: “re: gates and google—we have good connections at both orgs . . .” We’ll definitely be reaching out to them again. . . . Ever since the Ebola outbreak [G]ates [foundation] are now getting more into pandemic preparedness.”205
Daszak, at that juncture, was acting as a conduit through which Tony Fauci, Robert Kadlec, the Pentagon (DARPA), and USAID—formerly a CIA cover and nowadays reporting to the National Security Council—were laundering grants to fund gain-of-function experiments, including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology Biosafety Lab. In 2018, the French government had warned US government officials that the Wuhan lab, which the French helped build, was shoddily maintained and inadequately staffed and secured. For example, the French construction company, bioMérieux, which built the lab, had neglected to properly complete the negative airflow system—a critical piece of infrastructure to prevent the escape of viruses deliberately enhanced to create pandemics. Dr. Fauci ignored the warning.
When in May 2021 I emailed bioMérieux’s ex-CEO (2007–2011), Stéphane Bancel, to ask him if he knew that his company had violated its contract to provide a functional system, he did not reply. Bancel by that time was CEO of Moderna and a partner of Bill Gates and Tony Fauci, operating a company that would be the primary beneficiary of the lab leak, quickly making Bancel’s 9 percent stake worth over $1 billion and counting. In March 2019, eight months before COVID-19 began circulating, Bancel had reapplied for a patent for an mRNA technology for Moderna’s new vaccine. The US patent office had previously rejected his application. But this time he approached the patent office with special urgency, expressing “a concern for reemergence or a deliberate release of the SARS coronavirus.”206, 207, 208, 209, 210
Between Germ Game simulations, Gates continued his barnstorming tour laying pipe for mass panic and authoritarian rule. At the annual Shattuck Lecture on April 27, 2018, in Boston, he warned: “We can’t predict when, but given the continual emergence of new pathogens, the increasing risk of a bioterror attack, and how connected our world is through air travel, there is a significant probability of a large and lethal, modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.” Biological weapons of mass destruction, he warned, had “become easier to create in the lab.” Gates went on to add that “we are supporting efforts by others, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose vaccine candidate [presumably Moderna] is expected to advance to human safety trials in about a year.”211
Clade X 2018
Then, on May 15, 2018, inside the darkened ballroom of Washington’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel, foreboding military music introduced another “pandemic/biowarfare preparation exercise” hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (formerly the Hopkins Population Center, which Gates and NIH fund). The daylong event, dubbed Clade X, “simulate[d] the response to a fictitious bioengineered pathogen for which there is no vaccine.”212 Hoping to reduce world population, an elite cult released their genetically engineered bug from a Zurich lab. The disease spreads first to Germany and Venezuela and then to the United States, killing 100 million people globally as “healthcare systems collapsed, panic spread, the US stock market crashed.”213
The simulation included “a series of National Security Council-convened meetings of ten US government leaders, played by individuals prominent in the fields of national security or epidemic response.”214 The exercise emphasized the need for militarized pandemic responses and explored strategies for controlling media and social media. It was a training drill to prepare political, bureaucratic, military, and intelligence officials to support the coup d’état against American democracy and the US Constitution. Participating were a kitchen cabinet of former top leaders of the FDA and CDC, as well as a former CIA general counsel. Playing themselves were ex-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Indianapolis Congresswoman Susan Brooks. Daschle, a former Army Intelligence officer who was among the targets of the 2001 anthrax-laced letters, became a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist by 2018. Susan Brooks, the so-called “Member from Eli Lilly,” founded the Congressional Biodefense Caucus. She also introduced a successful bill in 2015—the Social Media Working Group Act of 2014—to establish a Social Media Bureau within the Department of Homeland Security to facilitate censorship of social media during national emergencies. Another of her bills in 2015 sought to streamline implementation of coercive vaccination programs by the federal government during pandemics.
Clade X livestreamed on Facebook before about 150 invited guests, including carefully selected representatives of major media. The simulation left his adulatory press quaking with fear. “This mock pandemic killed 150 million people. Next time it might not be a drill,” Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post headlined.215 The New York Post assured readers that “the world is completely unprepared for the next pandemic.”216, 217