? Hasti Taghi (media adviser) sums up: “The anti-vaccine movement was very strong and this is something specifically through social media that has spread. So as we do the research to come up with the right vaccines to help prevent the continuation of this, how do we get the right information out there? How do we communicate the right information to ensure that the public has trust in these vaccines that we’re creating?”266
? Kevin McAleese, a communications officer for Gates-funded agricultural projects, observes that “To me, it is clear countries need to make strong efforts to manage both mis-and disinformation. We know social media companies are working around the clock to combat these disinflation campaigns. The task of identifying every bad actor is immense. This is a huge problem that’s going to keep us from ending the pandemic and might even lead to the fall of governments, as we saw in the Arab Spring. If the solution means controlling and reducing access to information, I think it’s the right choice.”267
? Dr. Tom Inglesby (Johns Hopkins) concurs, asking if “In this case, do you think governments are at the point where they need to require social media companies to operate in a certain way?”268
? Lavan Thiru, Singapore’s finance minister, suggests that the government might make examples by arresting dissidents with “governments on enforcement actions against fake news. Some of us, this new regulations are come in place about how we deal with fake news. Maybe this is a time for us to showcase some cases where we are able to bring forward some bad actors and leave it before the courts to decide whether they have actually spread some fake news.”269
? Sofia Borges, head of the New York office of the UN, spoke of putting out positive stories about people who’d beaten the disease and “having a centralized source of information and a world body that could garner the respect of everyone. I think the WHO, in this instance, might be that source of information.”270
? Adrian Thomas added, “It’s important to think about what atypical players in the private sector can we bring to bear in this? Bringing multinational pharmaceutical companies to talk about… why their products are safe could be seen as non-credible.”271
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Gates’s Event 201 global pandemic war game quickly demonstrated that it was reaching and indoctrinating its intended audiences—the globe’s top-level decision makers. A week after Event 201, presidential aspirant Joe Biden read a Washington Post article about the follow-up to the Event 201 report coauthored by the Hopkins Center for Health Security. According to a newly invented Global Health Security Index assessing 195 countries, “No country—the United States included—is fully prepared to respond to a deliberate or accidental threat with the potential to wipe out humanity.”272 Biden tweeted a response on October 25, 2019: “We are not prepared for a pandemic. . . . We need leadership that . . . focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores.”273
At the end of November 2019, Robb Butler—the head of WHO/Europe’s Vaccine Preventable Diseases and Immunization Program from 2014 to 2018—told the European Scientific Conference on Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology that “vaccine hesitancy” must be tackled and “immunization is a best buy.”274
The Triumph of the Military/Intelligence Complex: Intelligence Agencies and COVID-19
In November 2020, the British spy agency MI6 announced that its spooks would be surveilling foreigners all over the world (presumably including Americans) who questioned official orthodoxies about COVID-19 vaccines. Declaring the launch of an “offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda,”275 the Foreign Branch hinted that it would henceforth target individuals who asked awkward or impudent questions about vaccines or questioned official COVID proclamations or countermeasures. The agency promised to deploy the same arsenal of monitoring and harassment weaponry and dirty tricks that it formerly reserved for terrorists. According to The Times, “The spy agency is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment peddled by Islamic state.”276 A government source assured the paper they weren’t kidding around: “GCHQ has been told to take out anti-vacciners online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda.”277
Federal law forbids US spy agencies from spying on or surveilling US citizens, but the Western intelligence bureaucracies work in collaboration with one another, and the CIA often deploys European, Israeli, and Canadian agencies as surrogates to skirt US laws.
In August 2020, after I appeared as a keynote speaker before an estimated crowd of 1.2 million democracy and civil rights advocates from every European nation protesting COVID restrictions at a Peace and Justice Rally in Berlin, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency announced that it would begin monitoring the top leaders of the group that invited me. The spy agency accused COVID protesters of trying to “permanently undermine trust in state institutions and their representatives,”278 according to the news agency AFP. “Now, the definition of terror is so broad,” says former CIA official Kevin Shipp, “that any mention of COVID vaccines comes under their purview.”279
These were the first explicit acknowledgments of the pervasive involvement by Western intelligence agencies in the vaccine enterprise that the global press has long overlooked. As two decades of Germ Game simulations foreshadowed, US and foreign clandestine agencies have a secretive but dominating presence in the COVID-19 pandemic response. Intelligence community alumni and active officers occupy key positions in the international agencies that promote global vaccinations. For example, President Biden’s director of USAID is former WHO Ambassador Samantha Power. Power is an imperialist war hawk who as President Obama’s National Security Advisor persuaded him to intervene militarily in Libya. She has declared that her primary goal at USAID is “to restore US prestige by getting American-made vaccines ‘into arms’ around the world.”280 UNICEF’s Director, Anthony Lake, was President Bill Clinton’s national security advisor and his nominee to be CIA Director until corruption charges derailed his appointment. In January 2020, UNICEF telegraphed its brave new embrace of authoritarianism by cheerleading the Maldives legislature’s passage of a bill making it a criminal offense for parents to decline any government-recommended vaccine for their children. UNICEF’s unsheathed enthusiasm makes clear that the organization regards the Maldives innovation as a pilot program for humanity.281