In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
—Dwight Eisenhower, 1961
With all the preparations for a coordinated military response, with deep involvement from intelligence agencies, it should come as no surprise that the government’s COVID-19 response quickly emerged as a military project.
On Sept. 28, 2020, science journalist Nicholas Florko published in STAT a leaked organizational schematic291 exposing the $10 billion Operation Warp Speed project as a highly structured Defense Department campaign with “vast military involvement.” The byzantine flowchart292 shows four generals and sixty other military officials commanding Operation Warp Speed, badly outnumbering civilian health technocrats from HHS, who represented a mere twenty-nine of the roughly ninety leaders on the chart.
HHS’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Paul Mango, told STAT that the Department of Defense was deeply enmeshed in every aspect of the project, including creating more than two dozen vaccine pop-up manufacturing plants, airlifting in equipment and raw materials from across the globe, and erecting cybersecurity and physical security operations “to ensure an eventual vaccine is guarded very closely from ‘state actors who don’t want us to be successful in this.’” This paranoid addendum seems like a pretextual effort to link vaccine-hesitant Americans to sinister foreign governments, thereby justifying a military and intelligence agency response. It is, in short, a “conspiracy theory,” albeit an official one. Mango told STAT that Warp Speed planning and debriefing occurs “in protected rooms used to discuss classified information.” A senior federal health official told STAT he was struck by the sight of soldiers in military uniforms ambling about HHS’s headquarters in downtown Washington, including over 100 soldiers in the HHS corridors wearing “Desert Storm fatigues.”
Health officials complained to STAT that they found themselves marginalized as Warp Speed devolved into a partnership between the military and the pharmaceutical industry, presided over by Robert Kadlec—who, according to Mango, personally signed off on every business agreement made by HHS for Operation Warp Speed.
Warp Speed has secret deals with six major drug companies developing COVID-19 vaccines. The operation’s chief adviser is Moncef Slaoui, a former GlaxoSmithKline official who prior to the pandemic served as chairman of Moderna, the Fauci/Kadlec/Gates collaboration that would be Warp Speed’s primary beneficiary. By characterizing his post as an “outside contractor,” Slaoui, who holds roughly $10 million in GSK stock, dodged the application of federal ethics rules. Slaoui has since promised to donate any increase in the value of his stock.293
“The first person to be fired should be Dr. Slaoui,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) responded at a hearing. “The American people deserve to know that COVID-19 vaccine decisions are based on science, and not on personal greed.”294
Dr. Fauci had direct hands-on involvement with Warp Speed through his employee Larry Corey, who described himself as an “ex-officio” member of the Warp Speed governance. Corey runs Dr. Fauci’s COVID-19 prevention network, which transforms HIV clinical trial networks into Phase 3 COVID-19 clinical trials.295
Dr. Fauci was undaunted by the military takeover of US health policy, applauding the Operation as a “talent show.” Dr. Fauci told STAT he was untroubled by the dearth of public health experience among Warp Speed’s Pentagon leadership: “If you go through the organizational boxes of Operation Warp Speed, they’re very, very impressive.” Tom Inglesby also lauded the military involvement. “There is deep knowledge of science and on how to manage complex government operations,” said Inglesby. “It’s clearly operating in a challenging pandemic and political environment, and we won’t know if we have a safe and effective vaccine until the trials are finished. But it’s a highly competent group of people working to make it happen.”296
HHS secretary Alex Azar—a former Pharma CEO and lobbyist—and defense secretary Mark Esper share top billing as the organizational chairs. Slaoui, the project’s formal civilian leader, and Gen. Gustave Perna serve as Operation Warp Speed’s CEO.
Immediately beneath Perna and Slaoui are Lieutenant General (Retired) Paul Ostrowski,297 a former Special Forces soldier who manages distribution of an eventual vaccine, and Matt Hepburn, who specializes in futuristic warfare projects for the Pentagon, including a program to implant high-tech sensors into soldiers to detect illnesses and for other purposes.
“This should be a medical and not be a military operation,” Holocaust survivor and medical ethics advocate Vera Sharav told me. “It’s a public health problem. Why are the military and the CIA so heavily involved? Why is everything a secret? Why can’t we know the ingredients of these products, which the taxpayers financed? Why are all their emails redacted? Why can’t we see the contracts with vaccine manufacturers? Why are we mandating a treatment with an experimental technology with minimal testing? Since COVID-19 harms fewer than 1 percent, what is the justification for putting 100 percent of the population at risk? We need to recognize that this is a vast human experiment on all of mankind, with an unproven technology, conducted by spies and generals primarily trained to kill and not to save lives.” What could possibly go wrong?
Endnotes
1 Stephen Kinzer, “From mind control to murder? How a deadly fall revealed the CIA’s darkest secrets,” The Guardian (Sep. 6, 2019), theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/06/from-mind-control-to-murder-how-a-deadly-fall-revealed-the-cias-darkest-secrets
2 Michael Ignatieff, “Who Killed Frank Olson?,” The Guardian (Apr. 6, 2001), theguardian.com/books/2001/apr/07/books.guardianreview4
3 H. P. Albarelli, Jr., “Part One: The Mysterious Death of CIA Scientist Frank Olson,” Crime Magazine (Dec. 14, 2002), crimemagazine.com/part-one-mysterious-death-cia-scientist-frank-olson
4 David Franz, “The Dual Use Dilemma: Crying out for Leadership,” Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law and Policy 6 (Vol. 7:5 2013), slu.edu/law/academics/journals/health-law-policy/pdfs/issues/v7-i1/david_franz_article.pdf
5 Franz
6 William Lowther, “Rumsfeld ‘helped Iraq get chemical weapons,’” Daily Mail (Dec. 31, 2002), dailymail.co.uk/news/article-153210/Rumsfeld-helped-Iraq-chemical-weapons.html