Julien Charles
In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Cat’s Cradle, the deadpan realist from the Midwest–the 20th century’s Mark Twain–delivers an instructive review of the way in which Americans hold scientists in exceedingly high esteem—and the perils therein.
One of his characters is scientist Felix Hoenikker. Hoenikker is a partial reflection of Robert Oppenheimer, who led the team that invented the atomic bomb, but was later distraught by the use of his invention to exterminate whole urban populations in Japan.
At the successful detonation of the bomb Little Boy in New Mexico, he recalled a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna tells Arjuna, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
After Oppenheimer witnessed the fruit of his labor in Nagasaki, he became an advocate for the banning of nuclear weapons, but was, to put it mildly, a day late and a dollar short.
After materializing in Washington to air his views on nukes, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, the fanatical anti-communist and inspiration behind the Cold War, said of the man who might have done more to enable American military hegemony than anyone, “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in my office ever again.”
Vonnegut’s Hoenikker is comparable. Consumed by his task, he is somewhat near-sighted and does not at first perceive the larger interest of humanity that might be imperiled by his work and invents a solution that freezes anything it touches: Ice Nine.
Once he contemplates the staggering potential of his brainchild, he attempts to hide Ice Nine, and is increasingly troubled by the implications of his invention. His children discover his creation later and cannot resist the power it offers. The world is destroyed.
Vonnegut seems to suggest some scientists are perhaps morally naive regarding the possible uses of their work—as in most any innovative profession—and that their moral faculty emerges too late to mitigate their achievements, particularly after their inventions have fallen into the corrupt clutches of bought politicians or pharmaceutical executives beholden to an ever-needful bottom line.
A disturbing enough question in its own time, it now seems the world has evolved in a darker direction. Our scientists are no longer mere bystanders in the use of their work, no more are they unwitting accomplices to inscrutable ends.
Rather they are more likely the purveyors of those ends, having infiltrated political power and gained extraordinary influence within a caudillo of private drug monopolies and global health institutions.
Who are the power players in the modern world?
Bill Gates commands a multibillion-dollar foundation (BMGF) the express purpose of which is ‘a decade of vaccines’ and population control, among other global “health” initiatives. The foundation has its tentacles in every major media empire, in numerous global health institutions, leading pharmaceutical firms, and in novel NGOs designed to advance its agenda.
Gates has conceded that although he runs an ostensible foundation committed to the global good, he has never seen an industry with such stupendous return on investment. At the beginning of 2019, he enthused on Twitter about the prospects for vaccines, “…one of the best buys in global health.”
According to author and independent researcher Jacob Levich, GAVI is a Gates-created, Gates-funded, and Gates-controlled organization explicitly designed to connect major independent global institutions such as the WHO, UNICEF, and the World Bank with Big Pharma (Pfizer, Merck, Janssen).
Ostensibly launched to save the world’s children through vaccination, it seems more likely the organization is committed to the traditional goals of the white man’s burden, namely profit and power, with a kicker of population control.
Anthony Fauci, a beneficiary of Gates’ largesse, controls a $6B annual budget at the sprawling National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). His bequeaths to colleges and universities, labs and research centers, gives him immense influence over the aim and direction of those entities.
In 2017, Fauci warned on Twitter that the Trump administration would have to deal with an infectious disease outbreak before its term was finished.
For its part, dependent on the BMGF and US aid, the WHO delivers edicts adopted by dozens of nations worldwide. Public health is big business, and it is now the conduit through which Big Pharma ‘markets’ its latest innovations under the guise of rescuing humanity from a fell pathogen.
These WHO-stamped recommendations, seconded by nations and sometimes mandated, achieve what Obamacare sought to deliver—a government-mandated medical product largely paid for by the government. In other words, a risk-free, federally backed slush fund for health monopolies. Is it any surprise that Big Pharma is Washington’s largest lobby and that its front man and facilitator, the BMGF, is global health’s largest patron?
What has precipitated this shift? We can reasonably assume a shift has occurred. In 1976, distribution of the vaccine for the bogus swine flu epidemic was halted after just 53 deaths. Lawsuits concerning vaccine injury abounded after the 2009 swine flu pandemic.
In 2010, the Indian government halted an HPV vaccine program to investigate the death of seven girls who had received the vaccine. And yet earlier this summer the same government waived the need for clinical trials and batch testing for Covid19 vaccines if they had been tested in the country of origin.
Today there are said to be more than 30,000 deaths and five million adverse reactions that followed vaccination across the West, yet the hectoring campaign to immunize the planet goes rollicking along. Fauci has now suggested the definition of full vaccination may now include booster shots, meaning a never-ending regime of shots as they are tweaked to address new variants (identified genetic sequences).
Or, as is evidently the case with current boosters, they are just pushing overstock to drain inventory and reach sales targets. The apocalyptic predictions are the same, the dodgy data the same, vaccine injury problematic.
The difference? One likely candidate is the influence of profiteering on the institutions of public health. There is much evidence these institutions have fallen prey to the same fate as other critical public agencies: agency capture, or the process by which special interests pervert the true purpose of institutions until they serve the interests of private financial patrons rather than public constituencies.
We’ve seen the deleterious influence of elite capital on Wall Street’s regulatory agencies, the Bretton Woods institutions, and of course both houses of Congress.
In some sense politicians have been latter-day sophists, creating novel rationalizations for the abdication of their ethical duty to serve the public. Yet they serve corporate interests with fewer and fewer efforts to disguise the obvious.