Beginning this week, the censorship heavy Facebook rolled out a new warning to users alerting them to the possibility that they may have seen “extremist content” or may be friends with extremists. Every member of the Free Thought Project received one of these warnings — despite years of promoting only peace and freedom for all.
“Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?” read one of the messages that some users received. Another read, “you may have been exposed to harmful extremist content recently.” Both included links to “get support” where users can report content they deem extremist.
In a teleconference three weeks ago, a senior administration official told reporters of a plan that sounds reminiscent of the Minority Report by attacking “pre-crime.”
“We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs,” the official said.
The official went on to explain how this would work, which involves family members and friends snitching on each other.
We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs. And on that, I would just note that one of the things we’re talking about is the need to do something in this space, like the “See something” — “If you see something, say something” concept that has been promulgated previously by DHS. This involves creating contexts in which those who are family members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards violence.
The official also announced that the government would be partnering with big tech to achieve “increased information sharing” between tech platforms to help combat this potential for radicalization.
It now appears that it’s here.
On Thursday, Facebook said the extremist warning was a test for a global approach to prevent radicalization on the site.
“This test is part of our larger work to assess ways to provide resources and support to people on Facebook who may have engaged with or were exposed to extremist content, or may know someone who is at risk,” said a Facebook spokesperson in an emailed statement to Reuters. “We are partnering with NGOs and academic experts in this space and hope to have more to share in the future.”
But exactly what Facebook considers “extremism” or “extremist content” remains unclear. What is perfectly clear, however, is that they will undoubtedly crack down on political speech, vaccine safety speech, and all other legal free speech that may challenge the status quo — as this has been their MO from the start.
As Facebook moves the needle on censorship of free speech to an all time high, last week, they were sued in the Texas Supreme Court for allowing child predators to groom and recruit children for sex-trafficking.
The lawsuit, carried out by a group of children who were recruited on Facebook by their abusers, was successful in moving forward last week. The group sued Facebook for negligence and product liability, saying that Facebook failed to warn about or attempt to prevent sex trafficking from taking place on its internet platforms. The suits also alleged that Facebook benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking victims, according to a report in the Houston Chronicle.
The three victims accused Facebook of “running “an unrestricted platform to stalk, exploit, recruit, groom, and extort children into the sex trade.” One was 15 when an older man contacted her on Facebook, offered her a modeling job, photographed her, posted the pictures on the now-defunct BackPage website, and prostituted her to other men, leading her to be “raped, beaten, and forced into further sex trafficking.” The other two girls were 14, and reported almost identical experiences, with one openly pimped out for “dates” on Instagram, a Facebook subsidiary,” Graham Dockery explained.
Facebook lawyers argued the company was shielded from liability under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which states that what users say or write online is not akin to a publisher conveying the same message.
This should totally be the case, but if Facebook can claim Section 230 on child trafficking, then why do they target and eliminate political speech so viciously? If Facebook does not act as a neutral party and removes peaceful anti-establishment content, they have no legal basis to claim entitlement under Section 230.
The court disagreed with Facebook’s lawyers, ruling, “We do not understand Section 230 to ‘create a lawless no-man’s-land on the Internet’ in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking.”
“Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that Section 230 does not allow it,” the opinion said. “Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking.”
For years, TFTP has reported on this phenomenon of Facebook attacking political speech while child exploitation goes unchecked. In 2018, Facebook and Twitter — without warning or justification — deleted the pages of Free Thought Project and Police the Police which had over 5 million followers.
During this purge, they also removed hundreds of other pages including massive police accountability groups, antiwar activists, alternative media, and libertarian news outlets. Facebook claimed to remove these pages in the name of fighting disinformation online and creating a safer user experience. But this was a farce. Illustrating just how big of an ostentatious sham this was, just weeks after claiming to keep their community safe, a child was openly sold on their platform.
This was no isolated incident either. The Guardian reported a study in 2020 that suggested Facebook is not fully enforcing its own standards banning content that exploits or endangers children.
According to the study, it examined at least 366 cases between January 2013 and December 2019, according to a report from the not-for-profit investigative group Tech Transparency Project (TPP) analyzing Department of Justice news releases.
Of the 366 cases of child sex abuse on Facebook, the social media giant reported just 9% of them to authorities. Investigations initiated by authorities discovered the other 91% of the cases — not Facebook.
As the great purge of anti-establishment views continues, remember that this company who claims they have your best interests in mind, according to the aforementioned lawsuit, is benefiting from the exploitation and trafficking of children.
The US government has shut down multiple news media websites based in the Middle East, including Iran’s state-owned Press TV, and al-Masirah TV which is owned by the Houthi group Ansarullah in Yemen. The Department of Justice said on Tuesday it had seized 36 Iranian-linked websites, claiming without evidence that they were associated with “either disinformation activities or violent organizations” and were shut down for a violation of US sanctions.
He tweeted this the month before the US government shut down dozens of Middle East-based news media websites and weeks before US-sponsored military explosives were used to destroy over 20 Palestinian media outlets in Gaza, all while Julian Assange wastes away in Belmarsh Prison. https://t.co/iZw7BxxhoV
The Biden administration has been bleating “rules-based order” so frequently and with such obvious meaninglessness that even The New York Timesvoiced some criticism of the way that vapid, idiotic phrase is being used instead of the well-defined term “international law”. As Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies wrote for Salon last month:
For Blinken, the concept of a “rules-based order” seems to serve mainly as a cudgel with which to attack China and Russia. At a May 7 UN Security Council meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovsuggested that instead of accepting the already existing rules of international law, the United States and its allies are trying to come up with “other rules developed in closed, non-inclusive formats, and then imposed on everyone else.”
…
Today, far from being a leader of the international rules-based system, the United States is an outlier. It has failed to sign or ratify about 50 important and widely accepted multilateral treaties on everything from children’s rights to arms control. Its unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and other countries are themselves violations of international law, and the new Biden administration has shamefully failed to lift these illegal sanctions, ignoring UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ request to suspend such unilateral coercive measures during the pandemic.
Indeed, US government officials babble endlessly about “rules”, and the “rules” are literally always tools used for the benefit of the US government, and the US government literally always flouts those “rules” exponentially worse than any other government on earth.
What the phrase “rules-based order” actually means is Washington-based order. It means a world order imposed by the US government and its lackey states on pain of devastation and death, which exists solely to keep the US at the head of a unipolar empire. It means do as I say, not as I do. It means rules for thee but not for me. It means we decide what happens based on what suits our interests.
If you peel away all the narrative spin and outward politeness, the US empire just looks like any other tyrannical force that has ever existed throughout human history, except it kills a lot more people than most of the others. In the old days the thugs with the most effective killing force would dominate everyone else using terror, wearing frightening battle costumes adorned with the body parts of their enemies. Nowadays they still dominate everyone else using terror, except they do it while wearing suits, and while waxing self-righteously about the “rules-based international order”. And they are much better at killing.
There is no other government on earth that is less qualified to impose any “order” upon the world. This is the only government on earth which has killed millions of people and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century, the only government on earth that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates. Yemen alone completely delegitimizes any claim the US may have had to be the arbiter of “order” in the world, to say nothing of Iraq, Vietnam, Libya and all the other innumerable atrocities that this monstrous regime has inflicted upon our species.
The sooner humanity can extract the parasite that is the US empire from its skin, the better off the whole world will be.
What does The New York Times and a majority of other legacy media have in common with Big Pharma? Answer: They’re largely owned by BlackRock and the Vanguard Group, the two largest asset management firms in the world. Moreover, it turns out these two companies form a secret monopoly that own just about everything else you can think of too. As reported in the featured video:1,2
“The stock of the world’s largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors. They all own each other. This means that ‘competing’ brands, like Coke and Pepsi aren’t really competitors, at all, since their stock is owned by exactly the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies, banks and in some cases, governments.
The smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only two companies whose names we have often seen …They are Vanguard and BlackRock.
The power of these two companies is beyond your imagination. Not only do they own a large part of the stocks of nearly all big companies but also the stocks of the investors in those companies. This gives them a complete monopoly.
A Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028, together will have investments in the amount of 20 trillion dollars. That means that they will own almost everything.’”
Who Are the Vanguard?
The word “vanguard” means “the foremost position in an army or fleet advancing into battle,” and/or “the leading position in a trend or movement.” Both are fitting descriptions of this global behemoth, owned by globalists pushing for a Great Reset, the core of which is the transfer of wealth and ownership from the hands of the many into the hands of the very few.
Interestingly, Vanguard is the largest shareholder of BlackRock, as of March 2021.3,4 Vanguard itself, on the other hand, has a “unique” corporate structure that makes its ownership more difficult to discern. It’s owned by its various funds, which in turn are owned by the shareholders. Aside from these shareholders, it has no outside investors and is not publicly traded.5 As reported in the featured video:6,7
“The elite who own Vanguard apparently do not like being in the spotlight but of course they cannot hide from who is willing to dig. Reports from Oxfam and Bloomberg say that 1% of the world, together owns more money than the other 99%. Even worse, Oxfam says that 82% of all earned money in 2017 went to this 1%.
In other words, these two investment companies, Vanguard and BlackRock hold a monopoly in all industries in the world and they, in turn are owned by the richest families in the world, some of whom are royalty and who have been very rich since before the Industrial Revolution.”
While it would take time to sift through all of Vanguard’s funds to identify individual shareholders, and therefore owners of Vanguard, a quick look-see suggests Rothschild Investment Corp.8 and the Edmond De Rothschild Holding are two such stakeholders.9 Keep the name Rothschild in your mind as you read on, as it will feature again later.
The video above also identifies the Italian Orsini family, the American Bush family, the British Royal family, the du Pont family, the Morgans, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, as Vanguard owners.
BlackRock/Vanguard Own Big Pharma
According to Simply Wall Street, in February 2020, BlackRock and Vanguard were the two largest shareholders of GlaxoSmithKline, at 7% and 3.5% of shares respectively.10 At Pfizer, the ownership is reversed, with Vanguard being the top investor and BlackRock the second-largest stockholder.11
Keep in mind that stock ownership ratios can change at any time, since companies buy and sell on a regular basis, so don’t get hung up on percentages. The bottom line is that BlackRock and Vanguard, individually and combined, own enough shares at any given time that we can say they easily control both Big Pharma and the centralized legacy media — and then some.
Why does this matter? It matters because drug companies are driving COVID-19 responses — all of which, so far, have endangered rather than optimized public health — and mainstream media have been willing accomplices in spreading their propaganda, a false official narrative that has, and still is, leading the public astray and fosters fear based on lies.
To have any chance of righting this situation, we must understand who the central players are, where the harmful dictates are coming from, and why these false narratives are being created in the first place.
As noted in Global Justice Now’s December 2020 report12 “The Horrible History of Big Pharma,” we simply cannot allow drug companies — “which have a long track record of prioritizing corporate profit over people’s health” — to continue to dictate COVID-19 responses.
In it, they review the shameful history of the top seven drug companies in the world that are now developing and manufacturing drugs and gene-based “vaccines” against COVID-19, while mainstream media have helped suppress information about readily available older drugs that have been shown to have a high degree of efficacy against the infection.
BlackRock/Vanguard Own the Media
When it comes to The New York Times, as of May 2021, BlackRock is the second-largest stockholder at 7.43% of total shares, just after The Vanguard Group, which owns the largest portion (8.11%).13,14
In addition to The New York Times, Vanguard and BlackRock are also the top two owners of Time Warner, Comcast, Disney and News Corp, four of the six media companies that control more than 90% of the U.S. media landscape.15,16
Needless to say, if you have control of this many news outlets, you can control entire nations by way of carefully orchestrated and organized centralized propaganda disguised as journalism.
If your head is spinning already, you’re not alone. It’s difficult to describe circular and tightly interwoven relationships in a linear fashion. The world of corporate ownership is labyrinthine, where everyone seems to own everyone, to some degree.
However, the key take-home message is that two companies stand out head and neck above all others, and that’s BlackRock and Vanguard. Together, they form a hidden monopoly on global asset holdings, and through their influence over our centralized media, they have the power to manipulate and control a great deal of the world’s economy and events, and how the world views it all.
Considering BlackRock in 2018 announced that it has “social expectations” from the companies it invests in,17 its potential role as a central hub in the Great Reset and the “build back better” plan cannot be overlooked.
Add to this information showing it “undermines competition through owning shares in competing companies” and “blurs boundaries between private capital and government affairs by working closely with regulators,” and one would be hard-pressed to not see how BlackRock/Vanguard and their globalist owners might be able to facilitate the Great Reset and the so-called “green” revolution, both of which are part of the same wealth-theft scheme.
BlackRock and Vanguard Own the World
That assertion will become even clearer once you realize that this duo’s influence is not limited to Big Pharma and the media. Importantly, BlackRock also works closely with central banks around the world, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, which is a private entity, not a federal one.18,19 It lends money to the central bank, acts as an adviser to it, and develops the central bank’s software.20In all, BlackRock and Vanguard have ownership in some 1,600 American firms, which in 2015 had combined revenues of $9.1 trillion. When you add in the third-largest global owner, State Street, their combined ownership encompasses nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.
BlackRock/Vanguard also own shares of long list of other companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet Inc.21 As illustrated in the graphic of BlackRock and Vanguard’s ownership network below,22 featured in the 2017 article “These Three Firms Own Corporate America” in The Conversation, it would be near-impossible to list them all.
In all, BlackRock and Vanguard have ownership in some 1,600 American firms, which in 2015 had combined revenues of $9.1 trillion. When you add in the third-largest global owner, State Street, their combined ownership encompasses nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.23
A Global Monopoly Few Know Anything About
To tease out the overarching influence of BlackRock and Vanguard in the global marketplace, be sure to watch the 45-minute-long video featured at the top of this article. It provides a wide-view summary of the hidden monopoly network of Vanguard- and BlackRock-owned corporations, and their role in the Great Reset. A second much shorter video (above) offers an additional review of this information.
How can we tie BlackRock/Vanguard — and the globalist families that own them — to the Great Reset? Barring a public confession, we have to look at the relationships between these behemoth globalist-owned corporations and consider the influence they can wield through those relationships. As noted by Lew Rockwell:24
“When Lynn Forester de Rothschild wants the United States to be a one-party country (like China) and doesn’t want voter ID laws passed in the U.S., so that more election fraud can be perpetrated to achieve that end, what does she do?
She holds a conference call with the world’s top 100 CEOs and tells them to publicly decry as ‘Jim Crow’ Georgia’s passing of an anti-corruption law and she orders her dutiful CEOs to boycott the State of Georgia, like we saw with Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball and even Hollywood star, Will Smith.
In this conference call, we see shades of the Great Reset, Agenda 2030, the New World Order. The UN wants to make sure, as does [World Economic Forum founder and executive chairman Klaus] Schwab that in 2030, poverty, hunger, pollution and disease no longer plague the Earth.
To achieve this, the UN wants taxes from Western countries to be split by the mega corporations of the elite to create a brand-new society. For this project, the UN says we need a world government — namely the UN, itself.”
As I’ve reviewed in many previous articles, it seems quite clear that the COVID-19 pandemic was orchestrated to bring about this New World Order — the Great Reset — and the 45-minute video featured at top of article does a good job of explaining how this was done. And at the heart of it all, the “heart” toward which all global wealth streams flow, we find BlackRock and Vanguard.
Over the last twelve months, social media’s expurgation of any and all information pertaining to Covid-19, not part-and-parcel to the mainstream status quo, has become ineffaceable.
Everywhere we look now, we see embedded links to the Covid-19 Information Center on any post that dares even utter the words “vaccine” or “covid”. More pervasive still, are the notices of “this content is no longer available”, having been unceremoniously expunged for allegedly violating the ministry of truth’s “community guidelines”. Being so brazen as to even brand one hundred percent authentic facts as “misinformation”.
Facebook is now permeated with warnings pinned upon post after post indicating “this information has been disputed by independent fact-checkers”.
Ahh yes, the same “independent fact-checkers” that only recently had their financial biases uncovered. Confirming the very conflicts of interest many of us had suspected in the first place, along with their counterparts in the mainstream media.
Now, as the Overton window begins to shift it appears the MSM is left with egg on their face yet again.
On May 26th, as new research alleging the supposed origins of Covid-19 began to surface, Facebook announced that it would no longer be deleting posts claiming that the virus may have been man-made. What the company did not announce, of course, was recompense or at the very least an apology for all of the people whose free-speech it had infringed upon over the last year and a half.
On June 1st reports began to surface calling out the Washington Post for stealthily editing a 15 month old headline in which they had preemptively “debunked” the Wuhan lab origin theory of SARS-CoV-2.
Now, headlines, pundits, and politicians have done a complete one-eighty and are running amok propagating this as a part of the new mainstream narrative — with zero regard for the civil liberties they spent months trampling by vilifying those who postulated this plausibility.
A recent Bloomberg opinion piece lays out quite concisely the very argument that we and many others have carried for years — Transparency, as opposed to obscurity, is always the best course of action;
The author states at various points —
“Labelling misinformation online is doing more harm than good. The possibility that Covid-19 came from a lab accident is just the latest example. Social media companies tried to suppress any discussion of it for months. But why? There’s no strong evidence against it, and evidence for other theories is still inconclusive. Pathogens have escaped from labs many times, and people have died as a result.
Social media fact-checkers don’t have any special knowledge or ability to sort fact from misinformation. What they have is extraordinary power to shape what people believe. And stifling ideas can backfire if it leads people to believe there’s a “real story” that is being suppressed” …..
“It’s much better to provide additional information than to censor information” …..
“Even without the power of censorship, social media culture encourages the facile labelling of ideas and people as a way of dismissing them — it’s easy to call people deniers or as anti-science because they question prevailing wisdom.”
Concluding the piece by stating —
“The fiasco was the media’s propagation of the lie that the issue was settled and that anyone questioning it might be deemed an idiot or conspiracy theorist.”…
“What helped was not taking away information but giving people additional information. Censoring information — or what one deems “misinformation” — isn’t as helpful as it seems. The best we can do is keep questioning, and give people the most complete story we can.”
With these facts in mind, there are a few points important to note however. While this may in some ways come as a form of vindication for those that were previously silenced, it is necessary to recognize that this is not a confirmation of the lab origin theory. Nor should a narrative being adopted by the mainstream be seen as a form of validation or legitimacy. Rather, it is a demonstration of their blatant hypocrisy and stifling of discourse and objective critical analysis.
As always, the corporate media–intelligence–apparatus of the United States, who functions as a state disseminator of propaganda have been thoroughly documented in TFTP’s most recent investigative series installment — One should always question the motives of the media when they adopt a story, as almost always they possess an ulterior agenda.
Already, we see the neoliberal and neoconservative talking heads twisting this rhetoric to better fit their aims of demonizing their geopolitical opposition in China.
Fervent warmonger Senator Tom Cotton, who has championed the idea of the Wuhan lab leak against China from the very beginning; has been frothing at the mouth at this revitalized opportunity to capitalize upon these sentiments for his own nefarious incentives, as elaborated in a recent account by journalist and political commentator Caitlin Johnstone.
That’s not to say that if the virus did originate in the Chinese lab, if it were or wasn’t released deliberately, or any of the other yet to be confirmed uncertainties, that any crimes committed by the CCP regime should not be held to account. But the American government, in all of its imperialist machinations and blatant hypocrisies are the last ones that should be doling out recompense to that regard.
In any case, as Miss Johnstone explains, it is because of the US’s imperialist influence over the international community that any truly unbiased and independent investigation into the origins of Covid-19 is likely impossible. And this is largely due to the increasing tempo with which the US State Department is ramping up its new Cold War propaganda against its geopolitical adversaries in the east.
Despite these points, it is evident in this latest flip-flop fiasco that one thing is certain. Suppressing genuinely open public dialogue with regard to this or any other prevailing issue is not only an affront to the right of free speech. It is an affront to intelligence itself.
It should be held among the most basic of principles that for any society to be intellectually competent, and therefore be aptly informed and capable of rendering the most logical decisions; encouraging communication and free expression of ideas throughout the public sector is of the utmost preeminence.
Words slip out of our mouths to surprise us. Thoughts slip into our minds to shock us. Dreams slip into our nights to sometimes slip into our waking thoughts to startle us. And, as the wonderful singer/songwriter Paul Simon, sings, we are always “slip sliding away,” a reminder that can be a spur to courage and freedom or an inducement to fear and shut-upness.
Slips are double-edged.
It is obvious that since September 11, 2001, and more so since the corona virus lockdowns and the World Economic Forum’s push for a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology, that the USA and other countries have been slipping into a new form of fascist control. Or at least it should be obvious, especially since this push has been accompanied by massive censorship by technology companies of dissenting voices and government crackdowns on what they term “domestic terrorists.” Dissent has become unpatriotic and worse – treasonous.
Unless people wake up and rebel in greater numbers, the gates of this electronic iron cage will quietly be shut.
In the name of teleological efficiency and reason, as Max Weber noted more than a century ago in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, capitalist elites, operating from within the shadows of bureaucratic castles such as The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization WHO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank (WBG), The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Google, Facebook, the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA, etc., – run by people whose faces are always well hidden – have been using digital technology to exert increasing control over the thoughts and actions of people worldwide. They have been doing this not only by diktats but by manufacturing social habits – customary usages – through which they exert their social power over populations. This linguistic and ideational propaganda is continually slipped into the daily “news” by their mainstream media partners in crime. They become social habits that occupy people’s minds and lead to certain forms of behavior. Ideas have consequences but also histories because humans are etymological animals – that is, their ideas, beliefs, and behaviors have histories. It is not just words that have etymologies.
When Weber said “a polar night of icy darkness” was coming in the future, he was referring to what is happening today. Fascism usually comes on slowly as history has shown. It slips in when people are asleep.
John Berger, commenting on the ghostly life of our received ideas whose etymology is so often lost on us, aptly said:
Our totalitarianism begins with our teleology.
And the teleology in use today is digital technology controlled by wealthy elites and governments for social control. For years they have been creating certain dispositions in the general public, as Jacques Ellul has said, “by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination” that makes the public receptive to the digital life. This is accomplished slowly in increments, as permanent dispositions are established by slipping in regular reminders of how wonderful the new technology is and how its magical possibilities will make life so free and easy. Efficient. Happiness machines. A close study of the past twenty-five years would no doubt reveal the specifics of this campaign. In The Technological Society, Ellul writes:
… the use of certain propaganda techniques is not meant to entail immediate and definite adhesion to a given formula, but rather to bring about a long-range vacuity of the individual. The individual, his soul massaged, emptied of his natural tendencies, and thoroughly assimilated to the group, is ready for anything. Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well-grounded, and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can easily be set into motion.
Once this softening up has made people “available,” the stage is set to get them to act impulsively. Ellul again:
It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movements are sometimes necessary). Of course, this dissociation can be effective only after the propaganda technique has been fused with the popular mores and has become indispensable to the population. This stage may be reached quickly, as, for example, in Germany in 1942, after only ten years of psychic manipulation.
The end result, he argues, is the establishment of an abstract universe, in which reality is completely recreated in people’s minds. This fake reality is truer than reality as the news is faked and people are formed rather than informed.
In today’s computer driven world, one thing that people have been told for decades is to be vigilant that their computers do not become infected with viruses. This meme was slipped regularly into popular consciousness. To avoid infection, everyone was advised to make sure to have virus protection by downloading protection or using that provided by their operating systems, despite all the back doors built in which most have been unaware of.
Now that other incredible “machine” – the human body – can get virus “protection” by getting what the vaccine maker Moderna says is its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” that functions “like an operating system on a computer.” First people must be softened up and made available and then “set in motion” to accept the solution to the fearful problem built in from the start by the same people creating the problem. A slippery slope indeed.
But slipping is also good, especially when repetition and conventional thought rules people’s lives as it does today in a digital screen life world where algorithms often prevent creative breakthroughs, and the checking of hourly weather reports from cells is a commonplace fix to ease the anxiety of being trapped in a seemingly uncontrollable nightmare. It seems you now do need computer generated weather reports to know which way the wind blows.
In our culture of the copy, new thoughts are difficult and so the problems that plague society persist and get rehashed ad infinitum. I think most people realize at some level of feeling if not articulation that they are caught in a repetitive cycle of social stasis that is akin to addiction, one that has been imposed on them by elite forces they sense but don’t fully comprehend since they have bought into this circular trap that they love and hate simultaneously. The cell phone is its symbol and the world-wide lockdowns its reality. Even right now as the authorities grant a tactical reprieve from their cruel lockdowns if you obey and get experimentally shot with a non-vaccine vaccine, there is an anxious sense that another shoe will drop when we least expect it. And it will. But don’t say this out loud.
So repetition and constant change, seemingly opposites, suffuse society these days. The sagacious John Steppling captures this brilliantly in a recent article:
So ubiquitous are the metaphors and myths of AI, post humanism, transhumanism, et al. that they infuse daily discourse and pass barely noticed. And there is a quality of incoherence in a lot of this post humanist discourse, a kind of default setting for obfuscation….The techno and cyber vocabulary now meets the language of World Banking. Bourgeois economics provides the structural underpinning for enormous amounts of political rhetoric, and increasingly of cultural expression….This new incoherence is both intentional, and unintentional. The so called ‘Great Reset’ is operationally effective, and it is happening before our eyes, and yet it is also a testament to just how far basic logic has been eroded….Advanced social atomization and a radical absence of social change. Today, I might argue, at least in the U.S. (and likely much of Europe) there is a profound sense of repetitiveness to daily life. No matter one’s occupation, and quite possibly no matter one’s class. Certainly the repetitiveness of the high-net-worth one percent is of a different quality than that of an Uber driver. And yet, the experience of life is an experience of repetition.
A kind of flaccid grimness accompanies this sensibility. Humor is absent, and the only kind of laughter allowed is the mocking kind that hides a nihilistic spirit of resignation – a sense of inevitability that mocks the spirit of rebellion. Everything is solipsistic and even jokes are taken as revelations of one’s personal life.
The other day I was going grocery shopping. My wife had written on the list: “heavy cream or whipping cream.” Not knowing if there were a difference, I asked her which she preferred. “I prefer whipping,” she said.
I replied, “But I don’t have a whip nor do they sell them at the supermarket.”
We both laughed, although I found it funnier than she. She slipped, and I found humor in that. Because it was an innocent slip of the tongue with no significance and she had done the slipping, there was also a slippage between our senses of humor.
But when I told this to a few people, they hesitated to laugh as if I might be revealing some sado-masochistic personal reality, and they didn’t know whether to laugh or not.
It’s harder to laugh at yourself because we get uptight and are afraid to say the “wrong” things. Many people come to the end of their lives hearing the tolling for their tongues that never spoke freely because of the pale cast of thought that has infected them. Not their own thoughts, but thoughts that have been placed into their minds by their controllers in the mass media.
Freud famously wrote about slips of the tongue and tried to pin them down. In this he was a bit similar to a lepidopterist who pins butterflies. We are left with the eponymous Freudian slips that sometimes do and sometimes don’t signify some revelation that the speaker does not consciously intend to utter.
It seems to me that in order to understand anything about ourselves and our present historical condition – which no doubt seems very confusing to many people as propagandists and liars spew out disinformation daily – we need to develop a way to cut through the enervating miasma of fear that grips so many. A fear created by elites to cower regular people into submission, as another doctor named Anthony Fauci has said: “Now is the time to just do what you are told.”
But obviously words do matter, but what they matter is open to interpretation and sometimes debate. To be told to shut up and do what you’re told, to censor differences of opinion, to impose authoritarian restrictions on free speech as is happening now, speech that can involve slips of the tongue, is a slippery slope in an allegedly democratic society. Jim Garrison of JFK fame said that we live in a doll’s house of propaganda where the population is treated as children and fantasies have replaced reality. He was right.
So how can we break out of this deeply imbedded impasse?
This is the hard part, for digital addiction has penetrated deep into our lives.
I believe we need to disrupt our routines, break free from our habits, in order to clearly see what is happening today.
We need to slip away for a while. Leave our cells. Let their doors clang shut behind. Abandon television. Close the computer. Step out without any mask, not just the paper kind but the ones used to hide from others. Disburden our minds of its old rubbish. Become another as you go walking away. Find a park or some natural enclave where the hum and buzz quiets down and you can breathe. Recall that in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the only place Winston Smith can escape the prying eyes and spies of Big Brother, the only place he can grasp the truth, was not in analyzing Doublethink or Crimestop, but “in a natural clearing, a tiny grass knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely” and bluebells bloomed and a thrush sang madly. Here he meets his lover and they affirm their humanity and feel free and alive for a brief respite. Here in the green wood, the green chaos, new thoughts have a chance to grow. It is an old story and old remedy, transitory of course, but as vital as breathing. In his profound meditation on this phenomenon, The Tree, John Fowles, another Englishman, writes:
It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same thing.
I am not proposing that such a retreat is a permanent answer to the propaganda that engulfs us. But without it we are lost. Without it, we cannot break free from received opinions and the constant mental noise the digital media have substituted for thought. Without it, we cannot distinguish our own thoughts from those slyly suggested to us to make us “available.” Without it, we will always feel ourselves lost, “shipwrecked upon things,” in the words of the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset. If we are to take a stand against the endless lies and a world-wide war waged against regular people by the world’s elites, we must first take “a stand within the self, ensimismamiento,” by slipping away into contemplation. Only then, once we have clarified what we really believe and don’t believe, can we take meaningful action.
There’s an old saying about falling or slipping between the cracks. It’s meant to be a bad thing and to refer to a place where no one is taking care of you. The saying doesn’t make sense. For if you end up between the cracks, you are on the same ground where habits hold you in learned helplessness. Better to slip into the cracks where, as Leonard Cohen sings, “the light gets in.”
It may feel like you are slipping away, but you may be exploring your roots.
A year ago, the idea that Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan – a short distance from the wet market that is usually claimed to be the source of the virus – was dismissed as a crackpot theory, supported only by Donald Trump, QAnon and hawks on the right looking to escalate tensions dangerously with China.
Now, after what has been effectively a year-long blackout of the lab-leak theory by the corporate media and the scientific establishment, President Joe Biden has announced an investigation to assess its credibility. And as a consequence, what was treated until a few weeks ago as an unhinged, rightwing conspiracy is suddenly being widely aired and seriously considered by liberals.
Every media outlet is running prominent stories wondering whether a pandemic that has killed so many people and destroyed the lives of so many more can be blamed on human hubris and meddling rather than on a natural cause.
For many years, scientists at labs like Wuhan’s have conducted Frankenstein-type experiments on viruses. They have modified naturally occurring infective agents – often found in animals such as bats – to try to predict the worst-case scenarios for how viruses, especially coronaviruses, might evolve. The claimed purpose has been to ensure humankind gets a head start on any new pandemic, preparing strategies and vaccines in advance to cope.
Viruses are known to have escaped from labs like Wuhan’s many times before, and leaked US cables show Washington was concerned about safety procedures and security at the Wuhan lab two years before the emergence of Covid-19. There are now reports, rejected by China, that several staff at Wuhan got sick in late 2019, shortly before Covid-19 exploded on to the world stage. Did a human-manipulated novel coronavirus escape from the lab and spread around the world?
No interest in truth
Here we get to the tricky bit. Because nobody in a position to answer that question appears to have any interest in finding out the truth – or at least, they have no interest in the rest of us learning the truth. Not China. Not US policy-makers. Not the World Health Organisation. And not the corporate media.
The only thing we can state with certainty is this: our understanding of the origins of Covid has been narratively managed over the past 15 months and is still being narratively managed. We are being told only what suits powerful political, scientific and commercial interests.
We now know that we were misdirected a year ago into believing that a lab leak was either fanciful nonsense or evidence of Sinophobia – when it was very obviously neither. And we should understand now, even though the story has switched 180 degrees, that we are still being misdirected. Nothing that the US administration or the corporate media have told us, or are now telling us, about the origins of the virus can be trusted.
No one in power truly wants to get to the bottom of this story. In fact, quite the reverse. Were we to truly understand its implications, this story might have the potential not only to hugely discredit western political, media and scientific elites but even to challenge the whole ideological basis on which their power rests.
Which is why what we are seeing is not an effort to grapple with the truth of the past year, but a desperate bid by those same elites to continue controlling our understanding of it. Western publics are being subjected to a continuous psy-op by their own officials.
Virus experiments
Last year, the safest story for the western political and scientific establishments to promote was the idea that a wild animal like a bat introduced Covid-19 to the human population. In other words, no one was to blame. The alternative was to hold China responsible for a lab leak, as Trump tried to do.
But there was a very good reason why most US policy-makers did not want to go down that latter path. And it had little to do with a concern either to refrain from conspiracy theories or to avoid provoking unnecessary tension with a nuclear-armed China.
Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science writer, set out in May, in an in-depth investigation, why the case for a lab leak was scientifically strong, citing some of the world’s leading virologists.
But Wade also highlighted a much deeper problem for US elites: just before the first outbreak of Covid, the Wuhan lab was, it seems, cooperating with the US scientific establishment and WHO officials on its virus experiments – what is known, in scientific parlance, as “gain-of-function” research.
Gain-of-function experiments had been paused during the second Obama administration, precisely because of concerns about the danger of a human-engineered virus mutation escaping and creating a pandemic. But under Trump, US officials restarted the programme and were reportedly funding work at the Wuhan lab through a US-based medical organisation called the EcoHealth Alliance.
The US official who pushed this agenda hardest is reported to have been Dr Anthony Fauci – yes, the US President’s chief medical adviser and the official widely credited with curbing Trump’s reckless approach to the pandemic. If the lab leak theory is right, the pandemic’s saviour in the US might actually have been one of its chief instigators.
And to top it off, senior officials at the WHO have been implicated too, for being closely involved with gain-of-function research through groups like EcoHealth.
Colluding in deceit
This seems to be the real reason why the lab-leak theory was quashed so aggressively last year by western political, medical and media establishments without any effort to seriously assess the claims or investigate them. Not out of any sense of obligation towards the truth or concern about racist incitement against the Chinese. It was done out of naked self-interest.
If anyone doubts that, consider this: the WHO appointed Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, the very group that reportedly funded gain-of-function research at Wuhan on behalf of the US, to investigate the lab-leak theory and effectively become the WHO’s spokesman on the matter. To say that Daszak had a conflict of interest is to massively understate the problem.
He, of course, has loudly discounted any possibility of a leak and, perhaps not surprisingly, continues to direct the media’s attention to Wuhan’s wet market.
The extent to which major media are not only negligently failing to cover the story with any seriousness but are also actively continuing to collude in deceiving their audiences – and sweeping these egregious conflicts of interest under the carpet – is illustrated by this article published by the BBC at the weekend.
The BBC ostensibly weighs the two possible narratives about Covid’s origins. But it mentions none of Wade’s explosive findings, including the potential US role in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan. Both Fauci and Daszak are cited as trusted and dispassionate commentators rather than as figures who have the most to lose from a serious investigation into what happened at the Wuhan lab.
Given this context, the events of the past 15 months look much more like a pre-emptive cover-up: a desire to stop the truth from ever emerging because, if a lab leak did occur, it would threaten the credibility of the very structures of authority on which the power of western elites rests.
Media blackout
So why, after the strenuously enforced blackout of the past year, are Biden, the corporate media and the scientific establishment suddenly going public with the possibility of a China lab leak?
The answer to that seems clear: because Nicholas Wade’s article, in particular, blew open the doors that had been kept tightly shut on the lab-leak hypothesis. Scientists who had formerly feared being associated with Trump or a “conspiracy theory” have belatedly spoken up. The cat is out of the bag.
Or as the Financial Times reported of the new official narrative, “the driving factor was a shift among scientists who had been wary of helping Trump before the election or angering influential scientists who had dismissed the theory”.
The journal Science recently upped the stakes by publishing a letter from 18 prominent scientists stating that the lab-leak and animal-origin theories were equally “viable” and that the WHO’s earlier investigation had not given “balanced consideration” to both – a polite way of suggesting that the WHO investigation was a fix.
And so we are now being subjected by the Biden administration to Plan B: damage limitation. The US President, the medical establishment and the corporate media are raising the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak, but are excluding all the evidence unearthed by Wade and others that would implicate Fauci and the US policy elite in such a leak, if it occurred. (Meanwhile, Fauci and his supporters have been preemptively muddying the waters by trying to redefine what constitutes gain-of-function.)
The growing clamour on social media, much of it provoked by Wade’s research, is one of the main reasons Biden and the media are being forced to address the lab-leak theory, having previously discounted it. And yet Wade’s revelations of US and WHO involvement in gain-of-function research, and of potential complicity in a lab leak and a subsequent cover-up are missing from almost all corporate media reporting.
Evasion tactic
Biden’s so-called investigation is intended to be cynically evasive. It makes the administration look serious about getting to the truth when it is nothing of the sort. It eases pressure on the corporate media that might otherwise be expected to dig out the truth themselves. The narrow focus on the lab leak theory displaces the wider story of potential US and WHO complicity in such a leak and overshadows efforts by outside critics to highlight that very point. And the inevitable delay while the investigation is carried out readily exploits Covid news fatigue as western publics start to emerge from under the pandemic’s shadow.
The Biden administration will hope the public’s interest rapidly wanes on this story so that the corporate media can let it drop off their radar. In any case, the investigation’s findings will most likely be inconclusive, to avoid a war of duelling narratives with China.
But even if the investigation is forced to point the finger at the Chinese, the Biden administration knows that the western corporate media will loyally report its accusations against China as fact – just as they loyally blacked out any consideration of a lab leak until they were forced to do so over the past few days.
Illusion of truth
The Wuhan story provides a chance to understand more deeply how elites wield their narrative power over us – to control what we think, or are even capable of thinking. They can twist any narrative to their advantage.
In the calculations of western elites, the truth is largely irrelevant. What is of utmost importance is maintaining the illusion of truth. It is vital to keep us believing that our leaders rule in our best interests; that the western system – despite all its flaws – is the best possible one for arranging our political and economic lives; and that we are on a steady, if sometimes rocky, path towards progress.
The job of sustaining the illusion of truth falls to the corporate media. It will be their role now to expose us to a potentially lengthy, certainly lively – but carefully ring-fenced and ultimately inconclusive – debate about whether Covid emerged naturally or leaked from the Wuhan lab.
The media’s task is to manage smoothly the transition from last year’s unquestionable certainty – that the pandemic had an animal origin – to a more hesitant, confusing picture that includes the possibility of a human, but very much Chinese, role in the virus’ emergence. It is to ensure we do not feel any cognitive dissonance as a theory we were assured was impossible by the experts only weeks ago suddenly becomes only too possible, even though nothing has materially changed in the meantime.
What is essential for the political, media and scientific establishments is that we do not ponder deeper questions:
How is it that the supposedly sceptical, disputatious, raucous media once again spoke mostly with a single and uncritical voice on such a vitally important matter – in this case, for more than a year on the origins of Covid?
Why was that media consensus broken not by a large, well-resourced media organisation, but by a lone, former science writer working independently and publishing in a relatively obscure science magazine?
Why did the many leading scientists who are now ready to question the imposed narrative of Covid’s animal origin remain silent for so long about the apparently equally credible hypothesis of a lab leak?
And most importantly, why should we believe that the political, media and scientific establishments have on this occasion any interest in telling us the truth, or in ensuring our welfare, after they have been shown to have repeatedly lied or stayed silent on even graver matters and over much longer periods, such as about the various ecological catastrophes that have been looming since the 1950s?
Class interests
Those questions, let alone the answers, will be avoided by anyone who needs to believe that our rulers are competent and moral and that they pursue the public good rather than their own individual, narrow, selfish interests – or those of their class or professional group.
Scientists defer slavishly to the scientific establishment because that same establishment oversees a system in which scientists are rewarded with research funding, employment opportunities and promotions. And because scientists have little incentive to question or expose their own professional community’s failings, or increase public scepticism towards science and scientists.
Similarly, journalists work for a handful of billionaire-owned media corporations that want to maintain the public’s faith in the “benevolence” of the power structures that reward billionaires for their supposed genius and ability to improve the lives of the rest of us. The corporate media has no interest in encouraging the public to question whether it can really operate as a neutral conduit that channels information to ordinary people rather than preserves a status quo that benefits a tiny wealth-elite.
And politicians have every reason to continue to persuade us that they represent our interests rather than the billionaire donors whose corporations and media outlets can so easily destroy their careers.
What we are dealing with here is a set of professional classes doing everything in their power to preserve their own interests and the interests of the system that rewards them. And that requires strenuous efforts on their part to make sure we do not understand that policy is driven chiefly by greed and a craving for status, not by the common good or by a concern for truth and transparency.
Which is why no meaningful lessons will be learnt about what really happened in Wuhan. Maintaining the illusion of truth will continue to take precedence over uncovering the truth. And for that reason we are doomed to keep making the same screw-ups. As the next pandemic will doubtless attest.
Last year, a government commission called for the US to adopt an AI-driven mass surveillance system far beyond that used in any other country in order to ensure American hegemony in artificial intelligence. Now, many of the “obstacles” they had cited as preventing its implementation are rapidly being removed under the guise of combating the coronavirus crisis.
Last year, a U.S. government body dedicated to examining how artificial intelligence can “address the national security and defense needs of the United States” discussed in detail the “structural” changes that the American economy and society must undergo in order to ensure a technological advantage over China, according to a recent document acquired through a FOIA request. This document suggests that the U.S. follow China’s lead and even surpass them in many aspects related to AI-driven technologies, particularly their use of mass surveillance. This perspective clearly clashes with the public rhetoric of prominent U.S. government officials and politicians on China, who have labeled the Chinese government’s technology investments and export of its surveillance systems and other technologies as a major “threat” to Americans’ “way of life.”
In addition, many of the steps for the implementation of such a program in the U.S., as laid out in this newly available document, are currently being promoted and implemented as part of the government’s response to the current coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis. This likely due to the fact that many members of this same body have considerable overlap with the taskforces and advisors currently guiding the government’s plans to “re-open the economy” and efforts to use technology to respond to the current crisis.
The FOIA document, obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), was produced by a little-known U.S. government organization called the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI). It was created by the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and its official purpose is “to consider the methods and means necessary to advance the development of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and associated technologies to comprehensively address the national security and defense needs of the United States.”
The NSCAI is a key part of the government’s response to what is often referred to as the coming “fourth industrial revolution,” which has been described as “a revolution characterized by discontinuous technological development in areas like artificial intelligence (AI), big data, fifth-generation telecommunications networking (5G), nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and quantum computing.”
However, their main focus is ensuring that “the United States … maintain a technological advantage in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other associated technologies related to national security and defense.” The vice-chair of NSCAI, Robert Work – former Deputy Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at the hawkish Center for a New American Security (CNAS), described the commission’s purpose as determining “how the U.S. national security apparatus should approach artificial intelligence, including a focus on how the government can work with industry to compete with China’s ‘civil-military fusion’ concept.”
The recently released NSCAI document is a May 2019 presentation entitled “Chinese Tech Landscape Overview.” Throughout the presentation, the NSCAI promotes the overhaul of the U.S. economy and way of life as necessary for allowing the U.S. to ensure it holds a considerable technological advantage over China, as losing this advantage is currently deemed a major “national security” issue by the U.S. national security apparatus. This concern about maintaining a technological advantage can be seen in several other U.S. military documents and think tank reports, several of whichhave warned that the U.S.’ technological advantage is quickly eroding.
The U.S. government and establishment media outlets often blame alleged Chinese espionage or the Chinese government’s more explicit partnershipswith private technology companies in support of their claim that the U.S. is losing this advantage over China. For instance, Chris Darby, the current CEO of the CIA’s In-Q-Tel, who is also on the NSCAI, told CBS News last year that China is the U.S.’ main competitor in terms of technology and that U.S. privacy laws were hampering the U.S.’ capacity to counter China in this regard, stating that:
“[D]ata is the new oil. And China is just awash with data. And they don’t have the same restraints that we do around collecting it and using it, because of the privacy difference between our countries. This notion that they have the largest labeled data set in the world is going to be a huge strength for them.”
In another example, Michael Dempsey – former acting Director of National Intelligence and currently a government-funded fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations – argued in The Hill that:
“It’s quite clear, though, that China is determined to erase our technological advantage, and is committing hundreds of billions of dollars to this effort. In particular, China is determined to be a world leader in such areas as artificial intelligence, high performance computing, and synthetic biology. These are the industries that will shape life on the planet and the military balance of power for the next several decades.”
In fact, the national security apparatus of the United States is so concerned about losing a technological edge over China that the Pentagon recently decided to join forces directly with the U.S. intelligence community in order “to get in front of Chinese advances in artificial intelligence.” This union resulted in the creation of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), which ties together “the military’s efforts with those of the Intelligence Community, allowing them to combine efforts in a breakneck push to move government’s AI initiatives forward.” It also coordinates with other government agencies, industry, academics, and U.S. allies. Robert Work, who subsequently became the NSCAI vice-chair, said at the time that JAIC’s creation was a “welcome first step in response to Chinese, and to a lesser extent, Russian, plans to dominate these technologies.”
Similar concerns about “losing” technological advantage to China have also been voiced by the NSCAI chairman, Eric Schmidt, the former head of Alphabet – Google’s parent company, who argued in February in the New York Times that Silicon Valley could soon lose “the technology wars” to China if the U.S. government doesn’t take action. Thus, the three main groups represented within the NSCAI – the intelligence community, the Pentagon and Silicon Valley – all view China’s advancements in AI as a major national security threat (and in Silicon Valley’s case, threat to their bottom lines and market shares) that must be tackled quickly.
Targeting China’s “adoption advantage”
In the May 2019 “Chinese Tech Landscape Overview” presentation, the NSCAI discusses that, while the U.S. still leads in the “creation” stage of AI and related technologies, it lags behind China in the “adoption” stage due to “structural factors.” It says that “creation”, followed by “adoption” and “iteration” are the three phases of the “life cycle of new tech” and asserts that failing to dominate in the “adoption” stage will allow China to “leapfrog” the U.S. and dominate AI for the foreseeable future.
The presentation also argues that, in order to “leapfrog” competitors in emerging markets, what is needed is not “individual brilliance” but instead specific “structural conditions that exist within certain markets.” It cites several case studies where China is considered to be “leapfrogging” the U.S. due to major differences in these “structural factors.” Thus, the insinuation of the document (though not directly stated) is that the U.S. must alter the “structural factors” that are currently responsible for its lagging behind China in the “adoption” phase of AI-driven technologies.
Chief among the troublesome “structural factors” highlighted in this presentation are so-called “legacy systems” that are common in the U.S. but much less so in China. The NSCAI document states that examples of “legacy systems” include a financial system that still utilizes cash and card payments, individual car ownership and even receiving medical attention from a human doctor. It states that, while these “legacy systems” in the US are “good enough,” too many “good enough” systems “hinder the adoption of new things,” specifically AI-driven systems.
Another structural factor deemed by the NSCAI to be an obstacle to the U.S.’ ability to maintain a technological advantage over China is the “scale of the consumer market,” arguing that “extreme urban density = on-demand service adoption.” In other words, extreme urbanization results in more people using online or mobile-based “on-demand” services, ranging from ride-sharing to online shopping. It also cites the use of mass surveillance on China’s “huge population base” is an example of how China’s “scale of consumer market” advantage allowing “China to leap ahead” in the fields of related technologies, like facial recognition.
In addition to the alleged shortcomings of the U.S.’ “legacy systems” and lack of “extreme urban density,” the NSCAI also calls for more “explicit government support and involvement” as a means to speed up the adoption of these systems in the U.S. This includes the government lending its stores of data on civilians to train AI, specifically citing facial recognition databases, and mandating that cities be “re-architected around AVs [autonomous vehicles],” among others. Other examples given include the government investing large amounts of money in AI start-ups and adding tech behemoths to a national, public-private AI taskforce focused on smart city-implementation (among other things).
With regards to the latter, the document says “this level of public-private cooperation” in China is “outwardly embraced” by the parties involved, with this “serving as a stark contrast to the controversy around Silicon Valley selling to the U.S. government.” Examples of such controversy, from the NSCAI’s perspective, likely include Google employees petitioning to end the Google-Pentagon “Project Maven,” which uses Google’s AI software to analyze footage captured by drones. Google eventually chose not to renew its Maven contract as a result of the controversy, even though top Google executives viewed the project as a “golden opportunity” to collaborate more closely with the military and intelligence communities.
The document also defines another aspect of government support as the “clearing of regulatory barriers.” This term is used in the document specifically with respect to U.S. privacy laws, despite the fact that the U.S. national security state has long violated these laws with near complete impunity. However, the document seems to suggest that privacy laws in the U.S. should be altered so that what the U.S. government has done “in secret” with private citizen data can be done more openly and more extensively. The NSCAI document also discusses the removal of “regulatory barriers” in order to speed up the adoption of self-driving cars, even though autonomous driving technology has resulted in several deadlyand horrific car accidents and presents other safety concerns.
Also discussed is how China’s “adoption advantage” will “allow it to leapfrog the U.S.” in several new fields, including “AI medical diagnosis” and “smart cities.” It then asserts that “the future will be decided at the intersection of private enterprise and policy leaders between China and the U.S.” If this coordination over the global AI market does not occur, the document warns that “we [the U.S.] risk being left out of the discussions where norms around AI are set for the rest of our lifetimes.”
The presentation also dwells considerably on how “the main battleground [in technology] are not the domestic Chinese and US markets,” but what it refers to as the NBU (next billion users) markets, where it states that “Chinese players will aggressively challenge Silicon Valley.” In order to challenge them more successfully, the presentation argues that, “just like we [view] the market of teenagers as a harbinger for new trends, we should look at China.”
The document also expresses concerns about China exporting AI more extensively and intensively than the U.S., saying that China is “already crossing borders” by helping to build facial databases in Zimbabwe and selling image recognition and smart city systems to Malaysia. If allowed to become “the unambiguous leader in AI,” it says that “China could end up writing much of the rulebook of international norms around the deployment of AI” and that it would “broaden China’s sphere of influence amongst an international community that increasingly looks to the pragmatic authoritarianism of China and Singapore as an alternative to Western liberal democracy.”
What will replace the US’ “legacy systems”?
Given that the document makes it quite clear that “legacy systems” in the U.S. are impeding its ability to prevent China from “leapfrogging” ahead in AI and then dominating it for the foreseeable future, it is also important to examine what the document suggests should replace these “legacy systems” in the U.S.
As previously mentioned, one “legacy system” cited early on in the presentation is the main means of payment for most Americans, cash and credit/debit cards. The presentation asserts, in contrast to these “legacy systems” that the best and most advanced system is moving entirely to smartphone-based digital wallets.
It notes specifically the main mobile wallet provider in India, PayTM, is majority owned by Chinese companies. It quotes an article, which states that “a big break came [in 2016] when India canceled 86% of currency in circulation in an effort to cut corruption and bring more people into the tax net by forcing them to use less cash.” At the time, claims that India’s 2016 “currency reform” would be used as a stepping stone towards a cashless society were dismissed by some as “conspiracy theory.” However, last year, a committee convened by India’s central bank (and led by an Indian tech oligarch who also created India’s massive civilian biometric database) resulted in the Indian government’s “Cashless India” program.
Regarding India’s 2016 “currency reform,” the NSCAI document then asserts that “this would be unfathomable in the West. And unsurprisingly, when 86% of the cash got cancelled and nobody had a credit card, mobile wallets in India exploded, laying the groundwork for a far more advanced payments ecosystem in India than the US.” However, it has become increasingly less unfathomable in light of the current coronavirus crisis, which has seen efforts to reduce the amount of cash used because paper bills may carry the virus as well as efforts to introduce a Federal Reserve-backed “digital dollar.”
In addition, the NSCAI document from last May calls for the end of in-person shopping and promotes moving towards all shopping being performed online. It argues that “American companies have a lot to gain by adopting ideas from Chinese companies” by shifting towards exclusive e-commerce purchasing options. It states that only shopping online provides a “great experience” and also adds that “when buying online is literally the only way to get what you want, consumers go online.”
Another “legacy system” that the NSCAI seeks to overhaul is car ownership, as it promotes autonomous, or self-driving vehicles and further asserts that “fleet ownership > individual ownership.” It specifically points to a need for “a centralized ride-sharing network,” which it says “is needed to coordinate cars to achieve near 100% utilization rates.” However, it warns against ride-sharing networks that “need a human operator paired with each vehicle” and also asserts that “fleet ownership makes more sense” than individual car ownership. It also specifically calls for these fleets to not only be composed of self-driving cars, but electric cars and cites reports that China “has the world’s most aggressive electric vehicle goals….and seek[s] the lead in an emerging industry.”
The document states that China leads in ride-sharing today even though ride-sharing was pioneered first in the U.S. It asserts once again that the U.S. “legacy system” of individual car ownership and lack of “extreme urban density” are responsible for China’s dominance in this area. It also predicts that China will “achieve mass autonomous [vehicle] adoption before the U.S.,” largely because “the lack of mass car ownership [in China] leads to far more consumer receptiveness to AVs [autonomous vehicles].” It then notes that “earlier mass adoption leads to a virtuous cycle that allows Chinese core self-driving tech to accelerate beyond [its] Western counterparts.”
In addition to their vision for a future financial system and future self-driving transport system, the NSCAI has a similarly dystopian vision for surveillance. The document calls mass surveillance “one of the ‘first-and-best customers’ for AI” and “a killer application for deep learning.” It also states that “having streets carpeted with cameras is good infrastructure.”
It then discusses how “an entire generation of AI unicorn” companies are “collecting the bulk of their early revenue from government security contracts” and praises the use of AI in facilitating policing activities. For instance, it lauds reports that “police are making convictions based on phone calls monitored with iFlyTek’s voice-recognition technology” and that “police departments are using [AI] facial recognition tech to assist in everything from catching traffic law violators to resolving murder cases.”
On the point of facial recognition technology specifically, the NSCAI document asserts that China has “leapt ahead” of the US on facial recognition, even though “breakthroughs in using machine learning for image recognition initially occurred in the US.” It claims that China’s advantage in this instance is because they have government-implemented mass surveillance (“clearing of regulatory barriers”), enormous government-provided stores of data (“explicit government support”) combined with private sector databases on a huge population base (“scale of consumer market”). As a consequence of this, the NSCAI argues, China is also set to leap ahead of the U.S. in both image/facial recognition and biometrics.
The document also points to another glaring difference between the U.S. and its rival, stating that: “In the press and politics of America and Europe, Al is painted as something to be feared that is eroding privacy and stealing jobs. Conversely, China views it as both a tool for solving major macroeconomic challenges in order to sustain their economic miracle, and an opportunity to take technological leadership on the global stage.”
The NSCAI document also touches on the area of healthcare, calling for the implementation of a system that seems to be becoming reality thanks to the current coronavirus crisis. In discussing the use of AI in healthcare (almost a year before the current crisis began), it states that “China could lead the world in this sector” and “this could lead to them exporting their tech and setting international norms.” One reason for this is also that China has “far too few doctors for the population” and calls having enough doctors for in-person visits a “legacy system.” It also cited U.S. regulatory measures such as “HIPPA compliance and FDA approval” as obstacles that don’t constrain Chinese authorities.
More troubling, it argues that “the potential impact of government supplied data is even more significant in biology and healthcare,” and says it is likely that “the Chinese government [will] require every single citizen to have their DNA sequenced and stored in government databases, something nearly impossible to imagine in places as privacy conscious as the U.S. and Europe.” It continues by saying that “the Chinese apparatus is well-equipped to take advantage” and calls these civilian DNA databases a “logical next step.”
Who are the NSCAI?
Given the sweeping changes to the U.S. that the NSCAI promoted in this presentation last May, it becomes important to examine who makes up the commission and to consider their influence over U.S. policy on these matters, particularly during the current crisis. As previously mentioned, the chairman of the NSCAI is Eric Schmidt, the former head of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) who has also invested heavily in Israeli intelligence-linked tech companies including the controversial start-up “incubator” Team8. In addition, the committee’s vice-chair is Robert Work, is not only a former top Pentagon official, but is currently working with the think tank CNAS, which is run by John McCain’s long-time foreign policy adviser and Joe Biden’s former national security adviser.
Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle, with close ties to Trump’s top donor Sheldon Adelson
Steve Chien, supervisor of the Artificial Intelligence Group at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Lab
Mignon Clyburn, Open Society Foundation fellow and former FCC commissioner
Chris Darby, CEO of In-Q-Tel (CIA’s venture capital arm)
Ken Ford, CEO of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition
Jose-Marie Griffiths, president of Dakota State University and former National Science Board member
Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research Labs
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services (CIA contractor)
Gilman Louie, partner at Alsop Louie Partners and former CEO of In-Q-Tel
William Mark, director of SRI International and former Lockheed Martin director
Jason Matheny, director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, former Assistant director of National Intelligence and former director of IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Project Agency)
Katharina McFarland, consultant at Cypress International and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition
Andrew Moore, head of Google Cloud AI
As can be seen in the list above, there is a considerable amount of overlap between the NSCAI and the companies currently advising the White House on “re-opening” the economy (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Lockheed Martin, Oracle) and one NSCAI member, Oracle’s Safra Katz, is on the White House’s “economic revival” taskforce. Also, there is also overlap between the NSCAI and the companies that are intimately involved in the implementation of the “contact tracing” “coronavirus surveillance system,” a mass surveillance system promoted by the Jared Kushner-led, private-sector coronavirus task force. That surveillance system is set to be constructed by companies with deep ties to Google and the U.S. national security state, and both Google and Apple, who create the operating systems for the vast majority of smartphones used in the U.S., have said they will now build that surveillance system directly into their smartphone operating systems.
Also notable is the fact that In-Q-Tel and the U.S. intelligence community has considerable representation on the NSCAI and that they also boast close ties with Google, Palantir and other Silicon Valley giants, having been early investors in those companies. Both Google and Palantir, as well as Amazon (also on the NSCAI) are also major contractors for U.S. intelligence agencies. In-Q-Tel’s involvement on the NSCAI is also significant because they have been heavily promoting mass surveillance of consumer electronic devices for use in pandemics for the past several years. Much of that push has come from In-Q-Tel’s current Executive Vice President Tara O’Toole, who was previously the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and also co-authored several controversial biowarfare/pandemic simulations, such as Dark Winter.
In addition, since at least January, the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon have been at the forefront of developing the U.S. government’s still-classified “9/11-style” response plans for the coronavirus crisis, alongside the National Security Council. Few news organizations have noted that these classified response plans, which are set to be triggered if and when the U.S. reaches a certain number of coronavirus cases, has been created largely by elements of the national security state (i.e. the NSC, Pentagon, and intelligence), as opposed to civilian agencies or those focused on public health issues.
Furthermore, it has been reported that the U.S. intelligence community as well as U.S. military intelligence knew by at least January (though recent reports have said as early as last November) that the coronavirus crisis would reach “pandemic proportions” by March. The American public were not warned, but elite members of the business and political classes were apparently informed, given the record numbers of CEO resignations in January and several high-profile insider trading allegations that preceded the current crisis by a matter of weeks.
Perhaps even more disconcerting is the added fact that the U.S. government not only participated in the eerily prescient pandemic simulation last October known as Event 201, it also led a series of pandemic response simulations last year. Crimson Contagion was a series of four simulations that involved 19 U.S. federal agencies, including intelligence and the military, as well as 12 different states and a host of private sector companies that simulated a devastating pandemic influenza outbreak that had originated in China. It was led by the current HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, Robert Kadlec, who is a former lobbyist for military and intelligence contractors and a Bush-era homeland security “bioterrorism” advisor.
In addition, both Kadlec and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which was intimately involved in Event 201, have direct ties to the controversial June 2001 biowarfare exercise “Dark Winter,” which predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks that transpired just months later in disturbing ways. Though efforts by media and government were made to blame the anthrax attacks on a foreign source, the anthrax was later found to have originated at a U.S. bioweapons lab and the FBI investigation into the case has been widely regarded as a cover-up, including by the FBI’s once-lead investigator on that case.
Given the above, it is worth asking if those who share the NSCAI’s vision saw the coronavirus pandemic early on as an opportunity to make the “structural changes” it had deemed essential to countering China’s lead in the mass adoption of AI-driven technologies, especially considering that many of the changes in the May 2019 document are now quickly taking place under the guise of combatting the coronavirus crisis.
The NSCAI’s vision takes shape
Though the May 2019 NSCAI document was authored nearly a year ago, the coronavirus crisis has resulted in the implementation of many of the changes and the removal of many of the “structural” obstacles that the commission argued needed to be drastically altered in order to ensure a technological advantage over China in the field of AI. The aforementioned move away from cash, which is taking place not just in the U.S. but internationally, is just one example of many.
For instance, earlier this week CNN reported that grocery stores are now considering banning in-person shopping and that the U.S. Department of Labor has recommended that retailers nationwide start “‘using a drive-through window or offering curbside pick-up’ to protect workers for exposure to coronavirus.” In addition, last week, the state of Florida approved an online-purchase plan for low income families using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Other reports have argued that social distancing inside grocery stores is ineffective and endangering people’s lives. As previously mentioned, the May 2019 NSCAI document argues that moving away from in-person shopping is necessary to mitigate China’s “adoption advantage” and also argued that “when buying online is literally the only way to get what you want, consumers go online.”
Reports have also argued that these changes in shopping will last far beyond coronavirus, such as an article by Business Insider entitled “The coronavirus pandemic is pushing more people online and will forever change how Americans shop for groceries, experts say.” Those cited in the piece argue that this shift away from in-person shopping will be “permanent” and also states that “More people are trying these services than otherwise would have without this catalyst and gives online players a greater chance to acquire and keep a new customer base.” A similar article in Yahoo! News argues that, thanks to the current crisis, “our dependence on online shopping will only rise because no one wants to catch a virus at a shop.”
In addition, the push towards the mass use of self-driving cars has also gotten a boost thanks to coronavirus, with driverless cars now making on-demand deliveries in California. Two companies, one Chinese-owned and the other backed by Japan’s SoftBank, have since been approved to have their self-driving cars used on California roads and that approval was expedited due to the coronavirus crisis. The CPO of Nuro Inc., the SoftBank-backed company, was quoted in Bloomberg as saying that “The Covid-19 pandemic has expedited the public need for contactless delivery services. Our R2 fleet is custom-designed to change the very nature of driving and the movement of goods by allowing people to remain safely at home while their groceries, medicines, and packages are brought to them.” Notably, the May 2019 NSCAI document references the inter-connected web of SoftBank-backed companies, particularly those backed by its largely Saudi-funded “Vision Fund,” as forming “the connective tissue for a global federation of tech companies” set to dominate AI.
California isn’t the only state to start using self-driving cars, as the Mayo Clinic of Florida is now also using them. “Using artificial intelligence enables us to protect staff from exposure to this contagious virus by using cutting-edge autonomous vehicle technology and frees up staff time that can be dedicated to direct treatment and care for patients,” Kent Thielen, M.D., CEO of Mayo Clinic in Florida stated in a recent press release cited by Mic.
Like the changes to in-person shopping in the age of coronavirus, other reports assert that self-driving vehicles are here to stay. One report published by Mashable is entitled “It took a coronavirus outbreak for self-driving cars to become more appealing,” and opens by stating “Suddenly, a future full of self-driving cars isn’t just a sci-fi pipe dream. What used to be considered a scary, uncertain technology for many Americans looks more like an effective tool to protect ourselves from a fast-spreading, infectious disease.” It further argues that this is hardly a “fleeting shift” in driving habits and one tech CEO cited in the piece, Anuja Sonalker of Steer Tech, claims that “There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless technology. Humans are biohazards, machines are not.”
Another focus of the NSCAI presentation, AI medicine, has also seen its star rise in recent weeks. For instance, several reports have touted how AI-driven drug discovery platforms have been able to identify potential treatments for coronavirus. Microsoft, whose research lab director is on the NSCAI, recently put $20 million into its “AI for health” program to speed up the use of AI in analyzing coronavirus data. In addition, “telemedicine”– a form of remote medical care – has also becomewidely adopted due to the coronavirus crisis.
Several other AI-driven technologies have similarly become more widely adopted thanks to coronavirus, including the use of mass surveillance for “contact tracing” as well as facial recognition technology and biometrics. A recent Wall Street Journal report stated that the government is seriously considering both contact tracing via phone geolocation data and facial recognition technology in order to track those who might have coronavirus. In addition, private businesses – like grocery stores and restaurants – are using sensors and facial recognition to see how many people and which people are entering their stores.
As far as biometrics go, university researchers are now working to determine if “smartphones and biometric wearables already contain the data we need to know if we have become infected with the novel coronavirus.” Those efforts seek to detect coronavirus infections early by analyzing “sleep schedules, oxygen levels, activity levels and heart rate” based on smartphone apps like FitBit and smartwatches. In countries outside the U.S., biometric IDs are being touted as a way to track those who have and lack immunity to coronavirus.
In addition, one report in The Edge argued that the current crisis is changing what types of biometrics should be used, asserting that a shift towards thermal scanning and facial recognition is necessary:
“At this critical juncture of the crisis, any integrated facial recognition and thermal scanning solution must be implemented easily, rapidly and in a cost-effective manner. Workers returning to offices or factories must not have to scramble to learn a new process or fumble with declaration forms. They must feel safe and healthy for them to work productively. They just have to look at the camera and smile. Cameras and thermal scanners, supported by a cloud-based solution and the appropriate software protocols, will do the rest.”
Also benefiting from the coronavirus crisis is the concept of “smart cities,” with Forbes recently writing that “Smart cities can help us combat the coronavirus pandemic.” That article states that “Governments and local authorities are using smart city technology, sensors and data to trace the contacts of people infected with the coronavirus. At the same time, smart cities are also helping in efforts to determine whether social distancing rules are being followed.”
That article in Forbes also contains the following passage:
“…[T]he use of masses of connected sensors makes it clear that the coronavirus pandemic is–intentionally or not–being used as a testbed for new surveillance technologies that may threaten privacy and civil liberties. So aside from being a global health crisis, the coronavirus has effectively become an experiment in how to monitor and control people at scale.”
Another report in The Guardian states that “If one of the government takeaways from coronavirus is that ‘smart cities’ including Songdo or Shenzhen are safer cities from a public health perspective, then we can expect greater efforts to digitally capture and record our behaviour in urban areas – and fiercer debates over the power such surveillance hands to corporations and states.” There have also been reports that assert that typical cities are “woefully unprepared” to face pandemics compared to “smart cities.”
Yet, beyond many of the NSCAI’s specific concerns regarding mass AI adoption being conveniently resolved by the current crisis, there has also been a concerted effort to change the public’s perception of AI in general. As previously mentioned, the NSCAI had pointed out last year that:
“In the press and politics of America and Europe, Al is painted as something to be feared that is eroding privacy and stealing jobs. Conversely, China views it as both a tool for solving major macroeconomic challenges in order to sustain their economic miracle, and an opportunity to take technological leadership on the global stage.”
It is indeed striking how the coronavirus crisis has seemingly fulfilled the NSCAI’s entire wishlist and removed many of the obstacles to the mass adoption of AI technologies in the United States. Like major crises of the past, the national security state appears to be using the chaos and fear to promote and implement initiatives that would be normally rejected by Americans and, if history is any indicator, these new changes will remain long after the coronavirus crisis fades from the news cycle. It is essential that these so-called “solutions” be recognized for what they are and that we consider what type of world they will end up creating – an authoritarian technocracy. We ignore the rapid advance of these NSCAI-promoted initiatives and the phasing out of so-called “legacy systems” (and with them, many long-cherished freedoms) at our own peril.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. virus expert, acknowledged the risk of a pandemic from an accidental leak of a fortified virus but supported the research anyway, The Australian newspaper has reported.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wrote in an academic paper nine years ago that he supported “gain-of-function” research on viruses despite admitting a “remote” possibility that such “important work” could lead to a global pandemic if such a fortified virus escaped from a lab, The Australian newspaper reported on Friday.
In October 2012, Fauci wrote a paper for the American Society for Microbiology, in which he said:
“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?
Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.”
The newspaper’s revelation comes as President Joe Biden announced this week an investigation into whether the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)’s lab in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic first broke out.
Fauci, who had dismissed that possibility and insisted the virus had natural transmission from another species to humans, on May 11 reversed himself, saying at a conference that he was “not convinced” of the coronavirus’ natural origins and said authorities needed to learn “exactly what happened.”
Fauci has denied allegations that his NIH helped fund gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab. He told a U.S. Senate hearing this month that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the WIV.” But The Australian reported: “Papers published as late as last year in American peer-reviewed academic journals that include WIV researchers – including its prominent virologist Shi Zhengli – disclose that work on coronaviruses had been funded by at least three NIH grants.”
Lifted the Ban
The newspaper also revealed that in December 2017 Fauci unilaterally reversed an Obama administration 2014 ban on such experiments precisely because of the danger that a leak could cause a pandemic. The Australian quoted former Trump administration officials as saying that no one at the Trump White House knew that Fauci had lifted Obama’s ban.
“It kind of just got rammed through,” one official told the newspaper. “I think there’s truth in the narrative that the (National Security Council) staff, the president, the White House chief-of-staff, those people were in the dark that he was switching back on the research.”
Gain-of-function research by manipulating, splicing and recombining viruses increases its lethality and contagiousness in the apparent attempt to help combat future viruses.
The Australian reported that prominent scientists oppose the research, including 200 researchers at the Cambridge Working Group who issued this warning in a 2014 letter:
“Accident risks with newly created ‘potential pandemic pathogens’ raise grave new concerns. Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks.
An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control. Historically, new strains of influenza, once they establish transmission in the human population, have infected a quarter or more of the world’s population within two years.”
Steven Salzberg, at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, wrote in 2015 that gains from the research were “minimal at best” and could “far more safely be obtained through other avenues of research.”
“I am very concerned that the continuing gain-of-function research on influenza viruses, and more recently on other viruses, presents extremely serious risks to the public health,” he wrote.
Acknowledging the Risks
In his academic paper, Fauci detailed the risks involved with gain-of-function research, particularly in labs with substandard safety measures.
“Within the research community, many have expressed concern that important research progress could come to a halt just because of the fear that someone, somewhere, might attempt to replicate these experiments sloppily. This is a valid concern.
“Putting aside the specter of bioterrorism for the moment, consider this hypothetical scenario: an important gain-of-function experiment involving a virus with serious pandemic potential is performed in a well-regulated, world-class laboratory by experienced investigators, but the information from the experiment is then used by another scientist who does not have the same training and facilities and is not subject to the same regulations.”
Fauci said virologists needed to respect “that there are genuine and legitimate concerns about this type of research, both domestically and globally.” He added:
“We cannot expect those who have these concerns to simply take us, the scientific community, at our word that the benefits of this work outweigh the risks, nor can we ignore their calls for greater transparency, their concerns about conflicts of interest, and their efforts to engage in a dialogue about whether these experiments should have been performed in the first place.
Those of us in the scientific community who believe in the merits of this work have the responsibility to address these concerns thoughtfully and respectfully.
Granted, the time it takes to engage in such a dialog could potentially delay or even immobilize the conduct of certain important experiments and the publication of valuable information that could move the field forward for the good of public health.
If we want to continue this important work, we collectively need to do a better job of articulating the scientific rationale for such experiments well before they are performed and provide discussion about the potential risk to public health, however remote.”
Among the evidence being looked at in the U.S. probe into a possible lab leak is a CIA finding, first reported in February from a State Dept. fact sheet by The Wall Street Journal, that three lab workers at the WIV became seriously ill with a flu-like disease and were hospitalized in November 2019.
After the Crash 