The CDC and Pharma: Did their decades-long partnership shape the COVID-19 response?

Experts' “failures?”

Rational Ground’s Justin Hart is looking for answers regarding the 19 major COVID-19 “screw-ups” he outlined in his substack, holding the “experts” responsible—from how the virus spreads to whether masks actually work. Hart took aim at Dr. Fauci, labeling him “the patron saint of TERRIBLE COVID policies,” and listed 20 things the former Chief Medical Advisor to the President got wrong.

But Hart noted, he’s not the only one interested in answers to the colossal COVID errors. Last year, he continued, the Norfolk Group “dropped a bomb of a document laying out all these failures,” including the necessary references to prove their points. 

Hart emphasizes the need for answers to understand what went wrong and ensure something like this doesn’t happen again.

Listen, I'm not here to say "I told you so" (okay, maybe a little), but we need to talk about this. Because if we don't learn from how badly our "experts" messed up, we're just asking for a repeat performance next time around. And honestly? I don't think any of us can handle another round of plexiglass theater and double masking.

Let's break down exactly how they got it wrong, and more importantly, why they kept doubling down even when the evidence said otherwise. Buckle up - this is gonna be a wild ride through the greatest public health face-plant in modern history.

No good answers

The thing is, those 19 major errors each have five or more subitems, none of which anyone will have good answers for. There are too many, and they’re too egregious. This is because "experts" at federal agencies, including the CDC and Dr. Fauci’s NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, from which he recently resigned after heading the agency for 37 years), have financial entanglements and conflicts of interest with Big Pharma. Expecting to be able to prevent this from happening again despite the way these agencies are structured is like asking a leopard to change its spots.

This article focuses on the CDC’s role in COVID "failures," as its influence extends further and impacts a broader range of policies—such as public health guidance, vaccine distribution, and data reporting—than Dr. Fauci's, even though he often represented the face of COVID countermeasures. Dr. Fauci’s role will be explored in a forthcoming article.

The CDC's true priorities

The CDC isn’t in the business of public health and safety as it claims. The actions it has taken over the years prove falsity of those claims. 

VAERS 

The CDC never improved VAERS (its vaccine adverse event reporting system) to make it user-friendly and a reliable source of information. CHD’s The Defender wrote about problems with VAERS reports.

From doctors unable to file reports to disappearing data, limits on transparency, and lack of resources to follow up on concerning vaccine reactions, experts warn VAERS is failing to detect critical safety signals.

This, The Defender continued, wasn’t accidental but purposeful, as the CDC works to protect Big Pharma.

According to one of those experts — VAERS researcher Albert Benavides, whose experience includes HMO claims auditing, data analytics, and revenue cycle management — VAERS’ failure isn’t accidental.

“It is not broken,” Benavides wrote in his Substack coverage of the BMJ investigation. “VAERS runs cover for the big pharma cabal.”

CDC ghosting

Although VAERS issues were especially noticeable during COVID, they went back almost two decades.

In 2007, the CDC awarded Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC) a $1 million grant to study VAERS and propose improvements. However, after HPHC submitted its findings and recommendations in 2010, the CDC abruptly cut off contact—effectively ghosting the researchers. The project was left unfinished, and the recommendations were left unaddressed.

TruthSnitch suggested two possible takeaways from the CDC’s abrupt silence and lack of follow-up:

1. You give the CDC the benefit of the doubt, assume deep down they have the safety of the public at heart and chalk up their monumental waste of money, time, and a good idea to bureaucratic incompetence.

2. You stop naively believing that the CDC cares ultimately about public safety and realize that the vaccine industry makes way too much money to allow public confidence in the safety of vaccines to be eroded by a surveillance system capable of giving the public a glimpse of the scope and magnitude of the adverse effects vaccines are actually responsible for. (Emphasis added.)

Disease scaremongering

The CDC is known to scaremonger in order to promote Pharma interests. Here's how the agency pulled it off with the flu vaccine "recipe."

In 2004, Glen Nowak, CDC Acting Director of Media Relations and Associate Director for Communications, NIP (National Immunization Program)/CDC, produced a PowerPoint titled "Seven-Step `Recipe' for Generating Interest in, and Demand for, Flu (or any other) Vaccination" instructing doctors and the media on flu scaremongering tactics to increase uptake of the flu vaccine. It even included a remake of a Tom Toles cartoon, below, to show just how it’s done. The first image is the actual cartoon while the second one is the CDS's remake to scare people so they will get flu shots.

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In an interview with NPR, Nowak explained that Pharma's complaints about a lack of vaccine uptake as the impetus for the presentation:

[D]emand had been low early into the 2003 flu season. "At that point, the manufacturers were telling us that they weren't receiving a lot of orders for vaccine for use in November or even December," recalled Dr Nowak on National Public Radio. "It really did look like we needed to do something to encourage people to get a flu shot." 

Scaremongering COVID?

Covid-1984’s tweet, below, points out that the CDC seems to be repurposing the “Recipe” for COVID.

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CDC Foundation

Industry funding and influence

The CDC operates a non-profit organization, the CDC Foundation, which receives substantial funding from pharmaceutical and other industries, as Rodef Shalom 613 reported.

‍Despite the CDC’s claims, a 2015 report in the BMJ, Center for Disease Control and Prevention: protecting the private good?, revealed that since 1983

“…the CDC has been authorized to accept “external “gifts” from industry and other private parties. In 1992, Congress passed legislation to encourage relationships between industry and the CDC by creating the non-profit CDC Foundation, which began operations in 1995.”

 . . . 

“[President and chief executive of the Institute for Family Health in New York Neil] Calman said, “Industry claims their scientific methodology ensures their studies are unbiased—just as the CDC claims money doesn’t affect their recommendations. Yet multiple studies clearly—and repeatedly—show that who sponsors a study, or issues a guideline, makes a difference.” 

. . . 

[Methodologist and emeritus professor of medicine at UCLA Jerome R] Hoffman said, “Most of us were shocked to learn the CDC takes funding from industry. Of course it is outrageous that industry apparently is allowed to punish the CDC if the agency conducts research that has the potential to cut into profits. But it was our government that made this very bad arrangement, so the way to fix it is not to ask the CDC to ‘pretty please be more ethical, and avoid conflicts of interest’; rather, as a society, we have to get the government to reject this devil’s bargain, by changing the rules so this can no longer happen.” (Emphasis added.)

Owns 56 vaccine patents

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Trump’s nominee to head the HHS) explains that the CDC owns 20 vaccine patents, which represents a significant conflict of interest for an agency tasked with approving and regulating vaccines.

State of the Nation thus investigated RFK Jr’s claim that “[t]he CDC is a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry and owned 20 vaccine patents.” The State of the Nation author noted that Mark Blaxill, an intellectual property expert, discovered that it wasn’t 20 vaccine patents, but 56.[1]

The CDC’s involvement in vaccine manufacture runs deep. These are the specific areas in which Blaxhill found patents belonging to the CDC:

“There are CDC patents applicable to vaccines for Flu, Rotavirus, Hepatitis A, HIV, Anthrax, Rabies, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, Group A Strep, Pneumococcal disease, Meningococcal disease, RSV, Gastroenteritis, Japanese encephalitis, SARS, Rift Valley Fever, and chlamydophila pneumoniae.

There is a CDC patent for “Nucleic acid vaccines for prevention of flavivirus infection,” which has applications in vaccines for Zika, West Nile virus, Dengue fever, tick-borne encephalitis virus, yellow fever, Palm Creek virus, and Parramatta River virus.

CDC also has several patents for administering various ”shots” via aerosol delivery systems for vaccines.

There’s a CDC patent on a process for vaccine quality control by “quantifying proteins in a complex preparation of uni- or multivalent commercial or research vaccine preparations.”

There’s a CDC patent on a method “for producing a model for evaluating the antiretroviral effects of drugs and vaccines.”

CDC has a patent for companies who want to test their respiratory system applicable vaccine on an artificial lung system.

If a vaccine maker is concerned that their vaccine might contain a human rhinovirus, CDC has a patent on a process for determining if such contamination exists.

CDC has a patent on an assay to assist vaccine makers in finding antigen-specific antibodies in a biological sample.

CDC holds a patent that provides vaccine makers with a method of “reducing the replicative fitness of a pathogen by deoptimizing codons.”  Asserting that, “pathogens with deoptimized codons can be used to increase the phenotypic stability of attenuated vaccines.”

The agency also holds a patent on adjuvants for a vaccine used on premature infants and young babies.

There is a CDC patent to cover a vaccine for an infection induced by a tape worm found in pork.

They even have patents that cover vaccines for animal illnesses including Canarypox virus, Fowlpox virus, Sealpox virus, dog flu and monkey cancer.”

State of the Nation then asks:

Does this seem like a public health agency making “independent” vaccine recommendations, or a private company with an impressive portfolio to which one might look for investment opportunities? (Emphasis added.)

A plausible explanation for COVID "failures"

Justin Hart is seeking to understand the reasons behind the failures of COVID 'experts.' The decades-long partnership between the CDC and Pharma offers a plausible explanation for many of the "failures" during the pandemic—"failures" that not only fueled public fear but also contributed to a surge in vaccine uptake."