The Science Too Is Captured

WHO team member Peter Daszak leaves his hotel after the World Health Organization (WHO) team wrapped up its investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus in Wuhan in China's central Hubei Province on Feb. 10, 2021. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

The “nonprofit” called EcoHealth Alliance currently has 12 active grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) totaling $34 million, if you can believe it.

Recall that EcoHealth is the institution that Fauci chose as a conduit through which to fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology after gain-of-function research became verboten due to changes in the law. The head of EcoHealth, Robert Dazsak, was also one of the first voices to spin virus messaging, writing in the New York Times on Feb. 28, 2020.

In a sworn deposition, Fauci could barely recall his name, though they have worked closely together for years.

Do you smell a rat? So did the Office of the Inspector General, which just released a report that reads as follows:

“Despite identifying potential risks associated with research being performed under the EcoHealth awards, we found that NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance with some requirements. Although NIH and EcoHealth had established monitoring procedures, we found deficiencies in complying with those procedures limited NIH and EcoHealth’s ability to effectively monitor Federal grant awards and subawards to understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas, and take corrective action. Using its discretion, NIH did not refer the research to HHS for an outside review for enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPPs) because it determined the research did not involve and was not reasonably anticipated to create, use, or transfer an ePPP.”

Shall we translate? NIH (Fauci) was just throwing money around. Still is. We can assume that the recipients are not random. It all happens for a reason. And keep in mind that the Inspector General only examined grants up to 2021.

Not surprised? I’m not either but I’m still bugged. The whole point of NIH is to fund research that falls outside normal channels of profit-and-loss calculation. We know that capitalistic companies do their own R&D in hopes of profits down the line. But what of research involving repurposed drugs and processes that don’t meet the normal standards of the cash nexus? That’s where NIH is supposed to come in.

During the last three years, very little of that has happened. That’s because NIH has been thoroughly captured. Everyone knows it. But no one seems to know what to do about it.

We are gradually adjusting to the weird reality of what it means to lose trust in such institutions.

Last evening, I organized a talk, under the auspices of Brownstone Institute, by Dr. Pierre Kory, who has been on the frontlines in the battling over therapeutics now going on three years. Previously he was a quiet medical doctor in clinical practice. And he is a very good one: he treated me when I got COVID. But to his astonishment when lockdowns came, he could not get his patients what they needed.

Seeing no one else stand up for what everyone knew—that there are repurposed drugs that work for respiratory infections—he threw himself into writing. He started noticing that the main journals were refusing to accept papers showing what everyone knew to be true. He further noticed that the studies supposedly debunking Ivermectin and HCQ were poorly constructed, designed to fail. The conclusion is predetermined.

At some point, and in light of all his writing, he started getting calls from the U.S. Senate, Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) office in particular. He stepped up his game and went into full battle mode. His career started getting shaky. He was being leaned on and paid to shut up. He refused several different positions that made his silence part of the contract.

I’m sure you know this, but the backstory is now firmly established. The vaccines would have a much harder time obtaining Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA if there were widely available and cheaper alternatives. Therefore, the normal therapeutics used all over the world came to be effectively banned from normal use in the United States, UK, and other nations captured by Big Pharma.

Horsepaste, they said. This was a line from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, constructed by the PR team which came to be celebrated inside the agency for garnering so many likes and shares. Never mind that the drug received a Nobel Prize and has saved millions of lives. The whole thing felt Orwellian because it is.

In the course of all this upheaval, Dr. Kory really did stand out as a truth teller. Today he has finally found a way to practice medicine without being hounded and hectored by the captured agencies regulating his profession, who are now attempting to ban doctors who depart from the government line. He is now licensed under a Native tribe that no government can touch.

We all know that life in the once-free United States is fundamentally broken. So many of the commanding heights of society are captured by government and its connected interests. This obviously includes mainstream media. But it extends far beyond that to all of Big Tech. And also academia. Nearly all the professions and their regulators are captured too.

This is not just regrettable. In a crisis such as we’ve lived through for three years, it becomes a matter of life and death. In Mexico throughout the whole time, they had no big lockdowns and you could always buy Ivermectin at the pharmacy without a prescription. Not so here.

We look around the United States today and still see the prosperity and the capital and the innovation. There are still skyscrapers going up in New York, for example. And there are still innovations in technology that are garnering billions in start-up capital. The stock markets still work and the banks are not yet entirely run by government.

But one does wonder: how much of the prosperity around is due to the legacy we inherit rather than the current realities all around us? We are not yet a totalitarian society but we are far less free than we were just three years ago. The trendlines do not look good either. The ability of the population to control or even influence the decisions and judgments of the power elites running the system has become ever more elusive.

Shocked by the presentation I heard last night, I began the day today by digging through the latest GDP report. The headline number doesn’t seem half bad: 4th quarter growth is annualized at 2.9 percent. Seems fine. But then you look more carefully. I’ll just quote the release:

“The increase in real GDP reflected private inventory investment, consumer spending, federal government spending, state and local government spending, and nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by decreases in residential fixed investment and exports. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, decreased.”

None of this makes sense. Three levels of government spending more does not mean economic growth. It means sucking more capital out of private markets. If someone steals the radio from our car, we don’t cheer the improvement in our driving experience. Nor should we cheer when government spends more money as if that is making us richer. This ridiculous claim has been around since the 1930s and is somehow never corrected in the GDP calculation.

The increase in private inventory is a good sign but note the main industry: oil and gas. This is happening to meet energy needs but it occurs in defiance of government’s own plans to somehow transition the world away from reliance on fossil fuels so that we can live off breezes and sunbeams, in the immortal words of George Gilder.

As for consumer spending, check out the increase in consumer debt. It is awful. Spending funded by debt is not a sign of prosperity.

Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker

As for imports, the idea that importing goods should subtract from GDP is absolutely nuts, if we are to believe that GDP is supposed to be some kind of measure of output. One would suppose that we would have graduated past late-19th century notions of national autarky and realized by now that trade with other nations is a good thing but nope.

Despite the headline number, then, this latest report does not give much reason to celebrate—with the exception perhaps of the booming oil and gas sector. That has to give every red-blooded skeptic of Greta Thunberg a distinct feeling of Schadenfreude.

I’ve also noticed over the last two years that the data-collecting and data-announcing agencies of the federal government seem more and more politicized. We used to be able to count on them to be above it all. Now we see very subtle introductions of spin in them, and that is especially true with the labor numbers. No longer can one trust the headlines. You have to dig through the numbers yourself.

We are gradually adjusting to the weird reality of what it means to lose trust. We know they are lying. But we don’t know yet what the full truth is. That is a very odd situation in which we find ourselves, searching for facts and meaning but not knowing entirely where to find them. So much of what we once believed in has been shattered. It’s a terrible feeling. The future very much seems like an abyss.

Still, my own advice I take from the ancient wisdom: stay close to those you love, find hope in immutable values, keep working to rebuild from the disaster, and remember that the future can be better if we take the right steps.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.