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Okay, so welcome to this real live, unedited live stream of rounding the news, your weekly
news roundup brought to you by Rounding the Earth, hosted by me, Liam Sturgis.
That's better though.
Ahoy mateys.
So let's get right into it, ladies and gentlemen.
Today's live stream, today's episode is called Dear in the Headlights.
And that's because I can't think of a better way to describe the face that this soon to
be former Biden administration official tends to bear.
But before we get started, just a reminder that this show carries on because of your
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But enough of the plugs.
Ladies and gentlemen, let's jump right in.
We're going to do a couple of rapid fire news stories.
Did you know that Elon Musk had stepped down as CEO of Twitter?
I vaguely remember some poll where he said, if people agree that I should step down, I
will.
But that was a while ago.
In any case, from Zero Hedge, its official top NBC Universal ad exec and World Economic
Forum task force chair is Twitter's new CEO.
Its official moments ago, NBC confirmed that its head of advertising is leaving the company.
Musk has finally tweeted to confirm her position, noting that Yetterino will focus primarily
on business operations while he will focus on product design and new technology.
And as Musk says in this tweet, looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform
into X, the everything app.
Very interesting.
And moving on to another current event that many people are talking about.
Migrants rush across US border in final hours before Title 42 expires.
I read this from the Globe and Mail.
Migrants rushed across the Mexico border Thursday, racing to enter the United States before pandemic-related
asylum restrictions are lifted in a shift that threatens to put a historic strain on
the nation's beleaguered immigration system.
The imminent end of the rules, known as Title 42, stirred fear among migrants that changes
would make it more difficult for them to stay in the US.
And the Biden administration was dealt a potentially serious legal setback when a federal judge
temporarily blocked its attempt to more quickly release migrants when border patrol holding
stations are full.
This is related to the invocation of a pre-existing law, but during the Trump administration,
under the guise of pandemic measures, to make it…
I don't know.
It's related to immigration.
Everyone's freaking out.
I'm not totally sure if this has actually resulted in a huge strain on the system beyond
what has already been there for a while, but I'll be interested in seeing what others
are talking about on this topic today.
Okay.
Now, moving on to our main story.
Because, speaking of pandemic measures, this is the face of Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who
has announced her resignation as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
in the United States.
Her official reason cited was the nation's progress in coping with COVID-19.
The announcement also happened to coincide with the World Health Organization's declaration
that the global health emergency related to COVID-19 has ended, which we mentioned last
week.
Now, Walensky was nominated to the directorship by President-elect Joe Biden on December 7,
2020, while she was employed at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and
Brigham and Women's Hospital.
She had replaced the outgoing Robert Redfield, who served in the administration of President
Donald Trump.
Dr. Anthony Fauci got to stick around, but not Dr. Redfield.
Now, as noted by NPR, Walensky's career in medicine started during the height of the
HIV AIDS crisis.
From 2014 to 2015, she served as chair of the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council,
a team within the NIH tasked with advising high-level officials on the planning, coordination,
and evaluation of research and other HIV AIDS activities conducted or supported by the National
Institutes of Health, including the Director of the Office of AIDS Research, the Secretary
of Health and Human Services, the Assistant Secretary for Health, and the Director of
the NIH.
Now, Walensky's profile on the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's Prevention
Policy Modeling Lab website describes her as being internationally recognized for motivating
U.S. policy toward the promotion of routine HIV screening and for her work on effective
and efficient strategies of HIV care in South Africa.
She's a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association
of American Physicians, not to be confused with the American Association of Physicians
and Surgeons, and has also served as a member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services' Panel on Anti-Retroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents.
Prior to taking office in the Biden administration in 2021, Walensky had already been actively
engaged on the question of the COVID-19 pandemic.
She was among the first signatories of the John Snow memorandum published in The Lancet
and a few other places simultaneously in October 2020.
The memo asserted that the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is several-fold higher than
that of seasonal influenza and infection can lead to persisting illness, including in young,
previously healthy people.
That's what they stated, based on the false premise that pre-existing immunity to the
novel virus did not exist within the population.
It called for clear communication about the risks posed by COVID-19 and effective strategies
to combat them, such as physical distancing, face coverings, and continuing restrictions
which must be supported by financial and social programs.
The memo is worth reading, as it comes across very much like a one-for-one counter to the
Great Barrington Declaration, which was published the very same month.
In fact, that seems to have been exactly the point.
As per the Great Barrington Declaration's Wikipedia page, they call it the counter-memorandum.
There are thousands of signatories on this thing now.
We have a page on the Campfire Wiki with so many thousands of names, there is no way we
could possibly link up, you know, it's very poorly formatted at the moment.
It was a big copy paste, there are so many names on the list, but there was an initial
set of signatories, probably 30, maybe 20.
Other signatories, in addition to Walensky from that initial crew, include the infamous
David Fissman, who argued it was dangerous for the vaccinated to mix with the unvaccinated.
Also Isabel Eckerle, don't know if I pronounced that right, a collaborator of the more infamous
Christian Drozdin, who was responsible for pushing through a proprietary PCR assay that
set the standard for PCR testing for SARS-CoV-2 around the world, but it turns out his paper
was fraudulent and he had the conflict of interest and oh dear, oh dear.
Also Angela Rasmussen, who piled on Doctors Spreading Misinformation, co-authored that
article with the equally pleasant Timothy Caulfield, while also working at Vito Intervac,
an institution at the University of Saskatchewan developing their own COVID-19 vaccine and
possibly even manufacturing other companies COVID-19 vaccines.
Well, now back to Walensky, on November 19th, 2020, the journal Health Affairs published
a study led by Walensky with a rather odd premise.
Now if you go to Look, you'll find this piece is now hidden behind a paywall, which is sort
of odd for COVID-19 research.
They tend to have this open science framework that they apply and by they I mean everybody,
you tend to not have to pay for them.
But anyway, an archived version remains available titled Clinical Outcomes of a COVID-19 Vaccine
Implementation Over Efficacy.
The study argues that factors related to implementation will contribute more to the success of vaccination
programs than a vaccine's efficacy as determined in clinical trials.
Now I thought that's funny, she must have seen the data coming out of the Pfizer-BioNTech
clinical trial, because that would be a fairly reasonable conclusion to come to.
You know, maybe we should not focus so much on what the clinical trials are saying.
And I would direct everybody, if you haven't yet seen or haven't been following the wonderful
work of OpenVate or Pierre and Josh Getsgo, I highly recommend you go check them out,
because they're doing fantastic work laying out the, how do they put it, mathematical
proofs of fraud for at least the Pfizer-BioNTech trial.
But specifically though, within this study, Walensky and her team warn that things like
manufacturing or deployment delays, significant vaccine hesitancy, or greater epidemic severity
would all make the COVID-19 vaccines work less well, and that therefore health officials
should invest greater financial resources and attention to vaccine production and distribution
programs to redouble efforts to promote public confidence in COVID-19 vaccines, and to encourage
continued adherence to other mitigation approaches even after a vaccine becomes available.
In other words, Walensky set the stage for the inevitable COVID-19 vaccine failures to
be blamed on any combination of the following unrelated things.
One, a rollout that is deemed to be too slow.
Two, any arbitrary number of people who decline to take the shot for any reason whatsoever.
Three, any increase in illness or perceived increase in illness that can be blamed on
COVID-19.
Four, not enough money.
And five, people not continuing to do non-vaccine things like locking down, wearing face coverings,
working from home, etc.
You know, all of the things that people were promised they'd be able to stop doing once
they got vaccinated.
Thus, it shouldn't be surprising that Walensky then led the charge in declaring the pandemic
of the unvaccinated less than one year later.
I was surprised to see this was in July 2021 that this was the attitude taken, or July
2022.
I can't remember.
2021 was the dark year, if I recall correctly.
Now a comment on the study from someone named Paul G. sums up quite well why Walensky's
approach has always been completely backwards.
I'll read it for you.
This article is a nice theoretical discussion that relies on models, but it is woefully
short on real-world applicability or substance.
Instead of trying to persuade or trick people into believing the vaccines will work, try
developing and publishing actual lab-based and real-world evidence that shows that they
work and what that will mean.
Massive PR campaigns to promote vaccine acceptance and government threats to force people to
get vaccinated will likely promote a tremendous backlash if the vaccines don't work.
In other words, don't lie to people and don't try to con them into accepting vaccines.
Produce something that actually does work and that is shown to be effective and people
will line up to get their shots.
The irony, of course, is in the reply from Eric, who offers as rebuttal links to the
Phase III clinical trial interim reports from the aforementioned Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca.
The exact trials that Walensky argues are essentially irrelevant.
In the acknowledgments, Walensky discloses funding from the National Institutes of Health,
Massachusetts General Hospital, where of course she was employed at this time, and CNN of
all things.
All of that took place before she was hired to the Biden administration to lead the Center
of Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, which of course was one of the most important
public health institutions making decisions about everything from vaccines, as we've seen,
to face coverings and eviction moratoriums and basically anything that they could attempt
to sway policy over.
But then she did become that.
And then we get to the question of conflicts of interest, which is my bread and butter.
By the way, this wasn't supposed to be my main story this week.
I just, once I started, I hate to use the term rabbit hole, but once I got started down
the rabbit hole, I couldn't stop.
Beyond the well-covered inconsistencies in Walensky's statements regarding COVID-19
and associated vaccine products, Walensky has faced criticism for perceived or possible
conflicts of interest.
Her husband is Loren Walensky, a renowned pediatric oncology researcher at the Dana
Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University.
And I want to give credit to Matthew Crawford here, because I stumbled on this particular
factoid and this line of information on the Campfire Wiki when I was looking for any information
that we already had on Rochelle Walensky, but I saw that Matthew had added something
in, which was this Red State article.
So thank you, Matthew.
This is why the Campfire Wiki is so vital.
So as detailed in an article published by Red State in August 2021, Loren Walensky co-founded
a biotechnology company called Litica Therapeutics in October 2019, which swiftly received a
$16.9 million grant from the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the
government agency that now employs Rochelle.
And in fact, she was already working on a number of their task forces.
You could say she was already employed with them.
The grant was issued February 18th, 2020, right before a pretty crazy time.
Now the specific funding program in question, CARB-X, which stands for Combating Antibiotic
Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator, CARB-X is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, the German
Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, NIAID, which was until recently led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United Kingdom
Department of Health and Social Care through the Global Antimicrobial Resistance Innovation
Fund or GAMRIF, and the Wellcome Trust, a who's who, of global health entities.
Now CARB-X is a global nonprofit partnership accelerating antibacterial products to address
drug resistant bacteria.
And the grant that it awarded to Litica, I'll bring it back up now, is intended to, I quote,
develop antibacterial peptides with broad activity against multidrug resistant bacteria.
With this in mind, consider the role that bacterial pneumonia seems to have played in
a significant portion of COVID-19 related fatalities, as recently highlighted just a
week ago by Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.
The headline I have on the screen, Secondary Bacterial Pneumonia Drove Many COVID-19 Deaths.
Machine Learning Finds No Evidence of Cytokine Storm in Critically Ill Patients with COVID-19.
Now, of course, this is not new information.
The fact that it's being covered in this way perhaps is new.
And it's very important that people understand, I think, the facts here.
Now it's not new to most people who are paying attention.
In their October 2021 paper titled Nature of the COVID-era Public Health Disaster in
the USA from All Cause Mortality and Socio-Geoeconomic and Climatic Data, researchers Denis Rancourt,
Marine Baudin, and Jérémie Mercier identified efforts across the world, really, to limit
the use of antibiotics in patients diagnosed or suspected of having COVID-19.
They find antibiotic prescriptions dropped significantly in April 2020 and remained low,
allowing for secondary bacterial pneumonia to overtake patients who otherwise would have
likely recovered.
I have on the screen right here just a selection of graphs showing the prescription patterns.
It looks as though this represents the same sort of waves you could overlay it with the
flu season, the cold and flu season every year, and that's probably when these tend
to be prescribed the most.
And you can see a tremendous drop in there are six different antibiotics on the screen,
antibiotic products, and all of them dropped.
Very interesting.
Now Rancourt and colleagues also note that the suppression of the use of specifically
ivermectin likely also contributed given its broad antiviral and antibacterial properties,
and they cite past research on its use against tuberculosis as an example, something that
one Mark Kulak of Hucitonic Live might find relevant given his stream yesterday.
Now if Walensky's Lyteca therapeutics is tasked with developing new antibiotic products
to treat lung infections like pneumonia, it stands to reason that the use of the many
existing antibiotics and ivermectin and likely other yet to be identified or as of yet not
widely discussed repurposed drugs, the use of those would stand in the way of Lyteca
therapeutics fulfilling their CARB-X grant obligations.
Hence conflict of interest.
Then there's the fun fact that in May of 2022, Lyteca was accepted into the Blue Night
Program funded by Johnson & Johnson and BARDA.
Now we mentioned BARDA before, but know that BARDA sits within, rather alongside Walensky's
CDC within the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
Johnson & Johnson of course developed an adenoviral vector COVID-19 vaccine under its Janssen
subsidiary which received hundreds of millions of dollars in United States government funding
through Operation Warp Speed to develop their product.
Interestingly the page on Lyteca's website that formally detailed Walensky's role as
scientific co-founder is no longer available except by Wayback Machine of course, but he
does still appear on the front page under the leadership heading.
Not far above the scientific advisory board section that includes a former Janssen vice
president named Marco Gattardis.
But Lyteca is not Lauren Walensky's first rodeo.
He also serves as a member of the scientific advisory board and consultant for A.Luron
Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company developing treatments against side effects
caused by cancer chemotherapy.
A.Luron's investors are a who's who of pharmaceutical industry giants including Eli Lilly, Novartis,
Roche and SR1 which is GlaxoSmithKline's venture capital firm which recently I think
spun off into its own thing.
Now the first paper published on the news section of Lyteca's website titled Design
of Stapled Antimicrobial Peptides that are Stable, Non-Toxic and Kill Antibiotic Resistant
Bacteria in Mice.
This study discloses a partnership between A.Luron and Walensky's employer the Dana
Farber Cancer Institute.
So just to confirm the paper on the new company that started in 2019 or the on the website
of the new company, the study discussing the core product or the core technology underlying
that new company, within that first paper there's an acknowledgement that basically
it's come out of a partnership at least somewhat between the older company A.Luron and Dana
Farber Cancer Institute.
Okay, now incidentally the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and I tried to put all the logos
on here but there were too many so I'm just gonna read out the logos that would be fun
to see altogether.
But Dana Farber Cancer Institute has itself been funded by a large number of relevant
organizations such as Abbott, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bayer, BD, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
Biogen, BlackRock, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson,
York, Novartis, Pfizer and Takeda, all of whom profited greatly from diagnostics, experimental
treatments and novel vaccine candidates for COVID-19.
But additional donors of note are Donald and Melania Trump, the Trump Foundation, the Doris
Duke Charitable Foundation, whose by the way board of directors includes Anthony Fauci and
the former FDA Commissioner slash current GAVI director Margaret Hamburg, as well as
the International Monetary Fund, literally the IMF, one of the most powerful financial
institutions in the world.
But not to be forgotten, the Steve and Michelle Kirsch Foundation and Open Society Foundations
and the World Health Organization.
Now Lauren Walensky's lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute acknowledges further research
funding from the National Cancer Institute and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
Again, incidentally, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society received at least two grants from
Pfizer in 2021.
I'm sure there's even more.
I just happen to have that information handy.
So according to NPR, employees at the CDC were actually unaware of the news of Walensky's
departure until they themselves heard the announcement on the news.
She is set to remain in office until June 30th of this year.
And as of today, no replacement has been named.
So I found it interesting that her departure was announced so suddenly that people didn't
appear to know about it and I remarked to Sam, my partner yesterday, that because she
thought it seems odd that her employees wouldn't know about it.
And I said, well, I kind of think she probably didn't know about it.
You start to wonder if part of the reason why someone like Dr. Walensky always looks
like a deer in the headlights, like she's not totally sure what's going on, maybe because
she herself is often being told, perhaps at the last minute, perhaps being guided by her
daily agenda, you know, there's a sense that people don't always sound prepared.
They don't always know what they're talking about in positions like this when they're
speaking on television.
And it may be because your life when you take a position like this ceases being your own,
your days, your time, your schedule.
They're not put together by you.
You have an entire agency.
You have multiple agencies in the United States government, one of the largest bureaucracies
in the world, putting together what you're going to do each day, what you're going to
say, what your positions on various issues of scientific matters are going to be.
And it's entirely possible that in the grand scheme of things on the chessboard of whatever
we're doing here, the plandemonium, as Matthew would would would coin it, perhaps Walensky
is being moved.
Perhaps this won't be a, you know, sit down and shut up and we'll never hear from you
again.
It's either a promotion to something like NIAID or something in whatever the next administration
will be or most likely back into industry.
My point, I suppose, is it looks like this family connection never left industry.
And it seems as though this Walensky family, at least Rochelle, having grown up in the
era of the Fauci HIV empire, was always an influential player, never quite independent
enough maybe to wield such a position of public authority.
But in any case, I hope this has been educational.
A reminder to join us over at roundingtheearth.locals.com where I will be posting the show notes for
today's episode within probably about 20 minutes of today's episode finishing up.
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And yeah, this has been great.
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I hope you have a fantastic weekend.
This has been Rounding the News.
We will see you again shortly.
Bye.