Timeline to Covid Tyranny: Part One
Constructing the Biosecurity Empire (1999–2018)
Introduction: In Timeline to Covid Tyranny: Part One – Constructing the Biosecurity Empire (1999–2018), HFDF writer and researcher, Mike Bryant takes a deep dive into the events leading up to the covid-19 pandemic, arguing that it wasn’t just a sudden crisis but the result of years of planning by powerful entities. Covering key legislative, policy, and purported public health moments from 1999 to 2018, HFDF explores how two decades of measures helped set the stage for the global response to covid-19, uncovering that the pandemic response wasn’t just about public health—it was about expanding control and reshaping society in ways most people never saw coming.
Five years ago, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization’s Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, declared that “COVID-19” was now officially categorized as a global pandemic. He added, “This is not just a public health crisis, it is a crisis that will touch every sector.”
Tedros’ cataclysmic emergency declaration would indeed reverberate throughout the world. In fact, the impacts of this catastrophe are being felt to this day.
On this fifth anniversary of his declaration, some might question the need to revisit the covid story. Why not just learn from the “mistakes” of that public health crisis and move on from the events of 2020?
The answer to that question stretches beyond the fact that to date there has been no accountability for the years of pain and suffering caused by globe-wide government measures and mandates imposed on many millions—even billions—of people. To suggest—or, in some cases, demand—that we move past this historical event, as if it never happened, is the ultimate gaslight and a form of pacification and control.
The processes that led to the covid tyranny have not been properly revealed for what they are. Indeed, they are still in motion. The notion that we are out of the woods is an illusion. All the administrative, legislative, and financial infrastructure built before and during the covid era is intact. Thus, emergency countermeasures could return with the flip of the switch. We could once again be forced to bear the brunt of draconian decrees and repressive measures mandated by public health authorities.
For these reasons, it is vital we not forget what happened in the years 2020 through 2023. We must understand the covid campaign was not an isolated episode but, rather, a highly organized undertaking disguised as a public health emergency. This multi-faceted structural event was the culmination of the Deep State’s decades-old determination to institute a raft of invasive policies—including the worldwide suspension of basic civil liberties—to salvage their crumbling financial empire and usher in a complete transformation of society.
So, at this critical juncture of the five-year anniversary of the declared global emergency, we will take a trip through a timeline of ever-expanding medical tyranny. By tracing the continuum of medical-and-biosecurity-related decisions and developments that have brought us to where we are today, we hope we can play a small role in reversing this totalitarian trend and in returning humanity to individual sovereignty and healthcare freedom of choice.
January 11, 1999 — Time magazine publishes a special issue, with a cover announcing “The Future of Medicine — How Genetic Engineering Will Change Us In The Next Century.”
Summer 1999 — The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is formally established.
November 1999 — The Gates Foundation donates $750 million to set up the GAVI Alliance (initially called the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, now called GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance) for the purpose of accelerating “the delivery of life-saving vaccines to the world’s poorest children.”
Spring 2000 — The Vaccine Research Center opens its doors as Building 40 on the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus. The origins of the Vaccine Research Center date back to 1996, following discussions about HIV/AIDS research that were held by President Bill Clinton and National Institute Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci.
Fall 2000 — Bill Gates visits a child health clinic in New Delhi, India, announces a $25 million grant to support polio vaccinations there, then helps administer oral polio vaccines to Indian children. Melinda does the same with children in Thailand.
2001 — Epidemiologist and Imperial College Professor Neil Ferguson convinces Prime Minister Tony Blair to have 6 million cattle slaughtered to stop an alleged foot-and-mouth epidemic.
June 22–23, 2001 — Operation Dark Winter is the first of five tabletop exercises simulating a health crisis that the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security would sponsor between 2001 and 2019. A hypothetical smallpox attack, the Dark Winter war game takes place at Andrews Air Force Base in Camp Springs, Maryland, less than three months before the events of 9/11. Several congressmen, a former CIA director, a former FBI director, government insiders, and invited members of the press are involved in simulating the response to a smallpox biological weapon attack against the American public. During the drill, authorities pretend to try to stop the spread of “dangerous misinformation” and “unverified” cures. Participants discuss the possibility of removing civil liberties and of enforcing “martial rule.”
September 10, 2001 — Donald Rumsfeld reports that the Pentagon cannot account for a missing $2.3 trillion.
September–October 2001 — Shortly after 9/11, four letters in envelopes containing anthrax are mailed to two members of the media in New York City and to two US senators in their Washington, D.C., offices. The anthrax attacks allegedly kill five people and sicken seventeen others.
October 23, 2001 — The USA PATRIOT Act is introduced in Congress. It is signed into law on October 26, 2001.
October 23, 2001 — On the same day the Patriot Act is introduced, the first draft of The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act is also introduced to Congress. It confers extraordinary power to state governors and health departments in the event of a public health emergency. Though initially drafted in 1999 by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), what Congress receives is a revision written by the Center for Law and the Public’s Health (a collaboration between Georgetown and Johns Hopkins universities).
November 28, 2001 — The US President’s Council on Bioethics (2001–2009) (PCBE) is appointed by President George W. Bush to advise his administration on “bioethical issues that may emerge as a consequence of advances in biomedical science and technology.” PCBE is later replaced by Barack Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
December 21, 2001 — After undergoing another revision, a new draft of the MSEHPA (see October 23, 2001) is released to state legislatures to help them revise their own public health laws to control epidemics. The draft’s authors, Lawrence Gostin et al, assert that uniform emergency response legislation is needed in all 50 states. As of August 1, 2011, forty states have passed various forms of MSEHPA legislation.
2002 — The same scaremongering epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson (see 2001), calculates that mad cow disease will kill some 50,000 Britons—and another 150,000 if transmitted to sheep. The actual death toll in the UK is said to be 177, though the cause of their demise is never firmly established.
May 2002 — An alleged outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV-1) begins in China’s Guangdong Province and spreads throughout countries in Asia for eighteen months.
June 12, 2002 — In the wake of 9/11, the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act is signed into law by President George W. Bush. PHSBPRA establishes procedures for preparing for acts of bioterrorism and public health emergencies. It is accompanied by the creation of a medical system that coordinates teams of health professionals in emergency situations.
November 25, 2002 — The Homeland Security Act (HSA) is enacted.
January 31, 2003 — The first so-called “super-spreader” of SARS, a fish seller named Zhou Zuofen, checks into Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, where he allegedly infects thirty nurses and doctors.
March 1, 2003 — The National Pharmaceutical Stockpile is renamed the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) program. It is jointly managed by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
March 12, 2003 — The World Health Organization (WHO) issues a global alert about the SARS outbreak and institutes worldwide surveillance.
March 15, 2003 — The WHO declares that the new disease SARS-CoV-1 (see May 2002) is a worldwide health threat.
May 27, 2003 — The United States Leadership Against Global HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003 is signed into law by President George W. Bush, creating the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. (PEPFAR).
NOTE: Per Wikipedia, PEPFAR has “provided cumulative funding for HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention, and research since its inception, making it the largest global health program focused on a single disease in history until the COVID-19. PEPFAR is implemented by a combination of U.S. government agencies in over 50 countries and overseen by the Global AIDS Coordinator at the United States Department of State.”
From April 2014 to January 2021, Deborah Birx was the Ambassador-at-Large and US Global AIDS Coordinator for PEPFAR.
According to investigative journalist Corey Lynn of Corey’s Digs, “Well over a hundred billion dollars has siphoned through the hands of individuals with scandalous histories, with over $90 billion from the US Government (taxpayers) alone, via PEPFAR.” She continues:
“The U.S. Government’s PEPFAR is the largest funder of any nation to a single disease in the world and [is] the largest donor to the Global Fund, to the tune of over $90 billion to date. Despite this, due to the fact that the Global Fund is located in Geneva, Switzerland, it is not subject to U.S. taxation, jurisdiction, or law. George W. Bush’s 2006 executive order afforded the Global Fund additional exemptions, privileges, and immunities.
“Three U.S. Presidents, over 35 governments, the UNDP, the Global Fund, GAVI, and over two dozen major non-profits along with countless smaller ones, have been cashing in for nearly two decades.
“Bill and Melinda Gates, Jeffrey Sachs, Kofi Annan, and Amir Attaran are listed as the founders of the Global Fund, but who really strategized and implemented its structure, its funding, and its ‘immunity’ status?”
September 8–10, 2003 — The US Department of State’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism organizes an international bioterrorism exercise dubbed Global Mercury with the CDC, the NIH, the FDA, and the WHO. Over a fifty-six-hour period, public health technocrats coordinate communications and lockstep response between “trusted agents” from the GHSAG nations (the United States, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Mexico) during a simulated outbreak after self-inoculated terrorists spread smallpox to countries around the world.
July 21, 2004 — The Project BioShield Act of 2004, a federal program to develop, acquire, stockpile, and distribute medical countermeasures to protect the US against weapons of mass destruction, is signed into law by President George W. Bush. An amendment to the Public Health Service Act, Project BioShield authorizes the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “conduct and support research and development activities regarding qualified countermeasures (a drug, biological product, or device to treat, identify, or prevent harm from any biological, chemical, radiological, or nuclear agent) that may cause a public health emergency affecting national security.”
Under Project BioShield, the DHS stockpiles billions of dollars worth of experimental vaccines. Using the authority of the DHS, the US government can now create a lucrative vaccine market for unapproved experimental vaccines using taxpayer funds.
2005 — The World Health Organization (WHO) establishes the International Health Regulations (IHR) for 2005. This binding instrument of international law enters into force on June 15, 2007.
January 2005 — An alleged outbreak of avian influenza H5N1 (affecting thirty-three out of sixty-four cities and provinces in Vietnam) is announced, leading to the forced killing of nearly 1.2 million poultry.
January 14, 2005 — Atlantic Storm is the second of five tabletop preparedness drills sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security between 2001 and 2019. It simulates bioterrorism attacks on the transatlantic community. Specifically, it portrays presidents, prime ministers, and other international leaders from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in a summit meeting, during which they respond to make-believe bioterrorist attacks in several countries. Atlantic Storm’s organizers were the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the Center for Transatlantic Relations of Johns Hopkins University, and the Transatlantic Biosecurity Network.
May 2005 — Following the alleged SARS outbreak of 2002/2003, the European Union establishes the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDPC).
August 2005 — Neil Ferguson says in an interview that bird flu could kill as many as 200 million people worldwide. He warns that failure to take swift action will be catastrophic for the United Kingdom: “If the virus got as far as Britain, it would effectively be too late.” Once again inflating the likely number of deaths, Ferguson predicts that bird flu will kill 65,000 Britons. But the alleged virus does not reach Britain and the total number of deaths from the alleged disease was 282 worldwide.
September 30, 2005 — David Nabarro, newly appointed Senior United Nations System Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza, warns the world that an outbreak of avian influenza might kill 5 million to 150 million people. The same day, $4 billion is appropriated to develop vaccines and treatments for avian influenza in the US and $3.1 billion is appropriated to stockpile Tamiflu.
October 17, 2005 — The Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005, nicknamed “Bioshield Two,” is introduced with the goal of shortening the pharmaceutical development process for new vaccines and drugs in case of a pandemic. Its other aim is to protect vaccine-makers and the pharmaceutical industry from legal liability for vaccine injuries. The proposed bill would create a new federal agency, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA), which would act “as the single point of authority” to promote advanced research and development of drugs and vaccines in response to bioterrorism and natural disease outbreaks, while shielding the agency from public Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
December 30, 2005 — The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act), passed by Congress, is signed into law by President George W. Bush. It authorizes the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to issue a declaration that provides immunity from liability for any loss caused, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from the use of “countermeasures to diseases, threats, and conditions determined in the Declaration to constitute a present or credible risk of a future public health emergency.”
February 12, 2006 — An article in The New York Times introduces the idea of social distancing so as not to transmit avian flu.
November 2006 — A paper titled Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza is published at Pub Med.
December 19, 2006 — The Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) Public Law No. 109–417 is signed into law by President George W. Bush. Title IV of PAHPA establishes the aforementioned Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to facilitate the research, development, and acquisition of medical countermeasures.
January 22, 2007 — Journalist Gina Kolata writes a New York Times article, “Faith in Quick Test Leads to Pandemic that Wasn’t,” illustrating how the PCR test is misused to create the illusion of a medical emergency.
August 24, 2007 — “Outbreaks of Respiratory Illness Mistakenly Attributed to Pertussis” is published by Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), an official publication of the CDC. The report explains how false pertussis “epidemics” are created by the use of the PCR assay.
2008 — Neil Ferguson co-founds the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, based at his university, Imperial College London. It is considered the leading body advising national governments on pathogen outbreaks. As such, it gets millions of dollars in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (the MRC Centre is one of the BMGF’s biggest grantees) and works with the UK National Health Service (NHS) and the US CDC and is tasked with supplying the WHO with analysis of urgent infectious disease problems.
April 26, 2009 — The Acting Secretary of HHS, Charles E. Johnson, issues a nationwide public health emergency declaration in response to rising human infections from the swine flu H1N1 virus. The declaration is a proactive and precautionary measure that allows the HHS Secretary to take appropriate action to respond to a public health emergency, including making grants, entering into contracts, and investigating the cause, treatment, or prevention of a disease or disorder.
May 2009 — The WHO changes the official definition of a pandemic from an infection of global proportions with a high mortality to simply an infection of global proportions, which no longer takes into account the severity of the disease. The change occurs shortly after the United States has declared a state of “national health emergency” despite only twenty people being infected with the swine flu virus and despite no deaths.
June 11, 2009 — The worldwide swine-flu pandemic level is raised to a Phase 6 alert, the highest alert assigned by the WHO. It is characterized as a global outbreak of a disease, indicating that a global pandemic is underway. The announcement of the swine flu pandemic initiates, for the first time ever, expensive measures against a pandemic, including worldwide production of vaccines and worldwide mass vaccinations. The Phase 6 alert is kept in place until August 2010, although there was neither any indication of nor serious health threats from H1N1 influenza.
July 17, 2009 — Legal immunity is set for the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine makers, as provided for by the PREP Act.
July 29, 2009 — A copy of a confidential warning letter is leaked by the UK government’s Health Protection Agency to the Daily Mail. It warns British neurologists that the swine flu vaccine—which was briefly used in a mass vaccination program in the US in 1976, until it was abruptly withdrawn because of dangerous side effects—is linked to Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS).
September 15, 2009 — Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair unveils a number of “new concerns” reflected in The National Intelligence Strategy (NIS), including the global economic crisis, a potential global pandemic (like avian or swine flu), and climate change.
“The National Intelligence Strategy lays out the strategic environment — challenges the U.S. faces not only from other nations and non-state actors, but also from global trends related to forces like economics, the environment, emerging technology, and pandemic disease.”
January 2010 — In a Global Research article, “WHO Scientist: Swine Flu Pandemic Was ‘Completely Exaggerated,'” author Steve Watson writes: “Professor Ulrich Keil, director of the WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Epidemiology, slammed the organization and its flu chief, Dr. Keiji Fukuda, while giving evidence before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). ‘With SARS, with avian flu, always the predictions are wrong. [. . .] Why don’t we learn from history?’ Keil said. ‘It [swine flu] produced a lot of turmoil in the public and was completely exaggerated in contrast with all the really important matters we have to deal with in public health.’ The WHO advisor on heart disease added that the decision had led to a ‘gigantic misallocation of health budgets.'”
January 29, 2010 — In a press release headlined “Bill and Melinda Gates Pledge $10 Billion in Call for Decade of Vaccines,” we learn that the Gateses have established the Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP) to enable greater coordination across all stakeholder groups. A Leadership Council of the Decade of Vaccines (DoV) Collaboration is also established. Two DoV members are NIAID Director Anthony Fauci and Dr. Christopher Elias, president and CEO of international nonprofit PATH. The collaboration brings together diverse stakeholders to develop the GVAP, which aims to stimulate the discovery, development, and delivery of vaccines.
February 5, 2010 — Journalist Michael Fumento publishes the article “Why the WHO Faked the Pandemic” in Forbes magazine.
May 2010 — The Rockefeller Foundation publishes “Scenarios For The Future Of Technology And International Development,” which includes a Lock Step Simulation Scenario (in which a coronavirus-like pandemic triggers the imposition of police-state controls on people’s movements, the economy, and other areas of society).
May 2010 — The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) issues a report criticizing the WHO’s handling of the H1N1 swine flu pandemic. Titled “Millions Vaccinated for No Good Reason,” this report (with testimonies) makes the point that “grave shortcomings have been identified regarding the transparency of decision-making processes relating to the pandemic which have generated concerns about the possible influence of the pharmaceutical industry on some of the major decisions relating to the pandemic.”
2010 — The pharmaceutical company Moderna, Inc. is founded to commercialize the research of cell biologist Derrick Rossi and turn a profit. One strike against Moderna is that it intimately involves controversial scientist and close Bill Gates associate Bob Langer.
2011 — Stéphane Bancel, a French business executive and former sales director of Eli Lilly and Company, is appointed CEO of Moderna, Inc.
November 14, 2011 — The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) issues a press release on the Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics (ADEPT) program, which focuses on developing a non-integrating nucleic acid-based vaccine that has the potential to be safer and more effective than traditional vaccines.
May 2012 — The Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP) is endorsed by the 194 Member States of the World Health Assembly.
June 2012 — There is an alleged outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). A supposed novel β coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was first isolated from the respiratory tract of a fatal case of viral pneumonia in a Saudi businessman. According to the CDC, the first United States case occurred on May 2, 2014, in Indiana. This first US case was a traveler going from Saudi Arabia to Indiana via London and Chicago. (There’s more on MERS in this timeline: see June 4, 2014.)
March 13, 2013 — Pandemic preparedness legislation originally passed by Congress in 2006 is amended by the Pandemic and All-Hazards Emergency Preparedness Reauthorization Act (PAHPRA). Section 101 amends the Public Health Service Act (PHSA) to require the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to submit the National Health Security Strategy to the relevant congressional committees. PAHPRA revises the strategy’s preparedness goals, particularly to ensure medical surge capacity for events without notice.
September 24, 2013 — A press release, “Moderna Therapeutics Named a ‘Fierce 15’ Biotech Company,” says the following: “Moderna Therapeutics, the pioneering company developing messenger RNA therapeutics™, a revolutionary new treatment modality to enable the in vivo production of therapeutic proteins, announced today that FierceBiotech has named Moderna as one of 2013’s Fierce 15. The award designates Moderna as one of the most promising private companies in the biotech industry. Companies from around the world are selected based on strength of technology, venture funding, and their potential to positively impact the treatment of human diseases.”
October 2, 2013 — DARPA, through its “synthetic biology” ADEPT: PROTECT program, awards Moderna Therapeutics “up to $25 million to research and develop its messenger RNA therapeutics™ platform as a rapid and reliable way to make antibody-producing drugs to protect against a wide range of known and unknown emerging infectious diseases and engineered biological threats.”
June 4, 2014 — Presaging the bat-to-human zoonotic supposition in the Wuhan narrative, The New England Journal of Medicine publishes a study that asserts camel-to-human transmission of the MERS virus is possible. Yet it contains no physical isolation of a virus—and there are no controls built into the study. Despite those serious drawbacks, the infamous Prof. Christian Drosten gets a nod in the study’s acknowledgements for having provided MERS-CoV–specific primers, an assay kit, and technical advice.
September 18, 2014 — The WHO publishes “Ebola Response Roadmap Situation Report” in response to an alleged Ebola outbreak in sub-Saharan Africa. The United Nations Security Council declares the Ebola virus outbreak in the West Africa subregion a “threat to international peace and security” and unanimously adopts a resolution urging UN member states to provide more resources to fight the outbreak.
October 1, 2014 — The WHO issues the final report of the SAGE Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy, which contains this statement: “At the November 2011 meeting of the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunization, SAGE noted with concern the impact of reluctance to accept immunization on the uptake of vaccines reported from both developed and developing countries. These reports led SAGE to request the establishment of a working group on vaccine hesitancy.”
October 7, 2014 — NIH Director Francis S. Collins announces that the NIH and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have entered into “a new phase of cooperation” that includes partnering to develop new vaccines. Among Collins’ remarks: “We are taking our partnership to a new level and will build on our cooperation and progress made to date toward reducing global disparities in health and improving life expectancy and quality of life for the billions who desperately need it.”
December 16, 2014 — President Obama signs into law an appropriations act that allocates $5.4 billion in emergency funding to support the US government’s response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
March 18, 2015 — At a TED conference in Vancouver, Bill Gates announces “We Are Not Ready for the Next Epidemic.” According to Gates: “The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is a tragedy—as I write this, more than 10,000 people have died. [. . .] As awful as this epidemic has been, the next one could be much worse. The world is simply not prepared to deal with a disease—an especially virulent flu, for example—that infects large numbers of people very quickly. Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic. But I believe we can prevent such a catastrophe by building a global warning and response system for epidemics. It would apply the kind of planning that goes into national defense—systems for recruiting, training, and equipping health workers; investments in new tools; etc.—to the effort to prevent and contain outbreaks.”
March 27, 2015 — At a workshop called “Rapid Medical Countermeasure Response to Infectious Diseases: Enabling Sustainable Capabilities Through Ongoing Public- and Private-Sector Partnerships,” Peter Daszak gives a presentation titled “Ranking risk for zoonotic potential of novel viruses.” In it, he is quoted as saying: “Until an infectious disease crisis is very real, present, and at an emergency threshold, it is often largely ignored. To sustain the funding base beyond the crisis [. . .] we need to increase public understanding of the need for MCMs [medical countermeasures] such as a pan-influenza or pan-coronavirus vaccine. A key driver is the media, and the economics follow the hype. We need to use that hype to our advantage to get to the real issues. Investors will respond if they see profit at the end of process.”
January 12, 2016 — An article headlined “Moderna Wins $20 Million Grant from Gates Foundation” explains how the pharmaceutical company is developing a combination of messenger RNA–based antibody therapeutics geared toward preventing HIV infection.
January 20–23, 2016 — At its annual meeting in Davos, the World Economic Forum (WEF) convenes under the theme “Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” The 4IR is characterized “by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.”
February 1, 2016 — Warning that Zika is “spreading explosively” throughout the Americas, the WHO decides to announce that the disease is a “public health emergency of international concern.”
February 24, 2016 — The US Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee holds a hearing, “Zika Virus: Addressing the Growing Public Health Threat.” In testimony given at the hearing, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci makes the following statement:
“One of the most important things we have done and are doing now with Zika is the development of vaccines. Shown on this slide are a number of candidates. The ones with the red bullets are those that are essentially what we call ‘shovel ready’ — in other words, ready to go right into the development in clinical trials.
“One of the advantages that we have with the development of vaccines — let us take the first one on that top bullet called ‘DNA Vaccine.’ And I have next to it ‘Success with West Nile Virus.’ And what we did, as some of you may remember, is that we were able to take this what we call vaccine platform, which is a chunk of DNA, in which we inserted the gene for West Nile virus. And we made a successful West Nile virus vaccine many years ago. It was not used because industry was not particularly interested in it. But what we were able to do now is very easily pull out that West Nile gene and stick in the Zika gene and do exactly the same thing.”
May 20, 2016 — The inaugural ID2020 Summit, “Harnessing Digital Identity for the Global Community,” is held at the UN Headquarters in New York City. Over 400 experts in blockchain and other cryptographic technology come together to create a plan for providing a unique digital identity to everyone on the planet by the year 2030. The five founding members of ID2020 are Accenture; Microsoft; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; IDEO.org; and the Rockefeller Foundation.
May 24, 2016 — The World Health Assembly endorses the R&D Blueprint, “a global strategy and preparedness plan that allows the rapid activation of research and development activities during epidemics” with the aim to “fast-track the availability of effective tests, vaccines and medicines that can be used to save lives and avert large scale crisis.”
May 18, 2016 — The US House approves the Zika Response Appropriations Act. The bill provides a total of $622.1 million to federal agencies to fight the Zika virus.
November 2016 — The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) publishes its Preliminary Business Plan 2017–2021. Advertising itself as “an innovative global partnership working to accelerate the development of vaccines against epidemic and pandemic threats,” CEPI develops its original business plan this month (November 2016) and will be formally launched at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by a consortium that includes the governments of Norway, Japan, and Germany as well as the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation.
December 13, 2016 — The 2013 PAHPRA is amended by the 21st Century Cures Act, which is signed into law by outgoing President Obama. The new act says the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) “is designed to help accelerate medical product development and bring new innovations and advances to patients who need them faster and more efficiently.” Though marketed as a victory for science and innovation, in reality the Cures Act is a sweeping deregulation effort that hands unprecedented power to pharmaceutical companies, defense agencies, and private investors. Groups like the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) spend millions lobbying for the 21st Century Cures Act, knowing it will grease the wheels for faster approvals and fewer regulatory hurdles.
January 10, 2017 — Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the NIAID since 1984, is keynote speaker at a conference sponsored by a partnership of Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security and Harvard’s Global Health Institute. In his address, “Pandemic Preparedness in the Next Administration,” Dr. Fauci says he brings the perspective of having worked for five consecutive administrations to the subject of pandemic preparedness. At the 3:15-minute mark he declares: “And if there’s one message that I want to leave with you today, based on my experience, [it] is that there is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases—both chronic infectious diseases in the sense of already ongoing disease (and we have certainly a large burden of that)—but also THERE WILL BE A SURPRISE OUTBREAK” [emphasis added].
January 13, 2017 — The FDA finalizes guidance on the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of Medical Products.
January 18, 2017 — The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) is officially launched at the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland. CEPI bills itself as “a global coalition to create new vaccines for emerging infectious diseases, designed to help give the world an insurance policy against epidemics.” CEPI also advertises that it will “shorten the time it takes to develop new vaccines to protect against viruses that emerge suddenly as public health threats.” The project is funded by private and governmental donors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the governments of Germany, Japan, and Norway, and six vaccine manufacturers.
February 13, 2017 — DARPA launches the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3), a program designed to facilitate a system capable of halting the spread of any viral disease outbreak before it can escalate to pandemic status. “Such a capability would offer a stark contrast to the state of the art for developing and deploying traditional vaccines—a process that does not deliver treatments to patients until months, years, or even decades after a viral threat emerges,” DARPA explains. It goes on to say: “DARPA-funded researchers have pioneered RNA vaccine technology, a medical countermeasure against infectious diseases.” P3 Program Manager Matt Hepburn notes that “DARPA’s goal is to create a technology platform that can place a protective treatment into health providers’ hands within 60 days of a pathogen being identified and have that treatment induce protection in patients within three days of administration. We need to be able to move at this speed, considering how quickly outbreaks can get out of control.”
June 2, 2017 — For the fourth consecutive year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation teams up with the NIH’s Vaccine Research Center for a consultative global health workshop. According to the June 30, 2017, issue of the NIH Record (LXIX, No. 13), “Foundation cochair and trustee Bill Gates, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci, Fogarty International Center director Dr. Roger Glass and NIBIB director Dr. Roderic Pettigrew were among officials on hand for the session.”
August 18, 2017 — The FDA Reauthorization Act of 2017 (FDARA) is signed into law. It amends the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 by, among other things, revising and extending the user-fee programs for drugs, medical devices, generic drugs, and bio-similar biological products.
October 23, 2017 — The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security issues an eighty-nine-page, self-guided tabletop training book, “The SPARS Scenario,” which features an outbreak of the novel SPARS coronavirus spreading to every US state and more than forty countries. This is the third of five tabletop exercises John Hopkins co-sponsors between 2001 and 2019. In this training exercise, case fatality rates vary, depending on the capabilities of local health systems. Federal regulators work with a pharmaceutical company to fast-track the production of a SPARS vaccine.
December 6, 2017 — Dr. Deborah L. Birx, Ambassador-at-Large and Global AIDS Coordinator and Special Representative for Global Health Diplomacy at the State Department, and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Director of the NIAID, discuss the latest advances in science and medicine aimed at combating, containing, and curing HIV/AIDS.
January 22, 2018 — The ID2020 Alliance publicizes its new partners in the Digital Identity Initiative: Microsoft, Mercy Corps, the Hyperledger Foundation, and the UN International Computing Center. Also, the ID2020 Alliance announces that Microsoft has joined Accenture and the Rockefeller Foundation as a major donor to the initiative.
January 24, 2018 — Alex Azar, a Washington, D.C., lobbyist and ex-president of the US division of Eli Lilly and Company, is confirmed as the new Secretary of HHS. From 2012 to 2017, Azar was president of Eli Lilly’s US arm and a member of the board of directors of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the largest advocacy association in the world representing the biotechnology industry.
February 6–7, 2018 — The WHO convenes an expert committee at its Geneva headquarters to consider a ninth global threat: Disease X.
April 4, 2018 — Patrick Vallance, former head of research and development at pharma titan Glaxo-Smith-Kline (GSK), begins his five-year tenure as Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, replacing interim officeholder Chris Whitty.
April 18, 2018 — Speaking at the Malaria Summit in London, Bill Gates warns that a deadly new disease could arise within a decade and that a new flu would most likely kill 30 million people within six months. “The world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war,” Gates advises.
May 15, 2018 — The Clade X Simulation is held at the John Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHCHS). It is the fourth of five tabletop exercises John Hopkins co-sponsors between 2001 and 2019 (the fifth will be highlighted in Part Two of this timeline). The exercise simulates a series of National Security Council-convened meetings of ten US government leaders—each one portrayed by an individual who works in the field of either national security or epidemic response. In this drill, the virus is released by a terror group called A Brighter Dawn.
Following Clade X, JHCHS releases “Implications of Clade X for National Policy,” which served as the background material for the tabletop exercise. The document recommends that the United States commit to six strategic policy goals. These policy goals foreshadow some of the themes of this “COVID-19” structural event:
1. Capability to produce new vaccines and drugs for novel pathogens within months, not years;
2. A strong and sustainable global health security system;
3. A robust, highly capable national public health system that can manage the challenges of pandemic response;
4. A national plan to effectively harness all US healthcare assets in a catastrophic pandemic;
5. An international strategy for addressing research that increases pandemic risks;
6. A national security community well-prepared to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease emergencies.
May 24, 2018 — The World Health Organization issues a news release announcing that the WHO and the World Bank are joining forces “to strengthen global health security” by convening the new Global Preparedness Monitoring Board. The statement reads: “WHO and the World Bank Group today convened the first meeting of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB), a new body set up to monitor the world’s readiness to respond to outbreaks and other health emergencies. The GPMB is chaired by Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and former WHO Director-General, and Mr Elhadj As Sy, Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.”
May 30, 2018 — The New England Journal of Medicine publishes an article by Bill Gates that is titled “Innovation for Pandemics.” In it, Gates asserts, “[T]here is a significant probability that a large and lethal modern-day pandemic will occur in our lifetime.” He offers the remedy: “What the world needs is a coordinated global approach to pandemics.” Then he adds, “Later this year, the coalition will announce grants to several companies, working with a variety of technologies, including nucleic acid vaccines, viral vectors, and other innovative approaches. The goal is the capability to develop, test, and release new vaccines in a matter of months rather than years.”
June 6, 2018 — Merck Animal Health introduces SEQUIVITY™ Technology. The company’s news release notes that this “innovative and highly advanced RNA Particle Technology is used to create flexible, safe and precise vaccine solutions to new and evolving disease challenges.” It further observes that “SEQUIVITY represents a technological advance within the company’s existing vaccine portfolio, with a platform that uses genetic sequences for specific antigens found in disease producing pathogens.” According to Joe Roder, D.V.M., technical services manager of Merck Animal Health, “By producing herd-specific custom vaccines, the technology enables producers and veterinarians to tackle animal health issues quickly and safely. In addition to being able to customize vaccines to meet specific threats, the SEQUIVITY platform technology can be used to provide a solution in a short period of time, where traditional vaccines can take years to develop.”
June 8, 2018 — The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation unveils its biotech spinoff, the Gates Medical Research Institute (MRI), in Cambridge, Mass. Armed with $100 million a year in funding, the biotech-within-a-charity will focus on developing new treatments and vaccines.
August 10, 2018 — The FDA approves a targeted RNA-based therapy—the first-of-its-kind approval of a new class of drugs called “small interfering ribonucleic acid (siRNA) treatment.” Specifically, the FDA grants the drug ONPATTRO® to Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. via Fast Track, Priority Review and Breakthrough Therapy designations.
August 16, 2018 — A Pfizer press release announces that the company has signed a collaboration agreement with BioNTech AG of Mainz, Germany, to develop mRNA-based vaccines for the prevention of influenza: “BioNTech will receive $120 million in upfront, equity and near-term research payments from Pfizer and will be eligible to receive up to $305 million in potential development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments and up to double-digit royalties.” The news release also says: “The partnership brings together Pfizer’s leadership in vaccines with BioNTech’s expertise in mRNA technology.”
October 9, 2018 — The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security releases a seventy-one-page report, “Technologies to Address Global Catastrophic Biological Risks.” The report highlights the fifteen “technologies or categories of technologies that, with further scientific attention and investment, as well as attention to accompanying legal, regulatory, ethical, policy, and operational issues, could help make the world better prepared and equipped to prevent future infectious disease outbreaks from becoming catastrophic events.”
October 16, 2018 — BioNTech founder and CEO Dr. Ugur Sahin is featured as a “spotlight” speaker at the World Health Summit and Grand Challenges annual meeting held in Berlin, Germany. In his speech, Dr. Sahin notes, “The vaccines that we make have to be produced in a few weeks. This type of rapid vaccine could be useful for rapidly spreading infectious diseases.” Other speakers include Bill Gates and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
December 7, 2018 — Moderna, a developer of the messenger RNA platform, becomes the largest biotech company to go public. On Friday, December 7, Moderna announces that it has sold “more than 26 million shares late Thursday, raising $604 million, making it the largest biotech initial public offering (IPO) in history.” Moderna is valued at $7.5 billion, according to Business Insider’s December 6, 2018, article. The initial offering at $23 per share immediately trades down, leaving IPO buyers instantly underwater. By the time the markets close, shares have fallen 19 percent from the IPO price to $18.60 per share.
In Part Two, we will examine the critical events of 2019 that forewarn and usher in the coming storm.
Originally posted on healthfreedomdefense.org.