Yesterday Paula Jardine discussed the background to the lockdown policy during the Covid pandemic. Today she highlights the possible links with plans to control the global population via digital surveillance under the pretext of public health concerns.
THE World Health Organisation declared the first Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) under the 2005 International Health Regulations on April 26, 2009 in response to H1N1 swine flu, upgrading it to pandemic status in June.
The late Labour MP Paul Flynn and an assortment of European Parliamentarians including the respiratory consultant Dr Wolfgang Wodarg spoke out in responseabout the WHO’s ‘mishandling’ of this ‘pandemic’ and profiteering by the pharmaceutical companies.
‘They [WHO] frightened the whole world with the possibility that a major plague was on the way,’ said Flynn. ‘The result of that was that the world spent billions and billions of pounds on vaccines and anti-virals that will never be used. It is huge waste of money.’
By 2009, many other measures linked to the NeoCon post 9/11 War on Terror agenda were attracting criticism in the UK on civil liberties grounds. The Liberal Democrat MP Chris Huhne called out the creeping authoritarianism of the Blair government saying, ‘We have sleepwalked into a surveillance state without serious debate and without adequate safeguards. The government’s infatuation with social control shows that it has misunderstood the lessons of George Orwell’s 1984, which was a warning, and not a blueprint. We are not yet living under the Stasi, but we are living in a country whose proud liberal history is under threat.’
The ‘mitigation’ measures devised and promoted by Dr Richard Hatchett, the chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI).have disrupted the global economy and supply chains in a way unprecedented outside wartime, ruining small businesses, national health systems and the education of millions of children, while simultaneously enriching multi-national corporations. The Economist recently warned of ‘the coming food catastrophe’.
In light of the characterisation by Hatchett of the Covid pandemic as a watershed leading to a ‘very, very, different world’, the relationship of the man and by extension CEPI, the organisation he leads, with the NeoCon policy agenda set in motion after the September 11, 2001 outrage in the heart of Manhattan requires greater scrutiny.
Publicly, Hatchett says CEPI is an initiative of global public health authorities with Sir Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust and Bill Gates taking credit for being its co-founders. But was Hatchett, the man invited to run CEPI in 2017, the brains behind and instigatorof the idea?
In 2016 Hatchett, then the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and Deputy Director of BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority), a US government agency focused on protecting the homeland against bioterrorism, spoke at an American National Academy of Sciences workshop on Rapid Medical Countermeasure Responses to Infectious Diseases.
He argued that a lesson from the West African Ebola epidemic of 2013-16, which had fizzled out naturally before a vaccine was authorised, was that ‘responding to emerging infectious diseases must be institutionalised as something that the government values, such that it sufficiently organises, funds, and conducts preparedness and response activities. This will need to involve government partnership with industry partners, and ideally, engagement of global partners’. The workshop report ‘likened the level of organisation and commitment (including funding) needed for such an endeavour to that of the Manhattan Project’ (after America’s World War II programme to build an atomic bomb).
As Dominic Cummings said in his parliamentary testimony last year, CEPI’s Covid vaccine plan was also talked about as a ‘Manhattan’ project.
‘What Bill Gates and people like that said to me and others at No 10 was, “You need to think of this much more like some of the classic programmes of the past – the Manhattan Project in World War Two or the Apollo programme – and build it all in parallel”,’ said Cummings. ‘In normal Government accounting terms, that is completely crazy, because if nothing works out you have spent literally billions building all these things up, and the end result is nothing – you get zero for it, it’s all waste. What Bill Gates and people and Patrick Vallance and his team were saying was that the actual expected return on this is so high that even if it does turn out to be all wasted billions, it is still a good gamble in the end.’
The evidence is pointing to a very bad, highly reckless and unnecessary gamble.
The Bush-era NeoCon vision for America wasbuilt on the defence strategy formulated by Defence Secretary Cheney during the Bush Sr administration and set out in a 1992 policy paper, described as ‘a blueprint for maintaining US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great-power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.’
The September before 9/11, the NeoCon think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC) published an update called Rebuilding America’s Defences (RAD), articulating a vision of a ‘global pax-Americana’ that ‘must have ‘a secure foundation on unquestioned US military pre-eminence’. With the Cold War over, the NeoCon objective was to reshape American strategic capabilities to achieve what they called Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD).
The scope of their ambition was for American dominance in every theatre possible, land, air, sea, space and cyberspace. RAD itself became the blueprint for the George W Bush administration’s defence policy, particularly its muscular post-9/11 iteration, the ‘War on Terror’. The late Labour MP Michael Meacher recognised the danger in this agenda and spoke out about the creeping authoritarianism in 2003, calling the War on Terror ‘bogus’.
The NeoCons were interested in the potential to develop digital fingerprints to identify security threats. A Cambridge-based company called Autonomy was contracted to help. Companies House records show that US NeoCon stalwart Richard Perle became a director and consultant in March 2000 while he was a member of the US Defense Policy Board. He was also a shareholder.
The PNAC RAD paper identified control of space and cyberspace as important policy. It said, ‘Much as control of the high seas – and the protection of international commerce – defined global powers in the past, so will control of the new “international commons” be a key to world power in the future. An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the “infosphere” will find it difficult to exert global political leadership.’
The Common Pass, a digital health app linked to digital finance launched by the Commons Project Foundation to ‘help countries safely reopen borders during and after the Covid-19 pandemic’ is backed by the World Economic Forum, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
How much easier would it be to achieve Full Spectrum Dominance of cyberspace if every last person on earth could be tracked for life via a unique identifier number? Just such a unique identification number was proposed in 2010 in the Global Vaccine Action Plan. Unique digital identifiers required to make such a common pass workable make easier work of creating ‘digital fingerprints’ while advances in AI make interpreting the data far easier than it was 20 years ago.
The World Bank began promoting biometric digital identity toolkits in 2014, citing as one justification the need to identify each individual for vaccination purposes. ID2020, an alliance founded by the Rockefeller Foundation, GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, Microsoft, Accenture and Ideo, campaigns for ‘secure’ digital identity. Peruse its website and the link between digital identity and health passes tracking vaccination records is readily apparent. Last week Government Digital Services, part of the Cabinet Office, announced multi-year multi-million pound contracts linked to verification of digital identity and biometrics with two companies Iproov and InnoValor.
In 2002, the New York Times reported on a project called Total Information Awareness. The Pentagon was to build a supercomputer to detect terrorism threats through a vast electronic dragnet that hoovered up and stored indefinitely every piece of information out there. It was backed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the same agency that funded Moderna in 2013 to develop its mRNA platform for use against infectious diseases.
The US Total Information Awareness supercomputer came partially online in 2013. It sits in the Utah desert outside the town of Bluffdale like a giant Death Star, requiring 65 gigawatts of power and diverting up to 1.7million gallons of water daily to run the cooling system. In 2014, Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the scale and the intrusiveness of the US government’s warrantless domestic surveillance programme called PRISM. In fact the scope of the NeoCon vision of American power projection was to create perpetual global pre-eminence. The surveillance programme extends beyond US borders.
In the decade that followed 9/11, the War on Terror didn’t prove sufficiently terrifying to permit full acceptance of the programme. Concerns over the implications for civil liberties stymied it. In the face of a public health threat posed by a supposedly deadly invisible enemy, the War on Microbes has proved to be a more useful tool as people made fearful have all too easily surrendered fundamental freedoms.
On the back of a not very deadly virus, Richard Hatchett believes we have to wage a continuous War on Microbes using vaccines. The Covid vaccine rollout was barely 100 days old when CEPI announced its Moonshot plan to develop prototype vaccines for all 25 known pathogen classes so that new vaccines could be developed in 100 days for rapid rollout in the event of an outbreak being declared.
In his first address to the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned, ‘Digital authoritarianism is not, alas, the stuff of dystopian fantasy but of an emerging reality.’ A few months later, days after the WHO declared Covid-19 a PHEIC, Johnson was warning that responses to new diseases such as coronavirus that went beyond what was medically rational would cause real and unnecessary economic damage.
However this view did not survive andpublic health monitoring and intelligence gathering were soon merged. During his appearance before a parliamentary committee in May 2021, Dominic Cummings was asked by Labour MP Dawn Butler about the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) launched the year before on June 1 2020, headed by veterans of the security services and modelled on the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre.
Cummings said, ‘A big part of it is Test and Trace and the whole data side . . . Obviously, the senior management of PHE [Public Health England] the whole thing had not worked, is putting it politely. ‘Everybody, in April, came to me . . . and said, “You cannot trust PHE with what needs to be built”. So the new JBC was essentially part of the Whitehall rejigging of the machinery: “Right, we’ve got to strip Test and Trace out of DH. We’ve got to create a new surveillance function that can integrate all of this different data”.’
On October 1 2021, the JCB was itself replaced by the UK Health Security Agency.
The response to Covid-19 with lockdowns, Test and Trace, masks and endless testing for a virus that for most people under the age of 70 is no worse than a flu has indeed progressed beyond the medically rational. The UK committed £37billion to Test and Trace and an additional investment of £37million in Genomics England. The public has been deliberately manipulated with fear, into accepting measures that would have been unthinkable when Chris Huhne spoke out in 2009.
In December 2021, 100 rebel back-bench Conservative MPs joined the Democratic Unionist Party, Liberal Democrats, Greens, independents and eight Labour MPs in voting against vaccine passports, but failed to defeat the government. The authoritarian vaccine passes haven’t gone away. Sir Desmond Swayne, one of the rebels, found himself asking then Health Minister Sajid Javid on June 8 this year why his department was advertising a £71,000-a-year post for a Deputy Director Delivery for a Covid Pass. The post has since been filled.
The Covid-19 response, based on a War on Terror era pandemicplaybook produced during the heyday of the NeoCons, has normalised intrusive surveillance on the pretext of public health considerations. ‘Plan Bill’ and ‘Plan Dick’ appear to be Trojan horses linked to Bush-era Full Spectrum Dominance plans with Bill Gates acting as the front man. Vaccine passes have the potential to render the concept of bodily autonomy obsolete, if accessing everyday life becomes contingent on submission to vaccination ordered at the whims of global public health authorities.
Draconian lockdowns and public health policies imposed by supposedly liberal democracies including Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, the UK as well as the EU – all intelligence partners of the US – are on the verge of reducing their people to numbers, virtual prisoners for ever of the tyrannical biosecurity state.
