Aug 9, 2022·edited Aug 9, 2022Liked by Paul D. Thacker
One of the most jarring things I’ve observed during the pandemic is the way in which people with a vested interest in preventing a serious scientific investigation of the pandemic’s origins have managed to manipulate the public and the mainstream corporate press by simply pandering to the “correct” politics. I’ve watched for over two years as people like Hotez, Anthony Fauci, Angela Rasmussen, Peter Daszak, and Kristian Andersen repeatedly took to social media to generate cover for themselves by cynically paying homage to trendy progressive causes – Black Lives Matter, eco-catastrophism, Trump impeachment, the supposed omnipresence of sexism in academia, etc. – as of way of signaling to the mainstream media that, “We’re on your side; now defend us.”
People in their positions came to recognize what is arguably the most important observation about life in the West in the 2020s, which is this: The left won the culture war, and won it decisively, and if you want money, power, and protection from criticism for your misdeeds (usually arising from the pursuit of the first two), you have to be willing to ingratiate yourself to those who hold power. It’s no different from the way the GOP used to performatively grovel before the evangelicals back in the 1980s and 1990s when religion held much more sway in American public life. Hence, when the New York Times and other major news outlets (which are now composed largely of the same typically white, upper-middle-class, college-educated people like Hotez) see this clique of virologists and NIH-associated schmucks decrying a lab leak as a conspiracy theory, they recognize them as confreres and go into full defend-and-promote mode. And because corporate media really *does* have a liberal bias now (in so far as they see liberal posturing as a roadmap to higher profitability), the average person who mistakenly thinks NPR is a middle-of-the-road news organization is left unaware that there are compelling reasons to think a lab leak might, in fact, be the genuine source of the pandemic.
Our culture may have moved on from paying undeserved, unquestioning respect to shibboleths of the Biblical kind, but we’ve simply graduated on to paying the same kind of undeserved deference to anything to which trendy, slapdash terms like “social justice” can be applied. Guys like Hotez understand this, largely because the places in which they work (e.g., academia) have come to demand political allegiance to one very narrow set of ideals. Academia, research institutes, federal funding agencies – these places have become cesspools of ideological conformity. Unfortunately, the lesson young people are being taught in all of this is that if you want to be culturally relevant – e.g., get into college, get a good job, be popular on social media – you, too, must adopt this one very specific set of partisan beliefs, including tacky truisms like “trust the science." This conformity portends something very bad for the future of American scientific research.
Agree with much of what you wrote by why the need to take potshots of people of religious faith in the process? Many of the people that fought this garbage from the start were people of deep religious faith (Drs. McCollough and Cole as examples). They did it specifically because their ethics of their faith required them to, not in spite of it.
Aug 9, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022Liked by Paul D. Thacker
Not to forget that in early November 2020 Hotez was still sufficiently anti-science and anti-vax to warn correctly that the Covid shots would not be effective
It looks like even Paul Offitt is starting to back peddle from the "Almighty Faucism" pulpit. Must know that poisoning babies makes one very unpopular. This may be Hotez's big break where he gets to be the Doctor Know-It-All of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But that's if he doesn't end up in prison first
I just hope there is sufficient prison space for all those who orchestrated the public health disaster SARS-CoV-2 and the war against early treatments. I include those in the media who gave a platform to every ugly policy mandated on what appears to be a public conditioned to accept government and institutional misinformation and fabrication. This makes me sick.
Hortez says: "Even as the first vaccines become more widely available they may be only partially protective to reduce severity of illness and won't stop transmission anyway so we won't need to pay people for that purpose," he told MedPage Today. "So I don't foresee a reason to pay anyone to get vaccinated against COVID-19."
Too Bad he says nothing about the adulterated spike protein and its Polyethylene glycol (PEG) carrier.
I have long been mystified that it is not self-evident to the credulous stenographers of the media that virologists and grant-addicts would circle the wagons around one of their own (Daszak), just like any other group would do. It is no different from cops uniting to defend a fellow from accusations of brutality or misconduct.
It is also ironic that anyone can suggest that criticism of Daszak is "unscientific," since the man isn't even a scientist himself. His career has been securing grant money from government agencies, first for ecological projects, and then later for medical research, where the real gravy is.
Anyway, when I become emperor, he will absolutely find himself in the dock for crimes against humanity. Along with Fauci.
If you are not familiar with Dr David Martin's expose on this scam from way back when it was Fauci's dream, it's certainly worth a read. Daszak is right smack dab in the middle of it.
The quote that Rand Paul should have drilled the little doctor with that shows what they were concocting back in 2015 - “Daszak reiterated that, 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, he said, we need to increase public understanding of the need for MCMs 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, Daszak stated.”
Hotez is clearly a paid shill for the Pharma Industrial Complex. Looking at his flip fops and idiotic statements, no wonder he would never step on a debate stage with any of the disinformation doctors he attacks. Considering that Dr Paul Offitt, Hotez and a few other clowns are leading the roar for the “safe and effective” mRNA campaign, it makes perfect sense that millions of people are now questioning this dirty corrupt deadly narrative.
From Paul's essay, Hotez seems more like a simple-minded water-carrier for the Narrative. It's how people like him make friends. After all, look at that bow tie.
Yeah, I don't think he's a shill. He's probably a nice person in most ways, but he's a true zealot when it comes to defending anyone he sees as a member of his personal scientific tribe.
No disagreement from me there. I just have no idea what my own behavior would look like if I were part of that echo chamber, had been neck deep in that research which now looks like such an extremely bad idea to so many in hindsight, etc.
I would be some flavor of at least subconsciously freaking the fuck out. I like to think I'd be more mature, more intellectually honest, and less crazycakes. Maybe I wouldn't be, though. I mean, that is one hell of a big pill to swallow.
You know I've always heard that once guys finish last. Maybe by being a "scientific" expert on behalf of the global elites and their poisons, Bowtie Peter gets to feel important and even draws respect from these mobsters. I normally don't like pointing fingers at people I disagree with but he's a pathetic piece of shit!
I have known Peter Hotez for almost 30 years. While in the middle 1990s the quest to develop vaccines for "neglected" tropical diseases seemed like a noble quest, continuing to receive grants for this field with only obviously fake results was a waste of taxpayers' money. Unfortunately, Hotez is very well connected at the NIH, well-known for wasting billions on such frauds as Hotez. He runs around Twitter and the media presenting himself as a vaccine developer. Unfortunately for Hotez, despite wasting more than one hundred million in NIH grants, he never developed a single vaccine.
He did, and began his testing on adolescents. Why give a vaccine to those wholly unaffected, unless it does nothing but looks good when innate immunity keeps these kids from getting sick.
Interestingly, he was developing vaccines for 30 years and they were just behind the corner. I would bet that this crook roped a dope and sprinkled NIH grants on the adding his name to something developed by others. Anyway, the India vaccine story is quite convoluted as Robert Malone was advertising himself as a developer of a COVID vaccine with an Indian biotech company. Don't ask or tell.
Good, fair article. Hotez is not at all an evil man. Quite the opposite, as far as I can tell. He's awful slow to give others any benefit of the doubt when it comes to motives in disagreements, though.
Peter Danszak is one of the masterminds behind the Plandemic. Check out his quote from 2015. That’s right 2015:
“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 he said, “we need to increase the public understanding for MCM’s such as a pan-influenza or a pan-corona vaccine. A key driver is the media, and the economics will follow the hype. We need to use that hype to our advantage to get to the real issues. Investors will respond if they have see profits at the end of the process” Danszak stated.
Let me get this straight. The Lancet Commission created a task force to look into how the pandemic started, which would *presumably start with no preconceptions* and look at all the evidence objectively. And a member (organizer?) of the task force, Peter Daszak, was a major figure in one of the hypothetical possibilities being investigated. Further, Daszak organized a letter signed by at least six other members of this task force calling a lab leak a “conspiracy theory.”
Did Sachs not notice that this task force seems to have been doomed to failure from the get-go? (Failure in terms of ascertaining the truth, not in attaining their goal of protecting somebody's interest.)
Sachs told Daszak to organize it. When Sachs began to realize there were problems and COI w/ Daszak, he demanded answers. Got none, and then disbanded the task force.
I really want to think highly of Sachs for doing the right thing and then speaking out afterwards.
However, I have to ask: what the hell took him so long? Early in 2020 even know-nothing civilians like me were aware that Daszak and EcoHealth were probably involved in gain-of-function research at the very least. Yet the task force wasn't disbanded until over a year later.
The WSJ article you linked is paywalled, but has a rather comical subhead: '...task force’s ties to nonprofit that worked with Wuhan Institute of Virology risked perception of bias'. Risked perception. Hahaha
I have only just realised from the photo that Dr Hotez is actually physically shorter than even Dr Fauci, who is not exactly a giant among men. Believing that the roots of Fauci's reported psychpathalogical traits can be traced back to suffering from SMS (Short Man Syndrome), I cannot even begin to conceive of the dreadful psychological pressure poor Dr Hotez has had to endure throughout his formative years, and which might go some way to explaining his Rottweiller demeanour and the antagonism he expresses towards any viewpoint, no matter how reasonable, that he considers a threat to his world view and self interest.
So please be sympathetic. The truth is painful enough without his critics adding more woe to his already brimming cup.
Wow, great work. I've been antagonizing this little "Hobgoblin" (perfect!) on Twitter because of his statements about anti-vaxxers being a 'well funded' organization intent on ruining science. Also his stance on vaxxinating children is awful. I will be passing around a video where he laughs about how many people are dying of covid. Thanks for this deep dive!
One of the most jarring things I’ve observed during the pandemic is the way in which people with a vested interest in preventing a serious scientific investigation of the pandemic’s origins have managed to manipulate the public and the mainstream corporate press by simply pandering to the “correct” politics. I’ve watched for over two years as people like Hotez, Anthony Fauci, Angela Rasmussen, Peter Daszak, and Kristian Andersen repeatedly took to social media to generate cover for themselves by cynically paying homage to trendy progressive causes – Black Lives Matter, eco-catastrophism, Trump impeachment, the supposed omnipresence of sexism in academia, etc. – as of way of signaling to the mainstream media that, “We’re on your side; now defend us.”
People in their positions came to recognize what is arguably the most important observation about life in the West in the 2020s, which is this: The left won the culture war, and won it decisively, and if you want money, power, and protection from criticism for your misdeeds (usually arising from the pursuit of the first two), you have to be willing to ingratiate yourself to those who hold power. It’s no different from the way the GOP used to performatively grovel before the evangelicals back in the 1980s and 1990s when religion held much more sway in American public life. Hence, when the New York Times and other major news outlets (which are now composed largely of the same typically white, upper-middle-class, college-educated people like Hotez) see this clique of virologists and NIH-associated schmucks decrying a lab leak as a conspiracy theory, they recognize them as confreres and go into full defend-and-promote mode. And because corporate media really *does* have a liberal bias now (in so far as they see liberal posturing as a roadmap to higher profitability), the average person who mistakenly thinks NPR is a middle-of-the-road news organization is left unaware that there are compelling reasons to think a lab leak might, in fact, be the genuine source of the pandemic.
Our culture may have moved on from paying undeserved, unquestioning respect to shibboleths of the Biblical kind, but we’ve simply graduated on to paying the same kind of undeserved deference to anything to which trendy, slapdash terms like “social justice” can be applied. Guys like Hotez understand this, largely because the places in which they work (e.g., academia) have come to demand political allegiance to one very narrow set of ideals. Academia, research institutes, federal funding agencies – these places have become cesspools of ideological conformity. Unfortunately, the lesson young people are being taught in all of this is that if you want to be culturally relevant – e.g., get into college, get a good job, be popular on social media – you, too, must adopt this one very specific set of partisan beliefs, including tacky truisms like “trust the science." This conformity portends something very bad for the future of American scientific research.
Agree with much of what you wrote by why the need to take potshots of people of religious faith in the process? Many of the people that fought this garbage from the start were people of deep religious faith (Drs. McCollough and Cole as examples). They did it specifically because their ethics of their faith required them to, not in spite of it.
Not to forget that in early November 2020 Hotez was still sufficiently anti-science and anti-vax to warn correctly that the Covid shots would not be effective
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/89512
Of course, a lot of people were saying this but the story changed as soon as Trump was out of the way, and wouldn’t get the kudos from the roll out.
It looks like even Paul Offitt is starting to back peddle from the "Almighty Faucism" pulpit. Must know that poisoning babies makes one very unpopular. This may be Hotez's big break where he gets to be the Doctor Know-It-All of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But that's if he doesn't end up in prison first
I just hope there is sufficient prison space for all those who orchestrated the public health disaster SARS-CoV-2 and the war against early treatments. I include those in the media who gave a platform to every ugly policy mandated on what appears to be a public conditioned to accept government and institutional misinformation and fabrication. This makes me sick.
For murders, there really is no need for prisons.
Hortez says: "Even as the first vaccines become more widely available they may be only partially protective to reduce severity of illness and won't stop transmission anyway so we won't need to pay people for that purpose," he told MedPage Today. "So I don't foresee a reason to pay anyone to get vaccinated against COVID-19."
Too Bad he says nothing about the adulterated spike protein and its Polyethylene glycol (PEG) carrier.
I have long been mystified that it is not self-evident to the credulous stenographers of the media that virologists and grant-addicts would circle the wagons around one of their own (Daszak), just like any other group would do. It is no different from cops uniting to defend a fellow from accusations of brutality or misconduct.
It is also ironic that anyone can suggest that criticism of Daszak is "unscientific," since the man isn't even a scientist himself. His career has been securing grant money from government agencies, first for ecological projects, and then later for medical research, where the real gravy is.
Anyway, when I become emperor, he will absolutely find himself in the dock for crimes against humanity. Along with Fauci.
Yep. Just like cops.
If you are not familiar with Dr David Martin's expose on this scam from way back when it was Fauci's dream, it's certainly worth a read. Daszak is right smack dab in the middle of it.
https://f.hubspotusercontent10.net/hubfs/8079569/The%20FauciCOVID-19%20Dossier.pdf
The quote that Rand Paul should have drilled the little doctor with that shows what they were concocting back in 2015 - “Daszak reiterated that, 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, he said, we need to increase public understanding of the need for MCMs 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, Daszak stated.”
Thanks for this. An excellent expose of the rather casual amoral criminality of stooges like this one.
What should be remarkable is the willingness to ignore obvious conflicts of interest.
But it's not considered remarkable any more. Arendt nailed it when she wrote of the banality of evil.
To forgive error admitted forthrightly is reasonable. To excuse moral bankruptcy is suicidal.
Hotez is clearly a paid shill for the Pharma Industrial Complex. Looking at his flip fops and idiotic statements, no wonder he would never step on a debate stage with any of the disinformation doctors he attacks. Considering that Dr Paul Offitt, Hotez and a few other clowns are leading the roar for the “safe and effective” mRNA campaign, it makes perfect sense that millions of people are now questioning this dirty corrupt deadly narrative.
From Paul's essay, Hotez seems more like a simple-minded water-carrier for the Narrative. It's how people like him make friends. After all, look at that bow tie.
Yeah, I don't think he's a shill. He's probably a nice person in most ways, but he's a true zealot when it comes to defending anyone he sees as a member of his personal scientific tribe.
He's still retweeting Peter Daszak, even after being confronted by Daszak's lies. So there's something happening that doesn't involve facts.
No disagreement from me there. I just have no idea what my own behavior would look like if I were part of that echo chamber, had been neck deep in that research which now looks like such an extremely bad idea to so many in hindsight, etc.
I would be some flavor of at least subconsciously freaking the fuck out. I like to think I'd be more mature, more intellectually honest, and less crazycakes. Maybe I wouldn't be, though. I mean, that is one hell of a big pill to swallow.
I'm reminded of the timeline from WWII to Robert McNamara doing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War#The_Lessons_of_Vietnam
Some errors, when the consequences are high enough, require decades to process.
One of the "lessons" from the Fog of War is highly relevant to all this, too:
"Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
McNamara affirms Morris' framing of lesson 7 in relation to the Gulf of Tonkin incident: "We see what we want to believe."
You know I've always heard that once guys finish last. Maybe by being a "scientific" expert on behalf of the global elites and their poisons, Bowtie Peter gets to feel important and even draws respect from these mobsters. I normally don't like pointing fingers at people I disagree with but he's a pathetic piece of shit!
I have known Peter Hotez for almost 30 years. While in the middle 1990s the quest to develop vaccines for "neglected" tropical diseases seemed like a noble quest, continuing to receive grants for this field with only obviously fake results was a waste of taxpayers' money. Unfortunately, Hotez is very well connected at the NIH, well-known for wasting billions on such frauds as Hotez. He runs around Twitter and the media presenting himself as a vaccine developer. Unfortunately for Hotez, despite wasting more than one hundred million in NIH grants, he never developed a single vaccine.
I think that one COVID vaccine he did is being distributed in India or somewhere, no?
He did, and began his testing on adolescents. Why give a vaccine to those wholly unaffected, unless it does nothing but looks good when innate immunity keeps these kids from getting sick.
His track record is pure fraud and misuse of public funds. In this case, he is pushing something that never will be approved in the US.
Interestingly, he was developing vaccines for 30 years and they were just behind the corner. I would bet that this crook roped a dope and sprinkled NIH grants on the adding his name to something developed by others. Anyway, the India vaccine story is quite convoluted as Robert Malone was advertising himself as a developer of a COVID vaccine with an Indian biotech company. Don't ask or tell.
Very appreciate you documenting this continuing charade for posterity!
Good, fair article. Hotez is not at all an evil man. Quite the opposite, as far as I can tell. He's awful slow to give others any benefit of the doubt when it comes to motives in disagreements, though.
Peter Danszak is one of the masterminds behind the Plandemic. Check out his quote from 2015. That’s right 2015:
“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 he said, “we need to increase the public understanding for MCM’s such as a pan-influenza or a pan-corona vaccine. A key driver is the media, and the economics will follow the hype. We need to use that hype to our advantage to get to the real issues. Investors will respond if they have see profits at the end of the process” Danszak stated.
Looking at him is almost as bad as listening to him. He makes me embarrassed to live in Houston Texas.
Let me get this straight. The Lancet Commission created a task force to look into how the pandemic started, which would *presumably start with no preconceptions* and look at all the evidence objectively. And a member (organizer?) of the task force, Peter Daszak, was a major figure in one of the hypothetical possibilities being investigated. Further, Daszak organized a letter signed by at least six other members of this task force calling a lab leak a “conspiracy theory.”
Did Sachs not notice that this task force seems to have been doomed to failure from the get-go? (Failure in terms of ascertaining the truth, not in attaining their goal of protecting somebody's interest.)
Sachs told Daszak to organize it. When Sachs began to realize there were problems and COI w/ Daszak, he demanded answers. Got none, and then disbanded the task force.
I really want to think highly of Sachs for doing the right thing and then speaking out afterwards.
However, I have to ask: what the hell took him so long? Early in 2020 even know-nothing civilians like me were aware that Daszak and EcoHealth were probably involved in gain-of-function research at the very least. Yet the task force wasn't disbanded until over a year later.
The WSJ article you linked is paywalled, but has a rather comical subhead: '...task force’s ties to nonprofit that worked with Wuhan Institute of Virology risked perception of bias'. Risked perception. Hahaha
This is a kick-ass article. Those criminals need to be held to responsibility for poisoning millions of people.
"I thought it would help my career" should NOT be an excuse.
Thank you for collecting all this data -- it needs to go into the Nuremberg 2.0 docket.
These people are very scared now -- for a reason
I have only just realised from the photo that Dr Hotez is actually physically shorter than even Dr Fauci, who is not exactly a giant among men. Believing that the roots of Fauci's reported psychpathalogical traits can be traced back to suffering from SMS (Short Man Syndrome), I cannot even begin to conceive of the dreadful psychological pressure poor Dr Hotez has had to endure throughout his formative years, and which might go some way to explaining his Rottweiller demeanour and the antagonism he expresses towards any viewpoint, no matter how reasonable, that he considers a threat to his world view and self interest.
So please be sympathetic. The truth is painful enough without his critics adding more woe to his already brimming cup.
I didn't know 90% of this. I was directed here by Dr. Mercola's editorial footnotes.
Wow, great work. I've been antagonizing this little "Hobgoblin" (perfect!) on Twitter because of his statements about anti-vaxxers being a 'well funded' organization intent on ruining science. Also his stance on vaxxinating children is awful. I will be passing around a video where he laughs about how many people are dying of covid. Thanks for this deep dive!