VIDEO: Universities and Lobbyists Created a Taxpayer-Funded BioDefense Money Pot

Government spending on dangerous virus research dumps your taxes into the gaping maw of Big Pharma, universities, and academic virologists.

2 minute read

I’m working on a big article about North Carolina as the central hub in American biodefense, but wanted to explain some of these complexities. There’s quite a few people jumping up and down on social media about dangerous gain-of-function virus research, and even more doing the same on vaccines.

But they’re actually part of one system: the $27 billion the U.S. government spends every year on biodefense. The biodefense industry just lost one of their most critical champions, Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Cassidy lost the Republican Senate primary over the weekend and is now out. He’ll be gone at the end of the year. Senator Cassidy is the top Republican on the Senate HELP Committee which oversees, the Department of Health and Humans Services (HHS) and all its agencies including FDA and NIH.

It’s a very powerful position.

The Senate HELP Committee is ground zero for Secretary Kennedy’s MAHA movement and Kennedy’s greatest critic has been Senator Cassidy. Looming behind Cassidy, and lobbying him to attack Kennedy, is the biodefense industry, whose leading lobbyist is Richard Burr, at DLA Piper.

Before becoming a DLA Piper biodefense lobbyist, Richard Burr was the Senator from North Carolina who ran Senate HELP, the Committee Cassidy now runs. And Burr put in place most of the laws that regulate and disburse funds for biodefense, including grants for university virus studies and federal contracts to buy vaccines and other pandemic products.

Watch this video to understand the complexities.