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On December 17, 2019, humanity was unknowingly at a turning point that would unleash a series of cultural, economic, and political changes that have shaped and will continue to shape the future of civilization in the coming decades.
On that Tuesday in December, the first reports would emerge in the city of Wuhan, China, of a virus that would soon lead to the confinement of the entire world and would give rise to a series of authoritarian measures by governments — “democratic” and dictatorial alike — as well as the birth of an uncontrollable phenomenon that would lead to collusion between corporations and governments to give birth to what many have called “the health dictatorship.”
The Wuhan virus, better known as coronavirus or Covid-19, in addition to making a large part of the population ill, generated a series of enormous economic incentives for big pharmaceutical companies and political incentives for bureaucrats and public officials, who, supported by the “health emergency,” found a way to expand their powers and exercise greater control over the population without rendering accounts to the public.
The first chapter of this whole series of false information, corruption, and cover-ups did not begin precisely in China. It started in Geneva, Switzerland— headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO)— where on January 14, 2020, it was declared that preliminary investigations had found no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus. Even after several Chinese doctors had already warned —contrary to the guidelines of the Communist Party of China — of its danger, some countries were already preparing to close communications and travel to the Asian giant. The WHO only changed its instructions when it was too late and the virus had already spread to Europe and the United States.
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 14, 2020
However, this piece will not go into an exhaustive analysis of the role of the WHO or China in the spread of coronavirus, nor the authoritarian measures and economic waste by Western governments. We will focus exclusively on the collusion between Big Pharma, especially Pfizer and Moderna, with the U.S. Federal Government.
Health or economic emergency? A virus that ailed the pockets of the American people.
According to government sources, at the time of this article, 1,029,337 deaths due to the coronavirus were .reported in the United States. This number is an estimate since, during the last few years, there have been several reports of people dying from covid but not from the disease, and they are counted as victims of the virus. In addition to the impossibility of keeping an accurate and incorruptible record of the deceased, the number could decrease or increase.
Likewise, according to USASPENDIG. gov, by August 5, 2022, between 43 agencies of the Federal Government, 3.91 trillion dollars have been spent on Covid treatment: the equivalent of more than 10% of the entire U.S. debt. Not to mention that, in 2019, the debt was over 22 trillion dollars and currently exceeds 30 trillion dollars—one of the largest debt increases in the history of the country—which has added to the also historic inflation of 9.1%, the highest in more than four decades.
No one questions the severity with which the coronavirus attacked the population, especially the elderly and people with pre-existing conditions, who were most affected by the virus. However, throughout these years —which seem like decades because of how traumatic they have been— many studies have been published warning about the inefficiency of confinements, the use of masks, and even vaccination in certain population groups. And despite this, the Biden administration and different elected officials —mostly Democrats— have promoted vaccination and mask mandates and allocated billions of dollars in payments to pharmaceutical companies and programs with the supposed purpose of containing the virus, which has degenerated into severe cases of corruption and exposed the ineffectiveness of governmental measures.
In the following sections, we will exemplify how the federal administration’s spending packages generated a series of incentives for corruption and how the Democrats’ measures may have magnified the effects of the virus, in addition to promoting less effective vaccines and drugs for the treatment of coronavirus.
US President Joe Biden. EFE
Corruption schemes: billions of dollars lost
In September 2020, former NFL player Josh Bellamy was charged with fraudulently obtaining $24 million of Covid relief funds.
Lee Price III, a 30-year-old Texas resident, fraudulently received $1.6 million in Covid Relief and bought a Lamborghini with part of the money.
Johnson Eustache, a Florida man, was sentenced to five years for fraudulently collecting more than $1.3 million in pandemic relief funds.
Don V. Cisternino was extradited from Croatia after a grand jury in Orlando, Florida, returned an indictment against him for allegedly defrauding more than $7.2 million in emergency COVID-19 relief funds.
James Stote, 55, of Hollywood, and Phillip Augustin, 52, of Coral Springs, pleaded guilty in federal court in Akron, Ohio, to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and fraudulently obtain more than $35 million in Covid-19 loans.
Reddy Raghav Budamala, 35, was charged with fraudulently obtaining more than $5 million in loans granted for Covid-19 through three shell companies. According to the California Department of Justice, he used the money to purchase a $1.2 million property in Eagle Rock, another $600,000 property in Malibu, a residence in Irvine, a $970,000 investment in an EB-5 Immigrant Investor Visa Program, and a nearly $3 million deposit into the TD Ameritrade personal account.
There are hundreds, thousands more cases like these. According to a study by Matt Weingarten of the American Enterprise Institute, the state of Illinois alone has more than $1.8 billion lost.
An article by Brad Polumbo published in the Foundation for Economic Education states that the federal government lost five times more money to COVID-19 stimulus fraud than it spent on vaccine development. Another article by the same author reveals seven ridiculous ways billions of dollars were stolen from public funds. In Washington state alone, a Nigerian fraud ring made off with an estimated $650 to $850 million in money stolen from taxpayers through fraudulent unemployment claims.
As early as September 2020, the FBI investigated hundreds of Covid fraud cases. At that point, 57 people had been charged, and more than 500 suspects had already been identified. By December 2021, the Secret Service estimated that at least a staggering $100 billion had been stolen from Covid “Relief” programs.
According to an NPR report, the IRS “mistakenly” sent $1,200 worth of stimulus checks to non-U.S. citizens in European countries.
The DOJ has a news page related to Covid-related fraud. On it, there are hundreds or thousands of indictments. However hard I tried to review each of them, the list is endless. The cases mentioned in this article do not even makeup 1% of the fraud allegations nationwide.
In an average time, such a systematic and scandalous series of thefts should not be overlooked. But in the last few years, we have had one emergency after another, and people do not even have the opportunity to react to one news item when a new one has already occurred. If the FBI, the DOJ, and other elements of the federal government had warned of the scams and theft of public money from the beginning of the pandemic, how come no corrective action was ever taken? Why was it allowed to continue?
When the theft is done on such a scale and magnitude, it is not enough to simply punish the weakest part of the link. But also the creators of this corrupt system that led to a loss of millions of dollars for the nation and every American, who are now not only poorer and have contracted through the Federal Government a debt much larger than what they can pay, but in turn, face inflation of 9.1% that has devalued the value of their money, and absolutely no one is responsible.
FBI (Archive)
The collusion between pharmaceutical companies and the Federal Government led to the economic crisis and corruption incentives.
The federal government has promised, and repeated over and over again, that covid-19 vaccines and tests are free and that no one would have to pay a single penny. That is the first big lie in a series of false claims.
While, according to Biden, his administration officials, and the liberal media, the Covid-19 treatments have been free, the truth is that Americans have paid for every single vaccine and test, either through taxes or even through inflation that devalued their money’s worth —currently at 9.1%. And much of that money has been arbitrarily transferred to Big Pharma and/or through federal government relief programs, which, as has been shown, ended up in corrupt hands for the most part.
“Pfizer’s 2021 revenue was $81.3 billion, roughly double its revenue in 2020, when its top sellers were a pneumonia vaccine, the cancer drug Ibrance, and the fibromyalgia treatment Lyrica, which had gone off-patent”, according to a report by Kaiser Health News.
Now, of course, it would be wonderful if Pfizer had made that much profit by operating in a free market and providing consumers with a product that, because of its remarkable effectiveness in combating a disease, was purchased en masse by the population without any coercion whatsoever. The problem lies in the fact that citizens never really had a choice as to whether or not they liked the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine; many did not even want to be vaccinated and were forced by government bureaucracy.
In short: the federal government awarded billions of dollars to Big Pharma by agreeing directly with them on a price and a product —regardless of its effectiveness or adverse effects— and then forcibly vaccinated millions of people with it.
Pfizer’s stratospheric revenues in 2021 are more than double the GDP of a nation like Croatia. Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine currently captures 70% of the U.S. and European markets.
Last July, the Biden administration agreed to purchase another 105 million doses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine for the fall booster campaign, agreeing to pay $3.2 billion. The agreed price was $30.47 per dose, a higher price than the $19.50 per dose the government paid for the first 100 million doses, presumably because it is being modified to combat early variants of Omicron.
The same Kaiser Health News report states that Pfizer has spent a lot of money to strengthen its leverage during the pandemic. The company paid more than $25 million to 19 lobbying firms, pushing for government protection of its products and promoting more intense vaccination programs in the United States.
Many health specialists have raised alarms that the federal government has become Big Pharma’s mouthpiece.
Closing out 2021, physician Peter Attia discussed in his podcast with Dr. Marty Makary, Johns Hopkins Professor and public health researcher, and Dr. Zubin Damania, UCSF Stanford-trained Internist and founder of Turntable Health, the adverse effects and benefits of vaccines in young people.
Moderna Vaccine. EFE
At that time, Germany and France had become the first countries to block the Moderna vaccine for people under 30 in Europe. This is because this vaccine presents a risk 3 or 4 times greater than other vaccines of producing cases of myocarditis in young people.
Subsequently, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway followed this recommendation. However, in the United States, the Moderna vaccine continued to be administered to young people, and some companies, universities, and local governments even demanded mandatory vaccination for this group of people.
Specialists revealed that, with the appearance of Omicron, Pfizer issued a press release stating that the vaccine was safe to fight the new variant, even though, at that time, neither private laboratories nor the Government itself had sufficient data or information to make such statement. The following day, the CDC recommended giving all adolescents a booster.
Over the past two years, Big Pharma, based on internal research, has frequently announced the next stage of the fight against the pandemic before the federal government authorities have made a decision and even before they have had time to review the research to determine the following steps to be taken.
Moderna reported total revenues of $18.5 billion for 2021, up from $803 million for the entire year of 2020.
Moderna’s revenue increase in 2021 is primarily attributed to commercial sales of its Covid-19 vaccine, Spikevax.
Despite the complications that Moderna’s vaccines caused in some population groups, at the close of 2021, sales of its vaccine recorded profits of 17.7 billion dollars after selling 807 million doses of the vaccine.
Big Pharma currently has special protection that prevents them from being sued for adverse effects from vaccines, all to the detriment of consumers and the health of Americans. If the federal government had not negotiated directly with the pharmaceutical companies for vaccines, and vaccination mandates had not been passed at various levels of government, the companies would have been forced to do more thorough research on their products, seek greater efficacy, and bring them to market at a more competitive price.
Instead, Big Pharma only had to pay a few million dollars to lobbyists and wait for them to negotiate with government emissaries on the prices of their products and push through the mandatory vaccine mandate to make tons of money, to the detriment of Americans.
Without the federal government’s protection of Big Pharma and the fat paychecks it secured for them from the state treasury; we would have had much more efficient vaccines, with much more testing and fewer adverse effects. This is because the corporations would have been forced to cover their backs and go to market with seamless products capable of competing in a free market.
However, with the federal government’s protection, Americans’ health was not their priority. Pfizer, Moderna, and the other companies were not obliged to convince consumers with efficiency, testing, and data but to negotiate directly with a few bureaucrats and watch their accounts fill up.
Silver Spring (United States), 11/20/2020.- A U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sign is seen at the White Oak campus in Silver Spring, Maryland, United States, on November 20, 2020. (United States) EFE/EPA/MICHAEL REYNOLDS
In turn, all these mandates had to go hand in hand with the state of generalized chaos and fear-mongering that destroyed the economy and the lives of millions of people. Precisely what wiped out millions of jobs and led to the closure of thousands of businesses was not the virus but the totalitarian confinements imposed by the government that had to be justified with the scaremongering narrative. These forced closures kept people from working, and in turn, to “combat” this, the government began to issue “relief checks.” It launched stimulus programs that, as we noted above, ended up becoming corruption programs.
In short, it was all part of a vicious cycle in which a greater evil was invoked to correct the first evil. Society fell into an infinite trap that yielded more power to the government and went deeper and deeper into debt. In contrast, the only ones who benefited were the big pharmaceutical companies, the lobbyists, and the State bureaucrats who saw their powers increase without any counterweight whatsoever.
Monkeypox: is history repeating itself?
Last Thursday, the Biden Administration declared a “National Health Emergency” for monkeypox, even though, according to government reports, to date, no deaths from the disease have been reported in the United States. So how is it that an outbreak that has not caused a single death is suddenly a “national health emergency”?
Follow the money. The Biden administration’s declaration will allow federal agencies to access emergency funds, supposedly to facilitate the management of vaccines and treatments for the disease.
Last week, it was announced that more than one million vaccines would be made available. The federal government also ordered $119 million for a 13 million freeze-dried monkeypox vaccine. At the same time, last week, it was reported that the same federal authorities had allowed 20 million doses of the vaccine to expire.
It is pretty remarkable that a disease that has not yet claimed the first death in the entire country, and the spread of which is far from reaching 0.10% of the population, has already become a “national emergency,” with the government and the corporate press trying to raise alarms and put the people once again in a state of fear and anxiety.
The side effects of government policies
It has become clear that the collusion between the government and Big Pharma, far from benefiting public health, has done enormous damage to American families and the public coffers of the State.
The state of alarmism generated to implement the vaccination and confinement mandates, in turn, led to an exacerbated spending by the authorities disguised as “relief,” which led to the emergence of one of the largest corruption networks in the history of the United States. Tons of money, thousands and millions of dollars stolen that now hardworking and honest Americans will have to pay with their hard work through taxes and the devaluation of their money.
Washington (U.S.), 11/01/2022.- Dr. Anthony Fauci (U.S.) EFE/EPA/Greg Nash / POOL
Given this situation and the vast deficit generated by Covid’s public policies, the Biden administration has launched a new spending plan that aims to raise taxes on Americans even more, even though the economy is currently in a technical recession.
In short, the public health gurus and bureaucrats of the federal government not only compromised the health of Americans by colluding with Big Pharma in favor of launching subsidized vaccines on the market without sufficient testing but also made the population even sicker by ruining the nation’s economy, creating a double national crisis: of health, of the economy, and now of distrust in the institutions.
Who is going to answer for the 100 billion dollars stolen? Who will answer for the side effects the vaccines produce in certain people? Who is going to answer for the collapse of the economy? Who will take care of the families left homeless, without food, and without income by the authoritarian measures of the Government? Who is going to answer for the inflation? Who will step forward and say: we were accomplices in one of the biggest scams in the history of the United States and the world?
Emmanuel Rincón is a lawyer, writer, novelist and essayist. He has won several international literary awards. He is Editor-at-large at El American // Emmanuel Rincón es abogado, escritor, novelista y ensayista. Ganador de diversos premios literarios internacionales. Es editor-at-large en El American