I'm reeling.
Remember when the Covid vaccine came out? As soon as it did, it was made as mandatory as legally possible. Dr. Fauci's NIH, a government agency, aggressively promoted the vaccine under the claim that it stopped transmission, a claim later proven to be a brazen lie.
Instead, it emerged that the NIH, supposedly an impartial regulatory body tasked with promoting public health, was a co-owner of the mRNA Covid vaccine patent. The agency has already pocketed $400 million from Moderna, is suing for more, and has now settled with Pfizer for nearly $800 million.
You read this right: the very agency responsible for public health guidance profited from the Covid vaccine it "selflessly" promoted to the tune of $1.2 billion, all the while granting legal immunity to the vaccine manufacturers.
Meanwhile, the liberal left unquestioningly embraced Fauci's narrative that not to take the vaccine was tantamount to killing grandma. Intellectuals proudly rolled up their sleeve, vilified dissenters as dangerous alt-right extremists, and endorsed censorship to silence criticism in order to preserve their self-satisfying narrative. The good old hubris of being on the right side of history!
As a historian of communism, I have always puzzled over the long and repetitive history of left-wing intellectuals as useful idiots for the power in place. But this level of state cronyism and of blindness in ideological loyalty must surely take the cake...?
Funnily enough, I first read about the NIH owning part of the Covid vaccine patent rights in RFK Jr.'s The Real Anthony Fauci, which came out in 2021. This story sounded so unbelievably corrupt I rubbed my eyes, but RFK Jr. is a lawyer, so surely he wouldn't make up such a wild accusation...? I waited with interest to see if Fauci sued him for slander. He didn't. Because RFK Jr. was right on this matter.
And because the left seemingly never misses an opportunity to dig itself into an ever deeper hole, RFK Jr. is now being promoted as HHS secretary. Not by the Democrats, his lifelong party, but by Trump. You would think President Biden might have taken his chance to denounce what must be the most egregious corruption case in the history of mankind and pin it on Trump. Silly me - why should the left miss a good opportunity instead to give Trump the opportunity to get all the credit for denouncing this scandalous corporatization of the state, and ever more ammunition to destroy them?
I am left banging my head against the wall. Oh, and read my book Pandemic Power: The Covid Response and the Erosion of Democracy, where I discuss all this and more, and which is coming out very soon at CEU Press - in open access, so I'm not saying this because I will make more money from it. As opposed to the NIH 🙄
reuters.com/business/healthc…