Crisis Update - Claim: Pfizer 'Evolving' New Covid Variants
Project Veritas video said to reveal 'directed evolution' of mutations
This is an important topic so it’s vital to try to establish veracity and motive.
As a developing story the facts may change; there may be new sources.
Take the allegations less as fact but as subject to the fog of war.
Pfizer alleged to be pursuing “directed evolution” to mutate Covid virus.
Questions outstanding about the identity of the Pfizer scientist.
Selected structure mutations seen as same-but-different gain of function.
This article is an exception to usual MO of waiting for the dust to settle.
There are reasons to suspect the revelations could benefit both sides.
As we noted less than 24 hours ago, much of what we witness is theatre.
See also Moneycircus, Jan 25 — Gurus Or Goons: Assessing The Theatre Of Davos
(3,200 words or about 15 minutes of your time.)
Jan 26, 2023
It’s now clear why Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla remained silent when questioned by independent journalists on the streets of Davos, as we discussed in yesterday’s newsletter.
Or is it?
The Project Veritas bombshell alleges that Pfizer is mutating Covid in a lab, so that it can preemptively develop new vaccines, according to one of its senior scientists.
Jordon Trishton Walker, a Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning at Pfizer, is on video telling Project Veritas that the experiment is underway, aware of the risks to both public reputation and health. [1]
Before going further, one should check the speaker’s identity. He gained a bachelor’s in science at Yale 10 years ago, followed by a doctor of medicine at Texas Southwestern Medical School. Specialising as a urologist he pops up in a Boston hospital, then Boston Consulting Group, and then Pfizer. According to the web site Signal Hire, he spent an average of one year, five months at each of three companies. That raises questions. His supervisor Sarah Wu reports to Mikael Dolsten who reports to Albert Bourla, CEO. [2]
Veritas says it has verified his identity from Pfizer internal documents. Information via web searches is harder to find.
Walker co-authored an article for Boston Consulting Group in 2020, The Near-Term Outlook for COVID-19 Therapeutic Treatments, in which his credit at the bottom of the page leads to LinkedIn — but the account has been scrubbed. [3]
Update: a cached version of his work profile is here. You may also see his photo on ZocDoc. The most comprehensive investigation of Walker’s documentation is provided by Substack author, Brian O’Shea. There is still no categorical confirmation of his identity.
Furthermore, the undercover interview is said to have been conducted by another Pfizer employee. Veritas has not said exactly how it came by the video.
We shall return to the possibilities below. First the allegation.
The Veritas video
Pfizer is exploring “directed evolution” which Jordon Walker insists is different to gain of function research.
“We’re not supposed to do gain of function research with the viruses. They’d rather not. But we do these selected structure mutations to try to see if we can make them more potent. So there is research ongoing about that. I don't know how that's going to work. There better not be any more outbreaks...”
In the scientist’s opinion the original Covid strain escaped during testing in a lab in Wuhan, China, so it is notable that he tells Project Veritas:
“You’d have to be very controlled so to make sure that this virus that you mutate doesn’t create something like, you know, goes everywhere.”
Pfizer is able to do this he says because the pharma industry is “a revolving door for all government officials.” Regulators are “not going to be as harsh on the company where they are getting their job.”
The company has already conceded that its mRNA shots do not stop transmission. [4]
Asked what Pfizer is doing to optimise vaccines now, Walker said he had just come from a meeting on the subject that very day.
“We’re exploring how the virus keeps mutating. Well, one of the things we’re exploring is why don’t we just mutate it ourselves so we could focus on, so we could create — preemptively develop — new vaccines, right? So we have to do that. If we’re going to do that, though, there is a risk, like, as you could imagine, no-one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f**ing viruses.”
“So that’s one of the things we’re considering for the future, like, maybe we can create new versions of the vaccines and things like that.”
Interviewer: “So Pfizer ultimately is thinking about mutating Covid?”
“Well, that’s not what we say to the public. No, that’s why it was, it was a thought that came up in a meeting and we were like, why do we not — it was, like, we’re going to consider that with more discussions. That exactly, actually.”
“We’re like, wait a minute, people won’t like that.”
The method
Pharma companies say they usually collect viruses from the environment, from patients, and then assess new variants. The account in the Veritas video suggests something more proactive.
“Don’t tell anyone. Promise you won’t tell anyone. So, the way it [the experiment] would work is that we put the virus in monkeys, and then we successively cause them to keep infecting each other, and we collect serial samples from them. And the ones that are more infectious, like the virus, we’ll put them, in another monkey and you constantly actively mutate it. That’s one way.
Or we could even do like, directed simulation, which we tend not to prefer. And they just sample what the different proteins on the surface of the virus look like over time. So then you can see the mutation You can now force it to mutate in a certain way you want it.”
Interviewer: “Is Pfizer going to implement the mutation of all these viruses?”
“I don’t know. It depends on how the experiments work out because this is just, like, something we’re trying, right.”
Interviewer: “So what’s going on with the whole virus mutation process?”
“Well, they’re still conducting the experiments on it but it seems like, from what I’ve heard, they’re kind of optimizing it but they’re going slow, because everyone is very cautious you know — obviously they don’t want to accelerate it too much but I think they’re also trying to do it as an exploratory thing because because you obviously don’t want to advertise that you are figuring out future mutations.”
The project, Walker said, originated from chief scientific officers in divisions across the company.
Project Veritas will release a second video tomorrow.
The objective
Benign or malevolent, Walker said that on one level the aim was to get ahead of mutations in the wild, before they “pop up in nature — and we can develop a vaccine prophylactically.” He said the industry had not been prepared for Omicron and Delta.
Dr Robert Malone MD commented on the video that “the gentleman seems to have absolutely no moral compass, at all, about what he’s doing. The hubris and arrogance and immaturity: if this is the quality of individuals within Pfizer that are making these huge decisions that risk global public health, with such a casual disregard for the human toll, it’s profoundly corrupt.” He added that Pfizer believes it has successfully captured the regulatory apparatus of the U.S. government and presumably worldwide, and is apparently quite proud of it.
Suspended British MP Andrew Bridgen commented on Twitter: “This video demonstrates what we are up against. Immoral business methods and practices and a regulator captured by the industry it’s supposed to control.”
Variant process
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla described the standard process of adapting the flu vaccine to variants in interviews he gave to corporate media in Davos last week. He said that the company's scientists wait for a variants to emerge: he gave no indication that they might actively mutate viruses in order to create variants.
He told Bloomberg Television that the process of creating the annual flu vaccine was a standard one:
“Every time there is a variation we have a standard process: that we isolate the virus, we try to see if the variant escapes the protection of vaccine. If we have suspicions that it might, we start like if we are going to make a new vaccine.”
“Many variants disappear but if some start growing, then we are not losing time because we have already prepared those steps.” [5]
He said Pfizer is already preparing a flu shot based on mRNA; it has recruited a team and is waiting for cases. The shot would be ready for use in the first half of this year. It has also begun experiments to combine the flu and Covid shots.
Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein would not comment on the Veritas revelations without more information but said he’s concerned people will miss the larger picture: “the failure of every institution on which civilization depends: medicine, every major university, every discipline, all major news outlets.”
The troubling conclusion he told a live discussion in response to the Veritas revelations, is that we cannot reform our way out of this: the people in office cannot be reformed.
Pfizer has not issued a statement but it has shut down comments on social media.
Disputed ownership
Whether or not the latest revelations stand up, it reopens the debate about who is driving the Covid response: the pharma industry or the military?
The military is not involved in the FDA trials and the contract makes Pfizer 100 per cent culpable according to Karen Kingston, a pharmaceutical and medical device business analyst with two decades in business development and marketing.
At the same time pharma executive Alexandra Latypova, a veteran of pharma/biotech with 25 years of experience in clinical trials, clinical technologies and regulatory approvals, and who founded several of her own firms, says the military owns and controls the mRNA Covid product — and that clinical trials were theatre, albeit with real victims.
Assertions of safe and effective, the emergency use authorization, the FDA approval and the granting of legal immunity was scenery if the real contracts were with the military under the equivalent of the war powers act.
Latypova points to a document trail that shows the Department of Defense planned the Covid Response, beginning during the second Clinton administration in 1997.
Of the Covid vaccine contracts, 400 were in the form of Other Transaction Authority, a type of contract that the Pentagon uses for prototypes and mission-critical technologies that omits the “fine-print terms and conditions” seen in regular contracts.
The Biological Advanced Research And Development Authority (BARDA) is the Department of Health and Human Services equivalent of the Pentagon’s better known DARPA. On BARDA’s website it lists its “expanding Covid-19 medical countermeasure portfolio.”
Each of these products, including the Moderna, Pfizer and Janssen injectables, are purchase by the U.S. administration through the HHS and DoD. So the pharma companies are contractors, according to Latypova and Watt.
TLDR; the regulatory laws are not "exempt" under emergency authorization; they do not apply because the Covid response is a military countermeasure.
Third version of events
There are other variants of the progenitors of the Covid response though we are not in a position to give more credence to one than the other.
The release of internal Twitter files by new owner Elon Musk shows the CIA wanted Twitter to push back on idea that military intelligence created the Covid Response.
The Global Engagement Center, the State Departments unit to counter propaganda efforts of foreign states, urged the suppression of information such as that Covid was an engineered bioweapon, researched at Wuhan, with the involvement of the CIA. [6]
Dr. Andrew Huff, former associate VP of EcoHealth Alliance, and author of The Truth About Wuhan (2022) claimed that EcoHealth president Peter Daszak, who conducted gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, told him he was working for the Central Intelligence Agency.
EcoHealth Alliance is described as a US-based non-governmental organization with a stated mission of protecting people from diseases.
What follows is a highlight of the research by Latypova and Katherine Watt, and some interpretations of what this implies. [7]
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