What's In It For Dr Walensky?

The phenomenon of Drs Fauci and Walensky, with the surrounding cast of characters like Drs Baric, Collins, and Daszak. has fascinated me from the start. They're clearly members of the credentialed elite, unelected and unaccountable, in many ways impervious to the sorts of scrutiny to which even powerful politicians are subject. In the past two weeks, Dr Walensky has had editorial calls for her removal amid clear indications of public incompetence, but this is unlikely. It brings me back to Ferdinand Lundberg and the sense that such decisions are made by people largely unknown to us and well above our pay grade.

If they're actually lizard-like humanoids, well, maybe so for all we know. (I realized the other day that the lizards in our back yard only speak Spanish, the way police dogs only understand German. I'm studying Spanish so I can talk to them.)

In the last several weeks, I've run into two articles about Dr Walensky that nobody else seems to have noticed. The first, by Sam Faddis, is CDC Head Rochelle Walensky Knows What She’s Doing – She’s Selling Vaccines. The other, by Scott Hounsell, is CDC Director Walensky's Husband Received $5 Million in HHS Grants - and That's Just the Start of It. The takeaway from both is that Dr Walensky in particular sits atop what appears to be a multibillion-dollar public health boodle involving big pharma, grants, preferences, approvals, policy advantages, and inevitable baksheesh.

The Faddis piece gives important bacground on Walensky's rise:

Walensky came to her current job as head of the CDC from Massachusetts General Hospital where she was the head of the Infectious Disease Department. Mass General is the original teaching hospital for Harvard University. It includes the Mass General Research Institute, which is the largest hospital-based research program in the nation. It conducts $1 billion in operations yearly and employs 9500 researchers that work in more than 30 institutes, centers, and departments.

Mass General has a host of contracts with U.S. government agencies. Almost a decade before the COVID-19 outbreak, Mass General investigator and Infectious Diseases Physician, Mark Poznansky, MD, Ph.D., received funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a platform for accelerated vaccine development in the event of a rapidly spreading infectious disease. The focus of this work was on the development and deployment of a vaccine on a timeline not previously considered possible.

In other words, over a decade ago DARPA and Mass General were laser-focused on confronting any new emerging disease via the deployment of a vaccine on an extremely short timeline. They were not discussing or planning for the treatment of individuals affected or the employment of other measures to mitigate the spread of the disease and/or to isolate those infected. The answer to a pandemic would be the deployment of a new, essentially experimental, vaccine.

. . . In the first quarter of 2021 alone, Mass General Brigham, the umbrella entity of which Mass General is the largest piece, earned in excess of $1 billion dollars. Pfizer alone stands to make in excess of $26 billion just this year from sales of its vaccine.

Walensky was chosen then not because of some unique track record in curing disease and saving lives but because she is a representative of perhaps the single most important institution in a giant complex involving huge quantities of taxpayer’s money, research institutions, and scientists getting rich off of their discoveries. This complex decided years ago that its approach to combatting the emergence of a virus – like COVID – would be the development and marketing of a vaccine on an accelerated timetable. It has worked toward that goal ever since.

The only possible fly in the ointment for such an approach would, of course, be “vaccine hesitancy.” Developing a vaccine and manufacturing is pointless if people will not take it. Walensky recognized this problem long ago.

I'm not an anti-vaxxer; I got the shots months ago. I don't give medical advice. On the other hand, one thing that's pestered me from the start of the year is that the late 2020 COVID surge peaked and began its sharp decline in mid-January 2021, only weeks after any vaccines were available at all, and well before anyone had been "fully vaccinated" with two shots and weeks of waiting between them. There may be a good explanation for this, but I haven't heard one.

And it's worth noting that the delta surge, wildly overhyped in the media, is being attributed to "vaccine hesitancy", but nevertheless people are being told to revert to the ineffective paper and cloth masks as well. There's a folk medicine atmosphere to the whole thing. And again, much as people like Dr Scott Gottlieb predicted, the delta surge is in the process of peaking weeks before those who've been induced to overcome their hesitancy are "fully vaccinated".

The Scott Hounsell piece on the Dr Walensky who's married to Dr Walensky is also revealing:

Walensky, who took over as director with Biden’s inauguration, is married to Loren D. Walensky, a renowned pediatric oncology researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard. In October 2019 Loren Walensky became the scientific co-founder and a member of the Board of Directors of Lytica Therapeutics, “an early-stage biotechnology company working on an innovative platform for developing next-generation antimicrobials.”

Just four months later, Walensky’s Lytica received a $16.9 million dollar HHS grant to “develop antibacterial peptides with broad activity against multidrug-resistant bacteria.” Only $5.3 million of that money was initially disbursed to Lytica, and the remaining $11.6 million is scheduled to be disbursed upon the achievement of “certain development milestones.” I have previously worked in the world of grant writing and can tell you most agencies will not give grants to organizations that have existed for less than a year and organizations that have no other stream of funding. In this particular case Crunchbase, which monitors funding for corporations and non-profits, shows that the only funding that Lytica has received to date is the $5.3 million allocated from the grant received.

. . . While Walensky received the grant prior to his wife becoming director of an HHS-governed organization, his wife was directly associated with HHS for more than a decade when his company was awarded the grant. Rochelle Walensky served as the chair of the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council, which put her in close contact with Dr. Antnony Fauci, and as a member of the US Department of Health and Human Services Panel on Antiretroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents (again, with Dr. Fauci). In fact, when “insiders” were surprised that Walensky was picked, it was revealed that Fauci had a lot to do with her appointment[.]

. . . The fact that Walensky’s grant was not disclosed as a portion of his wife’s appointment amounts to a massive lack of transparency. In her financial disclosures, submitted January 13, 2021, she lists her husband’s interest in Lytica Therapeutics as a “spousal holding,” but doesn’t indicate that he is the co-founder of the company and ostensibly working there since he is the inventor of the technology subject to the CARB-X grant. She also doesn’t indicate in that filing that his company is receiving a federal grant from the very agency in which she’s being appointed to a leadership position – and the agency that still has to make decisions on whether to award the additional $11.6 million.

Director Walensky had a responsibility to report this conflict of interest upon taking office, however, no records exist of her doing so.

Having spouses and other relatives collect what amount to bribes is a long-established technique practiced by families like the Clintons and Bidens. My guess would be that serious inquiry would lead to other connections between Walensky and Fauci, and other income to Fauci and other figures that violates what we would expect to be transparency.

And this leaves aside the clear circumstance that NIH and CDC money went to the Wuhan lab that was the cause of COVID in the first place.