Bret Swanson, president of the technology research firm Entropy Economics and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, today published an article on The Brownstone Institute’s website containing a worrisome reference. The article was in response to alarming allegations by a purported senior Pfizer executive in a secretly recorded video by Project Veritas, an organization of political activists that doesn’t register on my trust meter. Swanson strikes me as an exceptionally bright guy and his commentary suggests he’s knowledgeable about the mRNA technology used to manufacture Pfizer’s Covid vaccines.
What alarmed me was that Swanson’s commentary came with this caveat: If this video is legitimate (emphasis his). It’s irresponsible to link and comment to a video one isn’t certain is legitimate. This is pure speculation on my part, but my guess is Swanson hedged his commentary because the New York Times, long regarded as America’s “newspaper of record,” as of this writing has yet to write about the controversial video.
It’s time people realized the New York Times is no longer a publication accurately reporting on news and events, but rather a peddler of false information and narratives. The Times’ failure to report on Project Veritas’ videos is representative of the publication’s dishonesty.
The video Swanson referenced is Project Veritas’ third installment of a video series purporting to show a top Pfizer executive named Jordon Trishton Walker who is identified on screen as Pfizer’s Director of Research and Developments – Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning. Pfizer’s logo appears prominently on screen.
In the first installment, Walker is seen making disclosures about Pfizer’s vaccine R&D efforts, boasting how the company has regulators in its corporate back pockets, gushing how the pandemic will prove to be a cash cow for many years to come, and alluding that the Covid virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan. The disclosures themselves aren’t new or alarming but a top Pfizer admitting them with Walker’s aplomb is remarkable.
It’s been known for years that Big Pharma has undue influence over the FDA and CDC. Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, publicly railed about what she insisted was the pharmaceutical industry’s improper influence on regulators.
In 2004, Angell published a book entitled, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. Five years later, Pfizer settled a DOJ lawsuit for a then record $2.9 billion (equivalent of $3.5 billion in current dollars) for fraudulent marketing. It was the largest healthcare fraud settlement ever, until GlaxoSmithKline bested Pfizer three years later with a $3 billion settlement.
Scott Gottlieb, the FDA Commissioner under Donald Trump, sits on Pfizer’s board. Patricia Cavazzoni, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), previously worked at Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies. Janet Woodcock, the FDA’s acting head at the height of the pandemic, is widely viewed as Big Pharma’s FDA Trojan Horse. Here’s some more examples of Big Pharma’s FDA influence.
It’s also well-known Pfizer’s profited handsomely from the pandemic. The company this week reported that it generated $38 billion from its Covid vaccines in 2022, and $37 billion in 2021. Walker demonstrated that Pfizer is literally laughing all the way to bank because of the pandemic.
Pfizer’s only response to the Project Veritas videos came 48 hours after they were released, in a news release last Friday night clearly written or heavily edited by its lawyers. The company clarified that it “has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research” related to its “ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.” Gain of function and directed evolution research is highly controversial, and possibly illegal in some parts of the world, which explains why Pfizer’s lawyers wanted Walker’s seeming references to those activities officially denied.
Notably, Pfizer didn’t deny that Walker held the position claimed in the video or argue that his comments didn’t reflect the company’s values and he was suspended pending an investigation. Pfizer also didn’t make a legal stink about what arguably was an unauthorized use of the company’s logo, something consumer-facing Fortune 500 companies are normally pretty touchy about.
Project Veritas has previously settled lawsuits because of its questionable entrapment and hidden video practices, and Pfizer has the financial wherewithal to bury the organization in litigation for many years to come. Yet Pfizer’s response was as meek as a little lamb, which might explain why Project Veritas was emboldened to release its most damaging footage a week later.
The Walker videos have been viewed by millions of people, yet the New York Times and other mainstream media have ignored them, pretending they don’t exist. Among those taking notice of the silence are the British actor Russell Brand, whose YouTube channel has more than six million subscribers. Brand’s YouTube segment on the Walker videos garnered 54,000 approvals and not a single disapproval.
The New York Times knows first-hand that remaining silent after getting sandbagged by Project Veritas isn’t an effective strategy. In 2017, Project Veritas secretly filmed an “audience strategy” editor named Nick Dudich discussing his political beliefs and mocking the notion of acting as an objective journalist. The Times initially ignored coverage of the video, but ultimately felt compelled to address the incident in its “Reader Center,” a newsroom initiative helping the Times build deeper ties with its audience.”
Here’s what Times spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, was quoted as saying:
Based on what we’ve seen in the Project Veritas video, it appears that a recent hire in a junior position violated our ethical standards and misrepresented his role. In his role at The Times, he was responsible for posting already published video on other platforms and was never involved in the creation or editing of Times videos.
We are reviewing the situation now. We will update our readers on the situation when possible.
Apparently, it wasn’t possible for the Times to update its readers about Dudich because one never appeared. Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe subsequently claimed that Dudich’s name had been removed from the company directory and that he likely was fired or resigned.
The New York Times might understandably be a tad sensitive about Walker’s seeming admission that the Covid virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan. Apoorva Mandavilli, one of the Times’ Covid science writers, publicly declared on May 26, 2021, that it was “racist” to think such thoughts. ProPublica, one of the few remaining credible publications left in America, last October also discredited Madavilli’s declaration.
The Times’ pandemic is so sensational and uncritical of vaccines that some prominent physicians and academics can no longer stomach it. Vinay Prasad, a haematologist-oncologist at the University of California San Francisco who has published more than 350 scientific papers, recently posted a Substack commentary criticizing the New York Times’ pandemic coverage and warning that the best available evidence contradicts the narrative from the corporate media and many public health officials.
Prasad said the precautions being recommended are essentially unproven— “akin to burning an incense stick, or wearing garlic to ward off vampires.”
Reading Swanson’s commentary on the Brownstone Institute’s webpage I was curious about the organization because I frequently read their commentaries and find them very insightful. The organization was founded by Jeffrey Tucker, an erudite author who’s written 10 books and countless scholarly articles. However, I was taken aback that Tucker is also senior economics columnist for Epoch Times.
I’ve always been wary of the Epoch Times since reading this March 2021 article in the New York Times disclosing the publication was owned by the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong and was supposedly a purveyor of false information feeding “the online fever swamps of the far right.”
The Times’ story hasn’t aged well, as it accused the Epoch Times of being “one of the most prominent promoters” of “Spygate,” which it called “a baseless conspiracy theory” involving claims that Obama administration officials illegally spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign. Four months later, evidence emerged that the “baseless conspiracy theory” wasn’t so baseless after all.
The Times’ history is rife with false information, ranging from the Kitty Genovese story to its erroneous reports that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Yet somehow Americans, even those who loathe the publication, look to the publication for validation.
Mark Twain said if one gets a reputation for being an early riser, they can sleep ‘till noon. Increasingly, the newsroom of the New York Times doesn’t even get out of bed.
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