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Meet the anti-vaccine activist who could lead the response to the next pandemic (www.msnbc.com)

submitted 5 months ago by AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works to c/news@lemmy.world

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At the heart of Operation Warp Speed — the program that produced the Covid-19 vaccines that saved millions of lives — was a little-known federal agency that coordinates the government’s responses to public health crises and maintains the nation’s medical stockpile.

Historically led by doctors, military officers or career public health officials, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (or ASPR, pronounced “Asper”) is now being directed instead by John Knox, a firefighter turned anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist with no background in management or public health.

Six current and former senior Health and Human Services Department officials told MSNBC that in elevating Knox, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has placed an unqualified activist atop one of the federal government’s most critical health agencies. Most of them spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation for themselves or their colleagues, or were not authorized to speak publicly about the agency.

Those HHS veterans described ASPR under Knox as adrift: Experienced scientists and senior staff members have left or been pushed out; key roles in the agency have been filled with conspiracy theorists and advocates of false Covid treatments; and hundreds of millions of dollars in mRNA research contracts have been canceled, without good reason.

Most concerning, those officials said, is what could happen when a Covid denialist and anti-vaccine activist leads the very agency created to defend the country from the next pandemic.

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[–] AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 months ago

The final chapter is devoted to Kadlec, whom Kennedy describes as “a Dr. Strangelove knockoff with deep ties to spy agencies, Big Pharma, the Pentagon, and military contractors who profiteer from the spread of bioweapons alarmism.”

Kennedy’s book frames the Strategic National Stockpile as a mechanism meant to “enrich his vaccine industry friends and sideline public health,” and suggests ASPR simulations for biological weapons attacks and infectious disease outbreaks were not exercises but plans for manufactured crises.

Robert Kadlec... Why does that name sound so familiar.

Before the pandemic, top contractor received billions from government to help prepare the nation for biowarfare

The Gaithersburg-based company pressed for the national stockpile and its $700 million budget to be moved under the control of Robert Kadlec, Trump’s assistant HHS secretary for preparedness and response, or ASPR. The transfer took effect in 2018.

In the years before he took the government job, Kadlec consulted for Emergent as a strategic adviser and started a biodefense consulting company with Emergent’s founder, The Post previously reported. Kadlec and the company told The Post their past work together has no impact on his leadership at APSR.

Emergent’s annual revenue rose from $235 million in 2009 to $1.1 billion a decade later, much of it in contracts for the stockpile that were awarded without competitive bidding, the company’s financial filings show. Under Trump, before the pandemic, ASPR paid Emergent more than $894 million, more than double what it paid any other contractor. During that time, the company received more than 1 in every 6 dollars spent by ASPR, according to a review of contracting records.

I mean he's not entirely wrong. Kadlec is shady as fuck. But RFK is not leading the same department under Trump because he wants to actually help people. He just wants to take his place and make money doing the same fucking thing but with his own "holistic" bullshit spin.

It's like at minimum we have two shady factions looking to profit by swindling the American public, and I'm honestly not sure which of these is worse.

They're both evil grifters. One wants to sell you a stockpile of sunshine and colloidal silver. The other at least has a stockpile of real medicine and vaccines, but he also seems more likely be involved in some very shady false flag shit so that he can profit from the desperation of people who will have to purchase that stockpile from the only monopoly available.