Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

But I was wrong about that. From the moment of my reluctant entrance into the vaccine debate in 2005, I was astonished to realize that the pervasive web of deep financial entanglements between Pharma and the government health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids. The CDC, for example, owns 57 vaccine patents1 and spends $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget (as of 2019) buying and distributing vaccines.2,3 NIH owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High level officials, including Dr. Fauci, receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.4 The FDA receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry, through what are euphemistically called “user fees.”5 When I learned that extraordinary fact, the disastrous health of the American people was no longer a mystery; I wondered what the environment would look like if the EPA received 45 percent of its budget from the coal industry!

With 401 reporters certified to cover the case, only one, Leslie Stahl, bothered to look beneath the flimsy veneer at the myriad facts undermining the prosecutor’s frail parable.

Federal law forbids US spy agencies from spying on or surveilling US citizens, but the Western intelligence bureaucracies work in collaboration with one another, and the CIA often deploys European, Israeli, and Canadian agencies as surrogates to skirt US laws.