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KADLEC: And we had four during the last century. And even though we've had a mild one in this first century, I think the risk is that we'll have another severe one and that would devastate our country.
SOURCE: Pandemic Preparedness - testimony of ASPR's Robert Kadlec - December 4, 2019
Then there's Donald Rumsfeld. As Secretary of Defense in the first term of the George W. Bush administration, there are few people more closely associated with the "War on Terror." Rumsfeld, too, has been intimately associated with the emerging biosecurity state for decades. In the 1980s he personally participated in secret meetings with Saddam Hussein that resulted in anthrax, botulism, and other chemical weapons being sent from the US to Iraq. In the 1990s he was named chairman of Gilead Sciences, a California biotech company that profited handsomely from the scramble for Tamiflu during the bird flu scare of 2005 and which is currently profiting handsomely from Remdesivir as a result of the COVID-19 scare.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases
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ANTHONY FAUCI: The data shows that Remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.
There are many others whose careers blaze the same trail, transitioning seamlessly from the homeland security state to the biosecurity state. People like Dr. Richard Hatchett, who served as Director for Biodefense Policy under George W. Bush, then as acting Director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and acting Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response within HHS before becoming the CEO of CEPI, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation co-founded Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. In his position as "global health expert," Hatchett made waves back in March for his alarmist pronouncements about the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
RICHARD HATCHETT: It's the most frightening disease I've ever encountered in my career, and that includes Ebola, it includes MERS, it includes SARS. And it's frightening because of the combination of infectiousness and a lethality that appears to be manyfold higher than flu.
That so many of the people who were there at the birth of the war on terror are currently acting as midwives to the biosecurity state should come as no surprise. After all, the biosecurity paradigm is not a replacement for the terror paradigm; it is its fulfillment.
The war on terror imagined a covert army of foreign invaders slipping through the defenses of the Homeland and commandeering the resources of the body politic to wreak internal havoc. The biosecurity state posits largely the same scenario, but now those foreign invaders are not "terrorists" possessed with a "hatred of freedom," they are "asymptomatic carriers" possessed by a pathogen.
Just as the Homeland Security forces and border security agents were entrusted to protect us from the terrorists, now the "front line heroes," doctors and nurses armed with the tools of the technocratic priest class, can protect us from the invisible enemy.
This speaks to an important aspect of the biosecurity state: ultimately, it is not about health. It is about politics.
Once again we find insight on this turn of events from Giorgio Agamben, who has noted that viral epidemics are
"above all a political concept, which is preparing to become the new terrain of world politicsor non-politics. It is possible, however, that the epidemic that we are living through will be the actualization of the global civil war that, according to the most attentive political theorists, has taken the place of traditional world wars. All nations and all peoples are now in an enduring war with themselves, because the invisible and elusive enemy with which they are struggling is within us."
Governments are banning gatherings and events. Instituting new screening procedures. Quarantining healthy, functioning people against their will. Tracking and surveilling every individual. Controlling their movements. Monitoring their transactions. Make no mistake: the "War on Terror" is not over. It has just greatly expanded.
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