Deer in the Headlights

Rochelle Walensky, John Snow Memorandum, Loren Walensky, CARB-X and more

Rounding the Earth

The following article serves as the show notes for the video presentation of the same name released through the Rounding the News series, presented by Rounding the Earth. It is provided to allow RTE listeners to verify my sources and conduct their own due diligence, and is intended as a supplement to the video. As such, I highly encourage readers of this Substack to watch the full episode and support Rounding the Earth, whose founder Mathew Crawford has provided me the platform and resources to conduct this important work. Thank you, Rounding the Earth!

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Rochelle Walensky resigns as CDC director

Image source: HHS COVID-19 Public Education Campaign

Dr. Rochelle Walensky has announced her resignation as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States.

Her official reason cited was “the nation's progress in coping with COVID-19.”¹ The announcement also happened to coincide with the World Health Organization’s declaration that the “global health emergency” related to COVID-19 had ended.²

Walensky was nominated to the directorship by President-elect Joe Biden on December 7, 2020, while she was employed at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.³ She replaced the outgoing Robert Redfield.

As noted by NPR, Walensky’s “career in medicine started during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis.” From 2014-2015, she served as chair of the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council, a team within the NIH tasked with advising high-level officials on “the planning, coordination, and evaluation of research and other HIV/AIDS activities conducted or supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH),” including the Director of the Office of AIDS Research (OAR), the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Assistant Secretary for Health, and the Director of NIH.⁴

Walensky’s profile on the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Prevention Policy Modeling Lab website describes her as being “internationally recognized for motivating US policy toward the promotion of routine HIV screening and for her work on effective and efficient strategies of HIV care in South Africa.”⁵

She is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and the Association of American Physicians (AAP), and has also served as a member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Panel on Antiretroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents.⁶

Prior to taking office in the Biden Administration in 2021, Walensky had already been actively engaged on the question of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Image source: Eric Topol on Twitter

She was among the first signatories of the John Snow Memorandum, published in the Lancet in October 2020.⁷ The memo asserted that “[t]he infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is several-fold higher than that of seasonal influenza and infection can lead to persisting illness, including in young, previously healthy people,” based on the false premise that pre-existing immunity to the “novel” virus did not exist within the population. It called for “clear communication about the risks posed by COVID-19 and effective strategies to combat them” such as physical distancing, face coverings, and “continuing restrictions” which “must be supported by financial and social programmes.”

Image source: Wikipedia

The memo is worth reading, as it comes across very much like a one-for-one counter to the Great Barrington Declaration published the very same month.⁸ In fact, that seems to have been exactly the point, as per the GBD's Wikipedia page. Other signatories in the initial crew include the infamous David Fisman (who argued it was dangerous for the “vaccinated” to mix with the “unvaccinated”),⁹ Isabella Eckerle (a collaborator of the more infamous Christian Drosten),¹⁰ and Angela Rasmussen (who piled on doctors spreading “misinformation” with the equally pleasant Timothy Caulfield, while also working at VIDO-InterVac, an institution at the University of Saskatchewan developing their own COVID-19 vaccine).¹¹¹²

Image source: Health Affairs

On November 19, 2020, the journal Health Affairs published a study led by Walensky with a rather odd premise. The piece is now hidden behind a paywall but an archived version remains available.

Titled Clinical Outcomes Of A COVID-19 Vaccine: Implementation Over Efficacy, the study argues that “factors related to implementation will contribute more to the success of vaccination programs than a vaccine’s efficacy as determined in clinical trials.”¹³ Funny - she must have seen the data coming out of the Pfizer-BioNTech clinical trial! I would, of course, direct her to the excellent breakdown series at

OpenVAET’s Substack

and

Jackanapes Junction

.

Pfizer/BioNTech C4591001 Trial - How many mathematical proofs of fraud in this trial do we need, for independent inquiries to finally start ...?

Specifically, Walensky and her team warn that things like “manufacturing or deployment delays, significant vaccine hesitancy, or greater epidemic severity” would all make the COVID-19 vaccines work less well, and that therefore, health officials should “invest greater financial resources and attention to vaccine production and distribution programs, to redouble efforts to promote public confidence in COVID-19 vaccines, and to encourage continued adherence to other mitigation approaches, even after a vaccine becomes available.”

In other words, Walensky set the stage for the inevitable COVID-19 vaccine failures to be blamed on any combination of the following unrelated things:

• A rollout that is deemed to be “too slow”

• Any arbitrary number of people who decline to take the shot for any reason

• Any increase in illness that can be blamed on COVID-19

• Not enough money

• People not continuing to do non-vaccine things like locking down, wearing face coverings, working from home, etc.

Thus, it shouldn’t be surprising that Walensky then led the charge in declaring the “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated” less than one year later.¹⁴

A comment from someone named PaulG sums up quite well why Walensky’s approach has always been completely backwards. The irony, of course, is in the reply from “Eric”, who offers as rebuttal links to the Phase III clinical trial interim reports from Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca — the exact trials Walensky argues are essentially irrelevant.

In the acknowledgements, Walensky discloses funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Massachusetts General Hospital and CNN, of all things.

Conflicts of interest

Image source: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Beyond the well-covered inconsistencies in her statements regarding COVID-19 and associated vaccine products, Walensky has faced criticism for perceived conflicts of interest. Her husband is Loren Walensky, a “renowned pediatric oncology researcher” at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University.¹⁵

As detailed in an article published by RedState in August 2021, Loren co-founded a biotechnology company called Lytica Therapeutics in October 2019, which swiftly received a $16.9 million grant from the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) - the government agency that employs Rochelle.¹⁶ The grant was issued February 18, 2020.¹⁷

The specific funding program in question, the Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator (CARB-X), is funded by:¹⁸

• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

• Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA)

• German Federal Ministry of Education and Research

• National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)

• United Kingdom Department of Health and Social Care (through the Global Antimicrobial Resistance Innovation Fund)

• Wellcome Trust

CARB-X is a global non-profit partnership accelerating antibacterial products to address drug-resistant bacteria, and the grant it awarded to Lytica is intended to “develop antibacterial peptides with broad activity against multidrug-resistant bacteria.” With this in mind, consider the role that bacterial pneumonia seems to have played in a significant portion of COVID-19 fatalities, as recently highlighted by Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.¹⁹

Image source: Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Of course, this is not new information. In their October 2021 paper, researchers Denis Rancourt, Marine Baudin and Jérémie Mercier identified efforts across the world to limit the use of antibiotics in patients diagnosed with COVID-19.²⁰ Antibiotic prescriptions dropped significantly in April 2020 and remained low, allowing for secondary bacterial pneumonia to overtake patients who otherwise would have otherwise recovered.²¹²² They also note that the suppression of the use of ivermectin likely also contributed, given its broad antiviral and antibacterial properties, citing past research on its use against tuberculosis as an example.²³

If Walensky’s Lytica Therapeutics is tasked with developing new antibiotic products to treat lung infections (like pneumonia), it stands to reason that the use of the many existing antibiotics and ivermectin (and likely other yet-to-be-identified repurposed drugs) would stand in the way of them fulfilling their CARB-X grant obligations. Hence, conflict of interest.

Then there’s the fact that in May 2022, Lytica was accepted into the Blue Knight program funded by Johnson & Johnson and BARDA — the latter of which sits alongside Walensky’s CDC within the Department of Health and Human Services.²⁴ J&J, of course, developed an adenoviral vector COVID-19 vaccine under its Janssen subsidiary which received hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. government funding through Operation Warp Speed.²⁵

Interestingly, the page on Lytica’s website that formerly detailed Walensky’s role as scientific co-founder is no longer available (except by Wayback Machine, of course). He still appears on the front page under the Leadership heading, not far above the Scientific Advisory Board section that includes a former Janssen vice president.²⁶

But Lytica isn’t Loren Walensky’s first rodeo. He also serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board and a consultant for Aileron Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company developing treatments against side effects caused by cancer chemotherapy.²⁷

Aileron's investors are a who's who of pharmaceutical industry giants, including Eli Lilly, Novartis, Roche, and SR One (GlaxoSmithKline's venture capital firm).²⁸²⁹³⁰³¹ The first paper published on the news section of Lytica's website, titled Design of stapled antimicrobial peptides that are stable, nontoxic and kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria in mice, discloses a partnership between Aileron and Walensky’s employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Image source: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Incidentally, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has itself been funded by a number of relevant organizations such as Abbott, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bayer, BD, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Biogen, BlackRock, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, Takeda — all of whom profited greatly from diagnostics, experimental treatments and novel vaccine candidates for COVID-19. Additional donors of note are Donald and Melania Trump, the Trump Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (whose board of directors includes Anthony Fauci and former FDA commissioner/Gavi director Margaret Hamburg), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Steve and Michele Kirsch Foundation, Open Society Foundations and the World Health Organization.³²

Image source: Walensky Lab

Walensky’s lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute acknowledges further research funding from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.³³ The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society received at least two grants from Pfizer in 2021.³⁴

According to NPR, employees at the CDC were unaware of the news of Walensky’s departure until they heard the announcement themselves. She is set to remain in office until June 30, with no replacement named as of today.

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1. Chappell, B. (2023, May 5). Rochelle Walensky, who led the CDC during the pandemic, resigns. NPR. http://archive.today/2023.05.06-115616/https://www.npr.org/2023/05/05/1174349881/rochelle-walensky-who-led-the-cdc-during-the-pandemic-resigns

2. Savin, J. (2023, May 5). COVID-19 is officially “over”, according to the World Health Organisation. Yahoo Life; Cosmopolitan. https://web.archive.org/web/20230511191207/https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/covid-19-officially-over-according-143000966.html

3. Booker, B. (2020, December 7). Biden Names Massachusetts Doctor To Lead CDC. NPR. http://archive.today/2021.05.10-214155/https://www.npr.org/sections/biden-transition-updates/2020/12/07/943871894/biden-names-massachusetts-doctor-to-lead-cdc

4. Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council. National Institutes of Health. Retrieved May 11, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230511224245/https://www.oar.nih.gov/about/oarac

5. Rochelle Walensky. Prevention Policy Modeling Lab. Retrieved February 2, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230202190315/https://prevention-policy-modeling-lab.sph.harvard.edu/rochelle-walensky/

6. Rochelle Walensky. (2020, November 7). The Forum at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. https://web.archive.org/web/20230418171306/https://theforum.sph.harvard.edu/expert-participants/rochelle-walensky/

7. John Snow Memorandum. John Snow Memorandum. Retrieved January 26, 2022, from http://archive.today/2022.01.26-220855/https://www.johnsnowmemo.com/john-snow-memo.html

8. Great Barrington Declaration: One Year Later. (2021, October 5). Brownstone Institute. http://archive.today/2021.10.05-143852/https://brownstone.org/articles/great-barrington-declaration-one-year-later/

9. Fisman, D. N., Amoako, A., & Tuite, A. R. (2022). Impact of population mixing between vaccinated and unvaccinated subpopulations on infectious disease dynamics: implications for SARS-CoV-2 transmission. CMAJ, 194(16), E573–E580. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.212105

10. 2019 novel Coronavirus Global research and innovation forum: towards a research roadmap AGENDA. (2020). GLOPID-R. https://web.archive.org/web/20230208185417/https://www.glopid-r.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/covid-19-global-research-and-innovation-forum-2020-program.pdf

11. Abraham, N., Caulfield, T., Gommerman, J., Kindrachuk, J., Langlois, M.-A., Morris, A., Rasmussen, A., Saginur, R., & Tokhmafshan, F. (2022, January 27). Let evidence be our guide: Misinformation most insidious when it comes from health-care professionals. Healthy Debate. https://web.archive.org/web/20220128000330/https://healthydebate.ca/2022/01/topic/covid-misinformation-from-health-care-professionals/

12. Bridges, A. (2020,
23). Made-in-Canada COVID-19 vaccine effort slowed by manufacturing delay. CBC News. https://web.archive.org/web/20230406000537/http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/vido-intervac-university-of-saskatchewan-manufacturing-delays-canada-vaccine-1.5694008

13. Paltiel, A. D., Schwartz, J. L., Zheng, A., & Walensky, R. P. (2020). Clinical outcomes of a COVID-19 vaccine: implementation over efficacy. Health Affairs, 40(1), 10.1377/hlthaff. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.02054

14. Anthes, E., & Petri, A. (2021, July 16). C.D.C. Director Warns of a “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.” The New York Times. http://archive.today/2021.12.04-220605/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/health/covid-delta-cdc-walensky.html

15. Loren D. Walensky, MD, PhD. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Retrieved May 11, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230511193108/https://www.dana-farber.org/find-a-doctor/loren-d-walensky/

16. Hounsell, S. (2021, August 6). EXCLUSIVE: CDC Director Walensky’s Husband Received $5 Million in HHS Grants - and That’s Just the Start of It. RedState. https://web.archive.org/web/20230110204450/https://redstate.com/scotthounsell/2021/08/06/exclusive-cdc-director-walenskys-husband-received-5-million-in-hhs-grants-and-thats-just-the-start-of-it-n421809

17. Robinson, J., & Finnegan, A. (2020, April 18). CARB-X funds Lytica Therapeutics to develop antibacterial peptides to treat drug-resistant infections in the lungs and other parts of the body. CARB-X. http://archive.today/2021.08.08-003713/https://carb-x.org/carb-x-news/carb-x-funds-lytica-therapeutics-to-develop-antibacterial-peptides-to-treat-drug-resistant-infections-in-the-lungs-and-other-parts-of-the-body/

18. Funding Partners. (2022). CARB-X. http://archive.today/2022.06.06-075157/https://carb-x.org/partners/funding-partners/

19. Paul, M. (2023, May 5). Secondary Bacterial Pneumonia Drove Many COVID-19 Deaths. Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. http://archive.today/2023.05.11-193941/https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/2023/05/05/secondary-bacterial-pneumonia-drove-many-covid-19-deaths/

20. Rancourt, D., Baudin, M., & Mercier, J. (2021). Nature of the COVID-era public health disaster in the USA, from all-cause mortality and socio-geo-economic and climatic data. ResearchGate, 135–137. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.11570.32962

21. Karami, Z., Knoop, B. T., Dofferhoff, A. S. M., Blaauw, M. J. T., Janssen, N. A., van Apeldoorn, M., Kerckhoffs, A. P. M., van de Maat, J. S., Hoogerwerf, J. J., & ten Oever, J. (2020). Few bacterial co-infections but frequent empiric antibiotic use in the early phase of hospitalized patients with COVID-19: results from a multicentre retrospective cohort study in The Netherlands. Infectious Diseases, 53(2), 102–110. https://doi.org/10.1080/23744235.2020.1839672

22. Buehrle, D. J., Wagener, M. M., Nguyen, M. H., & Clancy, C. J. (2021). Trends in Outpatient Antibiotic Prescriptions in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020. JAMA Network Open, 4(9), e2126114. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.26114

23. Crump, A. (2017). Ivermectin: enigmatic multifaceted “wonder” drug continues to surprise and exceed expectations. The Journal of Antibiotics, 70(5), 495–505. https://doi.org/10.1038/ja.2017.11

24. Lytica Therapeutics, Inc. Johnson & Johnson Innovation. Retrieved May 11, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230511210540/https://jnjinnovation.com/JLABSNavigator/company/Lytica_Therapeutics,_Inc.

25. Explaining Operation Warp Speed. (2020, August). National Indian Health Board; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://web.archive.org/web/20230511211626/https://www.nihb.org/covid-19/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Fact-sheet-operation-warp-speed.pdf

26. Home. Lytica - the Secret to More Effective ADCs. Retrieved May 11, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230511210521/https://www.lyticatherapeutics.com/

27. Mourtada, R., Herce, H. D., Yin, D. J., Moroco, J. A., Wales, T. E., Engen, J. R., & Walensky, L. D. (2019). Design of stapled antimicrobial peptides that are stable, nontoxic and kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria in mice. Nature Biotechnology, 37(10), 1186–1197. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-019-0222-z

28. Aileron Therapeutics - Funding, Financials, Valuation & Investors. Crunchbase. Retrieved May 11, 2023, from https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/aileron-therapeutics/company_financials

29. Series A - Aileron Therapeutics - 2006-12-01 - Crunchbase Funding Round Profile. Crunchbase. Retrieved May 11, 2023, from https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/aileron-therapeutics-series-a--f1823f7a

30. Series D - Aileron Therapeutics - 2009-06-11 - Crunchbase Funding Round Profile. Crunchbase. Retrieved May 11, 2023, from https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/aileron-therapeutics-series-d--7c3c2e71

31. Series E - Aileron Therapeutics - 2014-10-29 - Crunchbase Funding Round Profile. Crunchbase. Retrieved May 11, 2023, from https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/aileron-therapeutics-series-e--740ce9be

32. Benz Jr., E. J., Paresky, S. S., Dana III, C. A., & Morse, R. P. 2012 Honor Roll of Donors. PageTurnPro; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Retrieved August 13, 2022, from https://web.archive.org/web/20220813072451/https://www.pageturnpro.com/Dana-Farber-Cancer-Institute-and-The-Jimmy-Fund/49214-2012-Honor-Roll-of-Donors/sdefault.html#page/76

33. Support. The Walensky Lab. Retrieved May 3, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230503163820/https://www.walenskylab.org/support

34. US Medical, Scientific, Patient and Civic Organization Funding Report: Q1-Q2 2021. (2021, September 27). Pfizer. https://web.archive.org/web/20230503211316/https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23787007/pfizer-2021-report.pdf