PART THREE - Lie Hard, With a Vengeance! In which we explore the nature of the report from the WHO panel on lessons from COVID, its chairman - Jeffery Sachs, his motives, and his thoughts on a US laboratory leak
Previously on Rebutting Russell Brand:
In Part One we saw how a 100-year-old racist panic was resurrected to obfuscate the Trump administration's response to COVID. We found that Russell was more than willing to indulge in these racist tropes to push his preferred narrative while ignoring the suffering of the most vulnerable people in our society.
In Part Two, we saw how Russell pushed the widely discredited idea that COVID originated from a US-based lab leak while ignoring all evidence to the contrary. We showed how Russell intentionally ignores the facts in front of him even as they describe the dangers of the toxic narrative that he pushes - one that has contributed to the deaths of over 6.5 million people worldwide.
In this final post on the subject, Part Three, we’ll look at the source of the extraordinary claims behind the US Lab-Leak hypothesis, and their apparent progenitor, the mysterious Professor Sachs
So, for the thrilling conclusion of Russell Brand and the Mysterious Professor Sachs, stay tuned for:
Part Three - Lie Hard, with a vengeance!
Is a disaster really a disaster if rich elites are able to profit from it??? And is an imperialism really an imperialism if it’s done by your mate what’s called Vlad and what lives in Moscow??????
Hello, you awakening profiteers in the calamities of this world! You harvesters of misery and despair arising from the crises - political and natural - that befall our fragile globe, floating, as it is, in the icy abyss of infinite space! And as you feast upon the wreckage of a civilization brought low by its own hubris and negligence, scavenging for the few remaining resources, hoarding wealth, oblivious to the festering masses who impart value to crude raw materials by the sweat and blood of their toil, you might consider buying tickets to one of Russell Brand's upcoming tours, or perhaps some merch’! But before you do any of that, we need to figure out what is all this malarky with the idea that COVID-19 comes from a laboratory in the little old US of A???!!!!
Throughout this series of three blog posts, I have been discussing Russell’s reading of a sensationalist Telegraph article that was reporting on the idea that COVID-19 was leaked from a US laboratory. This theory is purported to originate from a “major report” that was the conclusion of a committee formed by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the purpose of identifying any lessons that the WHO could employ to help in future pandemics. More specifically, however, the theory originates from the committee’s chairperson, the mysterious Professor Jeffery Sachs (of whom Russell is much enamored), but does not appear to be widely shared with other members of the committee, or with the scientific community as a whole.
So who is Jeffery Sachs? Far from the high brow and lofty academic, Russell presents him as, Sachs is a “superstar economist” and a fundraising powerhouse with a career spanning four decades in the media spotlight.
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, he became renowned as “Dr. Shock” during his time advising governments in South America and Eastern Europe on the transition to market-led economies. His solution - the sudden removal of all economic regulation and safety nets in an orgy of neoliberal free market capitalism. The result; mass unemployment and the emergence of wealthy elites picking through the bones of ravaged economies.
Sachs’ “Shock Therapy” would go on to become the blueprint for the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” (don’t tell Russell!), but in the 90’s, the whole gig unraveled when Sachs steered the Russian economy off a cliff, enabling the rise of the oligarch class and a decade of economic free fall crowned by the installation of Vladimir Putin as a “stabilizing” force. Don’t believe me? Check out the latest documentary series by Russell’s old mate, Adam Curtis, on the jolly old BBC.
After quitting Russia, a country that was circling an economic drain of Sachs’ creation, he moved on to the realm of International Development. This is an industry dominated by huge amounts of institutional charity and foreign aid money spent on massive aid projects (or rather, spent on the apparatus of UN bodies and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) set up to administer said projects).
By the early 2000s, Sachs was at the center of a web of shadowy NGOs and pseudo-academic institutions with blurred boundaries with the UN, all fueled by heaps and heaps of cold hard cash. Sachs drew in millions of dollars in aid money for his employers and his pet projects, including a $50 million check from George Soros (don't tell Russell!). His epic fundraising was enabled in no small measure by his celebrity status - tooling around Africa with the likes of Madonna, and behatted bellend and poverty botherer, Bono, who penned a hagiographic foreword for Sachs’ book.
But the celebrity patina rubbed thin with the release of Canadian journalist Naomi Klein’s expose “Shock Doctrine”, which drew a straight line from Sachs’ origins destroying developing nation’s economies to his more recent efforts at destroying regional economies in the name of International Development. Klein coined the term “disaster capitalism” to describe Sachs’ work. Klein, incidentally, worked with Russell Brand on a number of projects between 2014 and ‘17, back in the days when he wasn’t a right-wing firebrand.
Further scandal ensued a few years later when Journalist Nina Munk, who had followed Sachs’ Millennium Villages Projects for years, wrote a book describing how Sachs’ poverty eradication projects “left people even worse off than before”. Bill Gates described the book as “a valuable—and, at times, heartbreaking—cautionary tale.” Quite a turnaround when you consider the Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation had donated $15 million to Sachs’ Earth Institute just the year before (don’t tell Russell!).
Feeling the heat, Sachs then moved on to the Gross Domestic Happiness grift. He established another boundary-blurring NGO, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (UNSDSN), which has been publishing the World Happiness Report annually since 2012. This ranks nations according to the apparent happiness of their residents. Although some commentators were surprised to see notoriously oppressive and conservative Middle Eastern regimes, with large populations of indentured servants (read “slaves”), ranking so highly in the lists. Could it be anything to do with the millions of dollars those nations ploughed into Sachs’ new NGO? Coincidence, I’m sure!
Sachs tried to reinvent himself as a progressive. His 2012 attendance at an Occupy Wall Street protest was met with almost the same hostility and skepticism as Russell Brand’s appearance at anti-capitalist protests in 2015. Sachs now claimed to disdain neoliberalism, and the large cash infusions his previous economic shock therapy relied on were not to be seen as fundamental failures of free market neoliberalism but were now evidence that he’d never been a neoliberal in the first place!
In 2016 he felt the Bern, much like our Russell, and jumped wholeheartedly on the Bernie bus. It was about this time that Sachs started to embrace alt-imperialism.
For those that don’t know, alt-imperialists are people so preoccupied with the notion of US imperialism that they variously ignore, deny, excuse, or obfuscate other forms of imperialism, notably that of Russia and China. Extreme alt-imperialists see the hand of US imperialism in almost every international crisis or calamity- theirs’ is a perverted “American Exceptionalism” where America is uniquely evil and occupies the same space in their worldview as the Illuminati or (((Globalists))) of other, more recognizable, conspiracy theorists. You might recognize these characteristics in some notable public figures, perhaps a certain Glenn Greenwald, or his simpering acolyte, a one Mr. Russell E Brand, squire of Henley on Thames?
Sachs concocted a world history where the US was solely responsible for the Syrian civil war - initially as a critique of Hilary Clinton’s time as Secretary of State, but eventually developing a full-blown conspiracy that the CIA and FBI had waved their magic “civil war” wand over Syria after Obama had stated that Syrian president Assad “must go”. This ignored the fact that Obama’s supposed inciting comments were made months after the fuse of the civil war had been lit. And if Obama was so keen to intervene in Syria why did he not seize upon the multiple opportunities to do so - including the humiliating u-turn on his chemical weapons “red-line”?
Sachs has written more news articles and op-eds in the six years since he has deigned to take an interest in Syria (21) than he did about Afghanistan in the 20-odd years of US occupation there (17). Most of the Syrian articles were direct calls to end supposed US intervention, with titles like “Ending America’s Disastrous Role in Syria” - the real-world extent of which was cross-border strikes on ISIS from Iraq (after Obama left office). The Afghan ones; are just general foreign policy think pieces. The main difference between Afghanistan and Syria in Sachs’ eyes? We can only speculate, but it is worth noting that Russia was active in Syria, but not Afghanistan and that US strikes into Syria risked Russian operations.
A rather clear, and amusing, example of bias towards Russian imperialism is in his recent article “The West’s False Narrative about Russia and China” where he asks his readers to consider Russian “wars of choice” only in terms of those wars started since 1980 (conveniently missing the USSR invasion of Afghanistan), and outside former Soviet territories. Well, hey-presto!, this leaves only Syria, but conveniently ignores Chechnya (1&2), Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine (2014 & 2022), etc, etc. You get the picture. Oh yeah, and the USSR invasion of Afghanistan? That was the US toppling the Afghan communist government forcing Russian intervention, according to Sachs.
His attitudes to China have also been called into question - he jumped to the defense of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou after her arrest in Canada with such full-throated vigor that it caused at least one critic to speculate that Sachs was paid by Huawei.
Sachs denied this, of course, but he does have a slightly “it’s complicated” relationship with China. As The Intercept points out “SDSN [Sachs’ NGO] has affiliated centers in the UAE and China, and the nonprofit’s leadership council includes officials from both countries, among them the vice chair of the China Development Research Foundation, which reports to China’s State Council. Sachs also holds an advisory position at Beijing’s Tsinghua University that does not appear on his CV, his public LinkedIn profile, or his bios published outside China. The position is at an institute set up to promote China’s foreign policy goals within the U.N.”
He also, this year, won the 2022 Tang Prize in Sustainable Development, accompanied by a lovely big $1.3 million check. The Tang Prize is an attempt to create an “Asian Nobel Prize”, and is founded by a Taiwanese oligarch who “does business on both sides of the Taiwan Straight”. I.e. he does business in mainland China, unencumbered, I’m sure, by CCP government interference.
As to the specific acts of Sustainable Development that Sachs has been engaged in recently to merit this prize? Difficult to say, seeing as he has spent the last two years diligently working on the WHO report on lessons from the COVID response (another UN junket). You know the one! The one that’s caused him to spend the last two years bouncing all over the internet claiming COVID was made and released from a US lab, which, it has been noted, caused considerable satisfaction with Chinese diplomats. Weird coincidence! Received a cash prize from a prominent Chinese businessman the same year he promoted favorable Chinese COVID propaganda. All these coincidences!
And what of the report? Does it mention US labs as a source of COVID? Not really. It’s clearly been reported that other members of the committee responsible for authoring the report vehemently disagreed with Sachs-and I suspect they were able to exclude most of his wild claims. There are two references to US labs, and they seem to be mentioned only in terms of China not sharing data from their labs (“well, the US hasn’t either!”).
The US lab source conspiracy theory has to be inferred. Sachs claims to have worked “extensively” on this part of the report, and there is a detectable change in tone in writing style. For example, the part immediately prior to lab-leaks talks about zoonotic spillover and is heavily supported with citations to scientific academic papers. There are 19 document references in the preceding section, but only five in the lab leak section. The first two are there to support the statement that there has been a “significant” increase in gain-of-function testing since SARS-COV1 in the 2000s, but they describe only three experiments between them. “Significant “? But they are, at least scientific papers. The third is essentially an open letter from two doctors in an obscure medical blog which is presented to support the fact that “many” doctors are concerned about possible lab releases. The fourth is a statement from the US government claiming that the US does not sponsor gain of function experiments, and the fifth is a slightly whiny complaint from The Intercept news site about a US government document release that was almost entirely redacted, presented by Sachs as proof that the US government is not releasing data as a cover-up - even though The Intercept article acknowledges that the government had previously released thousands of pages of documents that The Intercept had developed stories from, somewhat contradicting Sachs’ claims of a cover-up.
The direct claims of a US lab source for COVID simply are not present. There is certainly zero evidence presented either. But these claims do feed on preexisting conspiracy theories that, even if the virus originated in a Chinese lab, they were ultimately funded by the US government. Of course, Chinese authorities like this narrative, not only does it further obfuscate reasonable discussions around the source of the virus, it also seeks to spread any “blame” for complicity or negligence in a possible lab release.
Some fun things that the report DOES mention though, are the impact of internet weirdos spreading misinformation on basic public health measures designed to protect populations against COVID and vaccine skepticism (don’t tell Russell!).
It also highlights the difference in death rates between pacific countries that adopted simple health measures - limited public gatherings, face masks, vaccines- and American countries with huge unmasked public rallies, crowded churches that might as well have invited attendees to spit in each other’s faces, and weirdos telling people not to get vaccinated.
We may never fully understand Professor Sachs’ motives for peddling his COVID conspiracy theories, but we do know he has a long and storied history of accepting cash from some very “interesting” people, and he’s not beyond cozying up to some very distasteful people when it aids his agenda and funds his projects. But, then again, maybe he’s 100% pilled for alt-imperialism and doesn’t need any other motive.
What I do find amusing are the parallels between Russell and Sachs’ careers - the early quest for celebrity, undone by hubris, a pivot to a more informed, international consciousness, eventually rejected due to the early celebrity, followed by a cynical pivot to harvest cash with no concern for morals or basic human decency.
I may not have much, but when I look at these ghouls I’m grateful to be a wage slave, depending on the vagaries of our economic rollercoaster for my bread and butter rather than being a soulless husk condemned to be endlessly grinding on the great wheel of grift to achieve the attention that is needed to fuel a meaningless existence.
And there we have it! But what do you think about massive parasites feeding off the misery brought about by the collapse of our democratic and economic systems? Please comment below so that the authorities can root you out and send you to a re-education camp! But what ever you do, be sure to like, review and subscribe!
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