Back To The Future: Bush, Cheney And 'Biodefense For The 21st Century'

One Man Wielded the Most Powerful Weapon Against the World

 Mercola

To understand how and why the CDC has morphed into an agency that works against, instead of for, the public good, we need to take a look at the history of American biodefense. Two journalists have recently dedicated articles to this issue.

In an August 29, 2022, Unherd article,6 Ashley Rindsberg reviewed how Dr. Anthony Fauci rose to power as the highest paid federal employee, sitting at the “very top of America’s biodefense infrastructure,” with near-unlimited authority, at least as it pertains to science; what gets funded and what doesn’t.

“To understand the rise of Fauci … we must return to the first months of the 2000s, when a hawkish new administration was settling into power,” Rindsberg writes. George W. Bush came into office with Dick Cheney as vice president. Cheney had already served as defense secretary under George H.W. Bush.

According to Rindsberg, the Bush administration “came to power with biological weapons and infectious disease very much top of mind, with Cheney seeking to address the gaping hole in America’s national security left by the country’s lack of a coherent biodefense strategy.”

Biodefense became an even more prominent concern in the aftermath of 9/11, when letters containing anthrax were sent out to members of media and two U.S. senators. Of the 22 people infected with anthrax, five died. According to Rindsberg, Cheney “served as the political engine behind a paradigm shift that would soon take place in America’s biodefense strategy.”

Just six days before 9/11, Joe Biden, then-chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had led a hearing on the threat of bioterrorism and the spread of infectious diseases.

Subsequent to that hearing, in June 2002, president Bush signed the “Biodefense for the 21st Century”7 directive, the aim of which was to advance a “comprehensive framework” for U.S. biodefense, based on the assumption that America could be devastated by a bioweapons attack.

The directive outlined “essential pillars” of the U.S. biodefense program, including threat awareness and vulnerability assessment, prevention and protection, surveillance and detection, response and recovery. The year before, in June 2001, senior policymakers had also performed a two-day tabletop simulation of a smallpox attack called Dark Winter.

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