WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The Biden administration has announced it is putting $5 billion toward developing new COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics, in a rebranded continuation of the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” initiative.
In an April 10 interview with the Washington Post, White House COVID coordinator Ashish Jha and Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) assistant secretary for preparedness and response Dawn O’Connell detailed “Project Next Gen,” which aims to marshal partnerships between government and private entities toward the development of longer-lasting monoclonal antibodies, vaccines that are better at reducing transmission, and vaccines for new COVID variants and other coronaviruses.
Heading the project will be epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, which has received funding from the far-left Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. In February, CIDRAP released a “road map” for future vaccines upon which Project Next Gen is based.
“While our vaccines are still very effective at preventing serious illness and death, they are less capable of reducing infections and transmission over time,” an HHS spokesperson told Reuters, in a marked contrast to President Joe Biden falsely claiming in the first year of his presidency that “you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
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Stopping transmission, which the existing vaccines have failed to do, was the original rationale for making them mandatory.
“It’s been very clear to us that the market on this is moving very slowly,” said Jha. “There’s a lot that government can do, the administration can do, to speed up those tools … for the American people.” Jha declined to project a timetable for the new products because it would depend on “how quickly the scientific advancements continue, and how quickly we can study and measure the efficacy and safety.”
“We’ve begun surveying the landscape out there — assessing what vaccine candidates are available, [and] moving through what exciting technologies are there,” added O’Connell, who said Operation Warp Speed left behind useful lessons for expediting vaccine development. “We’ve learned a lot in these three years,” she said.
But critics argue that Operation Warp Speed, which developed and released the COVID shots in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take, is a cautionary tale about rushing vaccine development, rather than a guide.
The federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) reports 35,048 deaths, 196,067 hospitalizations, 19,026 heart attacks, and 26,753 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of March 31. An April 2022 study out of Israel indicates that COVID infection itself cannot fully account for the myocarditis numbers, despite common insistence to the contrary. Jab defenders are quick to stress that reports submitted to VAERS are unconfirmed, as anyone can submit one, but U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
Further, VAERS is not the only data source containing red flags. Data from the U.S. Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) shows that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, (487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).
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Last September, the Japanese Society for Vaccinology published a peer-reviewed study conducted by researchers from Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Maryland, which found that the “Pfizer trial exhibited a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group” while the “Moderna trial exhibited a 6% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group,” for a combined “16% higher risk of serious adverse events in mRNA vaccine recipients.”
In December 2022, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) hosted a roundtable discussion, during which civil rights attorney Aaron Siri detailed data from the CDC’s V-Safe reporting system revealing that 800,000 of the system’s 10 million participants, or approximately 7.7 percent, reported needing medical care after COVID injection. “25 percent of those people needed emergency care or were hospitalized, and another 48 percent sought urgent care,” Siri added. “Also, another 25 percent on top of the 7.7 percent reported being unable to work or go to school.”
Another study by a team of American, British, and Canadian researchers, published last December in the Journal of Medical Ethics, found that COVID booster mandates for university students – a relatively healthy group at relatively low risk from the virus – do far more harm than good: “[P]er COVID-19 hospitalization prevented, we anticipate at least 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalization).”