So this is going around:
This Walker is listed as “Director, Worldwide R&D Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning.”
Many of you know, but for those who do not, a “Director” is a mid-level title. Corporations are flooded with them. The word doesn’t mean the English “director”, as in “person in charge.” In business it means “yet-another-peon in the chain.” Usually “Directors” are two gaping, yawning steps below a vice president; after “Director” is “Senior Director”. “Director” means very little.
There is some dispute whether this Jordan Walker in the video is a hoaxer, or worse, some kind of plant from a rival company, inserted there to make Pfizer look bad. To which I say, why bother? They do a good enough job at that themselves. How much in fines has Pfizer been charged for misinformation? But here is a thread on the debate.
A lot of the back-and-forth centers around how high this Walker is in the company. A skeptical journalist thinks because Walker calls himself a “Director” he should have lots of scientific papers and suchlike. Nah. Walker could just be yet another diversity hire, for all we know. “Directors” aren’t usually people of any importance.
Which means another take is that Walker’s job is real enough, and what he told Veritas is likely a mixture of truth, exaggeration, and bullshit. Trying to make himself seem more important than he is.
Indeed, this drama queen admits his bullshit himself. Before throwing a hilarious drama queen fit.
Some arch comedy here. Walker was set up on a “date” with a Veritas reporter, who either was, or was pretending to be, “oriented” in the way Walker obviously is. A third date, Walker says. There is nothing a reporter won’t do to get a story. I guess.
Walker chimps out at the end, and as he pushes and shoves he whines about being touched and hurt. Classic crybully.
Meanwhile, on the wall of the restaurant are two lovely paintings of Our Lord and Our Lady. I could not see whether they were weeping.
Walker himself says he’s not a scientist, that he came from a consulting firm. Which comports with his title well enough.
As far as I know, Pfizer didn’t react publicly to this. Except that they tweeted this shortly after (they do not often tweet):
Take that, haters.
The Veritas story has all the quotes.
Walker, who is quite obviously ignorant about biology, nevertheless might know some of what Pfizer is up to. For instance:
“One of the things we’re exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it [COVID] ourselves so we could create — preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that. If we’re gonna do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine — no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating ****ing viruses.”
“From what I’ve heard is they [Pfizer scientists] are optimizing it [COVID mutation process], but they’re going slow because everyone is very cautious — obviously they don’t want to accelerate it too much. I think they are also just trying to do it as an exploratory thing because you obviously don’t want to advertise that you are figuring out future mutations.”
None of that sounds wrong. Which doesn’t make it real, but it sure has the ring-a-ding-ding of truth. Especially that last quote.
Gain-of-lethality research is real. Almost certainly that’s how we got the coronadoom.
One idea behind GOLR is to create viruses in the lab so that drugs can be developed to cure the man-made viruses. Walker himself in effect says this. But there is no evidence that the man-made viruses look like anything like those created in the wild.
GOLR, therefore, is a “solution” in search of a problem. It is immoral. It is wrong. It happens because of hubris. It happens because of Pride. A sin.
My guess is that Pfizer (and others) are doing work along these lines, whether outright, or approaching it as near they can and stay on just-this-side of what they see as the law. For instance, they call it “directed evolution” instead of gain-of-lethality.
Pfizer is a business, and its business is making and selling drugs. From a purely business standpoint it makes sense.
From a sanity perspective, it is nuts, a crime.
💬 From a purely business standpoint it makes sense.
To riff off A MidWestern Doc, profitable & scalable doesn't mix well with safe & effective. As in at all 🤷
The problem any pharmaceutical company has these days is that they money selling vaccines and drug treatments. It is entirely plausible, given the amounts of money involved, that they have the incentive to create the diseases for which their drugs are the only solution. This used to be the stuff of movies (remember Crimea and Bellerophon from one of the Mission Impossible movies?). Technique is about power and control. Businesses apply that power to make money. One of the aims of bourgeois mentality is to free business and technique from moral restraint in the name of progress. If there is money to be made from producing solutions to crisis, would it not be a good business model to use technique to manufacture the crisis which is then gives power, control and makes you money?