Today’s final and most important story comes courtesy of Jeffrey Tucker and the Brownstone Institute, which broke a story yesterday headlined, “The Plot to Get RFK.” Someone, bless them, leaked a pharma-industry meeting memo, which you can find reprinted in full here. It’s a stinker.
Before digging into it, I must first state that Brownstone did not confirm the memo’s authenticity beyond the representations of its undisclosed whistleblower. The memo looks perfectly real, and so far nobody’s denied it, but that disclaimer stands.
Having said that, the memo summarized a recent meeting of BIO, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, which is the largest biotech lobby in the world. Think of it as Big Pharma’s embassy in Washington, D.C., but with a slicker brand and a bigger umbrella. While it’s often mistaken as a science nonprofit or a research consortium, at its core, BIO is a trade association, representing over 1,000 pharmaceutical, biotech, and academic institutions— including giants like Pfizer, Moderna, and Gilead. Its newly elected co-chairs are Silvia Taylor from Novavax and Art Hirt from Merck.
Unsurprisingly, while BIO markets itself as promoting innovation for the public good, it rarely (never) addresses product safety, transparency, vaccine injury reporting, conflicts of interest with regulators, or member misbehavior like pharma profiteering during public health crises. Cough.
If any of you are still wondering about Secretary Kennedy’s bona fides, this memo should bury those doubts in their shallow graves. In the four-page memo’s very first bullet point, BIO’s members identified Kennedy as “a direct threat.”
As you can readily see, the third bullet point revealed how juicily the members salivated over the “potential” for creating a political “breakdown” between Kennedy and President Trump. Like dogs with new Pets-R-Us chew toys, the BIO memo repeatedly homed in on ideas for attacking the new HHS Secretary. That was the admittedly troubling news Brownstone focused on. But there was so much more.
The specific kind of “direct threat” the pharma execs had in mind was unveiled midway down the first page: profits. Of course, they didn’t say that outright, instead using buzzwords and euphemisms like “capital access,” “unpredictability,” and “viable capital-raising opportunities:”
Between the memo’s lines, the close reader sniffed the acrid odor of an all-hands-on-deck dumpster-fire emergency. The rest of the memo focused on what to do about that pesky RFK and all this anti-vaxxer nonsense. I’m sorry to tell you this, but once the suggestions started, their very first idea was “engaging conservative influencers” like the American Enterprise Institute, an influential conservative think-tank:
They BIO executives are morons. Cluess, witless, whatever you want to call it. The memo exposed their hubristic downfall: the complete failure to engage with their industry’s singular point of weakness— safety and efficacy. And Hubris is inevitably followed by Nemesis. They incorrectly identified RFK as Nemesis, and failed to read the national room. RFK is a symptom of their disease, not its cause.
BIO’s memo revealed not just strategic failure, but a kind of institutional narcissism. They’re not thinking clearly because they still believe the problem is you, me, RFK, and “misinformation”— not the mountain of corpses beneath their collapsing slogan: “safe and effective.”
By the way, the phrase “safe and effective” —or anything like it— appeared nowhere in the memo. I interpreted that as a quiet, maybe even subconscious, recognition that the slogan has now become a sarcastic punchline.
But wait till you see what they intend to replace “safe and effective” with. It’s so deranged and clueless that it is almost parodic. It would be truly hilarious if they weren’t so damnably dangerous. Are you ready? The BIO’s executive brain trust recommended focusing their new public vaccine messaging on: national security.
You really can’t make this stuff up. We literally just emerged from a pandemic where the phrase “national security” in the context of public health became synonymous with gaslighting, censorship, secrecy, cover-ups, coercion, and buffonish denials in the face of plain facts. Here it is, in their own words, again from the first page, and without a single reference to their Achilles’ heel, safety:
Those words, “national security,” ripple through the rest of the memo like a talking doll script. It’s like they dug through the smoking wreckage of their credibility, held up the one remaining piece of debris still smoldering, and said: “This. This will be our new flag.”
Here’s another mentally disturbed example. Still on the first page, BIO identified “threats and opportunities,” circling back once again like sketchy housecats gobbling up unmentionable items from the litter box, to their jingositic incantation: “national security:”
Good grief. I’m just a lawyer, not a branding consultant, but even I can come up with something better than repositioning vaccines as national security assets. Why not drive full bore into the mouth of the enemy, and announce plans to prove once and for all just how safe and effective their products are? They could trumpet voluntary new vaccine surveillance systems, loosen their death’s grip on study data, pledge to protect children at all costs, promise better cooperation with the new ACIP, agree to stop marketing antidepressants to kindergartners— anything. Something!
But no. It’s the worst rebranding since New Coke, or since Budweiser slapped that effeminate cross-dresser on its bottles. They’re not just tone-deaf. They’re trying to re-militarize medicine, to invert the doctor-patient relationship into a compliance-state dynamic. It won’t work. It can’t work. We all now know exactly what “national security” means. It means “do what you’re told and don’t ask questions.”
In place of ‘safe and effective,’ we now offer you ‘top secret and compulsory.’ You’re welcome.
It is literally the definition of bio-fascism. Framing personal health choices as state-security imperatives. And what’s most guffaw-inducing is that BIO did it in a memo ostensibly about “promoting trust.”
You might wonder why BIO’s wildly overpaid board members landed on national security as their new brand identity rather than as the punchline to an off-color joke. The reason is, they found a single silver lining amidst their crashing stock prices and the new regulatory hostility. That silver lining appeared in the form of an April government report titled, “Charting the
Future of Biotechnology.” Here’s its ‘reassuring’ cover image:
Biomedicine in a sniper’s scope. The report implicitly presumes that all our bodies are nodes (defensive weapons) in the national security infrastructure. There are good nodes and dangerous, noncompliant nodes.
I won’t bother quoting the report, which is an elegy to high-tech biomedicine crossed with an AR-15. All I need to say is that it frequently and often favorably quoted Chinese President Xi —the world premier communist dictator— whose views on personal medical freedom are, shall we say, somewhat anemic. The report’s authors seemed to believe quoting Xi Jinping gave their recommendations gravitas, rather than revealing their ideological drift.
Or maybe it was even written by the CCP. It would be hard to tell if it weren’t. You could slap a red star on the cover, translate it into Mandarin, and pass it out at the next National People’s Congress, and the apparatchiks would devour it with spicy Szechuan relish.
In fairness, the report doesn’t exactly praise Xi Jinping— but it quotes him like Moses delivering the ten biological commandments from Mount Synthetic Biology. Ostensibly, the CCP leader’s words were framed as warnings, the kind designed to provoke flung-open checkbooks at a Senate hearing. But in every substantive respect, the report adopts Xi’s logic point for point: biotechnology as statecraft, innovation as national security, and dissent as destabilization. It pretends to scowl while busily duplicating China’s model in the back copy room.
So here’s the funniest part: BIO actually believes this report —this technocratic fever dream quoting Xi Jinping like a policy oracle— will somehow win over conservative skeptics and MAHA fence-sitters. It’s laughable. The very voters BIO hopes to “inspire” watched their jobs, their churches, and their kids’ lungs suffocated under policies born from this exact mentality. To somehow think that wrapping the same ideology in a national security flag and citing the world’s premier communist dictator will rebuild trust in vaccines and torpedo RFK is not just out of touch— it’s magical thinking bordering on a parody of Alice in Wonderland.
Please.
The takeaway for those of us way up here in the cheap seats is: BIO is big pharma’s wounded rhinoceros, which they are unleashing to prod red-on-red conflict, pitting Trump against RFK and tradcons against MAHA. Keep your eyes open, ignore the clickbait, and avoid the hot takes. Hold the line.
Damn fine article Jeff. Keep up the good work