Regulatory Capture, Pollution, and Vaccines
What did you learn about corporate America from your decades leading that group—which eventually became Riverkeeper, right?
The way that Riverkeeper began was when Art and Ritchie Garrett, both former Marines, went to the Corps of Engineers and they went to the State Conservation Department to beg them to stop Penn Central Railroad from vomiting oil into the Hudson. And the colonel who ran the Corps of Engineers, whom they visited 11 times in Manhattan, he finally told them, these are important people—meaning the Penn Central Board of Directors, we can’t stop them. [The Garretts] realize, “Oh, OK, government is in cahoots with the polluters.” If you’re a big shot, you can destroy people’s livelihoods. You can privatize the commons, you can poison the fish, and nobody’s going to stop you because you own the regulatory agencies.
What does owning regulatory agencies mean?
There have been hundreds of articles, and I’ve written books on regulatory captures. There are a lot of mechanisms by which powerful economic entities in a society are able to capture the regulators that are supposed to be protecting the public. It happens in every country. I mean, you see less of it in Canada than you do in New York, for example, or Louisiana. But it’s happening everywhere.
There are huge economic incentives to pollute. So the polluters are able to figure out ways to turn those agencies into sock puppets for the industry that they are supposed to regulate.
And when you go to Monsanto or Exxon or any of these companies that you sue and say, “Hey, you guys, you’re dumping this shit into the water and it contains mercury or whatever that could be harmful to kids, so why don’t you stop it?”, what kinds of responses would you get?
The official response from those entities is sophisticated. And you’re usually dealing with lawyers, who are very guarded.
The interesting question that I think most Americans have is: Why would a corporation like Monsanto or General Electric poison all the fish in the Hudson if it’s their fish too? And that question was answered by Sinclair Lewis, who said that it’s impossible to persuade a man of a fact when the existence of that fact diminishes his salary. There’s an economic law called “tragedy of the commons,” which basically says an individual following their own economic interests will capture and kill the last fish in the ocean no matter what it does to the rest of society.
So those people are able to put blinders on to persuade themselves that they’re creating jobs, that they’re doing good things, and they judge themselves by their intentions rather than their actions. And ultimately their ultimate redoubt is, I can live in Aspen, or I can live in Hawaii, or I can live in a gated community, and the mayhem that I’m creating for other communities will not reach my door.
So the idea that large pharmaceutical companies might be using additives or using processes that could cause damage to children didn’t come as a shock to you.
What was a shock to me was the economic entanglements between the pharmaceutical industry and the regulatory agencies—which were, to me, unprecedented in my previous experience. The EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] is a captive agency, but it’s captured by the coal industry, the oil industry, and by the chemical industry. When we tried the Monsanto case, we got papers where the head of EPA’s pesticide regulatory division had a secret communication with Monsanto where he was telling them, “I’m going to kill this study and you need to give me a medal when I’ve done it.” He was not working for the public. He was working privately and secretly for Monsanto. And that’s pretty common. That’s basically typical regulatory capture.
But with pharma, you have the entire agency that is dependent on pharmaceutical revenue.
We need this study, and we need it done in a year, and here’s your million bucks.
Right. We need this drug approved in a year, so we’re going to pay you extra to fast-track it. And that money, the regulatory agencies become dependent on it.
At NIH [National Institutes of Health], as it turns out, they’re doing very little in the way of basic scientific research. What NIH should be doing is saying, OK, what’s the answer to this interesting question: Why is it that in my generation, I’m 69, the rate of autism is 1 in 10,000, while in my kids’ generation it’s 1 in 34?
Now, I would argue that a lot of that is from the vaccine schedule, which changed in 1989. But what nobody can argue about is that it has to be an environmental exposure of some kind.
I saw a number the other day, it said that 45% of American children now suffer from a chronic disease.
It’s more than that. The 2006 study is 65%. I think 45% suffer from obesity, at least in some states. It’s 40, 47%, I saw, in Oklahoma, Mississippi, and West Virginia.
And you know it has to be an environmental exposure because genes do not cause epidemics. 1989 was the year that a lot of these changes happened. The food allergy stuff suddenly became epidemic. Rheumatoid arthritis became epidemic. Juvenile diabetes, a whole host of allergic-type disease like anaphylaxis, eczema, food allergies, peanut allergies, etc., asthma, went to 1 in every 4 African American kids in cities. You had this explosion of neurodevelopmental disorders, ADHD, speech-related, language-related, tics, Tourette syndrome.
In fact, Congress said to the EPA, tell us what year the autism epidemic began. The EPA is a captured agency, as I said, but it’s not captured by pharma. They came back and said, “1989, it’s a red line.” What happened in 1989 was some kind of ubiquitous exposure that affected every demographic from Cubans in Florida to Inuit in upper Alaska, affecting boys at four times the rate of girls. What happened?
Phil Landrigan, who’s probably the premier toxicologist alive, and who has been the expert in a number of cases for me, and who does not agree with me on vaccines—he did a peer review article that said these are the 11 things that fit that timeline. And it was like glyphosate, neonicotinoid pesticides, ultrasound (which was interesting), cellphones, plastics, bottled water plastics, and a few others.
Now, if you’re the head of NIH and you’re trying to protect American health, you say, “OK, this is helpful. It’s got to be one of these 11 things. Let’s design some studies to figure out which one it is, and we’ll make some policy recommendations.”
Did that ever happen? No. The opposite happened, which is: The NIH will ruin your career and bankrupt your university if you try to do that study.
If you were saying, “My name is Bobby Kennedy, and I’m representing an organization called Riverkeeper, and we are taking on Monsanto, which is a big company that is dumping chemicals associated with birth defects into your water,” people look at you and say, “Good for you, Bobby.” So why do you think emotionally, psychologically, that once you took on this other set of big companies, pharmaceutical companies, which work with a different set of chemicals, and started accusing them of some similar practices, suddenly that made you into a dangerous weirdo?
Well, it’s actually even a narrower question than that, because if you ask any Democrat or liberal, are the pharmaceutical companies greedy, evil, and homicidal, and are they committing mass murder with a lot of products like Vioxx, which killed 120,000 people, every Democrat and every liberal will tell you, “Yeah, those companies are pure distilled evil.”
The opioid crisis kills 56,000 young Americans every year, and they knew it.
Right. Everybody knows big pharma is crooked. So if you’re a Democrat and a liberal, you have to say yes, they are crooked in every aspect of their business—except for vaccines.
I think the three big pharma companies have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties and civil damages over the last decade or so. So they’re chronic felons. Why do you think that just with this one product they found Jesus and they are going to behave?
So, Are You an Anti-Vaxxer?
An “anti-vaxxer” is a very bad thing to be, in any kind of polite society. Of course, the alternative is to accept that it’s absolutely normal for there to suddenly be 27 mandatory vaccines in the state of New York, half of which no one ever contemplated 10 years ago. Also, you must believe that every one of those vaccines is immaculate and perfect, because the companies making them would never, ever lie to us—and if you don’t believe that then you are also against vaccinations for polio. Which is absurd.
It strikes me as a religious type of belief. Ultimately, they require you to suspend critical thinking and to believe a trusted authority. I think that’s a biological impulse that people have that comes to us from the 20,000 generations we spent wandering the African savannah. Little groups, where there’s a boss, and you had to obey them or you would perish. The people who are imposing these orthodoxies are pressing all of those buttons.
Pro-vaccine means you are part of the group. If you are not, then you are no longer part of the group.
And then you find the person who’s not in that group who you can say is evil and a threat to everything we believe in. So you point to Donald Trump and you say, either you believe him or you believe us.
Although of course Trump is the one that brought us the COVID vaccines, right?
He brought us Fauci. He brought us the vaccines. He allowed Fauci to kill ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and he brought us the lockdowns and all that. But they ignore that. And they say, OK, Fauci is good, Trump is bad. And anybody who tries to depart from that orthodoxy is dangerous. And you have to discredit them. You cannot debate them. The heretics must be burned. They must not be allowed to speak.
Do masks work to stop COVID?
The Cochrane collaboration, Cochrane Library, which is the premier authority for scientific clinical reviews, came out this week and said that masks, both the masks, the N95 and the regular surgical masks, are useless. And we looked at the studies, the existing literature, at the very beginning, and we collected it all in one place and saw the same thing. What Tony Fauci said originally was true: Masks don’t work against respiratory viruses during a pandemic.
The weird thing, which surprised me, is that my assumption was that the cloth masks, of course they don’t work, because the holes in them are 200 times the size of the virus. But then I started actually reading the literature and there’s this huge 1982 study, it’s either University College or Royal College of London, they said, we’ve been using masks in the surgical theater and elsewhere for 80 years, but there’s no study of how effective they are. Let’s do one. For six months, nobody’s going to wear a mask. As it turns out, the infection rate went down, even in the surgical theater.
I mean, my assumption is, I want my doctor wearing a mask in the surgical theater, because I do not want him sneezing into my open chest cavity. But as it turns out, the science doesn’t even support that! It was an exercise not in public health, but in control.
Or in public reassurance that then became control.
Right.
Don’t worry. You’re not helpless. Recite these words three times and sprinkle some rose water, and you’re going to be OK.
They became these instruments of moral signaling or sanctimony, that I’m wearing a mask, meaning I’m compliant. I’m showing my willingness to obey. It struck me from the beginning, that convincing populations to put on masks, there was something creepy about that.
Because, if you look at the ambition or the intention of every totalitarian system, it’s ultimately to end the capacity for group action, for communication, to control all communications and every aspect of human behavior, from monetary exchanges to political organizing to sex. This is the ambition, the intention, of totalitarianism. And what is more repressive than forcing somebody to cover their mouth and their face. “No,” it says, “you cannot communicate.” God or evolution has equipped the human face with 42 different muscles for expressing all kinds of subtle skepticism.
My entire life as a reporter, I never interviewed anybody over the phone for exactly this reason.
You want to look in their face.
Ninety percent of the information that you’re going to get about somebody’s going to come from their face, from the way they move their body. That’s how humans communicate. I also think that the very skilled use of fear has the capacity to disable critical thinking and make people run for the safety of authority. If you read the last chapter of my Fauci book, I go through all these tabletop simulations, which I uncovered, and there’s plenty of them that were organized by the CIA beginning in 1999, almost every year since, involving that model, which is the use of a pandemic to clamp down totalitarian controls and to obliterate the Bill of Rights. And they do it again and again and again, and it’s astonishing.
None of them talk about, how do you boost immune systems? How do you stockpile vitamin D? How do you link frontline physicians to figure out what therapies and repurposed medications are working and efficacious against the disease? It’s all about, how do you immediately impose censorship? How do you get people locked down in their homes, when all of the manuals on pandemic management say you do not do mass lockdowns. How do you do social isolation and impose all these social controls?
It was training frontline physicians in every country in Europe and Canada and the United States, Mexico, and Australia, that when the pandemic comes, the response to it is to impose totalitarian control and some censorship.
It’s like a Rorschach test, right? This is who these people are, deep down. And this is what some part of them, at least, is looking to do.
This is exactly what they did in COVID, in all of these liberal Western democracies. Trudeau was a huge protector of civil rights and human rights. All of a sudden they all pivot in lockstep and do the same thing: Masks, lockdowns, mandatory vaccines.
I agreed that it was a really weird thing to watch, especially after the first two, three months. You’re like, why is this happening this way? Why does it keep going?
And the marginalization, the vilification, and delicensing of physicians and scientists, and people, regular people, said, hey, I just got injured by the vaccine. My daughter died. My son died. I’m paralyzed.
He was an athlete in high school, and now he just suffered a heart attack.
On the field. And those people are punished and they’re vilified rather than treating them with compassion. The Military-Pharmaceutical Complex
I want to keep going for a little while about the pharmaceutical complex itself and the responses to COVID. It’s clear that there was a large-scale Pentagon bio-weapons program. Bill Gates was brought in as a partner for the investment in that program. Research for that program was offshored to labs in China. It seems obvious now that the virus likely escaped from one of those Chinese labs. And that there was funding for exactly this kind of research from the U.S. government at that specific Chinese lab that the virus escaped from. So why isn’t there an effort to create some kind of chain of legal responsibility for the enormous amount of damage that was done, the same way you would do if Monsanto was dumping toxins in the water?
First of all, it wasn’t just the military that ran the funding for the Wuhan lab. It was the military and the intelligence agencies. The EcoHealth Alliance was a CIA front. USAID, which was the biggest funder of the Wuhan lab, has a long, long connection to the CIA, and they had a much bigger investment in it than NIH did. So you have all of these U.S. military and intelligence agencies who are running the lab, and then killing the investigation. So there was a State Department investigation immediately, and Vanity Fair documented how people with intelligence agency credentials from the nonproliferation branch of the State Department ordered the investigation to stop specifically because it would implicate the U.S. military and intelligence agencies.
But I’m asking you, as someone who participated in 300 environmental lawsuits, why isn’t this a lawsuit?
Because if you look at how it was done, they gave themselves complete immunity from liability. You can’t sue them. If you look at actually who produced this vaccine, it was not Pfizer and it was not Moderna. It was military contractors, and it was the Pentagon. They did it under a series of provisions that were created after 2002, between 2002 and 2019, that allowed the Pentagon to evade any regulatory authority.
I’m not talking about the vaccine, though. I’m talking about the damage done by the virus itself, which is a man-made creation.
Oh, I misunderstood your question. I think there will be litigation on that, eventually. I feel we have enough evidence now that if I were allowed in front of a jury, that I could convince virtually any jury in our country that we made the virus, that this was a U.S. government and Chinese government collaboration.
