Late last November, President Donald Trump announced Jim O’Neill as his nominee for deputy secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), where he would work under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for HHS secretary upon confirmation. As deputy secretary, O’Neill would essentially function as the Chief Operating Officer of the department, overseeing “the day-to-day operations of all sub-agencies” as well as leading “public health emergency preparedness,” i.e. the government’s policy responses to bio-terror events, pandemics, etc. In addition, O’Neill would “oversee the development and clearance of HHS regulations” and ostensibly be the main implementer of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) policy agenda.

Built on a promise to eliminate industry capture of public health regulatory agencies and curb the influence of Big Pharma and Big Food, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement played a crucial role in funneling would-be Kennedy voters into the Trump camp. MAHA, in essence, granted the Trump campaign a tinge of populist legitimacy among Covid era dissidents, which grew out of the shuttering of RFK Jr.’s independent presidential run.

However, O’Neill’s business connections, both past and present, as well as his previous statements on public health policy, strongly suggest that he is not only unlikely to implement the policies that MAHA-centric voters are expecting, but that he may in fact pursue an agenda that stands in direct conflict with the main tenets of the MAHA movement. Specifically, he advocates reforming the FDA to deregulate and accelerate the pathway from drug development to legalization. This would notably aid the biotech industry, which has long struggled to get its products approved outside of an “emergency”-based deregulatory paradigm.

When considering the investments and board positions that O’Neill himself has made and held in biotechnology companies, this would likely include mRNA products that Kennedy and other MAHA influencers have spent years criticizing since the Covid-19 pandemic — a clear contradiction between O’Neill’s views on public health, and those which the MAGA base were sold on the campaign trail.

Perhaps standing in even starker contrast with MAHA principles, O’Neill currently sits on the board of a company that is currently pursuing the development of a neurotoxic substance as a “therapeutic” treatment for people with Alzheimer’s disease (a neurodegenerative disease). Ironically, that same substance has long been flagged by Kennedy and the organization he co-founded, Children’s Health Defense, as one of the main causative agents in their hypothesis for a vaccine-autism link and other chronic conditions suffered by many Americans, particularly children.

In addition to O’Neill’s biotech connections, he also boasts significant ties to the CIA-linked company Palantir and its co-founder Peter Thiel. Palantir, notably, is undertaking considerate efforts to apply a pre-crime paradigm to public health events, mainly through its several significant contracts with HHS that would greatly determine the nature of the “public health emergency preparedness” that O’Neill will directly oversee. Several of these contracts date back to the first Trump administration, when Palantir played a major role in the military-run Covid-19 biosurveillance and vaccine development / distribution program known as Operation Warp Speed – a program that has been heavily criticized by both Kennedy and the broader MAHA movement.

Indeed, Palantir has since further entrenched its role within the HHS apparatus, most recently via the CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA), a disease forecasting and mass biosurveillance program that Palantir runs significant amounts of data for.

Also indirectly connected to this CDC effort is Bill Gates, as the former vice-president of the Gates-connected Cascade Investment firm, Dylan George, now runs the CFA. Importantly, the Gates Foundation has significant investments in biotechnology, an industry that notoriously faces strenuous regulatory difficulties in getting its products through the standard Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process. As a result, prominent players in the biotech industry, including Gates as well as others like Trump surrogate Vivek Ramaswamy, have embarked on an effort to dismantle the current regulatory paradigm and replace it with one friendly to “innovation,” or in other words, one with significantly less rigorous standards.

Unlimited Hangout previously reported on the industry players tackling this problem on the global scale, and it seems that now, with O’Neill poised to be at the helm of “development and clearance of HHS regulations,” experimental biotech may finally gain the unfettered access to the American market it needs.

As this article will demonstrate, O’Neill himself also stands to benefit financially if his desired regulatory model is achieved, as do key members of Trump’s cabinet. Further, given the pandemic preparedness model of monitoring and developing preemptive countermeasures for pathogens with pandemic potential, as well as the Big Tech surveillance that coincided with the distribution of the experimental Covid-19 vaccines, it appears likely that biosurveillance will play a crucial role in the future of the biotech market — especially a deregulated one. Such a model would notably benefit the public-private surveillance infrastructure built up by the man who helped kickstart O’Neill’s private sector career, Peter Thiel.

Yet, O’Neill’s role in the now-decades long effort to provide accelerated, deregulated paths to market for experimental drugs dates back to his time in public office, where he served during the height of the now infamous War on Terror. It was likely there that he first met George W. Bush’s HHS Secretary, Tommy Thompson, who implemented the consequential Project Bioshield Act of 2004 — a piece of legislation that marked a firm step forward in the path towards “emergency” deregulation of drugs and vaccines.

O’Neill’s Early Forays in Public Health: From Bird Flu Panic to Project BioShield

After attending elite universities like Yale University and the University of Chicago, Jim O’Neill landed a job in the George W. Bush administration, first at the Department of Education and then at HHS. He began his new role at the end of 2002 as director of the Speech and Editorial Division, where he led the speechwriting team for then-HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson and did the same for the first several months of the tenure of Thompson’s successor, Mike Leavitt.

The latter years of O’Neill’s tenure in this position are particularly notable, as many of Thompson’s and Leavitt’s speeches between 2004 and 2005 focused on fearmongering over the threat of pandemic “bird flu,” specifically H5N1, which were later deemed overblown. Much of the fear propagated by Thompson and others during this time about bird flu were notably based on the doomsday predictions offered by the now heavily-discredited British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College London. Several of Thompson’s speeches before Congress, which O’Neill presumably helped write, demanded significant funding for flu vaccine stockpiles and to help vaccines switch from traditional vaccine production methods to “a new cell-based technology.” Upon his resignation in December 2004, Thompson stated that his greatest concern at that time was bird flu, which he referred to as “a really huge bomb […] that could adversely impact on the health care of the world.” Leavitt was even more effective than his predecessor at causing fear in the public and thereby generating public support for ultimately unnecessary flu vaccine and antiviral stockpiles. According to O’Neill’s LinkedIn profile, several of the “major policy addresses” he developed for both Thompson and Leavitt dealt specifically with “pandemic influenza.”

Even though the fearmongering of Thompson and Leavitt along with other “experts” was unwarranted, the panic their speeches and public comments generated ensured that the U.S. government spent over $7 billion on combating the bird flu “threat” by purchasing significant quantities of medications like Tamiflu, an anti-viral produced by Gilead. Notably, Gilead’s former chairman was then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Gilead’s stock price had dipped in 2003 before the bird flu concerns emerged, and when panic around bird flu arose the company saw its revenues quadruple. Rumsfeld sold some of his Gilead shares when the fearmongering began, and he was estimated to have netted at least $5 million. At the end of 2004, his financial disclosure report revealed that he still held $25 million in Gilead stock.

Many of those pre-emptive Tamiflu purchases for this “emergency stockpile” that were never ultimately needed (and justified using faulty modeling) were made through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). BARDA was established by the 2004 Project BioShield Act, which Thompson and his speechwriters heavily advocated for. The Bush administration justified the passage of this legislation in part by citing the dangers of the 2001 Anthrax attacks (a US military-linked false-flag tied to many of the same people who ultimately helped create and profited from BioShield and BARDA). Some of those figures would also go on to lead the government response to Covid-19 under the first Trump administration.

Beyond lining the pockets of Rumsfeld and Gilead through its mandate to create emergency drug stockpiles to thwart “bioterrorist” attacks, Project Bioshield also significantly advanced the emergency deregulation pathway for unapproved drugs—which notably saved Moderna from collapse during the Covid-19 pandemic 15 years later. Specifically, Project Bioshield granted the authorization of the “emergency use” of drugs that are “not approved, licensed, or cleared for commercial distribution” in the context of a potential or actual emergency.

Notably, O’Neill – after helping to write speeches that helped justify the creation of BARDA and the stockpiling of Tamiflu – joined the BARDA steering committee in 2006 and served in that capacity through 2008, the timeframe when many of these questionable Tamiflu purchases were actually made. A few months before joining BARDA’s steering committee, O’Neill had been promoted to the post of Associate Deputy Secretary and senior advisor to the Deputy Secretary in August 2005. During that time he oversaw policy for the CDC and worked on “emergency preparedness” and “homeland security.”

Presumably due to his utility to Thompson and his successor Mike Leavitt, O’Neill was again promoted, this time to the post of Principal associate deputy secretary of HHS in 2007, holding that position for close to a year. Again, O’Neill played an important role in developing pandemic preparedness policy and also focused on advising the HHS secretary and deputy secretary on homeland security, and in that capacity “led special projects related to policy and operations.”

After leaving the Bush administration, O’Neill became involved with Peter Thiel, who had previously helped the architects of mass surveillance during the Bush administration privatize its most controversial program, resulting in what is now the company Palantir. O’Neill began working as managing director at Thiel’s now-defunct Clarium Capital, a macro hedge fund that Thiel created shortly after selling PayPal to Pierre Omidyar’s eBay in 2002. O’Neill, relatively shortly thereafter, became head of the Thiel Foundation in 2009. There, he worked with Peter Thiel to create the foundation’s Thiel fellowship, which helped kickstart the careers of now prominent figures in military contracting (e.g. Palmer Luckey of Anduril), cryptocurrency and finance (e.g. Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum) and longevity-focused biotech (e.g. Laura Deming).

Around this same time, O’Neill became involved with the longevity-focused SENS research foundation, joining its board of directors in 2010 – a post he would hold through 2021. O’Neill also served as SENS’ CEO from 2019 to 2021, where he directed research focused on curing age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s. As will be noted again later, SENS’ earliest and most significant donor was Peter Thiel.

As Clarium Capital’s fortunes waned in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, Thiel teamed up with Ajay Royan to create Mithril Capital in 2012, with O’Neill serving as founding managing director. At this point, O’Neill left his post at the Thiel Foundation to work full-time at Mithril. While at Mithril, O’Neill oversaw current Vice President J.D. Vance, who joined Mithril in 2016 as a junior investor and left the firm in 2018. While at Mithril, O’Neill handled significant investments in some notable biotech companies as well as investments in the Thiel co-founded Palantir, which – as previously mentioned – controversially contracts with HHS and important HHS sub-agencies with major implications for public health, privacy and future pandemic response. O’Neill left Mithril in 2019, the same year that the firm came under FBI investigation for financial misconduct (those allegations, however, focused largely on firm co-founder Ajay Royan). 2019 was also notably the year that one of the companies Mithril had backed, uBiome, also came under FBI scrutiny, later resulting in its founders being charged with health care fraud conspiracies.

O’Neill’s Connections to the Biotech Industry

During O’Neill’s tenure in a top position at Mithril, the venture capital firm invested in several significant biotech companies. These include uBiome, which was also backed by Andreessen Horowitz and the Sam Altman-run Y-Combinator. The company was founded in 2012 “to sequence the microbiome,” allowing patients to “explore their microbiome” via the company’s microbial genomic test and their possession of the “largest microbiome database in the world.” The company’s series B funding was led by 8VC, the venture capital firm created by Palantir co-founder and Thiel associate Joe Lonsdale. The company was later caught overbilling patients, pressuring them to take multiple tests when it was unnecessary, and also pressuring doctors to approve tests, including for patients with no symptoms. The FBI raided the company’s offices in 2019. In 2021, the co-founders were each charged with more than 40 criminal counts, including healthcare, securities and wire fraud.

Another biotech company backed heavily by Mithril during O’Neill’s time as managing director is Fractyl Health, which Mithril began funding in 2014. Fractyl has been developing 2 products, Revita – an outpatient procedure that modifies the lining of the colon to target obesity and type 2 diabates, and Rejuva – a “one-time gene therapy” targeting the pancreas meant to “enable durable weight loss and long-term remission of type 2 diabetes.” Neither of the company’s products have been approved by the FDA and clinical studies on them have yet to be performed, despite the company having been in business for over a decade — representative of a common trend in biotech companies struggling to get drugs through clinical trials.

The chair of Fractyl’s board is the co-founder of Mithril alongside Thiel, Ajay Royan. Another board member, Marc Elia, sits on the board of the Mithril-backed biotech firm Invivyd (formerly Adagio Therapeutics). Also on the board of Fractyl is former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, who is also on the board of the Mithril-backed fintech and stablecoin-issuing firm Paxos. Bradley’s connections in tech also extend to figures adjacent to Jeffrey Epstein, as Bradley was notably affiliated with Ghislaine Maxwell’s husband Scott Borgerson and his firm Cargometrics—a satellite surveillance company that offers “unique data products and [software] solutions broadly to the investment management and maritime shipping & logistics markets.”

O’Neill has also had several notable connections to other biotech firms following his departure from Mithril in 2019. These include Oisin Biotechnologies, where O’Neill was a board observer from 2019 to 2021. Oisin develops therapies focused on longevity and “age-related diseases” that leverage a “new-non-viral delivery technology” they call Fusogenix Proteo-Lipid Vehicle.

That platform “enables extensive extrahepatic biodistribution for both DNA and RNA payloads.” The Fusogenix platform was not developed by Oisin directly, but by their partner firm Entos, which used the same platform to develop a “Covid-19 plasmid DNA vaccine” as well as several genetic treatments targeting obesity. Entos has four partner organizations/companies — three of them are Eli Lilly, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Oisin. John Lewis, the founder and CEO of Entos, co-founded Oisin in 2016 and has long served (and currently serves) as the Chief Science Officer of the company, further revealing the close association between the two companies.

O’Neill became involved with Oisin through his leadership roles at the SENS Research Foundation. During O’Neill’s time on the foundation’s board, SENS granted Oisin with an unlisted amount of seed-funding from SENS.

Notably, during his time at SENS, O’Neill served on the SENS board with a few important Thiel-associated figures. These include Blake Masters – a close Thiel associate who co-wrote a book with Thiel, served as COO of Thiel Capital and as head of the Thiel Foundation – as well as Kevin Dewalt. Dewalt maintained a position as the director of Strategic Alliances for the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel from 2005 to 2008. During that same period, Dewalt also worked with the Thiel-founded Palantir – specifically Palantir’s Stephen Cohen – to “deploy the company’s first AI product in the US Intelligence community.” Palantir’s earliest funder, aside from Thiel himself, was In-Q-Tel.

Some of those involved in “longevity” research importantly believe that AI and other emerging technologies will play a significant role in developing life-prolonging-tech. The SENS Research Foundation focuses on longevity research and many of its members, including its founder, believe that medical technology is capable of granting near-immortality to humans, if not immortality itself. The foundation’s first major donor was Peter Thiel, who has injected millions into the foundation since its inception.

According to his LinkedIn, O’Neill has only served on the board of directors of one biotechnology company, ADvantage Therapeutics, which he joined in March 2023. He continues to serve on the board, but will ostensibly recuse himself from that role if confirmed as HHS deputy secretary. ADvantage does not reveal its board of directors on its website, and thus O’Neill’s involvement is not visible there, but his position on the company’s board is noted in their SEC filings.

ADvantage as a company focuses on neurogenerative diseases, specifically Alzheimer’s. Their main product is a compound called AD04, previously known as Alhydrogel. It is an aluminum-based vaccine adjuvant (aluminum hydroxide) that has been used historically in human and animal vaccines, but ADvantage Therapeutics seeks to transform this adjuvant into a “therapeutic” for Alzheimer’s patients.

The origins of ADvantage as a company, and the quest to turn AD04 into an Alzheimer’s treatment, date back to a study that tested a failed Alzheimer’s vaccine candidate called AD02, produced by the Austrian company AFFiRiS. In the Phase 2 clinical trial of AD02, the group that received the vaccine fared significantly worse than the control group. Both the control group and the group that received the AD02 vaccine received doses of the vaccine adjuvant AD04.

Instead of considering that the AD02 vaccine significantly worsened the outcomes of Alzheimer’s patients, they instead concluded that the aluminum-based compound AD04 had actually made patient outcomes significantly better. This is despite the fact that aluminum toxicity has been studied as a factor in causing Alzheimer’s disease, as aluminum is a known neurotoxin. In addition, independent scientists outside the company did not share the conclusions of the AFFiRiS scientists. While company scientists claimed that the control group data showed “evidence of disease modification”, other unaffiliated scientists argued that the data implied no effect at all, as the correlations observed in the control group are also known to “occur in the absence of treatment.”

Despite the lack of data or consensus suggesting that injecting Alzheimer’s patients with a known neurotoxin would lead to better patient outcomes, the AFFiRiS scientists doubled down and acquired the patent rights to AD04. They then teamed up with Agustin Fernandez, a Cuban-born movie producer, and his business partner Jeffrey B. Madden to create ADvantage Therapeutics to commercialize AD04 as a treatment for Alzheimer’s. Notably, the ADvantage website notes that the initial AD02-AD04 study did not contain data supporting the use of AD04 as a “therapeutic entity”, and that the company and its founders are unable to explain how AD04 allegedly functions to reduce Alzheimer’s pathology.

Despite this admitted lack of evidence, the company is conducting pre-clinical trials in parallel to the clinical development of their AD04-based therapeutic as an attempt to shore up data that shows the compound has therapeutic potential. However, elsewhere on its website it treats AD04 as having passed Phase 2 clinical trials (and entering Phase 2b), but this seems to be a misleading reference to the original AFFiRiS study, characterizing it as a study that was testing for the effects of AD04. In reality, the AFFiRiS study was a Phase 2 trial for the failed AD02 vaccine, and was not a trial meant to test AD04.

In addition to AD04, the company is also attempting to develop two other products, AD09 and AD15. AD09 has an undisclosed mode of action, but appears to be a mRNA product based on the information provided on the company’s website. AD15 is also a mRNA product based on the Klotho protein, which can reduce symptoms of aging when over-expressed. The scientist who discovered the Klotho gene, Dr. Makoto Kuro-o, joined ADvantage as a member of its scientific advisory board in early 2024. As of late last year, the development of AD15 was spun-off from ADvantage Therapeutics and into a different company called Klothea.

According to a company press release, O’Neill’s appointment to the board of directors was aimed at facilitating the approval of AD04, the aluminum vaccine adjuvant, as well as its mRNA products. In the press release, CEO Jeffrey Madden was quoted as saying “The addition of Jim to our Board of Directors signals the next level of development for our company […] As we embark upon our confirmatory Phase 2b study for AD04 in early Alzheimer’s disease, we are fortunate to have Jim’s talents and experience to guide us during this exciting time.” Madden also stated that “Jim’s deep expertise in longevity will serve us well as we develop our mRNA technology to fight pathologies of aging by advancing and sustaining the capabilities of klotho, which many consider the longevity gene. We are developing platform technology to create a pipeline of [targets] to tackle the most common diseases of aging by using the klotho protein. We look forward to Jim’s guidance in this area.”

O’Neill himself had high praise for the company’s AD04 product, stating that “AD04 has the potential to radically improve the lives of millions. I am excited to collaborate with ADvantage to help propel it forward.” Even if he does recuse himself from ADvantage’s board of directors upon confirmation, his top role at HHS – where he will oversee the removal and creation of regulations at the FDA and other HHS agencies – would certainly place O’Neill in a position where he could propel products like AD04 forward.

O’Neill’s enthusiasm for turning an aluminum adjuvant into a therapeutic for a neurodegenerative disease clashes directly with past statements from incoming HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. For example, in his book Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak, co-written with Dr. Brian Hooker, Kennedy characterizes aluminum adjuvants as harmful to human health and as one of his major concerns with respect to vaccine safety. In addition, the Kennedy-affiliated organization Children’s Health Defense, in addition to publishing the aforementioned book by Kennedy and Hooker, has published many articles over the years warning of the dangers of aluminum vaccine adjuvants and have directly linked vaccines containing aluminum with adverse vaccine side effects, especially in children, as well as the increasing incidence in childhood autism rates. Unlimited Hangout reached out to Children’s Health Defense for comment on aluminum vaccine adjuvants and the attempt to commercialize one of them as a therapeutic, but did not receive a response prior to publication.

O’Neill’s significant biotech connections do not end there. He served as a “global health adviser” to Rational Vaccines, a company that, based on its founders and board, is deeply connected to ADvantage Therapeutics. The co-founders of ADvantage, former film producer Agustin Fernandez and CEO of ADvantage Jeffrey Madden, also occupy important roles at Rational Vaccines. Fernandez was the co-founder and is the current CEO of the company, while Madden sits on its board and is a lead investor.

The company is focused on treating herpes, mainly through the creation of a herpes vaccine. It was awarded $2.8 million by the National Institute of Health (NIH) to further its herpes product development, including a test that enables “routine population-based screening” of Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) with higher sensitivity than other tests, and a vaccine to curb the spread of herpes—which the company calls a “global pandemic.”

The company’s focus on herpes, however, has not stopped it from developing biotechnology for Covid-19. It is currently developing a “serological assay” Covid-19 test, which the company claims boasts higher sensitivity compared to currently available tests. This is apparently due to its ability to test for “antibodies to most viral proteins,” as opposed to a “single or small subset of viral proteins.” Rational Vaccines developed the blood assay technology by repurposing its herpes tests, and is notably employing the same technology behind their herpes vaccine candidate to develop a Covid-19 vaccine. According to the company, they are “in the process of adapting [their] HSV immunotherapeutic candidate, RVx201, to a viral vector format” in order to “enable the development of multiple vaccine types, including to SARS-COV-2.”

While Rational touts its ability to repurpose its herpes vaccine technology for other immunizations, the company’s long and sordid history of unethical regulatory obfuscation paints an unsettling picture of any future product it develops.

The questionable nature behind Rational Vaccines’ business practices began before the company’s inception. In 2013, the co-founder of the company, the late Southern Illinois University professor William Halford, administered doses of a shot that contained a virus he had created “at a Holiday Inn Express and a Crowne Plaza Hotel that were a 15-minute drive from [his] SIU lab.”

Halford’s unconventional methods continued in the years to come, and importantly at Rational Vaccines itself. After he co-founded Rational Vaccines with Fernandez, he ran an offshore clinical trial from a house in the Caribbean Islands for the company’s herpes vaccine. Halford utilized American participants, most of whom Rational Vaccines claims were “Americans with herpes who were flown to the island several times to be vaccinated,” as reported by Kaiser Health News. However, the trials were entirely unmonitored — neither by the FDA or any institutional review board.

Robert Califf, Obama’s former FDA commissioner, told Kaiser Health News that “he couldn’t think of a prior instance in which American researchers did not set up an IRB abroad.” Califf did note, however, that doing so “may be legal.”

On a side note, Califf’s critiques of Halford’s trials appear odd, given Califf has spent much of his career dedicated to implementing the principles of the Fourth Industrial Revolution into public health. Among these principles involve a deregulated drug development process that replaces the standard randomized clinical trial with a technocratic, “innovative” approach. While Califf headed the Duke Clinical Research Institute, the institute co-founded an initiative which aimed to create more “efficient clinical trials,” namely by “maximally [leveraging] available clinical and nonclinical data, including data collected via digital technologies, to minimize collection of necessary trial specific data,” or in other words, prioritizing the use of medical data collected outside of a clinical trial setting. Instead, the prioritized data in this model would be extracted from novel sources (such as digital technologies like wearables) and be “interoperable,” maximizing the capacity for “all researchers and sponsors” to see and share that data.

Despite experts slamming the experiment as unethical, Fernandez claimed that he knew of “individuals who experienced positive outcomes from the vaccine,” effectively downplaying the dangerous methodology used during the testing.

One of Rational’s most prominent early donors, former managing director of Credit Suisse Bartley J. Madden, was intrigued by Halford after hearing him talk about his work at a symposium at Southern Illinois University. According to Wired, Madden “wrote a book called Free to Choose Medicine, which argues that the FDA’s risk-averse approach to drug approval gets in the way of innovation and keeps life-saving medicines off the market.”

As he describes in his book, A Foundational Explanation of Human Behavior, “The conventional goal of safe and effective drugs leads to a relentless demand for ever more expensive clinical testing demands, sky high prescription drug prices, and, importantly, delayed access to life-changing medical treatments. I argue that the appropriate goal is better drugs, sooner, at lower cost. The key constraint is the hugely expensive (time and money) FDA clinical testing process.” Fittingly, in Bart Madden’s eyes, “Halford embodied the part of the brilliant outsider tangling with the scientific establishment.” While Madden claims that he wasn’t aware of the offshore trials at the time of his donation, his own beliefs on regulation appear in line with Halford’s methods.

Also notable is that Jeffrey B. Madden—CEO of ADvantage Therapeutics and prominent investor in Rational Vaccines — is a board member and the Treasurer of Bartley J. Madden’s Bartley J. Madden Foundation. Bart Madden previously worked in the US Army where he was “involved with classified weapons development/testing” before his private sector finance career took off. While a familial connection between the two does not appear to have been established, the work of both has obviously intersected greatly through the world of biotech, an industry that would benefit significantly from Bart Madden’s deregulated vision of drug development.

Likewise, the regulatory evasion and safety controversy did not stop O’Neill’s associate Peter Thiel from investing $4 million in the research, with the caveat that future testing comply with FDA standards. While Thiel’s caveat indicates disapproval of Halford’s brazenly dangerous methods, Thiel does believe regulations stand in the way of progress. As the Kaiser Health News story notes, Thiel previously said that the FDA’s standards are so cumbersome that “you would not be able to invent the polio vaccine today.”

Eliminating Efficacy Testing in the Name of “Innovation”

O’Neill himself has long echoed the deregulatory rhetoric of Peter Thiel, Bart Madden, Califf and others. In fact, O’Neill’s past statements on regulations may be even more blatantly controversial than his contemporaries — seeking to eliminate efficacy trials altogether. He previously made these opinions clear at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Ana, California during a 2014 talk for the SENS Research Foundation:

“We should reform [the] FDA so that it’s approving drugs after their sponsors have demonstrated safety and let people start using them at their own risk, but not much risk of safety…But let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.”

This speech first came under public scrutiny after it was reported in December 2016 that the first Trump administration’s transition team (of which Thiel was also a part) was considering O’Neill to head the FDA. O’Neill, at the time, was apparently deemed too controversial for the role and Scott Gottlieb was chosen instead. Gottlieb joined the boards of Pfizer and the CIA-linked biomanufacturing company Resilience shortly after his stint at the FDA concluded.

Notably, the current nominee to head the FDA, Johns Hopkins’ Martin Makary, has been deemed very friendly to the biotech industry. While Makary was a critic of Covid-19 lockdowns and some other policies, like vaccine mandates, he supported universal masking and early doses of mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. He also criticized the FDA during Covid-19 for being too slow to approve the “lifesaving” mRNA Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, arguing in a 2020 interview that the experimental vaccines should have been approved after Pfizer and Moderna’s application submissions within 24 hours. Mocking the FDA’s apparent dawdling on its review process, Makary called it “Operation Turtle Speed.” Upon his appointment to head the FDA for Trump’s second term, biotech industry leaders told STAT News they felt relief at Markary’s appointment, with one remarking we “dodged a bullet.” Other industry experts quoted by CNBC shared similar sentiments, with one stating that “we expect [Makary] will promote technology/innovation in a way that offers some reprieve for those that [are] fearing a department more aligned with different virtues.” In other words, it seems that Makary and O’Neill are quite aligned on deregulating the FDA drug/vaccine approval process.

O’Neill’s comments on the FDA, which he will oversee and greatly influence, ultimately fit into his larger plan to “[streamline] licensing and drug development and reducing time and costs” — which he remarked “was a big interest” of his during his time at HHS. Given his proximity to the centers of power that played an integral role in passing the consequential Project Bioshield Act of 2004, which authorized emergency use of unapproved medical products, this interest comes as no surprise. Notably, however, O’Neill’s advocacy in this context did not emerge from concerns of pandemic response or emergency situations, but instead from the desire to make biotechnology more viable, safe and attractive to investors.

This interest in “streamlining” drug development led him, per his own account, to “shut down” an effort by the FDA to start regulating In Vitro Diagnostic Multivariate Index Assays (IVDMIA), a kind of biotechnology used to diagnose “disease or other conditions,” or used to “cure, [mitigate, treat or prevent]” a disease. O’Neill used this story to segue into his controversial proposal to eliminate efficacy tests of drugs entirely, which he calls “progressive approval.” His calls for deregulation were met with applause from the crowd of academics, businessmen and investors present at the event.

O’Neill then proceeded to heap praise on the work of Richard Barker, founding director of Oxford’s Centre for the Advancement of Sustainable Medical Innovation, specifically his model of “adaptive licensing.” In essence, Barker’s model stands in direct conflict with the main principles of RFK Jr.’s MAHA agenda. While MAHA seeks to separate industry from public health agencies, Barker’s work focuses on infusing Big Pharma into the drug development process even further. He proposes this as a solution to what he describes as a problem so severe that it makes the current drug development process “not sustainable” — specifically, the alleged issue of those handling clinical development being “completely isolated” from those handling the commercial side of the process. He remarks that they remain “in their respective silos and report into different echelons of senior management,” and that as a consequence, “there is often a major disconnect between the clinical development program and the collection of value data.”

Barker’s solution is one eerily similar to Robert Califf’s aforementioned Fourth Industrial Revolution-inspired program at Duke. Barker believes that the utilization and collection of a massive array of “real-world data,” or data accumulated outside of clinical trial settings via unconventional sources, will solve this allegedly catastrophic problem. As Maddie Bannon described in her article on Robert Califf, real-world data “is collected from a vast array of sources including electronic health records (EHRs) submitted by medical professionals during a doctor or hospital visit, insurance claims and billing data, medical product and disease registries, the patient themselves (e.g. data submitted through an app), wearable devices, cellphones, and social media.”

This data, Barker says, can address the division between the commercial and scientific sides of development by integrating “value in the design of the clinical development, with an early crafting phase involving the input of regulators, payers, and patient associations, so as to ensure the collection of both clinical and value data.”

Further, he boasts that it can jack up drug prices by utilizing real-world data based on the surveillance of patients “to help establish the value of the product.” This would allegedly solve the problem of drug makers setting “the price as high as possible at the beginning of the process,” by allowing companies to continuously increase the price of a drug as they monitor its effects in the real world, using “compelling real-world data” as their justification for price hikes. In other words, Barker claims that a system should be in place to funnel mined biodata directly to drug manufacturers in order to alter the value of the product throughout its time on the market. Quite literally, this idea would allow Big Pharma to directly exploit the fragmented, data-mined parts of their customers to cultivate significant value and capital—a seemingly techno-feudalistic iteration of healthcare.

Yet this is not the only end Barker seeks to employ this data towards. In addition, he believes that mass profiling of patients should be used in order to “segment” communities “on a continuous basis” based on their medical needs. He claims that this would enable the industry to achieve its profits based on predicted, guaranteed “outcomes” as opposed to developing for volume. O’Neill recently expressed similar priorities on X (formerly Twitter) when he claimed that “Many Americans think we have free markets in health care. We don’t. Hundreds of bureaucratic rules, perverse incentives, and opaque pricing make health care more expensive and less efficient than it should be. Providers of care are usually paid by volume, not outcomes” (emphasis added).

This predictive, “outcome”-focused use of data would allow “products to be prescribed to and used by the right patient segment,” according to Barker. This line of thinking echoes the values of the mass surveillance based pre-crime, counterinsurgency culture that so many of the companies and figures surrounding Thiel pursue. It also bears striking similarities to Palantir’s Tiberius program that was used to distribute Covid-19 vaccines to AI-determined priority populations as part of Operation Warp Speed — which the CDC’s Center For Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics has since entrenched into HHS biosurveillance infrastructure.

However, Barker goes even further with this proposed strategy; he believes that when considering patients, “the industry needs to focus on the behavioral factors which drive adherence, either as accelerators or decelerators. The goal should be to collect evidence as to how to boost adherence, and the exercise is complex since there are many types of patients with different behavioral contexts and psychological barriers” (emphasis added). The breadth of data required to carry out such precise influence of behavior would obviously be vast, and comes out of a long term military strategy of weaponizing information.

This concept of utilizing knowledge accumulated from mass datasets to manipulate and direct human behavior dates back to J.C.R. Licklider’s time at the Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (ARPA) Behavioral Science and Command and Control division in the early 1960s, before the advent of modern computer networks. At least one of Licklider’s “Behavioral Science” schemes was performed under the auspices of standard military dealings, as his ARPA division deployed a project to study seemingly benign statistics of the Thai population “that sought to measure the body size of several thousand Thai military personnel to aid in the design of equipment and uniforms.” However, as Yasha Levine details in his book Surveillance Valley, beyond the physiological data the researchers collected, they also accumulated information on the participants’ ancestors, religion and their opinions on the king of Thailand. “The deeper purpose,” according to Levine, “was rooted in prediction and control.” Levine expounds on this idea by quoting Annie Jacobsen’s The Pentagon’s Brain: “If Thailand were to become a battle zone, ARPA would have information on Thai soldiers, each of whom could be tracked. Information — like who deserted the Thai army and became an enemy combatant— could be ascertained. Using computer models, ARPA could create algorithms describing human behavior in remote areas.”

Like Licklider’s strategy of utilizing data to control the “outcomes” of potentially insurgent populations in the Global South, Barker’s model relies on pushing populations towards the desired outcomes of bureaucrats that “trial participants” are likely unaware of. Both systems rely on the utility of seemingly neutral information to quell dissent, and ultimately manipulate (or even halt) what would be the organic decisions of people.

In addition, O’Neill’s views on ending efficacy testing would likely prove incredibly useful to the biotech industry, particularly those that manufacture mRNA products. Prior to the Covid-19 crisis, which facilitated emergency deregulation, mRNA products struggled to get to market under the existing regulatory paradigm. This is largely because most mRNA products struggle to be both safe and effective, as increasing effectiveness has tended to dramatically decrease safety while ensuring safety has tended to dramatically decrease efficacy. Thus, eliminating efficacy trials would allow mRNA products that have been unable to prove both safety and efficacy a much better chance at making it to market.

A telling example of this persistent issue in the mRNA industry is the company Moderna. Prior to its Covid-19 product, Moderna could not get a single mRNA product approved for over a decade and struggled to even get its products through animal testing. This issue for the company was largely based on its lipidnanoparticle (LNP) delivery system for mRNA. According to reporting from STAT News, this delivery system “created a daunting challenge [for Moderna]: Dose too little, and you don’t get enough enzyme to affect the disease; dose too much, and the drug is too toxic for patients.” Many major mRNA-focused companies, like Pfizer partner BioNTech and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Roivant, have bet heavily on this same LNP delivery system despite its dubious record, resulting in numerous legal snafus related to who exactly owns the rights to which aspects of that delivery system. It would be these types of companies that would stand to benefit the most from O’Neill’s prior proposals to eliminate efficacy testing for vaccines and other products, freeing them from long-standing concerns about their mRNA delivery mechanisms.

O’Neill’s Proximity to Palantir and What it Means for HHS’ Approach to AI

The merging of Big Tech, Big Healthcare and the public sector are part and parcel to the emergency deregulatory framework that O’Neill appears to support, both through his own statements and his business associations. It turns out that O’Neill has dabbled in all three of these ever-harder-to-distinguish sectors. As this article has previously noted, biosurveillance works in tandem with accelerated drug development, as the lack of regulatory scrutiny in these contexts provides the perfect pretext to justify the surveillance of those who receive the “experimental” drugs. This notably occurred during Operation Warp Speed. It just so happens that the government contractor on the front lines of this increasingly pervasive industry is Palantir, which was co-founded by O’Neill associate, Peter Thiel. Thiel remains the company’s leading investor. In addition, the VC firm of another Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, is deeply connected to the CIA-linked firm that produces the mRNA for Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, among others. Lonsdale has publicly praised O’Neill’s appointment as HHS deputy secretary, with O’Neill responding that Lonsdale has “greatly inspired me for a long time.”

While Palantir’s work with HHS dates back to at least 2010, the data company has become increasingly entrenched within HHS, influencing policy, resource allocation and more since the Covid-19 pandemic. Palantir gained major contracts with HHS during the Covid-19 era, particularly during the last year of the previous Trump administration. These included Palantir’s outbreak warning and wastewater surveillance system, HHS Protect, and its vaccine allocation program, Tiberius. The Covid-19 era FDA/Palantir program 21 FORWARD, which helped experts examine how Covid-19 incidence rates might affect the food supply, has expanded into a crucial part of the FDA’s “food supply chain disruption monitoring and crisis response.” The pre-crime operation turned predictive health iteration of DARPA, ARPA-H, tasked Palantir last year with running its core data infrastructure. Yet, arguably most importantly, in 2022, the two entities united a myriad of the Palantir and HHS/CDC biosurveillance programs together under the CDC’s “Common Operating Picture,” which aims to secure “strong collaboration across the federal government, jurisdictional health departments, private sector entities, and other key health partners.”

Preceding this pledge of CDC-Palantir unification was the announcement of the CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) — a program dedicated to carrying out, among other things, the multi-sector goal of the CDC’s Common Operating Picture. Through a consortium of academic centers, private institutions and federal agencies all analyzing novel data sources, the CFA generates artificial intelligence (AI) forecasts of disease outbreaks in order to curate specified, targeted policy measures for specific communities/populations — purportedly to stop epidemics before they occur.

As Unlimited Hangout recently detailed, the policy implications for such a program could be vast. For example, the CFA’s data analysis and extraction will inform policies involving the “community migration” of individuals and/or populations; whether they are deemed “high risk” or not (with proceeding policy directly curated relative to a community’s/individual’s purported “risk level”); and key decisions on medical countermeasures during disease outbreaks. To demonstrate the “targeted” nature of the program, the CFA will likely factor in a myriad of “social determinants” in dictating such policy, including race, geography, household crowding and even financial data.

The material implications of CFA, therefore, stand to be huge — with Palantir guiding the ship, and Thiel’s associate Jim O’Neill overseeing it all. The conflicts of interest are apparent. O’Neill’s history of injecting funds into Palantir itself and Thiel-backed projects will likely not cease at HHS, and given Palantir’s full integration into the agency’s biosurveillance infrastructure, it may even expand. Such a possibility becomes even more likely considering one of the architects of the HHS Protect system that Palantir manages, Kristen Honey, was recently appointed HHS’ Chief Data Officer.

Further, beyond O’Neill’s connections to Thiel, his own positions on AI make him likely to uphold and support this predictive healthcare infrastructure. O’Neill has long been a vocal supporter of the “artificial intelligence-driven” healthcare system that CFA and Palantir are currently implementing, and which Big Tech, Big Healthcare and the Pentagon support. On X, O’Neill responded to a tweet from a biotech executive that called for the widespread use of “autonomous AI” to cut healthcare costs with a flowery endorsement: “AI is going to become essential across government and across health care….FDA and [Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services] can help doctors and patients by supporting rapid adoption.”

This proclivity for AI has seemingly characterized another new pick for Trump’s HHS. Meghan Dierks, the new HHS Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, previously acted as “the chief data officer of San Francisco-based health care software company Komodo Health.” It was there that she “spearheaded the development and evaluation of AI-powered healthcare analytics tools for life sciences companies, healthcare practitioners, and patient advocacy groups.”

Interestingly, Komodo’s business model relies heavily on utilizing AI to tap and interpret “real-world data” in order to help pharmaceutical companies navigate the “uncharted waters” of commercial drug launches. This navigational data comes from the massive dataset the company has built “which ingests information from more than 15 million new patient encounters each day, capturing the anonymized experiences of more than 320 million Americans through disparate medical claims, diagnostic labs, and prescription data sets.”

This data comes to life through its Healthcare Map, which “follows the entire patient journey by utilizing analytics that go wider and deeper than any other data sources.” Almost as if the company emerged straight out of Barker’s “adaptive licensing” solutions, the breadth of data put to use via Komodo’s Healthcare Map “can discover patient populations that would benefit from their therapy; pinpoint patients that are not being treated at the standard of care; [and] identify medical centers most likely to recruit patients for clinical trials.” In other words, Komodo equips its clients to “segment” patients “on a continuous basis” based on their targeted medical needs — utilizing, sharing and likely expanding huge troves of data in the process.

However, Komodo’s mass AI data interpretation functions do not stop at drug launch assistance. Komodo can help with AI hospital management, as it enables “payors and employers [to] better understand referral patterns and patient flows, more effectively manage risk pools, and offer their members better care.” It also grants “local and national governments” predictive powers to “track outbreaks in real time, better estimate disease burden, and act more swiftly on behalf of the public.” The company’s entire model bears a striking similarity in function to the CDC’s Palantir-partnered CFA, which Unlimited Hangout recently reported on in great detail. Now, given Komodo’s connection to HHS via Dierks and its previous projects with the CDC, the tech company stands likely to be tapped by the CFA as a potential “data source” for the CFA’s many AI-healthcare goals.

In fact, this predictive infrastructure is deeply entrenched into other HHS / Palantir programs as well (beyond the CFA). For example, the Palantir-partnered ARPA-H — which was initially pitched to the Trump administration as a pre-crime program before its pivot into public health under Biden — recently selected and awarded four different “teams” to “develop bioelectronic devices to be implanted in patients through minor outpatient surgery.” While one team “aims to create a ‘Living Sentinel’ to measure key biomarkers in the body and monitor their condition in real-time,” all of the teams “aim to develop an implantable ‘Living Pharmacy’ programmed to deliver therapeutic molecules to the patient on demand for an extended period.” While ARPA-H pledges that the implantable chips will improve the care of people with a myriad of chronic conditions, this invasive technology also provides a new “novel” source of “real-world data” for Palantir to utilize.

The regulatory paradigm O’Neill seeks to implement will likely lead to huge gains for Thiel associates and Trump administration officials, ranging from Roivant co-founder Vivek Ramaswamy, to biotech investor JD Vance, to O’Neill, and Thiel themselves. Further, if efficacy trials are eliminated from the drug approval process, biosurveillance will likely be deemed the necessary alternative in order to “prove efficacy after [the drugs have] been legalized,” justifying the entire biosurveillance infrastructure built up by Palantir and its public sector partners.

Vaccine “Innovation” Seems Likely in New Trump Administration

Under O’Neill’s desired system, the entire biotech industry at large would be liberated from the regulatory hurdles that so often block its most “innovative” products from getting to market. Perhaps this is best demonstrated by prominent mRNA and biotech proponent Bill Gates’ recent praising of Trump. Gates, whom people often associate with the liberal side of the political spectrum, stated that he was “frankly impressed” with Trump after a “wide-ranging,” three hour discussion with the current President in which they discussed Gates’ ambitions for global health. They even both apparently got “pretty excited” when discussing the possibility of fast-tracking a HIV vaccine in the same manner that Trump enabled with the Covid-19 vaccine.

However, given Trump’s history with Gates during his previous term, Gates’ comments aren’t surprising. For instance, while Trump cut funding and left the World Health Organization in 2020, his administration continued to fund the Gates-backed GAVI vaccine alliance to the tune of a three-year pledge totaling $1.16 billion through the alleged CIA-front organization United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In April 2020, Trump lauded this partnership in a televised address to that year’s Global Vaccine Summit, stating “it’s great to be partnering with [Gavi]. We will work hard, we will work strong.” Notably, Gavi is one of the most prominent funders of the WHO, along with the Gates Foundation, and also co-led the WHO’s vaccine distribution program, COVAX, which “delivered nearly 2 billion doses of vaccines” across the globe. While Trump’s administration seemingly cut ties with the WHO during this period, it nevertheless supported at least one organization crucial to the WHO Covid response (i.e. Gavi).

In addition, the Trump administration itself arguably played a crucial in Gavi’s COVAX, as it funded, via Operation Warp Speed, some of the main vaccines that COVAX distributed. Gates personally yielded colossal returns on his investments in the Covid-19 vaccines, which were obviously aided by COVAX and the Trump administration’s fast-tracking of the vaccines themselves.

Gates’ recent comments, along with the ties of O’Neill and Vance to the biotech industry, suggests that the Trump administration will enable the proliferation of mRNA vaccine technology over the next four years. This notably indicates another betrayal of the MAHA movement, as the Trump-brokered era of Covid-19 “vaccine innovation” recently touted by Bill Gates has been long criticized by his incoming HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Indeed, in Kennedy’s book The Real Anthony Fauci, RFK demonstrated the integral role Gates played in Dr. Fauci’s “slow the spread, flatten the curve, wait for the jab” strategy of stopping the pandemic — specifically, in one instance, by literally orchestrating “homicidal” studies designed to kill clinical trial participants taking Hydroxychloroquine.

As Kennedy detailed:

“Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates, and WHO financed a cadre of research mercenaries to concoct a series of nearly twenty studies—all employing fraudulent protocols deliberately designed to discredit Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as unsafe…

Instead of using the standard treatment dose of 400mg/day, the 17 WHO studies administered a borderline lethal daily dose starting with 2,400mg on Day 1, and using 800mg/day thereafter. In a cynical, sinister, and literally homicidal crusade against HCQ, a team of BMGF operatives played a key role in devising and pushing through the exceptionally high dosing….

…Gate’s deadly deception allowed FDA to wrongly declare that HCQ would be ineffective at safe levels.”

Kennedy made these allegations as part of his larger argument that the medical establishment purposefully employed suspect and legally dubious methods to squander any chance that scientists might discover cheap, readily available medicines effective at treating Covid-19. This, he argued, allowed them to secure Emergency Use Authorization for the experimental vaccines. Based on this account, Gates played a crucial role in this grand scheme — committing medical “homicide” in the process.

RFK Jr.’s VP, Nicole Shanahan, said on the campaign trail that she and RFK were skeptical to endorse Trump because he had yet to acknowledge the failings of the vaccine-focused Operation Warp Speed. Now, Trump is negotiating with one of the most prominent perceived enemies of the MAHA movement, Bill Gates, to enact the exact same policy for at least one other vaccine.

To make things even more complicated for MAHA voters, Gates is not the only Big Tech executive seemingly giddy about the prospects of mRNA procurement under a Trump administration. Standing directly by Trump’s side at the White House to announce the $500 billion AI investment, Stargate, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made utopian promises about the ability of rapidly produced and personalized mRNA vaccines to cure cancer, seemingly causing Moderna stocks to surge. These vaccines would be created via AI, according to Ellison — with data derived from AI-performed scans of patient blood being used to rapidly develop these personalized vaccines. Ellison’s comments, and the context of him making them at the announcement of a multi-corporation AI infrastructure program, suggest others in Silicon Valley and Big Healthcare are similarly excited for the prospects of “vaccine innovation” that appear poised to return in Trump’s second term.

Such a possibility is also supported by recent reports that Trump’s transition team sidelined two top Kennedy aides for their views on vaccines, with the Wall Street Journal writing that this development “underscor[es] a split over immunizations in the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement.” Citing Trump and Kennedy associates, the Journal stated that it seems more likely than not that the incoming administrations’ HHS policies “will have little do with vaccines.”

Further underscoring the subversion of Kennedy at HHS is the recent appointment of Heather Flick, a former senior official at HHS during Trump’s first term, to be Kennedy’s chief of staff. While at HHS, Flick began as the department’s general counsel and eventually worked her way up to become senior adviser to former HHS secretary Alex Azar. According to a former FDA official, Flick is acting as “sort of the Trump guys’ eyes and ears within the department, too; it’s a very important liaison and information source…The chief of staff, they kinda lay down the law.” Indeed, another former FDA official told Politico that the chief of staff’s role “can be very, very involved in FDA business and FDA work,” meaning Flick will presumably play an important role in drug regulation policy. For the MAHA movement, this is especially concerning given Flick’s important role at HHS at the same time that Azar declared Covid-19 an emergency and also contracted Palantir to run vaccine distribution and wastewater surveillance. This suggests Flick would be more friendly to the interests of O’Neill than Kennedy.

O’Neill’s appointment to be deputy secretary at HHS at the least undermines the promises that the Trump campaign made during election season to “Make America Healthy Again” voters. More likely, O’Neill’s position at HHS signifies the direction the Trump campaign will go in relation to public health — namely, that it will fully embrace the goals of the biosecurity apparatus that grew out of the post-9/11, pre-crime, neoconservative Total Information Awareness program that Palantir quietly shifted into the private sector. The biotech executives and investors surrounding Trump stand to reap huge profits from this agenda. In fact, they may need it to survive.

Touting RFK Jr.’s endorsement on the campaign trail may have subverted the chance for critical analysis of Trump’s policy positions (or lack thereof) on public health and pandemic preparedness. As a result, the MAHA movement presumably led many voters who were disaffected, betrayed and harmed by the policies of Operation Warp Speed back into the very hands of the man who touted and took credit for them them in the first place. With RFK Jr. acting as the public face of Trump’s HHS — all while the most powerful forces of the biosecurity agenda lurk in the shadows behind him — resistance to this agenda from within the administration appears doubtful despite the hopes of the MAHA voting bloc.

Thiel-Linked HHS Nominee Threatens MAHA Ambitions with Biotech Stance.

The Pentagon and Silicon Valley are in the midst of cultivating an even closer relationship as the Department of Defense (DoD) and Big Tech companies seek to jointly transform the American healthcare system into one that is “artificial intelligence (AI)-driven.” The alleged advantages of such a system, espoused by the Army itself, Big Tech and Pharma executives as well as intelligence officers, would be unleashed by the rapidly developing power of so-called “predictive medicine,” or “a branch of medicine that aims to identify patients at risk of developing a disease, thereby enabling either prevention or early treatment of that disease.”

This will apparently be achieved via mass interagency data sharing between the DoD, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the private sector. In other words, the military and intelligence communities, as well as the public and private sector elements of the US healthcare system, are working closely with Big Tech to “predict” diseases and treat them before they occur (and even before symptoms are felt) for the purported purpose of improving civilian and military healthcare.

This cross-sector team plans to deliver this transformation of the healthcare system by first utilizing and sharing the DoD’s healthcare dataset, which is the most “comprehensive…in the world.” It seems, however, based on the programs that already utilize this predictive approach and the necessity for “machine learning” in the development of AI technology, that this partnership would also massively expand the breadth of this healthcare dataset through an array of technologies, methods and sources.

Yet, if the actors and institutions involved in lobbying for and implementing this system indicate anything, it appears that another—if not primary—purpose of this push towards a predictive AI-healthcare infrastructure is the resurrection of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-managed and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-supported program that Congress officially “shelved” decades ago. That program, Total Information Awareness (TIA), was a post 9/11 “pre-crime” operation which sought to use mass surveillance to stop terrorists before they committed any crimes through collaborative data mining efforts between the public and private sector.

While the “pre-crime” aspect of TIA is the best known component of the program, it also included a component that sought to use public and private health and financial data to “predict” bioterror events and pandemics before they emerge. This was TIA’s “Bio-Surveillance” program, which aimed to develop “necessary information technologies and a resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches.” Its architects argued it would achieve this by “monitoring non-traditional data sources” including “pre-diagnostic medical data” and “behavioral indicators.” While ostensibly created to thwart “bioterror” events, the program also sought to create algorithms for identifying “normal” disease outbreaks, essentially seeking to automate the early detection of either biological attacks or natural pathogen outbreaks, ranging from pandemics to presumably other, less severe disease events.

As previously reported by Unlimited Hangout, after TIA was terminated by Congress, it largely survived by privatizing its projects into the company known as Palantir, founded by Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel and some of his associates from his time at Stanford University. Notably, the initial software used to create Palantir’s first product was Paypal’s anti-fraud algorithm. While Palantir, for most of its history, has not overtly sought to resurrect the TIA Bio-surveillance program, that has now changed in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis.

In late 2022, Palantir announced that it and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would continue their ongoing work to “plan, manage and respond to future outbreaks and public health incidents” by streamlining its existing biosurveillance programs “into a singular, efficient vehicle” to support the CDC’s “Common Operating Picture.” This “Common Operating Picture” aims to secure “strong collaboration across the federal government, jurisdictional health departments, private sector entities, and other key health partners.”

The CDC and Palantir publicized this partnership just months after the CDC announced the creation of the its Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA). This office now plans to expand biosurveillance infrastructure via public-private partnerships across the country to ensure that local communities constantly supply federal agencies with a steady stream of bio-data to develop AI-generated pandemic “forecasts,” or viral outbreak predictions, that will inform pandemic policy measures during pandemics and before they even occur, theoretically before even a single person dies of a particular contagion.

On the surface level, such a mission might sound as though it would serve public health; if government and private institutions can collaborate to prevent pandemics before they happen, well then, why not? Yet, again, the origins of Palantir demonstrate that these “healthcare” surveillance policy measures actually work completely in tandem with the deeper, aforementioned “pre-crime” national security goal of TIA, which powerful forces have been slowly implementing for decades. The ultimate goal it seems, is to usher in a new, even more invasive surveillance paradigm where both the external environment and the public’s internal environment (i.e. our bodies) are monitored for “errant” signals.

Palantir’s founder and largest shareholder, Peter Thiel, incorporated the company the same year of Total Information Awareness’s (TIA) shut down—which resulted from prominent media and political criticism—with significant funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, as well as direct guidance from the CIA on its product development. As Unlimited Hangout detailed in its investigation into Donald Trump’s 2024 running-mate J.D. Vance and his rise to MAGA stardom, Thiel and Palantir co-founder Alex Karp met with the head of TIA at DARPA, John Poindexter, shortly after Palantir’s incorporation.

The middleman between the tech entrepreneurs and Poindexter was Poindexter’s old pal and key architect of the Iraq War, Richard Perle, who called the TIA-head to tell him that he wanted him to meet “a couple of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were starting a software company.” Poindexter, according to a report in New York Magazine, “was precisely the person” with whom Thiel and Karp wanted to meet, mainly because “their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon [that is, TIA], and they wanted to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance.” Since then, Palantir has been implementing the “pre-crime” initiatives of TIA under the cover of the “free market,” enabled by its position as a private company.

This story, along with the CIA’s intimate collaboration in developing Palantir’s early software, the CIA’s unique status as Palantir’s only client for its first several years as a company and Palantir co-founders’ statements about the company’s original intent (e.g. Alex Karp – CIA analysts were always the intended clients of Palantir), demonstrate that the company was founded to privatize the TIA programs in collaboration with the military and intelligence communities to which Palantir is a major contractor. Notably, TIA’s survival was actually enabled by its alleged killer, the US Congress, as lawmakers included a classified annex that preserved funding for TIA’s programs in the same bill that ostensibly “killed” the operation.

Yet while it appears that the national security apparatus plans to use the coming AI healthcare system for “pre-crime” and mass surveillance of American citizens, this “predictive” approach to healthcare will also inform significant policy shifts for the next pandemic. Specifically, the next pandemic will likely utilize the currently expanding biosurveillance infrastructure and AI disease forecasting software to develop “targeted” policy measures for specific communities and potentially individuals during future pandemics.

While Palantir stands at the forefront of this technocratic transformation of healthcare, the national security apparatus in collaboration with Big Healthcare and Big Tech at large are all contributing to weaving this lesser known “bioterror” component of TIA into private business schemes that covertly carry on the duties of the officially “shelved” program. This network of institutions consistently and conveniently omits the origins of its predictive biosurveillance healthcare approach — but the special interests tied to their efforts, as well as the striking similarities between their alleged public health solutions, and the decades-old biowarfare responses / surveillance programs of the Pentagon, reveal the ulterior motive of this public-private collaboration.

This investigation will examine how the CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) signifies a major step towards the “AI-driven healthcare system,” how Palantir’s management of the program’s data strongly suggests that this partnership is the latest multi-sector implementation of the “pre-crime” agenda of TIA and what frightening possibilities the “AI-driven healthcare system” could enable in a future pandemic and healthcare in general. This revolutionary system ultimately pushes society further into the sights of a digital panopticon that seeks surveillance and control of all that the makes up the average citizen—from outside their bodies, to within.

What Does the CDC Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) do? 

The CFA demonstrates that the AI healthcare and pandemic prevention industry is being materially (and quietly) implemented into public life in a significant way. Its policy measures massively expand invasive surveillance measures and, through sweeping biodata collection, will transform the way that public health policy policy is developed and enacted during pandemics and healthcare in general.

Based on the CFA and related developments in the public sector and amongst government contractors, American public health agencies are poised to utilize the mass collection of biosurveillance data to fuel: 1) targeted vaccine development and distribution of pathogens with “pandemic potential,” 2) curated policy and targeted lockdowns of specific communities and/or groups based on their “risk levels” and 3) medical prioritization of patients based on their AI-determined “needs” and AI hospital management.

The CFA’s mission is to “advance U.S. forecasting, outbreak analytics, and surveillance capacities related to disease outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics to support public health response and preparedness.” It plans to achieve this mission through multiple methods, but the data aggregation accumulated via Palantir programs within the CDC’s “Common Operating Picture”, and the way this data will manifest into policy, bind all these strategies together.

I. Your Data For All

Crucial to this effort is the CFA’s goal (arguably its primary goal) of creating a concrete digital infrastructure that will provide multiple sectors and jurisdictions of government with the ability to share, access and implement the biodata they collect. One duty assigned to the program’s Office of Director summarizes this strategy succinctly; it is tasked with guiding “the facilitation and coordination” of all biosurveillance activities, ranging from disease modeling to viral forecasting and the data extraction and collection necessary to support these activities—from the local to federal levels of government and healthcare entities. In simpler terms, the Office of Director will ensure that the institutions that make up the CFA (and partner with it) see that the program’s intention to create multi-sector, interagency, collaborative data sharing infrastructure is carried out.

Several other codified aims of the program make clear how crucial this element of mass data sharing is to the overall mission of CFA. For example, the Inform Division is tasked with sharing “timely, actionable” data with the federal government, local leaders, the public and even international leaders. It also coordinates real-time surveillance activities between CDC experts and US government agencies, and maintains “liaison” with CDC officials and staff, other US government departments and private sector partners.

Similarly, the Predict Division will develop “scientific collaborations to harmonize analytic approaches and develop tools,” which likely implies the importance of interoperability in collecting/sharing this data. Interoperability, or “harmonized” analytical approaches and tools, is a necessary component of creating the multi-sector collaborative data mining infrastructure that the CFA aims to cultivate. Through making data and its collection tools interoperable, different vendors and institutions gain the ability to seamlessly work together by enabling the exchange of data between different sources, whether they be military, hospitals, academic centers or anything else. In essence, interoperability centralizes a seemingly decentralized network of different vendors and institutions, all of whom are collecting and analyzing data plucked from various sources.

Likewise, the Office of the Director is tasked with maintaining “strategic relationships with academic, private sector, and interagency partners” as well as procuring “opportunities with industry partners.” And finally, the Innovate Branch will collaborate “with academic, private sector, and interagency partners” as part of its goal to create “products, tools and enterprise enhancements” in order to make pandemic data analysis “flexible, fast, and scalable for CFA customers including federal, state, tribal, local, or territorial authorities” (emphasis added). In other words, the Innovate Branch will engage in cross-sector collaboration for the direct purpose of creating and improving technology that makes mass data sharing more vast, rapid and simple for both government authorities and “customers.”

In fact, in 2023 this goal materialized with the creation of the CFA’s Insight Net. It contains more than “100 total network participants” and spans “24 states and 35 public health departments.” Its vast network has expanded the CFA’s reach to influence “many critical public health decisions” made at the state and local levels, and it boasts that its network is integrated and unifying, “leveraging connections with state, local, private, public, and academic partners to create a consortium of collaborators.” This collaboration that Insight Net facilitates between the public and private sector manifests in the lives of citizens through the policy it informs—a central part of the program.

II. When Data Becomes Policy 

The CFA plans to utilize this vast array of data to inform real-time policy decisions related to future pandemic planning and response. Multiple divisions within the CFA will contribute to this strategy of creating policy through the implementation of data into policy decision making.

The Office of the Director will oversee the general direction of this aim, as it defines “goals and objectives for policy formation, scientific oversight, and guidance in program planning and development…” The Office of Policy and Communications will then presumably work to implement these objectives into concrete policies and regulations, as it is responsible for “review[ing], coordinat[ing], and prepar[ing] legislation, briefing documents, Congressional testimony, and other legislative matters” as well as coordinating the “development, review, and approval of federal regulations,” presumably surrounding pandemic policy, surveillance, data and response efforts.

The Predict Division will play a crucial role in informing the specifics of these policies, as it generates “forecasts and analyses to support outbreak preparedness and response efforts”, and collaborates with partners from the local to federal to international level “on performing analytics to support decision-making.” It will also perform tabletop simulations to “match policies and resources with [its AI-generated] forecasts,” leaving the fate of communities, relating to their freedom as well as access to medical care, in the hands of algorithms and datasets.

Importantly, the CFA will not only utilize this data in long-term preparation or research, but in critical, high-pressure moments. Specifically, the Predict Division’s data sets and models will be used “to address questions that arise with short latency.”

During outbreaks, such questions that may arise with “short latency” would likely relate to containment efforts, and thus, lockdown policy. The Analytics Response Branch of the CFA, which uses its “analytical tools” to aid “decision making for key partners” both during a potential or ongoing outbreak, is also responsible for analyzing “disease spread through existing data sources to identify key populations/settings at highest risk” and correspondingly providing “essential information to key partners in decisions surrounding community migration” (emphasis added).

This sentence, though somewhat vague, suggests that AI-informed policy will subject certain communities/individuals to an extraordinary level of intrusion. Specifically, beyond more general, overarching pandemic policy, it appears that AI-generated forecasts and “risk levels” will dictate policy on the local, or perhaps even individual, level—directly controlling the movement, or “migration,” of communities.

Indeed, the CFA’s cooperative agreement states that the ability to apply data-driven, “mathematical” methods to tackle health equity problems in the face of disease outbreaks is “of great interest to the CFA.” Key to this objective is the collection of data “on the social determinants of health” to utilize in disease forecasting.  These “social determinants” include “geography (rural/urban), household crowding, employment status, occupation, income, and mobility/access to transportation,” as well as race, so long as race is not recognized as an “independent exposure variable” but instead is seen as a “proxy” for other social determinants. 

While on the surface level, this “targeted” approach may seem to provide a solution to the previously implemented universal pandemic policy, the digitization of lockdowns still raises the potential to seriously threaten individual and communal autonomy—only this time, under the auspices of “objective” data, accumulated and interpreted by AI technology.

Who’s Behind the AI-Healthcare Push? 

The tentacles of the biosecurity apparatus spread across multiple sectors of government and business, transcending the heavily blurred and essentially illusory lines between the public and private sector and Big Tech and Big Pharma. Military officials, tech operatives and global public health institutions all play a significant role in the lobbying for and implementation of this emerging healthcare industry. 

I. The Military

While the idea of developing preemptive vaccines to treat novel infectious pathogens dates back to the Reagan-era, these ideas initially focused on developing preemptive vaccines for diseases that emerged in a human population via a bioweapon, making the strategy rooted in national security as opposed to traditional disease response. Yet in the modern era, this militarized approach to public health has become the dominant ideology in establishment public health sectors—demonstrated by the core ideology that the CFA is built on.

The CFA’s Office of the Director ensures that “the CFA strategy is executed by the Predict Division and aligned with overall CDC goals” (emphasis added). While the vagueness of this passage omits the exact intentions of the referenced “CDC goals”—the CDC’s national biosurveillance strategy for human health, however, sheds light on the hidden agenda here.

The strategy is cemented in “U.S. laws and Presidential Directives, including Homeland Security Presidential Directive-21 (HSPD-21), ‘Public Health and Medical Preparedness.’” HSPD-21 is a Bush-era Department of Homeland Security directive made to “guide…efforts to defend a bioterrorist attack” that are also “applicable to a broad array of natural and manmade public health and medical challenges.” The directive aimed to predict disease outbreaks—natural or bioweapon-induced—via “early warning” and “early detection” of “health events.” Strikingly similar to the TIA “Bio-Surveillance” objectives, these values appear to have been placed in good hands at the CFA, as the Center’s director, Dylan George, previously served as vice-president of In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA.

A recent trip that US Army officials made to Silicon Valley illustrates how the ideology behind this strategy has manifested through the relationship between Silicon Valley, academia and the Pentagon. In this “pivotal visit” to the San Francisco Bay Area in Aug. 2024, the US Army’s surgeon general, Mary K. Izaguirre, met with scientists at Stanford University and Google to further “the Army’s efforts to integrate cutting-edge technology and build stronger ties with civilian sectors.” Izaguirre rendezvoused with Civilian Aides to the Secretary of the Army (CASAs) and Army Reserve Ambassadors to discuss “their efforts to bridge the gap between the Army and the civilian community.”

When she met with Stanford scientists, who have “a long history of collaboration with the military, particularly through research initiatives that contribute to national defense and public health,” the scientists briefed her on advancements made in AI allegedly capable of “[revolutionizing] emergency medicine.” This tech was part of Stanford’s, and presumably the military’s and Big Tech’s, “broader mission to integrate AI into various aspects of health care…”

From there, Izaguirre traveled to Google’s headquarters where she and the tech experts discussed how Google’s “AI, machine learning, and cloud computing capabilities” could assist the Army’s healthcare ambitions. She also thanked Google for helping veterans “find their footing” after their time in the military, acknowledging the role that the company’s “SkillBridge” program plays in aiding soldiers in their transitions “into civilian careers”—which provides a convenient funnel from the military into Silicon Valley for lucky servicemen. The article concluded by remarking that through its collaboration with “leaders in academia and technology, the Army aims to equip its soldiers with the best tools and support for the challenges ahead.” Notably Google also shares a $9 billion cloud computing contract, along with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Oracle, with the Pentagon for the military’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability system (JWCC).

This meeting, along with the ever-growing partnerships between Big Tech and the Pentagon, obviously do not occur in a vacuum, but instead represent a natural culmination of years-long industry plans to merge Silicon Valley data with military data. In March 2019, for example, co-authors Dr. Ryan Kappedal, a former intelligence officer whose job pedigree summarily includes — lead product manager for the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), data scientist at Johnson & Johnson, and currently a lead manager at Google — and Dr. Niels Olson, a US Navy Commander and the Laboratory Director at US Naval Hospital Guam, wrote an article for the Pentagon-funded neoconservative think tank, Center for New American Security (CNAS), titled “Predictive Medicine: Where the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Could Build a Bridge in Artificial Intelligence,” in which they fantasized about the merging of these industries that Kappedal hails from:

“[With] the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare system, the federal government has the largest healthcare system in the world. In the era of machine learning, this translates to the most comprehensive healthcare dataset in the world. The vastness of the DoD’s dataset combined with the department’s commitment to basic biological surveillance yields a unique opportunity to create the best artificial intelligence–driven healthcare system in the world. (emphasis added)”

While the CNAS authors claim that the Pentagon and Silicon Valley merely aim to improve civilian and military healthcare through this AI healthcare system, this technocratic evolution of healthcare importantly presents a mutually beneficial opportunity for each of these institutions. For the private sector, as the CNAS article states, the DoD possesses a plethora of data with “intrinsic commercial value.” For the Pentagon, such a relationship with Silicon Valley would expand its data mining efforts into the body, allowing for a wider array of valuable data to use for national security purposes.

Further, implementing a predictive medicine infrastructure provides both sectors with the pretext to amass more health data, and to continuously do so, in order to train the predictive AI technology. This has already granted the Pentagon the pretext to increase data-collection efforts in the name of creating this AI healthcare system, potentially explaining the creation of predictive health programs such as ARPA-H and AI forecasting infrastructure like the CDC’s CFA. Importantly, the biosurveillance field’s biggest advocates also have a long history of stressing the importance of mass interagency data sharing, including between the public and private sectors — highlighting again the cross-sectoral commitment to utilizing this data for both profit and national security.

II. Big Pharma

While the CNAS authors wrote their “Predictive Medicine” article before the Covid-19 pandemic, the most prominent institutions in the pandemic preparedness / biosurveillance field have already begun selling the “predictive” approach to public health as the solution to the “next pandemic.” One of the most prominent aspects of predictive health involves using biosurveillance data to fuel the research and distribution of medical countermeasures—a policy that the CDC’s CFA is pursuing:

“[The Analytics Response Branch] works with key partners to inform decisions on medical countermeasures during an active outbreak.”

This policy unsurprisingly has the backing of the industry that most clearly stands to gain the most from it—Big Pharma. In 2023, scientists from Pfizer’s mRNA Commercial Strategy & Innovation department (one of whom hails from John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) wrote an article titled “Outlook of pandemic preparedness in a post-COVID-19 world” in which they pushed for the utilization of predictive AI technology to inform real-time policy during the “next pandemic.” The scientists pitched AI-informed policy decisions as the solution to the downsides of universal pandemic policies, specifically through a more “targeted” approach to pandemic policy.

The paper advocates for the development of  preemptive vaccines, which are vaccines developed for viruses that do not yet spread prominently in human populations. Surveillance data of pathogens with pandemic potential fuels this research, as the paper notes that vaccination benefits have “continued to progress” due to the power of constant biosurveillance and accelerated manufacturing, demonstrated by the development of “updated vaccines for evolving variants of SARS-CoV-2.”

Similarly, the authors tout the abilities of these preemptive vaccines to be quickly dispersed to protect populations from outbreaks of pathogens with pandemic potential if the pathogen “closely aligns” with a preemptively developed vaccine stockpile. These preemptive vaccines, however, would only offer temporary protection until “more tailored interventions” were developed, if deemed necessary.

This echoes the long calls of other global health institutions to develop preemptive vaccines. As a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation reported, the WHO’s 2014 CEPI-partnered program, Research and Development Blueprint for Emerging Pathogens (R&D Blueprint) aims to “reduce the time” that vaccines can get to market after the declaration of a pandemic. It does this, however, not only through conducting R&D on pathogens that already reach pandemic status, but also by conducting R&D on diseases that “are likely to cause epidemics in the future.” CEPI itself—started with investments from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust—was founded to develop “vaccines against known infectious disease threats that could be deployed rapidly to contain outbreaks, before they become global health emergencies.”

CEPI is currently assisting in building up an apparatus of research and private companies pursuing predictive vaccine development, who may up end being some of the “key partners” that the CFA plans to work with to “inform decisions on medical countermeasures during an active outbreak,” given CEPI’s close partnership with the Gates Foundation via the Gates Foundation’s Gavi, the Gates Foundation’s history of funding the CDC and Gates’ potential influence within CFA (demonstrated later in this article). CEPI made these investments to further its “100 Days Mission” that aims to “accelerate the time taken to develop safe, effective, globally accessible vaccines against emerging disease outbreaks to within 100 days.”

Interestingly, CEPI claims that the construction of a “Global Vaccine Library” is crucial to the success of its 100 Days Mission. The Library plans to utilize AI technology to predict how “viral threats could mutate to evade our immune systems” in order to identify specific “vaccine targets.” Richard Hatchett, the CEO of CEPI (formerly of the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA)) stated that building the Global Vaccine Library will require “coordinated investments in countermeasure development and, in outbreak situations, rapid data sharing.” Perhaps the datasets that the CFA will utilize and expand could assist in creating this Global Vaccine Library by making possible the “rapid data sharing” that CEPI requires.

III. Building on Tiberius

Another element of informing medical countermeasure policy through data is distribution—something that Palantir gained direct experience with during the COVID-19 pandemic. The CFA now plans to utilize its data and analytical tools to inform its “key partners” on “decisions on medical countermeasures during an active outbreak.”

During COVID-19, the Pentagon–run Operation Warp Speed initiated its vaccine distribution policy in direct collaboration with Palantir through the Palantir program “Tiberius,” which the CDC has since pledged to unite with other Palantir biosurveillance programs as part of its “Common Operating Picture.” Tiberius uses a Palantir software product called Gotham that also manages another Palantir-run government program called Health and Human Services (HHS) Protect, “a secretive database that hoards information related to the spread of COVID-19 gathered from ‘more than 225 data sets, including demographic statistics, community-based tests, and a wide range of state-provided data.’” The database notably includes protected health information, which led Democratic senators and representatives to warn of the program’s “serious privacy concerns”:

“Neither HHS nor Palantir has publicly detailed what it plans to do with this PHI, or what privacy safeguards have been put in place, if any. We are concerned that, without any safeguards, data in HHS Protect could be used by other federal agencies in unexpected, unregulated, and potentially harmful ways, such as in the law and immigration enforcement context.” 

During the pandemic, Tiberius drew on this health data so that it could “help identify high-priority populations at highest risk of infection.” Tiberius identified the risk levels of these populations in order to develop “[vaccine] delivery timetables and locations” to prioritize vaccines in specific “at risk” populations. Most often these populations were minority communities and notably, the COVID-19 vaccines are associated with an excess risk of serious adverse effects, and can cause fatal myocarditis.

Further, as noted in a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation, intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies, such as the Los Angeles and New Orleans police departments, also use Gotham for “predictive policing,” or pre-crime initiatives which disproportionately affect minority communities (ICE also used Palantir’s digital profiling tech to apprehend and deport illegal immigrants). The US Army Research Laboratory also found Gotham useful, as evidenced by its $91 million contract with Palantir “‘to accelerate and enhance’ the Army’s research work.” More recently, Palantir teamed up with Microsoft to provide national security leaders with an opportunity to exploit a “first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology,” including its Gotham software, among other products, for “mission-planning” purposes (the military also uses Gotham for “targeting enemies” through its “AI-powered kill chain”). These lucrative contracts with the intelligence/military state highlight the dual-use nature of the technology behind the “AI-healthcare” revolution, and thus raise the question: will Palantir and other government agencies utilize the health data that CFA can access for “dual-use,” national security purposes?

The Digitization of Healthcare: Kinsa, Palantir and the ‘Targeted’ Nature of Future Pandemic Response

Notably, some prominent institutions within the biosecurity apparatus have already begun pitching “targeted” pandemic policy as a solution to the now widely recognized failings of the more universal non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) policies of COVID-19, such as lockdowns, social distancing and school closures, which unleashed economic devastation, physical death and mental health decline upon many populations.

For instance, the Pfizer paper, “Outlook of pandemic preparedness in a post-COVID-19 world”, mentioned earlier, surmises that the negative effects of NPIs such as school closures, lockdowns and hospital policies may be felt years into the future and even be shown to increase in severity with further studies. Lockdowns in particular, the authors note, “resulted in significant economic, social, and health costs,” and they even state that “the effect of social distancing on the mental health of children and adolescents [continues] to be difficult to measure.” From a bureaucratic perspective, the paper also admits that consistent and long-term use of NPIs can be “challenging because people grow tired and apathetic toward them.”

The solution that the Pfizer scientists offer is “early action” being used to “leverage all available interventions as soon as possible in pandemic response,” and importantly, “geographically specific and informed NPI policies.” It appears that at least one of the solutions the paper puts forth, to both implement “early action” and “geographically specific” policies, is to “have a gradient of warnings that separate dangerous pandemics from more manageable outbreaks…” This proposed policy recalls the CFA measure that analyzes “disease spread through existing data sources to identify key populations/settings at highest risk” (emphasis added).

The paper goes on:

“In healthcare settings, an artificial intelligence platform could help prioritize patients based on their medical needs, effectively managing resources during triage situations. Similarly, a gradient-based warning system for pandemics could initiate appropriate responses at different levels of threat, with each level tied to specific actions. An early warning or Level 1 may involve increased surveillance and information sharing, while higher levels could trigger more drastic measures like regional shutdowns or global travel restrictions.” (emphasis added)

A system of surveillance this vast, importantly, could only be achieved through the “the facilitation and coordination” of all biosurveillance activities—from the local to federal levels of government and healthcare entities— that the CFA will carry out.

Other Pharma-backed organizations have also called for targeted pandemic response policy, such as the Committee to Unleash Prosperity which stated “identifying the most vulnerable groups and focusing resources on their protection will always be critical to any sensible crisis response.” The Committee to Unleash Prosperity is funded by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, whose members include Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Glaxosmithkline, Merck,and Sanofi among other Big Pharma companies. The group was also notably co-founded by Larry Kudlow, formerly one of Trump’s top economic advisors and directors of the National Economic Council during his first term, who—during Covid-19—was part of the group that decided to effectively outsource the U.S. fiscal reponse to the crisis to Larry Fink’s BlackRock.

The push for such “targeted” measures are furthermore indicative of an even greater systemic transformation taking place in the healthcare system. The calls to “help prioritize patients based on their medical needs” in order to “effectively manage resources during triage situations” allude to the industry effort to digitize hospital management, resource allocation and patient care, and, in doing so, expand the health datasets of the biosecurity apparatus. Private companies including Palantir, among others, it turns out, are already playing crucial roles in this AI-hospital revolution.

Meanwhile, the CFA codifies the push towards this AI-system through multiple policies:

“[The Predict Division] assists with tabletop exercises to match policies and resources with forecasts”

“[The Office of Management Services] provides direction, strategy, analysis, and operational support in all aspects of human capital management, including workforce and career development and human resources operations”

The first company involved in this shift worth noting is Kinsa Health—a company that “uses internet-connected thermometers to predict the spread of the flu”—which is carrying out the kind of data mining that would enable this kind of predictive and targeted pandemic policy that CFA seeks to carry out. According to the The New York Times, Kinsa is “uniquely positioned to identify unusual clusters of fever because they have years of data for expected flu cases in each ZIP code.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kinsa was allegedly able to forecast which locations would become “COVID-19 epicenters” before more traditional surveillance systems could.

The thermometers supply data by connecting “to a cellphone app that instantly transmits their readings to the company.” Interestingly, “Users can also enter other symptoms they feel. The app then gives them general advice on when to seek medical attention.”

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kinsa has emerged as a rising star within the predictive health industry, as it has secured a significant deal with healthcare company Highmark Health to “predict health care utilization, recognize staffing needs, and plan emergency department and ICU bed capacity when infectious diseases like COVID-19 and influenza spike.” The initiative is “the first health delivery system to utilize Kinsa’s early warning system to model staffing needs and bed capacity”—signifying Kinsa’s increasing role in this healthcare shift.

This preceded health technology company Healthy Together’s 2024 acquisition of Kinsa, which marked a significant step for the thermometer company, as the acquisition signifies the expansion of Kinsa’s predictive powers and datasets into the public sector. The announcement proclaimed that “the synergy between the two companies will empower pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, Medicaid agencies, insurance companies, and public health departments with AI-driven tools to proactively respond to and address illness.” The bold vision here is perhaps unsurprising—that is, only when Healthy Together’s peculiar ties to government and Thiel-connected figures, and its larger vision, are understood.

Healthy Together is a Software as a Service (SaaS), or a service that “allows users to connect to and use cloud-based apps over the Internet.” It prides itself on unifying “the objectives of government programs and the needs of residents into a single platform.” The way it does this is through its “One Door” approach, or rather—its mission to make available one’s health records and immunization history “all in one place,” that place being their proprietary app. Indeed, Healthy Together has already partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Lighthouse program to access veteran’s health data ranging from immunization records, “test results, allergy records, clinical vitals, medical conditions and appointment records.” This connectivity was achieved via the VA’s application programming interface (API), as veterans using the Healthy Together app access their medical records through the VA API, which connects different computer programs together. This serves as a small-scale example of the growing harmonization between military and Big Tech data.

In addition to health data, the company also aims to link welfare data and access to its app—a particularly concerning feature given that some US health experts tied to the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and official government Covid-19 response policy previously pitched linking welfare benefits to vaccination status during the Covid-19 crisis.

When Healthy Together partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to join its AWS Partner Network (APN), it created a program that achieves this linkage of welfare data with its app. It was called the “Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Management Information System (MIS),” or Luna MIS. WIC is a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) federal assistance program that provides low-income pregnant women and children under the age of five with services such as EBT cards to help them afford food. Luna MIS apparently streamlines “the management of WIC benefits, from application and enrollment to benefit issuance and redemption,” meaning it transfers users’ entire interaction with WIC benefits, from registration to allocation, into the Healthy Together app. The company further supports this “One Door” approach for eligibility, enrollment and recertification for other social programs such as “Medicaid, SNAP, TANF…as well as behavioral health, disease surveillance, vital records, child welfare and more.”

Whether or not data collected via technology such as Kinsa thermometers or health records, such as immunization status, might informs one’s eligibility or enrollment for social programs in the future remains to be seen. Either way, the company already works directly on welfare benefits with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services , the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma, Missouri Department of Social Services, Maryland Market Money and Maryland Department of Agriculture and more. Given that the company already collects vast amounts of medical data, including vaccination records, linking such data to welfare benefits would likely prove an easy task for the company.

While there is not much public information available about Healthy Together’s board or funding, it appears that the “One Door” service was born out of another app—which is no longer available—called Twenty (as a significant number of Healthy Together’s co-founders/CEOs apparently still work at Twenty, and hold the exact same positions at each company).

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Healthy Together was developed in the early days of the pandemic when the state of Utah “contracted with mobile app developer Twenty to launch Healthy Together” in order to track the residents of Utah’s “movements” and, for those that fell ill, equip public health workers with a digital contact tracing tool to discover “where they crossed paths with other users.” The Tribune reported that Utah provided Twenty with a $1.75 million contract, along with an additional “$1 million to further develop [Healthy Together].” In other words, Healthy Together was built as a public-private “contact tracing” (i.e. surveillance) app.

Twenty, according to its LinkedIn, was an app that aimed “to drive more human connection” by making it easier for friends to meet up and make plans. It does this, however, by allowing users to see the locations of nearby friends, even cluing them into their friends’ later plans and pinning events for people to meet up at. While Healthy Together and Twenty are separate apps, it appears that the seemingly social location-based tracking technology used for Twenty was swiftly repurposed to create the contact-tracing and health-focused app Healthy Together, as the co-founder and co-CEO of Twenty and Healthy Together, Jared Allgood, stated:

“…at the start of the pandemic, we were contacted by some state governments who are interested in using some of the mobile platform technology that we had built previously, to create a link between the health department and residents in their state…” (emphasis added)

The Salt Lake Tribune explained the contact tracing process that the repurposed technology of Healthy Together helped the state achieve:

“the app uses Bluetooth and location tracing services to record when its users are in close proximity. When a user begins to feel ill, he or she can enter symptoms on the app, which provides directions for testing.”

“State epidemiologist Angela Dunn further explained the process…‘So if you choose to share your data with our contact tracers’ by using the app, she said, ‘they’ll be able to know about the places that you’ve been while you were infectious, and it’ll also provide our contact tracers with a snapshot of other app users who you had significant contact with and potentially exposed with COVID-19 as well’…. ‘that will allow contact tracers to follow up directly with those people and provide them information about how to protect themselves and others,’ she said.”

Now, the goals and functions of Healthy Together seem to have expanded into AI viral forecasting and hospital management with its acquisition of Kinsa, making the private company a potential asset for the CDC CFA, as its experience in working with health data would seemingly make it a fitting “existing data source” for the program.

The people behind these companies too, however, make Kinsa and Healthy Together not too far removed from CFA’s other private sector partners. Healthy Together was funded by SV Angel, the venture capital firm founded by “The Godfather of Silicon Valley,” Ron Conway, who was an early investor in the Elon Musk-and-Peter Thiel-founded Paypal and also in the Peter Thiel-backed Facebook (Thiel and Conway were among the earliest backers of the social network).

Another co-founder and co-CEO of Healthy Together and Twenty, Diesel Peltz, boasts interesting ties to the incoming Trump administration via his father, billionaire and chairman emeritus of the Wendy’s Company, Nelson Peltz. Nelson Peltz claims responsibility for re-connecting Elon Musk and Trump, which led to Musk financially and very publicly backing the 2024 Trump campaign. Since the election, Musk’s outsized role in setting incoming government policy has become both obvious and controversial. Variety reported the following about the Peltz family role in uniting Musk with Trump:

“[Peltz] said Musk, together with Peltz’s son Diesel…‘had a breakfast at the house, we invited Donald for breakfast, and they [Musk and Trump] sort of reunited again… I hope it’s good, you know. I was a matchmaker.’” (emphasis added)

Importantly, both Thiel and Musk played critical roles in successfully lobbying for the appointment of Thiel protege JD Vance as Trump’s vice presidential nominee. Now, Musk is set to head Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency advisory group, along with the founder of the biotech company Roivant (which has created subsidiary biotech companies with Pfizer, and has invested deeply in mRNA technology), Vivek Ramaswamy, to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”

The meeting between the two Peltz men, Musk and the President Elect took place in the late Spring, and it was only a few months later that Palantir and Wendy’s Supply Chain Co-op announced a partnership to “bring [the co-op] towards a fully integrated Supply Chain Network with opportunities for AI-driven, automated workflows,” by moving its supply chain onto Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform. The platform is, familiarly, “designed to connect disparate data sources into a single common operating picture…” Wendy’s will eventually use Palantir to manage its supply chain and waste prevention, including through “Demand Deviation and Allocation.” All of this will push the fast-food company with an otherwise folksy aesthetic, personified through its ginger-haired freckled mascot, Wendy, towards the increasingly technocratic new age—and the Peltz family closer to the Thiel-verse.

Also worth noting is Arianna Huffington’s seat on the board of Twenty. Huffington’s appointment warrants mentioning only because of her relationship with another protege of Peter Thiel, CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman. The media mogul and tech entrepreneur recently teamed up to create the fitness app Thrive AI Health, which gives users a “hyper-personalized” AI health coach.

Thiel has been described as Altman’s “longtime mentor,” and apparently at the beginning of Altman’s career, “Thiel…saw in Altman a magentic figure who could expand the tech sector’s approach across the world.” Thiel’s rosy view of the OpenAI CEO is evidenced by the mutually beneficial relationship that matured between the two after Altman sold his company Loopt, and Thiel raised the bulk of the $21 million dollars that Altman later gathered for his own venture capital firm, Hydrazine Capital, according to the The Washington Post. Soon after, “Altman’s bond with Thiel blossomed: He helped Thiel’s venture firm, Founder’s Fund, get access to hot start-ups, and the men sometimes traveled together to speak at events.”

Recently, Palantir and another Thiel-backed company, Anduril, have partnered on behalf of the Pentagon to “unlock the full potential of AI for national security,” specifically by retaining data at the “tactical edge” of the battlefield, data that is usually “never retained.” Apparently, this new partnership will make the collection of this “tactical edge” data possible, and be used to train AI models and “deliver the U.S. an advantage over adversaries.” It will also enable “collaboration with leading AI developers, including [Sam Altman’s] OpenAI” (emphasis added). 

It now seems that Thiel, through the aforementioned relationships, is not too distant in proximity from (though not directly intertwined with) Healthy Together and Kinsa, all while Palantir further entrenches its relationship with the CDC (as well as the DoD) and positions itself as a health data empire.

Kinsa’s Connections to Bill Gates

Notably, the CEO and founder of Kinsa, Inder Singh, hails from the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) where he formerly served as the Executive Vice President. CHAI was controversially created with significant involvement from Jeffrey Epstein, the now infamous pedophile, sex trafficker and intelligence asset, and Epstein was simultaneously involved with Bill Gates during that same period, including the Gates’ family philanthropy (Epstein was notably an advocate for transhumanism and eugenics, which informed much of his “philanthropic” activities and funding of prominent scientists). Unsuprisingly, CHAI has been funded by none other than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the tune of tens of millions of dollars (see here and here), and also shares a nearly identical goal of vaccinating “as many children as possible” with its partner Bill Gates’ Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, by “creating dramatic and sustainable improvements to vaccine markets and national immunization programs.” The Gates Foundation notably envisions AI as central to its global health objectives, as it funded a United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—an organization that often acts as a CIA front—effort to push for the global implementation of AI in healthcare.

As a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation noted, Gavi’s stated goal is to create “‘healthy markets’ for vaccines by ‘encourag[ing] manufacturers to lower vaccine prices for the poorest countries in return for long-term, high-volume and predictable demand for those countries.’”

And to bring these relationships full circle once again, Palantir joined “The Trinity Challenge” in 2020, “a global coalition of prominent academic institutions and foundations as well as leading technology, health and insurance companies with the aim of increasing the world’s resilience against the pandemics of the future by harnessing the power of data, analytics.” Its members included Google, Microsoft, Facebook, McKinsey & Company and—the Gates Foundation. The Trinity Challenge has been criticized for framing invasive surveillance and neo-Malthusian policies as “solutions” to the “next” pandemic and as beneficial for global public health.

Indeed, the influence of Gates may have navigated its way into CFA itself, with the CFA director, Dylan George, previously serving as vice-president of biotech firm Ginkgo Bioworks. Ginkgo Bioworks, a partner of the World Economic Forum, was heavily funded by Cascade Investment when the company went public, an investment firm controlled by Bill Gates. By utilizing a “constellation” of shell companies that all connect back to Cascade, Gates also accumulated enough property to make himself the largest farmland owner in the United States during the Covid-era. Cascade is still the largest shareholder of Ginkgo Bioworks.

It should also be noted that Gates supports the United Nation’s (UN) efforts to implement a universal Digital ID as a “human right,” or in reality, a pre-condition for accessing other human rights, for the entire global population by 2030 through the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 16.9. Previously, the EU Digital Covid Certificate enabled governments to, as the Pfizer “Outlook” paper advocates, “restrict global travel” based on a form of digital ID, that importantly had health data attached to it (in this case, only COVID-19 immunization status, testing results and records of previous infections.). Multiple groups seeking to impose digital ID infrastructure globally were intimately involved in digital vaccine passport production during the Covid-19 crisis.

It is important to remember that local travel restrictions, or “decisions surrounding community migration,” during the COVID-19 pandemic were enforced using both physical and digital proof-of-vaccination—a form of ID that attaches “health data” to the ID, with that “health data” then being utilized to determine one’s accessibility to certain human rights (such as entry into certain businesses/events or job access).

Gates’ funding of the CDC, as well as his connection to the CFA and the program’s stated policy aims of analyzing disease spread to identify the “highest risk” key populations and utilizing data to influence “community migration” rights raises an important question: will CFA data be attached to a digital ID, and how might that data be used to determine one’s human rights (such as community migration, for example) during a declared, or anticipated, public heath crisis?

AI Hospitals

While Palantir’s recent transition into AI hospital management is not an exact illustration of life with digital ID, some of its features suggest what a future managed by constant surveillance and AI decision-making might look like—not only in healthcare, but the workplace in general.

According to its website’s “Hospitals for Palantir” page, Palantir is already “powering nurse scheduling, nurse staffing, transfer center optimization, discharge management, and other critical workflows” for more than 15% of US hospitals. Palantir’s “healthcare engineers” work “directly alongside caregivers and hospital operators to build and tailor workflows — prioritizing speed, effectiveness, and usability.”

The tech company has “deployed a first of its kind application that takes into account nurse preferences, granular patient demand forecasts, staff competencies, and existing staff information to automatically generate AI-driven, optimal nursing schedules,” a seemingly innocent project. Yet, the degree of influence that this “first of its kind” application already appears to wield in American hospitals spells a troubling precedent for humanity in the workplace—specifically, by dehumanizing the logistical and bureaucratic nature of hospitals through AI substitutes under the auspices of “objective” machine decision-making.

Palantir’s Foundry is already forecasting “the patient census for a hospital based on data from the emergency department, operating rooms, transfers, discharges, and more.” The tech systems also keep track of the skills and information for every nurse in a hospital, “including (but not limited to) competencies, languages, skills, certifications, tenure, and other talent profile information.” Both kinds of data apparently generate the prime nursing schedule for the entire hospital, down to any given “unit, floor, department, [or] facility.”

While these systems project the image of an altruistic product aimed at providing a more seamless experience for patients and hospital workers alike, critical media scholar Dr. Nolan Higdon, co-author of the book “Surveillance Education” which explores the invasive nature of surveillance technologies in schools (as well as the intersection between Big Tech and the military industrial complex), told Unlimited Hangout that Big Tech companies recycle this altruism-pitch time and time again as a way to mask their ulterior motives:

“Whenever these companies employ data collection mechanisms under the auspices of improving the lives of customers, it ultimately ends up being a scheme to make more money, and at the expense of labor and the customer.

What we’ve seen consistently over and over again is whatever readout they get of the data ends up being an excuse to cut jobs, to overwork individuals, to minimize services and access to services as a way to cut costs…So it’s: if we collect data, how much more work can we throw on the back of this nurse? Can we throw enough work on the back of this nurse where patients will complain and we can cut another job or two? Those are the kind of questions that this data is trying to help folks make.”

Yet Higdon fears that this goal of increasing profits could also enable even more vicious price gouging of patients that the healthcare industry already engages in with little transparency. Palantir claims that its tech can recommend in real time where a hospital should place incoming patients based on “patient-specific criteria” and “current and upcoming [hospital] capacity,” which obviously would require access to a breadth of patient data. Higdon wonders whether or not insurance providers might weaponize this data against patients by raising their premiums based on life decisions of the patient:

“Not everybody is totally honest with their insurer about maybe how much they sleep or how much they drink or how much they party or whatever, right? These tools can be a way to surveil people to find that information out to set premiums that are aimed at maximizing the amount of money you get from customers and save the amount of money for the insurance company.

The more they know about your life, the more justifications they can make about setting premiums. Maybe in their algorithmic counts, if you sleep six hours a night instead of eight hours a night, you’re more likely to have these health outcomes. So they’re going to charge you more money now until your sleep patterns change. Or maybe you eat X amount of processed food and that’s been associated with this outcome. So they’re going to charge more on this premium.

There’s so [much] ‘in the weeds’ evidence that can be used against folks, and you don’t have any recourse. Because again, they go back to, ‘well the objective algorithm has given us this readout.’”

While Palantir vows that it keeps “patient privacy and information governance a top priority,” promises like these simply provide tech companies smokescreens to obfuscate the vast amount of data sharing they engage in. Higdon claims that while many companies, like Palantir, promise users that they do not sell client data, those companies still share it between institutions they’ve entered agreements with. On Palantir’s Medium Blog, for example, it vows to readers that it does not sell or share its data with other customers…that is, “except where those specific clients have entered into an agreement with each other.”

However, whether or not this applies specifically to Palantir’s first and longest-running client, the CIA, remains doubtful. Many tech companies, particularly social media giants and search engines, were revealed in past years to illegally share user data with US intelligence to facilitate vast, post-9/11 surveillance programs of dubious legality. Importantly, at Palantir’s origins its founders collaborated with the intelligence state to resurrect a DARPA-CIA surveillance program that sought to merge existing databases into one “virtual, centralized, grand database.” Given this, it seems more than plausible that Palantir allows US intelligence to access more of the data the company handles than they publicly acknowledge.

Palantir also creates profiles of American citizens for the CIA based on their online activities (and other activities that are surveillable). If Higdon’s concerns of data sharing do indeed apply to Palantir, then Palantir could easily fold its trove of American health data into such profiles. In fact, the CFA requires organizations applying to become partners of the program to describe how they plan to leverage novel data sources “to create new analytic products.” An example they provide for applicants involves using “data fusion techniques” to merge data extracted from the internet with “existing public health data streams” in order to create detailed forecasts of present (or future) events that “reduce latency.”

This is particularly troubling given Palantir’s role in implementing “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime, in the United States and that law enforcement and intelligence agencies could weaponize mental health data in particular in the context of preventing crimes before they occur. While some may deem this scenario far-fetched, it is worth considering that the previous Trump administration closely considered a policy to use AI to analyze innocent Americans’ social media profiles for posts that could indicate “early warning signs of neuro-psychiatric violence” as a means of preventing mass shootings before they occur. Per that program, the government would subject Americans flagged by the AI to various mandated mental health interventions or preventive house arrest. A scenario in which law enforcement utilizes mental health data from healthcare settings tied to Palantir in lieu of, or in combination with, social media posts is not difficult to envision.

Further, while Palantir claims to make patient privacy a “top priority,” regulatory bodies have yet to enact any meaningful oversight of the company to prevent it from sharing this data with other organizations, much less itself and thus the other branches of government it actively works with. This lack of transparency creates a “hall of mirrors” that blurs the lines between organizations, and therefore who owns what data, covertly eliminating any rights to privacy while at the same time enabling the corporate construction of a digitized global consciousness made up of the data of unknowing civilians—in this case, all in the name of “public health.”

The Hall of Mirrors

The CDC CFA’s alleged commitment to utilize groundbreaking methods to better public health remains to be seen. Yet, what this article definitively illustrates is that the CFA further entrenches both the public and private wings of the public health apparatus into the “hall of mirrors” of intelligence agency-connected corporations and public institutions. Behind these organizations sit some of the most influential kingmakers of Washington, hailing from Silicon Valley, seemingly committed to utilizing any industry or catastrophe to expand their surveillance of human bodies, equipping them with the capital to become the robber barons of the digital age.

Importantly, however, the CFA does not signify a shift in public health policy, but rather a firm step forward in a years-long effort to drive the entire public health apparatus into the hands of hawkish national security ideologues and their oligarchic, technocratic benefactors. For normal people, the implications of such policy pursuits may be significant. During the “future pandemics” that this entire industry is already spending billions of dollars preparing for—with expected returns in mind—the CFA’s surveillance may dictate the average civilians’ global travel rights, even their ability to traverse their own communities, what medicines they take/have access to and whether they are deemed “high risk” or not.

The actors behind this system are unsurprisingly the same ones that planned, directed and carried out the COVID-19, halfway-digitized, iterations of similar biosecurity policy. The fingerprints of figures like Gates, with the head of the CFA hailing from the Gates-funded Gingko Bioworks, and those of Big Pharma and the Pentagon are plastered all over the program’s doctrine.

Critically, the program’s existence should be considered within the context of the coming Trump administration, which boasts deep ties to its most prominent figures. The Thiel-verse have exerted their influence over D.C. politics wisely, demonstrated not only by the plethora of government contracts won by Thiel-connected companies across agencies, but by the infiltration of Thiel proxies like Founders Fund alumnus J.D. Vance into Trump’s cabinet.

As Stavroula Pabst recently noted in Responsible Statecraft, Thiel “bankrolled fellow venture capitalist and now-VP elect J.D. Vance’s successful 2022 Senate Campaign in Ohio to the tune of $15 million — the most anyone has given to a Senate candidate. Thiel and Vance are in fact long term associates, where Thiel previously assisted Vance’s own venture capital career.” While Trump ended up picking the billionaire national security contractor billionaire Stephen Feinberg as his Deputy Secretary of Defense, he was eyeballing Trae Stephens for the position, formerly of Palantir and a “longtime partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund and co-founder and Executive Chairman at Anduril,” further demonstrating that the relationship between Thiel and Trump continues to endure. In addition, another Thiel proxy – Jim O’Neill, who boasts deep ties to mRNA tech – has been nominated to be the No. 2 at HHS and will likely serve as HHS Secretary if the Senate rejects the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. O’Neill’s upcoming role at HHS heralds not only a continuation but a likely deepening of Palantir’s involvement at HHS sub-agencies like the CDC.

Companies such as Kinsa and Healthy Together stand as well-positioned potential benefactors of this Thiel-friendly relationship with the coming Trump administration, not only because of the connections Diesel Peltz boasts to PayPal Mafia member Elon Musk, Trump himself and early PayPal investor Ron Conway, but because its products have made it a prominent data-miner at the intersection of healthcare and Big Tech. From this perspective, a myriad of other companies including defense contractors Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, sit in a similar position.

Exactly which companies will be tasked to fulfill certain responsibilities remains to be seen, but the agenda-at-large remains the same; massively increase the surveillance powers of this biosurveillance apparatus, and then utilize these powers to influence public policy, increase control of civilian movement and access to rights, secure deregulated markets for biotechnology and, most importantly, make everything about the individual civilian subject to the surveillance, and scrutiny, of the shadowy organizations occupying the watchtower of the digital panopticon.

The privatization, and thus on-the-surface “decentralization” of this program grants it the appearance of the natural evolution of the free market. Yet Palantir’s origins in the DARPA/CIA Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, as well as the merging of all three of these sectors and the clear gains all stand to achieve, suggest a more organized and cynical pursuit of the policies that CFA appears to be making reality. Together, these industries form a technocratic iteration of the Mighty Wurlitzer. Playing specified tunes to targeted audiences, whether they be the altruistic notions of public health, the frightening potentials of unchecked domestic terrorism or bioterrorism, the catastrophe of global pandemics or even simple workplace efficiency, each melody this apparatus plays serves to manufacture consent for their ability to conduct ever-expanding surveillance of everyone. This obviously makes the declared “public health” purposes of the biosurveillance apparatus at large highly questionable.

After all, the AI-healthcare system promises a more efficient, convenient and effective healthcare system—yet the means by which this system is meant to lead the public to a predictive-health utopia involve the elimination of privacy and the dehumanization of healthcare itself. Left to algorithms controlled by corporate sharks and national security hawks, profits, surveillance and top-down influence are an all but guaranteed outcome, but what will the digitization of care do to the physical, mental and spiritual health of everyone else? Perhaps those people—beyond the data that corporations can extract from them—are an afterthought of those behind the AI-healthcare revolution.

The CDC, Palantir and the AI-Healthcare Revolution .