Does video of a 2019 conference prove that Dr. Anthony Fauci and Health and Human Services (HHS) officials plotted to release an avian flu virus in order to enforce a universal flu vaccination? No, that's not true: The stories spreading this claim pervert the meaning of "universal flu vaccine" to suggest it would be a part of a nefarious plot for global dominion instead of what it is: a long-desired single universal shot that would fight all the yearly variants of seasonal flu.
Any reasonable person watching the recording or reading the transcript will see the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Fauci) and HHS colleagues responding to a moderator's questions about what is being done to modernize vaccine production so that they can better do their jobs: prepare the U.S. public health system for infectious disease outbreaks that predictably arise among Earth's carbon-based life forms.
The claims originated in an InfoWars broadcast that was summarized in an October 6, 2021, Gateway Pundit article titled "EXPLOSIVE VIDEO Emerges of Fauci and HHS Officials Plotting for 'A New Avian Flu Virus' to Enforce Universal Flu Vaccination" (archived here) that opens:
Alex Jones highlighted three clips from the hour-long video of the summit from C-SPAN which proved the COVID-19 pandemic was planned and the Big Pharma worked with the UN and other corrupt government officials to develop and release the COVID-19 virus ahead of 'Great Reset.'
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The Gateway Pundit article summarizes the tape, saying "They all agreed that the annual flu virus was not scary enough to create an event that would convince people to get a universal vaccine. And as we now know today, about 2 years after this event, that 'terrifying virus' that was introduced was the COVID-19 Sars virus."
A search of C-SPAN's transcript of the tape finds no use of the words "fear," "terrify," "scare" or "scary." Reviewing the conversation, there is no consensus on the panel that people need to be fear-stampeded into universal vaccination, which Jones, in his show, says is the precursor to control of the masses.
False claim: Fauci, et al. discussed "how to enforce Universal Flu Vaccination"
This is a clear misstatement of what's going on in the videotaped discussion. It's not about enforcement.
The October 29, 2019, panel discussion, available on C-SPAN, was about efforts to develop a universal flu vaccine to replace the yearly flu shot gamble. The seasonal flu changes each year and it takes six months to produce mass quantities of vaccine. Under the current system, public health officials look at flu samples and basically guess which variant the coming year's vaccine should target. Some years they choose correctly and other years they do not.
A search of the transcript of the discussion finds there is not one instance of the word "enforce." Here is what the transcript search displays:
In the recording stored on C-SPAN's site, Fauci lays out exactly what is meant by a universal vaccine and it does not support the way Jones and the Gateway Pundit use the phrase. Fauci says:
... When we talk about a universal flu vaccine it really right now is an aspirational goal in that the quest being to make a vaccine that induces a response in the body to that part of the influenza that doesn't change from season to season from decade to decade or even that much when you get a pandemic.
False claim: C-SPAN video proves the COVID-19 pandemic was planned
In support of this claim, Jones and the Gateway Pundit rely on remarks by Rick Bright, who at that time was an HHS authority on biomedical advanced research. Bright responds to the moderator's complaint that 1947 -- vaccines grown in chicken eggs -- technology still defines vaccine development. The recording shows that Bright says :
If we can move into more synthetic the nucleic acid-based messenger RNA base those sequences can be rapidly shared around the world ... Putting those in a system to print those on a patch, a self-administered vaccine could happen. The technologies are out there. We haven't demonstrated their true effectiveness and the ability for a vaccine, but it's not too crazy to think that an outbreak of a novel avian virus could occur in China somewhere, we could get this RNA sequence from that, beam it to a number of regional centers ... The technology is there to be adapted and assembled to put into that futuristic view of rapid response to an emerging novel threat.
It is the job of Fauci's agency to plan ahead, which means imagining the worst-case scenario and planning what actions to take to counteract infectious disease outbreaks. Given that, before COVID-19, three of the five major flu epidemics of the last century originated in China (1957 "Asian flu," 1968 "Hong Kong flu" and 1977 "Russian flu"), it might have been considered malpractice in 2019 for public health agencies to base planning scenarios on a flu originating from another one of the 195 countries on Earth.
False claim: C-SPAN video proves Big Pharma/UN/corrupt officials timed coronavirus ahead of 'Great Reset'
Nothing in the C-SPAN video or its transcript connects the universal flu vaccine discussion to the United Nations or to the sponsors of "Great Reset."
It's the name of a proposal the World Economic Forum (WEF) drafted in response to the pandemic. Conspiracy theorists like Jones tell followers a secret organization will capitalize on the pandemic in order to march to world dominion. The Great Reset is no secret. WEF unveiled it with a good deal of publicity effort and built a website containing the details, which are seen here.
WEF summarizes as follows: "There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative."
The Great Reset has three aims:
- Steering markets toward fairer outcomes.
- Encouraging investments that advance shared goals, such as sustainability
- Harnessing technology in support of the public good.
Lead Stories has collected here a dozen "Great Reset" claims debunked.
