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That 'undercover Project Veritas reporter stings Pfizer exec' story -

This blogger - Sasha Latypova - has an interesting take on the story. If you’ve still not seen the vid, it’s embedded in the linked post. Once again, I find John Le Carre’s phrase ‘the wilderness of mirrors’ coming up spontaneously: How do you navigate through this fog of multiplex competing narratives? With great caution and a studiously open mind, obviously.

Perhaps I should just say also that, to this superannuated thesp, the video conversation with the - alleged - Pfizer exec smells markedly of Mike Leigh’s ‘directed improvisations’ technique for producing his unique, excellent films. The conversation could be genuine. But - very easily - it could be an improvised take:

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I have no respect at all for Project Veritas or James O’Keefe’s work but will try to keep an open mind.

That’s what several commentators have said, J. Have you any details about why you don’t trust him. I don’t know anything about him or PV.

According to the Epoch Times
“An online professional profile for Walker describes him as director of worldwide R&D strategic operations and mRNA scientific planning at Pfizer. Cached versions in search engines of his Linkedin profile list the same title. His actual Linkedin page was removed. Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine is built on messenger RNA, or mRNA, technology.”

Given we can all see and hear what he said, and there has been a lack of challenge to the provenance of the sting, I doubt the credentials of the stinger matter that much.

Meryl Nass’s take below.

PV have done us a favour, even if it’s only been to reveal what a shallow world this population is. He is now keen to tell us he’s not even a scientist, but he’s still directing something to do with mRHA for Pfizer.

Nass’s commentary provides general context.

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Missing from the job description: knowledge and hard work. Mr. Jordon Walker was using his imagination while looking for action and he got it, but not the kind he was looking for. He will probably have to change his identity to ever get another job. I feel kind of sorry for him.

I don’t know if Walker is from the Boston Consulting Group but Nass’s point is that there are a lot of people in high up positions because of their energy and ‘outside the box’ thinking - making things happen when they shouldnt - which is at odds with sound science.

Whatever the truth of his claims I’m just glad so many people have made the acquaintance of a Pfizer strategic mRNA bullshitter planner. :slightly_smiling_face:

Apologies if this comes through with wonky formatting. I haven’t learned how to use the tools here.

I don’t trust him because he uses dishonest techniques to undermine social service and pro choice organizations.

In the ACORN (a social service agency) case, he posed as a pimp and had a woman posing as a prostitute. They conducted sting operations with undercover video (later edited to present the worst case) to discredit the organization.

Blockquote

Videos from the visits to ACORN offices in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Brooklyn, San Bernardino, and San Diego were released between September 10 and September 17, 2009, and were used to launch Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment website.[28][29][30]

In the videos, O’Keefe included lead-in segments in which he wore a fur coat, top hat, sunglasses, and wielded a cane, giving viewers and the media the impression that he had dressed that way when visiting the ACORN offices.[26] His critics cite this as one of the ways he distorted the videos, since he actually dressed professionally during his ACORN visits, though he never revealed himself on camera in the ACORN offices.[26]

The Baltimore employees were fired by ACORN after the video was released.[31][32]

Tresa Kaelke, a California employee on the videos, stated she believed the activists were joking and made a variety of absurd or joking statements to them.[33][34] She said they were “somewhat entertaining, but they weren’t even good actors.”[35] On the other hand her office supervisor, Christina Spach, said Kaelke “pretended to cooperate with O’Keefe and Giles because she feared for her safety.” Kaelke responded to the pair’s requests for help setting up a child-prostitution ring on the video by claiming to be an ex-prostitute and exclaiming, “Heidi Fleiss is my hero!”[36] The California Attorney General’s investigation of Kaelke determined that “none of her claims” on the video were true, that “she was playing along with what she perceived as a joke”, and there was “no evidence she had ever engaged in prostitution.”[9] According to CNN, the filmmakers released a transcript of their discussion with Kaelke that included a comment left out of the originally released tape in which Kaelke said that ACORN would have nothing to do with their prostitution business.[37] Kaelke was fired by ACORN after the videos were released.

In the San Diego office, edited video showed ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera telling O’Keefe he had “contacts” in “Tijuana” to help get underage girls across the border.[38] But, after the discussion with O’Keefe, Vera reported O’Keefe’s fabricated plan for human smuggling to police.[39][40] Vera was fired for what ACORN called “unacceptable conduct”. Vera had said he tried to help the fake prostitute because she said that she needed to escape her controlling pimp.[41] On July 8, 2010, after the AG’s Report confirmed that he had contacted the police to try to thwart the couple’s smuggling plan, Vera filed a civil suit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California against O’Keefe and Giles for recording him without his permission, which was a violation of California law.[42] In July 2012, Giles settled the case paying Vera $50,000,[43] and in March 2013, O’Keefe settled, paying $100,000.[44]

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Thanks J! Don’t sound very trustworthy ‘journalists’, true. Iffy methods, to say the least. Worth watching what they can dig up even so, though with a strong caveat against trusting them too naively.

Remains to be seen just how authentic this alleged Pfizer-stiff sting is.

PS: Jimmy Dore’s view of the matter. Note, he says bluntly, that PV - just like Alex Jones - gets out more accurate, reliable news than the lamestream whores (my paraphrase). So there’s that. Still not reliable; but better than the official deceits…

Thanks for this Jackie, a timely reminder not to clock places as ‘good’ just because they broke something useful.

I’ve stopped looking for left/right credentials on coronavirus matters (as the left hardly ever report new stuff or question anything in the narrative). Risky perhaps, but I think you have to chase up stories to at least check the provenance anyway. The quotes attributed to Walker are seen to have been freely made by him, and further Pfizer have not denied any of his comments, in fact they are busy reframing them to avoid the damning words ‘gain of function’ and ‘directed evolution’ which to me as a layman mean the same thing.
This is one of the hardest things for the left to accept on the covid issues. Having abandoned their normal instincts to follow the money, the ground where the narrative is criticized has become tarred with ‘the right’; but it’s not because opposing the covid narrative (which seems mostly lies!?) is a right wing thing per se.
The left-right frames existed to some degree before covid, but it could be that a fateful moment occurred when the late and great Dr Zelenko, holding in his hands in hydroxychloroquine what was a near cure for covid virus in the early stages, in some desperation thought it a good idea to inform the US president, thinking he would be able to get the message out. A spectacular miscalculation, the rest is history - to paraphrase Meryl Nass it went to “Never Trump”, to “Never Hydroxychloroquine” and now we have, for the foreseeable future, ‘Always the Coronavrus’.
A US doctor I saw make a homely and avuncular speech about the need for Drs to stand up for their right to treat patients said he was going to run for Congress to change things. He impressed me so much I looked into him and the next thing I saw was a headline about him saying something like “No abortion exception for victims of rape and incest”. SInce then I stopped the habit of looking round a new site, that energy is better spent checking what brought you there in the first place.

If you sup with the devil…the old left-right strands of thinking were good and natural - but we can now see them being used as electric fences to control our thinking! It’s now more work to really learn anything, but it’s clear there are rewards too!
Cheers

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Am I the only one who feels that Walkers background is a bit spooky?

More from Robert Malone on this, below.

Pfizer hasn’t denied that Walker’s remarks make sense, and Walkers explanations are technical enough to give the impression he isn’t just ad-libbing about something that they are not doing, and not talking about doing. If he was making it up you’d expect a rapid denial from Pfizer indicating what was false, rather than an excuse that it was all okay really.
Boston University owned to doing something similar. I don’t think they’ve said who is actually funding that work.

Walker’s claim that he was lying are at odds with his reaction to being rumbled - he could have just fessed up, but instead he made desperate attempts to keep the footage from being aired. He could have passed it off as a joke, rather than stage this drama of blocking a car and calling the police…
To my mind, Walker’s reactions and those of Pfizer and Malone suggest the revelations are real and this is a thing being discussed in Pfizer; as it was taken further in Boston Uni, it’s the only real surprise would be who else is doing it.
ED

Dr. Robert Malone, author of “Lies My Gov’t Told Me,” in Washington on Dec. 19, 2022. (Jack Wang/The Epoch Times)

0:008:32

Dr. Robert Malone said he was “entirely emotional” after seeing Project Veritas’s undercover video in which a research director of Pfizer claimed the company’s scientists are talking about mutating the SARS-CoV-2 virus to “preemptively develop new vaccines.”

Dr. Jordon Walker, who was or is a Pfizer employee, stated in the video, “One of the things we are exploring is, why don’t we just mutate it ourselves so we could create—preemptively develop new vaccines?” He added later, “We’re going to consider that, with more discussions.”

Malone told NTD Business that Walker’s statement acknowledges something quite significant.

Related Coverage

Dr. Robert Malone: Pfizer Video From Project Veritas ‘Profoundly Disturbing’

“The buried lede in all of this is that it is an implicit acknowledgement that Pfizer is not able to produce the product that would be necessary to get out ahead of this virus and allow people to be protected using a vaccine,” he said.

“What is being said is an implicit acknowledgment that the products aren’t working, and they can’t make them work without going to extraordinary measures of these genetic manipulations, which they hope might solve their problem of getting out ahead of the virus evolution.”

Malone also expressed that he was emotional and “stunned” by Walker’s personality.

“I mean, this is somebody who is in a position to profoundly influence our all of our lives,” Malone said, adding later in reference to the kind of research Walker spoke about: “He’s just joking about it. He shows absolutely no signs of remorse, except for the caveats, caveats that he says, ‘well, please don’t tell anybody this,’ you know, in a kind of a conspiratorial way.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to Pfizer for comment regarding Malone’s assessment.

‘Profoundly Disturbing’

In the undercover video, Walker told the Project Veritas journalist: “Don’t tell anyone. Promise you won’t tell anyone. The way it [the experiment] would work is that we put the virus in monkeys, and we successively cause them to keep infecting each other, and we collect serial samples from them.”

Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine uses messenger RNA (mRNA) technology. Malone, a pioneer in mRNA technology development in vaccines, shared his understanding on Walker’s statement from a technical perspective.

“He’s talking about modifying domains of the virus,” Malone said. “And he’s talking about serial passaging in monkeys … and serial passage, this infecting one monkey and then taking virus from that monkey and putting it into another into another into another, demonstrates—this is what bothers me the most—it demonstrates an immunologic naivete at Pfizer. Remember, this is a senior Pfizer executive responsible for strategic planning.”

“What they seem to believe is that they can generate mutant viruses … and then somehow obtain viruses that are more pathogenic, or more infectious, that are escaping vaccination,” Malone added. “And then once they’ve developed those, then they can potentially develop a vaccine against those. So what they’re what they’re really talking about is attempting to accelerate in a more controlled environment using monkeys instead of humans—which have very different immune systems—so that they can anticipate the evolution the virus is going to take.”

Malone said that the situation is like a “self-licking ice cream cone, where they create the problem and the solution at the same time and then sell us the solution once the problem either manifests or somehow inadvertently ends up in the general population, such as happened in Wuhan.

“This is profoundly disturbing. Even just the fact that this gentleman would joke about this is profoundly disturbing.”

In this image from video, Pfizer Director of Research and Development Dr. Jordon Walker speaks about mutating COVID-19. (Courtesy of Project Veritas)

Pfizer’s Response

Following the release of the Project Veritas video on Jan. 25, Pfizer ignored multiple queries from The Epoch Times and other outlets before it issued a statement on Jan. 27, in which it denied having “conducted gain of function or directed evolution research” in the “ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.”

However, Pfizer noted that in the assessment of Paxlovid, an antiviral drug used against COVID-19, the company carries out laboratory tests “to identify potential resistance mutations” to nirmatrelvir, which is one of the two components of Paxlovid. Here, Pfizer noted that “[i]n a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells.”

Pfizer did not make any mention of Walker in its statement, and as such, neither confirmed nor denied that Walker was or is a Pfizer employee.

Pfizer also did not explicitly dispute the claim by Walker that its scientists are discussing mutating COVID-19 viruses to preemptively develop new vaccines.

While Pfizer specifically denied that it is engaging in gain of function or directed evolution research in developing the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, the company did not deny that it may be engaged in such research in general, including in relation to other potential COVID-19 vaccines that do not bear the Pfizer-BioNTech designation.

Walker, in a video shared by Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, denied he was “even a scientist” and claimed that he “came from a consulting firm that does business.” He denied working for Pfizer and said he “was a contractor.” He also told O’Keefe that he was “trying to impress a person on a date by lying.”

‘Directed Evolution’ Versus ‘Gain-of-Function’

Walker, in the initial undercover video, denied that the kind of research he was referring to would be characterized as “gain-of-function,” and instead called it “directed evolution.”

“You’re not supposed to do gain-of-function research with viruses. Regularly not,” Walker said in the video. “We can do these selected structure mutations to make them more potent. There is research ongoing about that. I don’t know how that is going to work. There better not be any more outbreaks.”

But for Malone, the terms refer to similar or the same things.

“This is really parsing of words or substituting one set of words for another that really are equivalent—or if they’re not equivalent they are so close to each other as to be irrelevant,” Malone said.

“Technically, one could define gain-of-function research—which by the way is poorly defined—as only involving the insertion of a new genetic element into a virus, you could define it that way. Or you could define it in the more normal way: anything that you do in mutating a virus genome, to cause it to have different properties would be gain of function that is gained and different properties, by definition, and in his case, he’s talking about obtaining different immunologic properties,” Malone said.

“But what he’s trying to do is substitute a more benign term for one that has become very widely understood to be wrong, to be illegal, in the United States. And he’s making a joke out of it. And and he’s clearly acknowledging in the video that the two things are really the same functionally.”

Malone speculated that “for purposes of PR for Pfizer, it appears that [Walker has] been instructed to use the term ‘directed evolution’ in lieu of the term ‘gain of function.’”

Malone noted that Pfizer’s Jan. 27 statement said its scientists “have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.”

“Swapping new spike sequences into original Wuhan-1 is technically gain of function research,” Malone commented on Twitter.

“Pfizer is basically acknowledging that they are doing the same type of gain of function research that Boston University was caught doing, but they are denying that it is gain of function or directed evolution,” Malone said in a separate Twitter post. He was referring to when researchers with Boston University said in October 2022 they developed a strain of COVID-19 that killed 80 percent of mice infected with it.

Don Ma