In this interview, investigative journalist Whitney Webb, who does both independent work and collaborations with The Last American Vagabond, discusses the little-known details of Operation Warp Speed, a joint operation between U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Defense to produce a fast-tracked COVID-19 vaccine and other therapeutics.

As you may have noticed by now, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and a host of other platforms are censoring information relating to COVID-19 in general and vaccine information in particular. Many commentators who touch on these issues have been deplatformed altogether, so information on these crucial topics are getting harder to come by.

“We’re at a point where the line between Silicon Valley and the national security state has become so blurred, you really can’t distinguish where one begins and where the other ends,” Webb says. This in large part helps explain how and why big tech is getting away with such blatant censorship as deplatforming of individuals who discuss issues the mainstream media refuse to touch. 

“You can definitely make the argument that it’s state censorship to a degree,” she says. “I think it’s quite telling that a lot of these companies, from the very beginning of their existence, had some sort of funding from U.S. intelligence.”

Operation Warp Speed

As noted by Webb, you’d expect Operation Warp Speed, being a government program, to be governed by some federal regulatory agency like the Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or even the HHS, but no. It’s almost entirely funded and operated by the CIA and the U.S. military. Webb explains:

“When Operation Warp Speed was announced … it was essentially sold to the public as a joint operation between HHS and the Department of Defense. So, the military was involved from the beginning. But oddly enough, last month, a lot of information about Warp Speed started to come to light. 

One was the organizational chart of its leadership, which showed that by and large, the entire operation is dominated by military. There were very few civilian health officials, and most of those civilian health officials are involved in the therapeutic side of Warp Speed, which as we know now is the most drastically underfunded part of this initiative.

It was initially given a $10 billion budget, and they’ve already spent $10 billion on the vaccine. Only $450 million have been given through Warp Speed to a therapeutics project, which of course we now know is Regeneron, which is allegedly what Trump received when he was at Walter Reed. 

What I’m saying is that most, the vast majority, of the money and time and energy has gone to a vaccine specifically, not really therapeutics. And so, if you look at the organizational chart, the people that aren’t directly deployed by the DoD or military intelligence were essentially put in the therapeutics part, which was drastically underfunded. It’s focused largely on the vaccine. 

What’s also interesting is we know that Operation Warp Speed currently has about six vaccine candidates. And we know now that they plan to use them all, and that they plan to allocate a specific vaccine to specific populations — what they identify in their official guidance as critical populations — which they announced just a few days ago.”

Palantir

A company called Palantir was given the contract to come up with the vaccine allocation strategy and determine the critical populations each vaccine should be distributed to. Palantir, founded by Peter Thiel, was initially funded by QTL, the CIA’s venture capital arm. 

The CIA was its only client for the first three years of its existence. At present, Palantir is a contractor to 17 U.S. intelligence agencies and also the U.S. military. The company is also in charge of COVID-19 data under the auspices of the HHS. Hospitals must now report their COVID-19 data to Palantir or lose their Medicaid and Medicare funding. Palantir is also involved in things like predictive policing.

“There are a lot of things in Warp Speed that are concerning. One of the things I read about recently is that Google and Oracle, two large tech companies that have longstanding ties to the CIA, are going to be involved in what they describe as a pharmacovigilance surveillance system, or what was more recently referred to by the head of Warp Speed as an incredibly precise tracking system, whereby everyone who receives one of these vaccines will be tracked and surveilled, not just to make sure that they get a second dose …

… but also to see what happens to people’s physiology, because they admit that every single one of these vaccine candidates … has never been brought to market or licensed by the government before,” Webb says.