Straight to the point

Last February, the serving White House (WH) Chief of Staff (COS) quietly resigned, and a new one was ushered in. But a comparison of the outgoing and incoming WH Chief of Staff demonstrates striking similarities. A careful reading of the bios of Biden’s two chief of staff picks reveals a disturbing trend. Both choices appear consistent with – first and foremost – the capture of both the “health”-related administrative state and the levers of the Biden administration itself by the pharmaceutical-medical industrial complex.

Why is this important? Because the WH Chief of Staff is the most critical political appointee of the President, and functionally serves as the head of the Executive Office of the President of the United States in addition to being a cabinet position. The position is widely considered the most important and powerful job in the Executive branch of the US Government, next to the sitting POTUS. 

In the case of a feeble or incapacitated president, the WH Chief of Staff essentially acts in place of the President. Given the ascendency of the power of the Executive Branch and its permanent Administrative State bureaucracy over the judicial and legislative branches, this appointed position functionally runs the country.

The job entails:

• “Selecting senior White House staffers and supervising their offices’ activities;
• Managing and designing the overall structure of the White House staff system;
• Controlling the flow of people into the Oval Office;
• Managing the flow of information to and decisions from the Resolute Desk (with the White House staff secretary);
• Directing, managing, and overseeing all policy development;
• Protecting the political interests of the president;
• Negotiating legislation and appropriating funds with United States Congress leaders, Cabinet secretaries, and extra-governmental political groups to implement the president’s agenda; and
• Advising on any and usually various issues set by the president.
• The firing of senior staff members.” (wiki)

The Chief of Staff is essentially given the keys to the White House. This position clearly has much more power than the vice president, and yet the job is not only an unelected one, but it is also not confirmed by the Senate. 

Why do I assert that Biden’s choices for WH COS demonstrate the functional capture of the White House by the pharmaceutical-medical industrial complex?

Biden’s first Chief of Staff was Ron Klain. He was Biden’s Chief of Staff when he was vice president under Biden. During that time, he initially transitioned from managing the allocation of stimulus funds to becoming the Ebola response coordination under Obama. The Ebola response was an “all-hands” government effort, due to a case of Ebola actually occurring on American soil, and the risk that this particular variant might become able to infect via the respiratory tract (thanks to fearporn primarily promoted by Dr. Michael Osterholm). 

Prior to and after Obama’s presidency, Mr. Klain was the executive vice president for Revolution, an investment firm that invested in several healthcare companies, such as BrainScope, Everyday Health, and Extend Health. “Extend Health” is now renamed “One Exchange” and is a leading provider of health care solutions for Medicare-eligible individuals. 

After his time in the Obama White House, Klain also became an external advisor for the Skoll Foundation, whose website lists as a main strategic priority the strengthening of global health systems and presenting pandemics. He held this position until his selection to serve as WH Chief of Staff under Biden.

Ron Klain has worked at high levels in the Clinton, Obama, and now Biden’s White House administration. His time in the White House has been punctuated by stints in the corporate world. Hence, he has seesawed between government and industry, at the highest levels – leveraging both for power, influence, and money. By serving in various White House administrations in unelected positions which do not need confirmation by the Senate, he has avoided having to publicly disclose conflicts of interest. 

During his tenure in Biden’s White House, Klain pursued a vaccine-only strategy and directed White House messaging relating to this policy including that horrible White House statement saying the vaccinated have ‘done the right thing’ and the unvaccinated are ‘looking at a winter of severe illness and death for you and your families.’ Adding insult to injury, Klain is the one that asserted that ‘The truth is the truth’ – remember that as Chief of Staff, Klain was directly responsible for “Directing, managing, and overseeing all policy development.”

The real “truth” of this whole situation is that the leadership of the Obama Ebola response team from 2014 was brought in to form the core of Biden’s White House operational management team, as documented in a November 2020 Politico article, just a week or two of Biden having “won” the election:

Klain is one of a number of people Biden has tapped for his administration whose views on battling a health crisis were shaped by what happened in 2014. At an event in Wilmington, Del. last week, Biden highlighted how his just-announced pick for Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, helped combat Ebola and Zika as part of the Obama administration. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, his pick for UN ambassador, “was our top State Department official in charge of Africa policy during the Ebola crisis,” Biden noted. And the former vice president praised Jake Sullivan, who served as his national security adviser during much of the Ebola outbreak, for “helping me develop our Covid-19 strategy…“

But many of the public health, communication and government mobilization lessons Klain and his team learned then are not only applicable now; they’re also at the core of Biden’s plan for tackling the pandemic when he takes office in January.

Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas worked with Klain from 2001 to 2009 at the O’Melveny law firm. Which is interesting because this where Klain has now returned to the firm as a partner. 

This is how the arm of the government has become completely captured by the pharmaceutical-medical industrial complex via prior “public health emergency” response teams. The clear fact is that the Biden White House was only interested in a vaccine solution, despite the established fact that public health research long ago determined that a vaccine for a rapidly evolving respiratory virus would never succeed. People in the White House must have known this but disregarded that knowledge because either 1) they were corrupted, 2) they were deep in the mass-formation psychosis and groupthink, or 3) they functioned as incompetent useful tools for others. 

I know that I personally spoke with Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s Chief of Staff in 2021 about these issues and had assurances that they would discuss the issues with a vaccine approach with the White House. That was the last I heard from them. This all leads me to believe that the resulting amazingly dysfunctional “public health” response was more about their own interests in making money and expanding political power than in developing an actual response that made sense.

My experience working in the Ebola response on 2014 reinforced a very different lesson than that of the Biden White House COVID policies. That is that vaccines would never be the answer to an ongoing outbreak. That medical countermeasures must include a response that listens to hands-on physicians tinkering to find medical counter measures. That the generic, FDA approved medicines that have worked in the past for early treatments will work in the future. They are the first line of defense.

Furthermore, non-respiratory infectious diseases versus respiratory infectious diseases will be very different from each other, in terms of public health responses. And finally, that the US intelligence community is deeply embedded in the bureaucracy that sets “public health” policies, particularly during infectious disease outbreaks, and works hand-in-glove with Bill Gates, WHO leadership, US State Department, and the giants of the BioPharmaceutical industry.

Ron Klain’s White House called for an all-of-government response focused on vaccines and that is what they got (all of government meaning DHS, HHS, DoD, Department of State and CIA/IC). This response was developed and operationalized for Klain by Jeff Zients, who was President Biden’s COVID czar. Which brings us to Klain’s replacement.

Let’s now focus our attention on the professional biography of the new Chief of Staff, Jeff Zients. Although Zients is purported to not have any “public health experience,” the truth is that he has spent his entire career milking the government out of money for his own medical-industrial complex investment funds. He has worked to continuously spin the revolving door between his businesses in the medical-industrial complex and the government – all to the benefit of public health, of course <insert sarcasm>.

Zients comes from an extremely wealthy family, who played a pivotal role in “health care services” since the 1990s. His father is known to have “helped” outsource veteran’s healthcare services to private industry way back when.

Jeff Zients joined The Advisory Board Corp in 1992, where he helped “build a research company focused on “providing best practices research and host[ing] seminars for 2,500 health care industry members, including hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and biotech firms.” The Advisory Board achieved astounding financial success and became one of the “pillars of Washington society.” During the presidency of Barack Obama, Zients served as director of the National Economic Council from 2014 to 2017. He was also acting director of the Office of Management and Budget in 2010. He then led the emergency effort to fix Obama care after the troubled launch.

During his tenure as director of the National Economic Council, Zients’ investment firm, Portfolio Logic – founded in 2003, settled a a multimillion-dollar suit with the Justice Department over allegations that its subsidiary health care firm committed Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Portfolio Logic LLC was and is an investment firm initially focused on health care and business services. Portfolio Logic’s current valuation is around $182 million and it appears that Portfolio Logic is still privately held by Zients and his family, although information about Portfolio Logic has mostly been scrubbed from the Internet.

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While leading the Obamacare (ACA) rollout, Zients also had an ownership position in PSA Healthcare. Which the Obama White house determined was not a conflict of interest. 

The American Prospect writes of Zients:

Zients was a leader in implementing many of the Obama administration’s most pro-corporate policies. Zients owes his entire public-policy career to his corporate worldview and connections, which have remained strikingly consistent for over a decade—exactly in keeping with his pre-government history.

In fact, a Fox News article documents that the Wikipedia page for Biden’s chief of staff was scrubbed to hide many of his corporate past dealings. This includes deleting the details in 2020 relating to Zients’ positions at Bain & Company, Portfolio Logic and Facebook. Although his Wiki page now mentions that Zients was CEO of Cranemere up until his leave in 2020, it does not mention that Cranemere Healthcare Services works in the healthcare ecosystem. As he is apparently still on leave from Cranemere, one can assume that he will resume his $1.6 million compensation package per year from Cranemere upon leaving the White House.

Jeffrey Zients is considered one of the wealthiest members of the Biden administration, and most of this money was inherited or made while working in the medical-industrial complex, which includes vast profits from the privatization of health care and billing. 

Zients was part of Biden’s transition team and then started working for the Biden WH as his COVID czar. During this period, he was considered a “special government employee,” and so could continue with his private sector employment and was exempted from filing the public financial disclosures that normal staff must complete. Again, Zients formulated the vaccine-only public health policy, including the mandate policies. He alone spoke to major airline CEOs to insist on vaccine mandates.

In January 2023, Zients became Biden’s Chief of Staff. Remember, that the position of Chief of Staff is the most important position next to the President. In this capacity, it appears that he has maintained the operational capture by the pharmaceutical-medical industrial complex of the executive branch of government initiated under Obama in the context of enacting and implementing the “Affordable Care Act,” ergo – the White House and President Biden. 

As Biden has proven to be a fragile and weak president, many believe that this has allowed Zients to seize the reins of executive power. Zients’ past history predicts that he will use this to further his own financial interests, which clearly represent a significant financial conflict of interest.

The revolving door just doesn’t stop spinning, and it all seems to revolve most efficiently around Zients, the pharmaceutical-medical industrial complex and now future pandemic responses. Talk about the foxes in the henhouse!

Republished from the author’s Substack

Source: Brownstone Institute Read the original article here: https://brownstone.org/