As draconian Covid-19 control structures rise up around us, Johnny Vedmore investigates a very small group of close friends linked to a powerful philanthropic organisation, The Wellcome Trust, who are responsible for some of the most defining events of the Covid-19 era. In this article we will look into the “proximal origin” of the Wellcome Five: Jeremy Farrar, Richard Sykes, Roy Anderson, Edward Holmes, and Neil Ferguson, and their band of scientific mercenaries.
There is a small group of elite British scientists who have been busy manipulating the Covid-19 crisis to benefit a hidden agenda. These core players at the centre of creating authoritarian control structures under the guise of Covid response have major connections to the Wellcome Trust, an ostensibly “philanthropic” endeavour known for funding medical research. These individual’s efforts began long before the Covid era and even include first engineering the creation of the modern day Wellcome Trust as a by-product of the birth of the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. This team of men are responsible for key components of global Covid-19 response, the infamous proximal origin paper, the implementation of the entire UK vaccine roll-out and so much more. Yet, barely anyone knows a single name of “the Wellcome Five.”
At the beginning of January 2020, many people had no idea whatsoever about what would soon unfold. But, there were a handful of scientists from a very small group of elite British institutions who seemed to be well prepared for the coming storm. In fact, these men would not only be made responsible for organising extremely key events throughout the pandemic response, they would also be responsible for pioneering the pandemic computer modelling methods used to send shock-waves of fear throughout the world. They had also helped fund the research of many prominent supporters of their agenda and had even implemented a very similar totalitarian lockdown in response to a seemingly manufactured epidemic in the United Kingdom two decades before. On that occasion, these men became more powerful than any elected politician and were responsible for burning pyres of dead animals that, thanks to their discredited models, littered the British countryside.
This article will examine a core group of British elite scientists who are all close friends and colleagues and have historic ties to the modern incarnation of the Wellcome Trust. During Covid-19, one member of this small group of unaccountable actors, Jeremy Farrar, has been given almost absolute power over designing the WHO’s global response to the pandemic. The same man would lead the production of the Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 paper over a ten day period in a seemingly brazen attempt to cover-up the true laboratory origins of the Covid-19 virus. In examining Farrar’s history, I discovered that this very small group of friends were all intricately involved in the modern evolution of pandemic responses and that they had pioneered large parts of the modelling techniques used to manufacture consent to introduce draconian lockdowns in the Anglo-American world, which were then adopted as the gold standard in modern pandemic responses by other nations globally. Whilst the events I map out will give you a basic idea of the history and structure of this extremely powerful and effective team of Wellcome Trust-linked scientists, they are not the only group like this active during the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, this behaviour is paralleled in other organisations across the globe who have all helped create this paradigm of authoritarian control we are experiencing today. It is our jobs as researchers and journalists to define these clandestine operations the best we can. I will continue to work at defining this particular operational unit emanating from the upper echelons of the Wellcome Trust, but others must do their part too. Defining the structure of any shadowy outfit involved in the organisation of such tyranny is not a simple task, but it must start somewhere.
As countries all around the world have been implementing harsh authoritarian responses to the Covid-19 crisis and push for further restrictions to their citizens’ freedom, it is more important than ever to look into this core band of unaccountable scientists who have been responsible for much of what we see today. For, without the Wellcome Five, much of this nightmare would not have been possible.
A Welcome to Wellcome
The Wellcome Trust is a philanthropic organisation which funds large amounts of scientific research globally. The scientific grants given out by Wellcome are extremely lucrative and sometimes stretch over a researcher’s entire career. The Wellcome Trust was established to administer the fortune of the American-born British pharmaceutical magnate Sir Henry Wellcome. It was initially entirely funded by income from Burroughs Wellcome, an early pharmaceutical giant which had been pioneers of medical technologies still used today. The trust would later be renamed in the UK as the Wellcome Foundation Ltd. In 1995, the Wellcome Trust divested itself of any interest in pharmaceuticals by selling all remaining Wellcome plc stock to Glaxo plc and, in doing so, creating GlaxoWellcome plc. In 2000, the Wellcome name disappeared from the drug business altogether when GlaxoWellcome merged with SmithKline Beecham, to form GlaxoSmithKline plc., essentially removing the Wellcome name from the private sector. This period of change would see the trust’s activities and their focus shifting to recruiting and funding the very best scientists coming out of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious universities.
Before 2020, the Wellcome Trust was not a household name, and its employees and representatives had been relatively free from any outside scrutiny. However, a few well-connected men tied to the Wellcome Trust have been responsible for key parts of the disastrous and overly authoritarian official Covid-19 response in the UK as well as having a massive impact and influence on responses globally. These powerful men would form their current operational unit is the mid-90s, rising out from the Wellcome Trust’s rebranding during this same period. They would use the fear of disease to take power on two definable occasions, firstly during the British Foot and Mouth Disease epidemic of 2001 and then again during Covid-19.
In the mid-90s, the Wellcome Trust was created anew as a philanthropic foundation. However, that didn’t mean they would leave the pharmaceutical industry entirely. In reality, the trust would use the great wealth they had amassed to fund large parts of modern scientific research at some of the most prestigious establishments which would not only aid the big pharmaceutical giants by-proxy, but would also allow the people at Wellcome to redesign the direction of research to suit their allies within the pharmaceutical industry. Another benefit for Wellcome was that this system allowed them to recruit and groom an entire generation of scientists to advance the organization’s agenda. Whilst the vast majority of scientists and researchers who are funded by the Wellcome Trust’s lucrative grant schemes are likely completely unaware of the foundation’s true political reach and power, they are often working as small cogs in a machine which they cannot really see from their relatively ground-level perspectives.
When inspected closely, the Wellcome machine also appears to provide a mechanism for the UK Ministry of Defence (or its allies abroad) to continue potentially catastrophic gain-of-function experimentation whilst simultaneously being able to quickly cover-up any lab-leaks when they do happen. In this article, I will show you just a very small part of that machine, focusing in on a very select five people who are all connected by a focused recruitment drive in 1994. In that year, the core of this group, Richard Sykes, Roy Anderson (who would bring his colleagues Neil Ferguson and Brian Spratt along with him), Edward C Holmes, and Jeremy Farrar, would create the processes and funding to recruit large swathes of those who now stands on their extreme end of the public Covid-19 debate. Although I will specifically mention one incident of career-long funding for 35 graduates during this article, this group also gave out large, long-term grants to hundreds of other top scientific graduates from 1994 onwards. These men went on to redesign the entire face of pandemic modelling and response, as well as being responsible for the creation of multiple suspicious origin stories, including the infamous Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 paper.
From the very beginning of the Covid-19 story, these men have played globally significant roles, including: Edward C Holmes’ translation of the original SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequence on 11 January 2020; Farrar being given complete control over coordinating the entire Covid response by the US and UK government’s (outranking both Anthony Fauci in the US and Chris Whitty in the UK); Ferguson and Anderson’s apocalyptic-looking Covid-19 computer modelling; Holmes and Farrar’s organisation of the Proximal Origin paper cover-up; and Sykes’ being put in charge of the entire vaccine rollout in the UK and promotion of related vaccine innovation and technology.
All of the aforementioned roles should have been tasked to officials who were elected by the people, but instead we have witnessed events being manufactured in such a way that it is almost impossible to hold anyone official to account. These people connected to the Wellcome Trust have been pivotal in creating a medical autocracy to which the public never consented. In this article, I will attempt to show how they have demonstrated a pattern of behaviour in the past which has been repeated during Covid-19. I will reveal how this select group of very close personal friends have been rolled out by the Ministry of Defence in the past to take part in official inquiries, only going on to certify the governments versions of any event which could cause further public scrutiny. I will show you as much as I can in one article. Firstly, lets go to the top tier.
Richard Sykes – The Glaxo Man and Vaccine King
Richard Sykes is a man of great significance to not only the reformation of the Wellcome Trust in the mid-90s but also for his supreme position in the official UK vaccine roll out during Covid-19. In 2020, Sykes led an independent review of the workings of the Vaccine Taskforce, and on 14 June 2021, Sykes was appointed chair of the Vaccine Taskforce. In this position, he became responsible for overseeing the delivery of the UK’s Covid-19 vaccines, including the preparation for further booster programmes.
Sir Richard Brook Sykes was born 7 August 1942, near Huddersfield in west Yorkshire to Eric and Muriel Sykes. He would attend Royds Hall Grammar School, the same school former-prime minister Harold Wilson had once attended. Even before he finished his initial schooling, Sykes had found work as a technician in a pathology laboratory. Sykes would go on to be awarded his PhD in Microbial Biochemistry from Bristol University and then, in 1972, he was recruited by Glaxo Research Ltd as Head of its Antibiotic Research Unit. The young Sykes would later move across the pond in 1979 to work for the Squibb Institute for Medical Research based in Princeton, New Jersey, where — between 1983 and 1986 — he was Vice-President of Infectious and Metabolic Diseases. In 1986, he rejoined Glaxo in the UK as Deputy Chief Executive of Glaxo Group Research Ltd and also became the Group Research and Development Director of Glaxo plc. A year later, he became Chairman as well as being Chief Executive of Glaxo Group Research Limited. In March 1993, he was appointed Deputy Chairman & Chief Executive of Glaxo plc.
In 1995, the recently knighted Sir Richard Sykes would engineer the merger between Glaxo and Wellcome plc, which would also see the default creation of a new envisioning of the original Wellcome Trust established as an independent charitable foundation. He would then become Chairman & Chief Executive of GlaxoWellcome plc in May 1997, stepping aside the following October. GlaxoWellcome would subsequently merge with SmithKline Beecham to form GlaxoSmithKline plc in 2000.
In 1997, Richard Sykes, who insisted on being called Dr. Sykes, would publish various papers contemplating the future of the pharmaceutical industry and, the following year, would write a paper on how to be a “modern pharmaceutical company.” In this paper, he argued for companies to share their scientific research data with each other. Between 1997 to 2008, Sykes was also classed as a Senior Independent Director for Rio Tinto plc, the Anglo-Australian multinational and world’s second-largest metals and mining corporation, where Sykes served as chairman of the Remuneration committee. Sykes would still be serving as a non-executive director for Rio Tinto in 2003 when Sir John Kerr was also appointed as a non-executive director. Kerr had been a member of the UK Diplomatic Service for 36 years, and its head from 1997 to 2002.
On 20 May 2002, Sykes would stand down as Chairman of GlaxoSmithKline plc at their annual general meeting (AGM) to concentrate on his role as Rector of Imperial College London. In 2003, Imperial College faced accusations of forgery in a prestigious medical journal after it was discovered that a member of their staff forged the signatures of seven co-authors on a paper. Sykes would lead the investigation after the New England Journal of Medicine was forced to make the rare step of publishing a retraction. From 2008, Sykes became Chairman of NHS London. He stepped down in May 2010 over the decision of the Cameron government to stop the planned reorganisation of healthcare in London. Over the next decade, he would take up various board positions at places such as the Eurasian National Resources Corp, Lonza Group (a company which later partnered with Moderna to manufacture and produce their Covid-19 vaccine), NetScientific plc, the Economic Development Board International, PDS Biotechnology as well as others. From 2012 until 2018, he was the Chairman of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trusts. At this time, he also held such positions as Chairman of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the Chancellor of Brunel University.
In December 2020, Matt Hancock MP would appoint Sir Richard to conduct an independent review of the strategy and goals of the Vaccine Taskforce. He would later be made Chair of the UK Government’s Vaccine Taskforce, a group which would be responsible for achieving three main objectives:
- Secure access to the most promising vaccine/s for the UK population as quickly as possible;
- Make provision for international distribution of vaccines so that the benefits of UK leadership and investment in this area could be widely shared; and
- Support the UK’s Industrial Strategy by establishing a long-term vaccine strategy to prepare the UK for future pandemics.
In June 2021, Richards Sykes was given the overall responsibility for “overseeing the delivery of the COVID-19 vaccination programme, including preparations for booster programmes and encouraging vaccine innovation in the UK”.
In a UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy end of year report entitled: UK Vaccine Taskforce 2020 Achievements and Future Strategy, Sykes writes within the introduction:
“In 1998 as CEO of GlaxoWellcome, I was instrumental in establishing and funding a three-way collaboration between Government, Industry and Academia designed to carry out the basic research necessary to develop and produce new vaccines. At the centre of the collaboration was a new research institute named after the British vaccine pioneer, Edward Jenner and officially opened by Peter Mandelson the Secretary of State for Industry. GlaxoWellcome made a commitment to fund the Institute for 10 years following which it struggled to obtain Government support and eventually ended up at Oxford University. So I am extremely supportive of renewed approaches to grow and strengthen the UK vaccine industry.”
Richard Sykes had been put in charge of the Vaccine Taskforce to make sure things were done quickly, something he claims he helped achieve in the aforementioned report where he states, “The number one priority for any vaccine remains its safety. In the normal course of events developing a new and novel vaccine from research to market would take a minimum of 10 years. In the present climate the combination of VTF leadership and private sector research and development has reduced this timescale dramatically.” In this rather self-absorbed example of Sykes’ out-of-touch rhetoric, he claims that the fast roll-out of the experimental vaccines are due to a “combination of VFT leadership and private sector research and development”, rather than a decimation of usual safety protocols.
One other very important note to come out of Sykes VTF is that he had managed to create what he would describe as “several world class clinical assets which support the development of COVID-19 vaccines but will prove invaluable for future pandemics.” These assets included the NHS Citizen Registry which had over 360,000 people registered by December 2020.
Sir Richard Sykes had been instrumental in engineering the creation of the modern incarnations of the Wellcome Trust and GlaxoSmithKline. In the 1990s, as he was beginning his reformation of the two major pharmaceutical companies, Sykes had already formed a very defined vision of what he wanted to do. Sykes was not alone in enacting his vision for the future. His colleague in the early 90s, Roy Anderson, who was then governor and director of the Wellcome Trust, would help Sykes to create what we are seeing and experiencing today.
Sir Roy Anderson – The Lord of Lockdown and Extermination
Sir Roy Malcolm Anderson is a British professor of epidemiology and is the link that connects many of Britain’s major modern pandemic responses and the majority of the official cover ups related to those events. He also happens to be the pioneer of pandemic computer modelling, models which – when applied to real world situations – have often proven to be highly erroneous. Nevertheless, his importance to and influence on the events of the last quarter of a century cannot be understated. Sir Roy Anderson is the British Establishment’s “man for all seasons” when it comes to pandemics.
Anderson was born on 12 April 1947 to James Anderson and Betty Watson-Weatherborn. He was educated at both Dunscombe School and Hertford Grammar School and would go on to study at Imperial College at the University of London. Between 1971 and 1973 Anderson was an IBM research fellow at the University of Oxford and from there he went on to lecture for four years at King’s College, University of London (UCL). In the late 1970s, Anderson could be found lecturing at Imperial College London, where he would also be noted as a reader (a reader denotes an appointment of a senior academic to a Commonwealth further educational establishment with a distinguished international reputation in research or scholarship) between 1980 and 1982. In 1982, he would become a Professor of Parasite Ecology and he would become the head of the UCL’s biology department two years later. He would hold these two positions until 1993, when he became the Linacre Professor of Zoology at Oxford University, a historic post first founded in 1860. That same year, Anderson would also be installed as Head of the Department of Zoology. He would also be named the director of the Wellcome Trust. Anderson had already served as a governor at the Wellcome Trust beginning just two years before, in 1991, and he would go on to head this “philanthropic” organisation until 2000, departing only when his behaviour towards a particular lady at Oxford became an uncomfortable issue.
Anderson received the Establishment honour of being elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986 and he would become known for working on the modelling of the AIDS virus. He subsequently became an advisor for the Thatcher government. He would then begin making media appearances, such as an interview Anderson gave on 24 September 1987, where he politely discusses the AIDS crisis with Colin Tudge on the British classical music station, BBC Radio 3. Anderson’s opinion on AIDS was reported again in the then Robert Maxwell-owned Daily Mirror a year later, on 10 September 1988. He had made a speech to the Science Association at a meeting in Oxford where he is recorded as warning that the country may be “on the border line of an epidemic that could hit many heterosexuals”. A survey conducted over the following year would find that some AIDS experts were concerned about the fight against the disease being downgraded because of the public perception that it “only threatens homosexuals and drug addicts.” Remarkably, the survey’s findings showed that AIDS specialists believed that there were now “medical advantages” to treating HIV-infected people before they develop full-blown AIDS. The Liverpool Echo reported on 28 November 1989, that Prof Roy Anderson’s predictions for the future of the spread of AIDS, with the article stating that he believed “the pessimistic view is that the second wave of the epidemic will appear in intravenous drug users in five to ten years time.” Anderson also stated that “there might then be a third wave, affecting mainly heterosexuals, on a longer time scale of 20 to 30 years’”. It should be noted that whilst Anderson was starting to talk publicly about potential HIV treatments, Burrough’s Wellcome – the then-US pharmaceutical arm of UK’s Wellcome plc – had started producing and marketing a new drug for HIV called AZT. The compound was the first drug to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of what was called at the time “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” (AIDS).
In 1988, Roy Anderson was also making a name for himself among concerned mothers who didn’t trust the MMR vaccine. On 10 September 1988, a report in the Aberdeen Evening Express with the headline “Compulsory Jabs Urged”, stated that “Children should not be allowed to attend primary school unless they have been vaccinated, according to a scientist”. A small side note in the newspaper article goes on to say, “Prof Roy Anderson of Imperial College London, said many health regions achieved only 57% of immunisation targets”. This may be the first hint of Roy Anderson’s penchant for using totalitarian policies to increase vaccine uptake.
In 1998, Anderson would again become a government advisor and he would soon have his attention diverted towards a new variant of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), a progressive neurological disorder of cattle, which is commonly referred to as Mad Cow’s Disease. Some cattle in Britain during this era were being fed a meat-and-bone meal that included the remains of other potentially affected cattle. One of the main issues was that it took four to five years to show up in the affected cows. This meant that by the time the cause was identified and rectified, the damage had already been done.
BSE had been discovered in 1985 by a junior pathologist who identified a spongy brain disease in a Frisian cow, but the connection with a potentially new form of bovine encephalopathy had not been recognised by senior officials until 1987. In 1996, the UK Government was advised that a new variant had been identified in humans and later, in December 1997, it was announced that there would be an inquiry into the history and emergence of BSE, and the Government’s response to the crisis up until March 1996. The Inquiry, which would produce Roy Anderson as a key witness, started on 12 January 1998.
The BSE scandal was a well managed affair, it needed to be as the conservative government of the day had found themselves in a bit of hot water. During the period of 1983 until 1991, Sir Donald Acheson had been the government’s Chief Medical Officer and had downplayed the risk of the potential cross-species spread of the illness. A cat had been diagnosed with the illness and, even with an example of cross species transmission of the disease, he had continuously recommended that it was safe to eat meat contaminated with BSE, stating clearly in 1990: “British beef can be eaten safely by everyone”. Acheson wasn’t the only representative of a scientific entity at the time to be more concerned with sales of meat and milk than human health. The Southwood Working Party, which was led by Erik Millstone and a man named Patrick van Zwanenberg, would also claim in the early 90s that the offal of infected cattle was “safe for adults but not for babies”. The disease would eventually be transmitted to humans from the eating of contaminated beef. The official BSE inquiry would mostly attempt to shift the blame for the poorly managed response away from the government and on to the early stooges who had been tasked with playing down the risks. This moment was important in Anderson’s development. His usefulness in managing the narrative of a precarious public inquiry had been noted by the Establishment and he would henceforth become a useful tool in the governments toolbox.
By the late 90s, Anderson’s prestigious career had also seen him daubed with various honorary positions, titles and memberships, including his fellowship at the very exclusive Royal Society and the Zoological Society, as well as being a board member on many various international advisory panels. Some of these positions would be jeopardised by his own behaviour. In 1999, Anderson was suspended from his position at Oxford after he stated that a colleague of his had only got her promotion by sleeping around. The person he was targetting was Dr Sunetra Gupta, who would over two decades later oppose Anderson’s extreme lockdown tactics during the Covid crisis as a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration. Notably, Gupta was married to Adrian Hill at this time, the man who has affiliations to the Wellcome Trust and who would later co-head the creation of the Oxford AZ vaccine during Covid-19, alongside Sarah Gilbert. At first, Anderson refused to retract his statements about Gupta, or apologise in any form, but eventually he was allowed to return to his Oxford position under the condition that he write a private apology to the people he had slandered. Anderson may have agreed to this proverbial slap on the wrists by the Oxford authorities, but Dr Gupta did not see this as an acceptable outcome. She demanded that he publicly retract his statement and that he also pay her a small amount of damages which would go to a charity. The pathetic drama, all to protect the ego of a misogynistic elite scientist, did not lead to Anderson retaining his position. A vote of no confidence from the board at Oxford would be unanimous, infuriating Anderson.
He would frame his departure with a positive spin. He had agreed with Imperial College London (ICL), to move his research projects, along with a grant worth over £7 million from the Wellcome Trust, and his band of 70 research staff to the ICL facilities, snubbing Oxford publicly in what appears to have been a pathetic example of pure egotistical spite. Along with his research team, Professor Anderson brought with him Professor Brian Spratt and Neil Ferguson, his close friends and colleagues. Even though Anderson thought he’d be able to retain his position as director of the Wellcome Trust, it would be “financial irregularities” which would eventually see Anderson removed from that specific position. It had surfaced that Anderson had an undeclared stake in a company receiving grants from the Wellcome Trust whilst he was also part of the committee which approved such grants. The financial stake was large enough to have broken the rules and, along with the Gupta saga still fresh in the collective mind of his colleagues, Anderson would stand down as the director of the Wellcome Trust. However, he would still continue to be receiving grants and funding from them.
Then, beginning in late 2000 and through 2001, Anderson and his team became central figures in one of the most controversial epidemic responses in British history.
From Foot in Mouth to Foot and Mouth
Anderson’s team made a bizarre change to their central focus of study in the closing months of 2000 and during their relocation to Imperial College. Although his team had been primarily focused on human pandemics and modelling the spread of human diseases, they would suddenly, and without giving any public reasoning, divert their focus to studying Foot and Mouth Disease in November 2000. This sudden and dramatic sea-change in focus was made even more strange given that there hadn’t been a significant Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreak in Britain since the late 1960s.
Anderson’s research team at the time included Dr. Neil Ferguson and Dr. Christl Donnelly. Their team had pioneered the use of computers for modelling the epidemiology of human diseases, such as AIDS, malaria and TB; yet, none of these researchers had any veterinary training or an understanding of the differences between modeling a human epidemic as opposed to an infectious outbreak in animals. The BSE crisis, which was the only significant animal disease response Roy Anderson had previously been involved in, had been related to contaminated cattle feed and was not spread like a traditional virus capable of causing an infectious epidemic.
Coincidentally, a few months after Anderson’s team had begun researching FMD, Britain recorded its first outbreak of the disease in over three decades. The subsequent actions of Roy Anderson, Neil Ferguson and their accomplices should be common knowledge; but, thanks to another convenient inquiry set up to fail, they were never held to account for their part in what would prove to be a devastating response to the Great Foot and Mouth Epidemic of 2001. This suspiciously convenient timing for an outbreak of FMD put Anderson’s team in a prime position to become government advisors.
At the time, Foot and Mouth outbreaks were fought using a combination of methods. One of the most tried and tested ways to control a FMD outbreak was by using the vaccination ring method. Unlike humans, farm cattle don’t usually travel long distances and thus, once an infection is noted, you then cull the affected animals and begin vaccinating all the livestock within a three mile radius, working your way back towards the original infection site. This is meant to effectively stop any outbreak within a week or two. There were political reasons why mass vaccination wasn’t possible at the time, but a small vaccination ring alongside a focused cull had been successful in bringing recent FMD outbreaks in other countries under control quickly. The other methods, besides vaccinating, was culling the animals affected, and there are of course different levels of a culling response. If the government involved in the epidemic wants to mitigate the financial damage to farmers, then a combination of testing, vaccinating and culling can be very effective. However, it takes time, patience, persistence and resources to do the whole process humanely, something the British government at the time, then led by Tony Blair, had no interest in.
The MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food – which would soon after be abolished and replaced by the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) had been trying to tackle the outbreak but, due to funding cuts made during the Thatcher government, their resources were insufficient for the task at hand. The FMD epidemic was a stage three outbreak by the time it was officially recognised, and it wasn’t expected to be solved overnight. The MAFF would need more funding and resources if they were going to tackle the outbreak humanely. Anderson and Ferguson would soon be brought in to advise the Blair government on the appropriate steps to take and they would create computer models akin to Neil Ferguson’s now infamous initial Covid-19 models. They predicted death and destruction on a scale beyond the imagination of most and asserted that this dire scenario would undoubtedly unfold if they did not immediately take over the design of the response to the epidemic from the MAFF. Blair would give them the power they desired. Blair’s lack of resistance to Anderson and his extreme methods could have been greatly influenced by the upcoming General Election, which was initially set to take place that May – only months away.
What followed was a fear-based and unscientific culling of mostly uninfected animals. The countryside of Great Britain became littered with burning pyres of livestock on a scale never seen before and the mass killing of animals left farmers completely traumatised by these extreme intervention methods. The British Army was even brought in to enact the culling process. The British countryside was put into lockdown and, unlike the Covid response, vaccines were vigorously attacked by Anderson as ineffective and likely to do more harm than good. This stance on vaccines represents an almost complete reversal when compared to our current paradigm. The FMD vaccines were widely considered very safe and mostly effective and there had been no negative side effects reported from humans consuming the milk and meat of animals who had been given this vaccine. In addition, this vaccine had been used to successfully control FMD on almost every occasion it was used. In contrast, today’s Covid “vaccines” are experimental, have many clear adverse reactions and were not fully tried and tested beforehand. Yet, the same people who have argued during the Covid pandemic for the mass use of these experimental vaccines had previously completely opposed a well-studied vaccine which had a known risk profile.
What the British people weren’t being told at the time was how and where the outbreak really began and the epidemic’s plausible links to vaccine research, research which it is often argued, needs gain-of-function experimentation to aid in the development of potent and effective vaccines. The first rumours of a potential lab leak emerged in an article originally released in the Evening Chronicle on 5 May 2001 entitled: “Did Scientists Start Foot and Mouth Plague?” The article revealed that there were 20 current foot and mouth disease experiments being conducted by the Institute of Animal Health (IAH) at their Pirbright facilities including “Immune responses induced by foot and mouth disease vaccine”, “matching properties of foot and mouth disease virus strains with those in field strains” and “Transmission of foot and mouth disease in sheep.” The article also reminds us that, during the crisis, the International Vaccine Bank for Foot and Mouth Disease was based at Pirbright, Surrey, and at that time stored “500,000 doses of high potency” vaccines for each of the seven different varieties of the disease.
Anderson and Ferguson’s computer modelling failed to help in bringing the outbreak under control and, with a general election coming up, the political situation was tense. What would follow next was an extraordinary public manipulation of the data to make it look as though FMD cases were decreasing when they were not. Tony Blair would postpone the general election for another month. The official data, like during the Covid era, began being manipulated to suit the government’s narrative and to aid their chances in the approaching election. The MAFF began changing the way in which they presented the statistics on their website — they began deleting the previous day’s figures as well as declining to report the earlier stats. Soon, they split the main number into three categories to play down the true totals. Anderson would have his computer model show that the crisis would be over, conveniently ending on the new General Election date Tony Blair had called. But, what the public hadn’t been told was that the Army had sped up the cull.
The manipulation of the official government statistics would leave everyone who was attempting to calculate the actual number of culled animals completely baffled. No one knew the true figures any more. Even the government’s own leading scientific expert on FMD, Dr Paul Kitching, would criticise the approach of Anderson and Ferguson’s computer modelling, saying when interviewed, that “Anderson’s Computer” had certainly come up with “some very seductive graphs”, but the data available to be fed into the programme were so inadequate that “one has to question the value of the data coming out.” Kitching was particularly critical about the change of the election date from May to June as well as the fact that the computer projections were being adjusted as the political situation advanced. After making those comments, Kitching stated that he was resigning as deputy-head of the Pirbright Institute and would soon be taking up a new post in Canada.
When a public inquiry was called into the FMD response, that would also be heavily manipulated. The Blair government would split the planned inquiry into three separate inquiries, each with different remits. This allowed Roy Anderson to remain completely unaccountable for the consequences of his actions. In addition, two of the people involved in the reviews were also connected with Roy Anderson. As the now defunct Warmwell website reported:
“What made this inquiry so particularly open to suspicion was the network of contacts intimately linking it to the little group of scientists who had been at the centre of the crisis since March, and who had been personally responsible for some of the most questionable aspects of the way it was handled. The Royal Society’s President was Sir Robert May, the former government chief scientist, who had played a key part in recommending another fellow of the society (FRS), Professor David King, to succeed him as chief scientist, and who had then stepped in to become Mr Blair’s chief adviser on the crisis. Another FRS was Sir Robert’s former Oxford colleague, Sir John Krebs of the Food Standards Agency, who had played a key part in having Prof. Roy Anderson FRS put in charge of the Government’s policy for controlling the epidemic. Prof. Anderson had co-authored two books with his former colleague Sir Robert May.”
The FMD crisis is quite astounding when you compare it to the Covid crisis. During FMD, Anderson and Ferguson would produce a terrifying computer model and this would be central to the government response. They refused to consider anything but the harshest measures immediately, and frowned upon any discussion of alternative policies. They used the Army to slaughter millions of animals without any regard for the emotional and economic harm they were causing to the people or animals involved. When their models failed, they created a new model and publicly manipulated the figures. Anderson would become all powerful during FMD, as not even Blair dared to challenge him. The key components of this pattern would repeat, beginning in 2020. Ferguson produced a terrifying computer model, which became central to the response. They refused to use any other strategies with Covid other than the harshest measures available, there were again no discussions about alternative measures allowed. They used the medical establishment during Covid like they had used the army during FMD, expecting and demanding drone-like obedience to what were probably illegal orders. Then, during Covid, when their models yet again failed, they began manipulating the numbers.
Despite his role in the scandalous FMD response, in 2003, Anderson became a member of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Advisory Group on SARS as well as the Health Protections Agency (HPA) Advisory Group on SARS. In 2004, Roy Malcolm Anderson also became the chief scientific advisor to the UK Ministry of Defence until 2008, at which point he would be installed as the Rector of Imperial College. These were rich rewards for a man who had managed to create a public perception of success out of the entirely disastrous FMD crisis of 2001. Between 2005 and 2011, Anderson would be made a member of the Bill and Melinda Gates Scientific Advisory Board for the Initiative on Grand Challenges in Global Health. By 2007, the awards and accolades for Anderson were getting ridiculous. As well as becoming chairman of the World Health Organisation Science and Technology Advisory Board on Neglected Tropical Diseases, he would also become the Governor of the Institute of Government, Trustee of the Natural History Museum, and a Council Member for the Royal College of Art, just to name a few. He would also become a major advisor to various governments and national scientific bodies all across the globe including in Malaysia, Thailand, Netherlands, Singapore, USA. He also boasts previous connections to institutions in Canada, Switzerland and Germany.
More than five years after the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak, another scare happened when cattle tested positive for the disease. On this occasion, they managed to catch the outbreak very early and it wasn’t allowed to spread. On that occasion the government accepted that major lab breaches had happened at the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright, which had led to the disease being released. In an article in the Irish Independent written on 11 September 2007 entitled, “Bio-security Breaches Caused FMD”, it states: “Five Separate breaches of bio-security at the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright are being blamed for July’s Foot and Mouth outbreak in Surrey”. The piece reports that wastewater carrying the live virus entered the drainage pipework and then leaked out and contaminated the surrounding soil. The investigations for the official reports were carried out by a man who the article describes as a “Health and Safety Executive and Professor”, a man named Brian Spratt, who we will talk about later in this article.
Anderson was the man who had trained the infamous Neil Ferguson, with whom he helped design and create the computer modeling programmes which would first be introduced during the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in Britain two decades before Covid.
Neil Ferguson – Anderson’s Apprentice
Over the past two decades, no one has made as many false predictions on potential pandemic numbers as Neil Ferguson. Ferguson obtained his Master of Arts degree in Physics in 1990 at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and would go on to study for his PhD in theoretical physics in 1994 at Linacre College, Oxford, where Roy Anderson was the Linacre Professor of Zoology at the time and who would soon become Ferguson’s teacher and mentor. It was also at Oxford where Ferguson attended a lecture by the aforementioned close friend and former colleague of Anderson, Sir Robert May, on modelling the HIV epidemic. It was after talking to Robert May at that presentation where Ferguson reportedly became interested in the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases. It appears that, from that moment on, Ferguson would work closely with Roy Anderson.
Ferguson would move with Roy Anderson’s group of infectious disease scientists from the University of Oxford to Imperial College in 2000. He would also shift his research focus to FMD a few months before the crisis began, placing him in a prime position to immediately start working on modelling the FMD outbreak as it began. During the epidemic, Ferguson’s unvalidated predictive models had successfully manufactured the consent needed to allow the Government to enact their brutal culling policy. Approximately ten million animals would be culled and burnt on pyres all around the UK, with the size and scale of the cull causing serious public concern. As a 2006 paper which is entitled, “Use and abuse of mathematical models: an illustration from the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic in the United Kingdom” which was produced by a team at Edinburgh University states: the experience “should have been a warning of how models can be abused in the interests of scientific opportunism”. That paper, headed by one of the other governments scientific advisors during the start of the FMD crisis, the aforementioned Dr. Kitching, would include in its conclusion that: “Modelling should only be countenanced if veterinarians and scientists agree that the design of the model and the information used to generate its results are correct (and plausible, from the known biology of the disease). Otherwise, models: ‘become exercises in mathematical sophistry’. Ferguson’s models had wreaked havoc on the lives of millions of British farmers, yet, the following year, Neil Ferguson would be honoured by the Queen with an OBE (Order of the British Empire) awarded to him for his services during the FMD crisis.
The ashes of the millions of slaughtered animals had barely settled before Neil Ferguson would warn that sheep may have contracted BSE and that the disease could kill tens-of-thousands of people. He would soon after produce a model of this new, potential BSE outbreak, which he claimed was just around the corner. Ferguson predicted that BSE could kill up to 150,000 people. The disease was only actually responsible for an approximate 178 deaths. In that paper, again written alongside Roy Anderson and Christl Donnelly, the authors state: “we estimate the 95% confidence interval for future vCJD mortality to be 50 to 50,000 human deaths considering exposure to bovine BSE alone, with the upper bound increasing to 150,000 once we include exposure from the worst-case ovine (sheep) BSE scenario examined.” Ferguson’s inability to accurately predict anything correctly didn’t stop him from continuing to make further predictions. In 2005, Ferguson would predict that deaths from Bird Flu worldwide would reach up to 200 million people, with the WHO eventually identifying a total of 455 deaths as probably attributable to the virus. During the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic in the UK, Ferguson would predict 65,000 deaths, whilst the actual number of deaths due to the disease was around 283.
In 2006, Ferguson began talking about the need to create vaccines quickly so as to respond effectively to a pandemic he claimed was emerging with Bird Flu, stating to the press that even a border closure that is 99.9% effective would only slow the pandemic by a few weeks at the most. “That doesn’t buy you much time to make [a] vaccine,” Ferguson said, going on to clarify, “And that is what matters. The model shows that if you could start giving people a vaccine based on the exact pandemic strain 30 days after it emerges, hitting 1% of the population a day – the maximum vaccine production rate – you might cut the number of cases by 97%.” Of course, Neil Ferguson was wrong again, but his eagerness to predict mass death did not end there. Ferguson’s claims of an imminent Bird Flu pandemic would also see the House of Lords recommend “passive immunisation” if bird flu reached the UK.
On 22 January 2020, Neil Ferguson would be involved in the first meeting of SAGE (the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group), the minutes of the meeting wouldn’t be released until 29 May 2020 and were entitled simply “Coronavirus (COVID-19) response”. Also appointed to the advisory group was Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar. The SAGE group was chaired by the former-President of Research and Development at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Patrick Vallance, who had left the global pharmaceutical giant in 2018 to become the United Kingdom’s chief scientific advisor. SAGE had originally been set-up by Sir Robert May (the man who’s presentation had inspired Ferguson’s carrer path) over a decade prior, with their first meeting being recorded in 2009 in response to a potential Flu pandemic that never materialized and which Neil Ferguson’s models falsely predicted would cause mass global casualties.
Ferguson would soon present his computer models which predicted half a million people would die of the Covid-19 virus in the UK alone. This large mortality number would have made the Covid-19 pandemic one of the worst viruses in time immemorial. The fear and panic induced by his false prophetic vision would help manufacture consent for one of the most severe and restrictive of pandemic responses in history. Of course, the history books will also record that Neil Ferguson’s Covid-19 modeling was not the only thing to cause concern. Ferguson would be caught having an affair during Covid-19 whilst he was meant to be strictly observing the nationwide lockdown which his models had forced on the rest of the country. On 5 May 2020, the UK Guardian newspaper would report that Ferguson “resigns from SAGE after admitting ‘error of judgment’”.
The Proximal Origin of Jeremy Farrar
Jeremy Farrar is one of the most important members of the Wellcome Trust’s Covid cartel and was the initial reason I began investigating the Wellcome Trust. He has been vital in the planning, preparation and in the rolling out of almost every part of the Covid-19 response in the UK and US, and there may be no other human on Earth who has been so powerful during this crisis and in turn is so culpable for the disaster which has unfolded whilst he was at the helm. Because of his extremely significant and all-powerful roll in the Covid-19 agenda, I decided to go back further into the history of Jeremy Farrar than any other of the Wellcome Five.
Eric Mitchell Farrar was born on 24 August 1917 and by the time World War II had begun, he was 22 and at a prime age for conscription. In 1940, Eric would join the Duke of Wellington’s West Riding Company, a unit named after its Yorkshire heartland, as a corporal. It wouldn’t be long before Corporal Eric Farrar was reported as officially missing, last being seen outside Dunkirk on 11 June 1940. On Friday 21 August the same year, it was reported in the Bradford Observer, in an article entitled, Prisoners of War: Halifax and Huddersfield Man, stating that “Corporal Eric M. Farrar, medical orderly, Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, Victoria Road, Lockwood, Huddersfield is also reported to be a prisoner of war in Germany.”
It would later be confirmed that Eric Farrar was being held at Stalag 383, Hohen Fels, in Bavaria Germany, and later moved to Stalag IX-C near Leipzig. On 29 March 1945, the camp where Eric was imprisoned was evacuated and the prisoners of war were forced to march towards allied lines. The Germans would use those prisoners in an attempt to slow the advancing Americans, with some of the prisoners being forced to march for four weeks before they were finally freed by US forces. Eric would be debriefed and declared no longer a POW on 31 May 1945 and on 11 October 1945 his distinguished service would be acknowledged in the London Gazette. He would again be honoured in 1946 in the Long Service and Good Conduct Awards.
Jeremy’s father and mother were an interesting pair. During World War II, Farrar’s mother, Amy Annie Farrar (born Melton) was also working for the army, driving army officials from bases in places like Scotland to various locations in the UK. On returning to Britain, Eric would be driven from Scotland and onto the Ministry of Defence in London to pass on intelligence concerning the POW camp where he had been held. On this long journey, which would have taken the entire day to complete, Farrar’s mother and father would meet for the first time and begin their own lifelong journey. They would marry soon after their first meeting, officially tying-the-knot at North Kesteven in the county of Amy’s birth, Lincolnshire, in June 1946. Described by Jeremy Farrar as “itinerant in nature”, his parents would travel the globe while they built up their family, which would eventually extend to having six children. Eric Farrar hadn’t had the opportunity to go to University during the war, but he would still become a teacher, working in the various countries where they were based. Jeremy was born in Singapore on 1 February 1961, while his father was teaching there, but Farrar would not grow up in Singapore, with the family moving to countries including New Zealand, Cyprus, Malaysia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya.
This wonderful tale of a post war jet-setting family is something I’ve seen over and over when researching people who worked in intelligence. Although there is a little evidence showing that Eric Farrar interacted with the MoD once, he did have a harsh military experience which would have proved his mental endurance and stamina to the officers he reported back to after the war. His locations where he settled are also suggestive of military placements, with Cyprus, Egypt and Libya being prime places during this era to place assets. However, although I don’t have direct evidence that Eric Farrar continued to work for the British state in any capacity, I do have reasons to be suspicious. You see, however neat and tidy Eric Farrar’s family history appears, there is one glaring fact that has led me to believe it’s not as simple as it appears at first glance. If we are to believe what has been recorded, then Eric Farrar’s mother and father were both 52 years old in 1917 when he was born. This is extremely unlikely and, even with all my experience in hunting the ancestors of the powerful players, I have been unable to confirm the answer to this riddle, but I do have a hunch.
Jeremy Farrar would be the sixth child of Eric and Amy Farrar, born in Singapore on 1 September 1961, where Amy was practising her art and Eric was employed as a teacher in a local school. Jeremy would live in Cyprus, Libya, and New Zealand before he would start his formal education in Britain, initially educated at Churcher’s College which is described as an “independent, fee-charging day school for girls and boys”, and later he would study at University College London Medical School, where he would obtain a Bachelor of Science degree in immunology in 1983 and a Bachelor of Medicine degree in 1986. Official sources state that Farrar completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Oxford in 1998 on myasthenia gravis, although Farrar has stated that he was finishing his first PhD from Oxford in 1994.
In a Tedmed presentation given 3 years before the current coronavirus crisis began, Farrar describes a very important moment in his life in which he places linguistic emphasis on it having occurred purely “by chance”. He states that in 1994 he had returned to Oxford University, where he was finishing his PhD, and that he was offered the opportunity to go live in Vietnam for a year, eventually staying for 18 years. He also claimed in a 2014 Financial Times article that his decision to move to Vietnam was due to his disdain for conference halls full of white men. In reality it is around this time that he was first recruited by the Wellcome Trust through an Oxford University initiative.
Farrar would be one of the many scientists to be offered continuous funding throughout their entire career via lucrative research grants supplied by the Wellcome Trust. Many scientists would be more than willing to work for such a generous institution which had seemingly unhooked themselves from the cut-throat world of the private pharmaceutical industry. Farrar would thrive in this culture of unlimited funding and he was able to do more research in a country with less regulations than the United Kingdom. From 1996 until 2013, Farrar is recorded as being Director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, Oxford University being partners to much of the Wellcome Trust’s efforts to recruit the best and brightest during the mid 1990s onward.
By 2009, Farrar found himself conveniently placed to respond to an emerging epidemiological crisis of the H5N1 virus in Asia and helped develop its origin story. To quote from a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation on the Trust’s new “Wellcome Leap” venture:
“An article published by Rockefeller University Press’s Journal of Experimental Medicine in 2009 is dramatically titled, “Jeremy Farrar: When Disaster Strikes.” Farrar, when referring to the H5N1 origin story stated: “The WHO people—and this is not a criticism—decided it was unlikely that the child had SARS or avian influenza. They left, but Professor Hien stayed behind to talk with the child and her mum. The girl admitted that she had been quite sad in the previous days with the death of her pet duck. The girl and her brother had fought over burying the duck and, because of this argument, she had gone back, dug up the duck, and reburied it—probably so her brother wouldn’t know where it was buried. With that history, Professor Hien phoned me at home and said he was worried about the child. He took some swabs from the child’s nose and throat and brought them back to the hospital. That night the laboratory ran tests on the samples, and they were positive for Influenza A.”
This quaint tale of a deadly duck seems plausible to most, although the local authorities were less convinced by Farrar’s and Hien’s supposed new discovery, but what should be thoroughly noted is that Jeremy Farrar was regularly found at ground zero of various emerging global epidemiological threat responses. Although still based in Vietnam, around 2009, Farrar was sent by Oxford to various locations around the globe to study other epidemics happening in real time including the subsequent global outbreaks of MERS [2012], Ebola [2014], and avian flu [2014]. In 2013, he would take up his directorship of the Wellcome Trust, a position he still retains. During the Ebola crisis, Farrar would also write papers such as, Infectious disease: Tough choices to reduce Ebola transmission, alongside both Neil Ferguson and Chris Whitty, the latter would head up the official UK public relations side of Covid-19 as Chief Medical Advisor to the UK Government.
In 2020, Farrar’s incredible reach became exposed to the general public after the release of the Fauci Emails. One of the infamous Fauci emails, dated 25 February 2020, and sent by Amelie Rioux of the WHO, stated that Jeremy Farrar’s official role at that time was “to act as the board’s focal point on the COVID-19 outbreak, to represent and advise the board on the science of the outbreak and the financing of the response.” The Fauci emails also showed us the preparation, over a ten-day period, of the paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”, which was accepted for publication by Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020. The paper claimed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from natural origins as opposed to gain-of-function research.
Farrar’s supreme authority over the organisation of the Covid-19 response was beginning to be exposed for the world to see, and soon people would begin questioning the scientific paper which he spearheaded as part of the major cover-up.
Read More – https://johnnyvedmore.com/2022/02/08/the-wellcome-5/