COVID-19 Pandemic

[kompir]

It isn't a done deal, the proposed legislation has a lot of people offside, even rusted on career clockwatchers in Parliament are aghast at what Andrews wants to push through.

If it does get through, Andrews will be crucified at the next election and Labor will be unelectable for decades.

[Phoenix]

When you consider that the next election in Victoria is slated for November 2022 (at the latest) and if Melbourne follows covid history by experiencing another seasonal spike in covid infection in the winter of 2022 - I'd say the Chairman is wanting to increase his political powers to go even earlier and even harder on the next rona-wave if/when it comes.

Premiers around Australia have all seen their popularity rise sky-high when they've employed the most despicable and draconian measures.
Imagine going into an election on an astronomically high approval rating built on the pretence that your government is keeping you safe.

Unprecedented and ultimate power...what could possibly go wrong?

[Soldier of Macedon]

Another concern that shouldn't be overlooked is the willingness (or lack thereof) of the Libs to rescind this draconian law if it comes into effect, should they win the elections in November 2022. They are marginally better on some key issues compared to Labour, but both are part of the same bureaucracy and it wouldn't come as a shock if they maintain this law in future, despite their current opposition. I just hope it doesn't turn out to be the same case of hypocrisy that we see in Macedonia, where, despite the empty rhetoric, DPNE has every intention of adhering to Zaev's treacherous name-change betrayal once back in power.

[Risto the Great]

Ego, ambition, and turmoil: Inside one of biotech’s most secretive startups

From 2016:

https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/13/moderna-therapeutics-biotech-mrna/

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — At first glance, Moderna Therapeutics looks like the most enviable biotech startup in the world. It has smashed fundraising records and teamed up with pharmaceutical giants as it pursues a radical plan to revolutionize medicine by transforming human cells into drug factories.

But the reality is more complicated.

A STAT investigation found that the company’s caustic work environment has for years driven away top talent and that behind its obsession with secrecy, there are signs Moderna has run into roadblocks with its most ambitious projects.

At the center of it all is Stéphane Bancel, a first-time biotech CEO with an unwavering belief that Moderna’s science will work — and that employees who don’t “live the mission” have no place in the company. Confident and intense, Bancel told STAT that Moderna’s science is on track and, when it is finally made public, that it will meet the brash goal he himself has set: The new drugs will change the world.

But interviews with more than 20 current and former employees and associates suggest Bancel has hampered progress at Moderna because of his ego, his need to assert control and his impatience with the setbacks that are an inevitable part of science. Moderna is worth more than any other private biotech in the US, and former employees said they felt that Bancel prized the company’s ever-increasing valuation, now approaching $5 billion, over its science.

As he pursued a complex and risky strategy for drug development, Bancel built a culture of recrimination at Moderna, former employees said. Failed experiments have been met with reprimands and even on-the-spot firings. They recalled abusive emails, dressings down at company meetings, exceedingly long hours, and unexplained terminations.

At least a dozen highly placed executives have quit in the past four years, including heads of finance, technology, manufacturing, and science. In just the past 12 months, respected leaders of Moderna’s cancer and rare disease programs both resigned, even though the company’s remarkable fundraising had put ample resources at their disposal. Each had been at the company less than 18 months, and the positions have yet to be filled.

Related: An ex-con is taking his debt-ridden, cash-burning biotech public. Why are people investing?
Lower-ranking employees, meanwhile, said they’ve been disappointed and confused by Moderna’s pivot to less ambitious — and less transformative — treatments. Moderna has pushed off projects meant to upend the drug industry to focus first on the less daunting (and most likely, far less lucrative) field of vaccines — though it is years behind competitors in that arena.

The company has published no data supporting its vaunted technology, and it’s so secretive that some job candidates have to sign nondisclosure agreements before they come in to interview. Outside venture capitalists said Moderna has so many investors clamoring to get in that it can afford to turn away any who ask too many questions. Some small players have been given only a peek at Moderna’s data before committing millions to the company, according to people familiar with the matter.

“It’s a case of the emperor’s new clothes,” said a former Moderna scientist. “They’re running an investment firm, and then hopefully it also develops a drug that’s successful.”

Like many employees and former employees, the scientist requested anonymity because of a nondisclosure agreement. Others would not permit their names to be published out of fear that speaking candidly about big players in the industry would hurt their job prospects down the road.

Moderna just moved its first two potential treatments — both vaccines — into human trials. In keeping with the culture of secrecy, though, executives won’t say which diseases the vaccines target, and they have not listed the studies on the public federal registry, ClinicalTrials.gov. Listing is optional for Phase 1 trials, which are meant to determine if a drug is safe, but most companies voluntarily disclose their work.

Investors say it’ll be worth the wait when the company finally lifts the veil.

“We think that when the world does get to see Moderna, they’re going to see something far larger in its scope than anybody’s seen before,” said Peter Kolchinsky, whose RA Capital Management owns a stake in the company.

Related: Is Adam Feuerstein the most feared man in biotech?
Bancel, meanwhile, said he is aware of the criticism of him and has taken some steps to address it. After scathing anonymous comments about Moderna’s management began showing up online, Bancel went to Silicon Valley to get tips on employee retention from the human resources departments of Facebook, Google, and Netflix. But he makes no apologies for tumult past or present, pointing to the thousands of patients who might be saved by Moderna’s technology.

“You want to be the guy who’s going to fail them? I don’t,” he said in an interview from his glassy third-floor office. “So was it an intense place? It was. And do I feel sorry about it? No.”

An ambitious CEO dreams big
Bancel, 44, had no experience running a drug development operation when one of biotech’s most successful venture capitalists tapped him to lead Moderna. He’d spent most of his career in sales and operations, not science.

But he had made no secret of his ambition.

A native of France, Bancel earned a master’s in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from Harvard in 2000. As Harvard Business School classmates rushed to cash in on the dot-com boom, Bancel laid out a plan to play “chess, not checkers.”

“I was always thinking, one day, somebody will have to make a decision about me getting a CEO job,” he told an audience at his alma mater in April. “… How do I make sure I’m not the bridesmaid? How do I make sure that I’m not always the person who’s almost selected but doesn’t get the role?”

He went into sales and rose through the operational ranks at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, eventually leading the company’s Belgian operation. And in 2007, at just 34, he achieved his goal, stepping in as CEO of the French diagnostics firm bioMérieux, which employs roughly 6,000 people.

The company improved its margins under Bancel’s tenure, and he developed a reputation as a stern manager who got results, according to an equities analyst who covered bioMérieux at the time.

“He doesn’t suffer fools lightly,” the analyst said, speaking on condition of anonymity to comply with company policy. “I think if you’re underperforming, you’ll probably find yourself looking for another job.”

Bancel’s rise caught the eye of the biotech investment firm Flagship Ventures, based here in Cambridge. Flagship CEO Noubar Afeyan repeatedly tried to entice him to take over one of the firm’s many startups, Bancel said. But he rejected one prospect after another because the startups seemed too narrow in scope.

Moderna was different.

The company’s core idea was seductively simple: cut out the middleman in biotech.

“It’s a case of the emperor’s new clothes. They’re running an investment firm, and then hopefully it also develops a drug that’s successful.”

FORMER MODERNA SCIENTIST

For decades, companies have endeavored to craft better and better protein therapies, leading to new treatments for cancer, autoimmune disorders, and rare diseases. Such therapies are costly to produce and have many limitations, but they’ve given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry. The anti-inflammatory Humira, the world’s top drug at $14 billion in sales a year, is a shining example of protein therapy.

Moderna’s technology promised to subvert the whole field, creating therapeutic proteins inside the body instead of in manufacturing plants. The key: harnessing messenger RNA, or mRNA.

In nature, mRNA molecules function like recipe books, directing cellular machinery to make specific proteins. Moderna believes it can play that system to its advantage by using synthetic mRNA to compel cells to produce whichever proteins it chooses. In effect, the mRNA would turn cells into tiny drug factories.

It’s highly risky. Big pharma companies had tried similar work and abandoned it because it’s exceedingly hard to get RNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects. But if Moderna can get it to work, the process could be used to treat scores of diseases, including cancers and rare diseases that can be death sentences for children.

Bancel was intrigued. He knew it was a gamble, he told STAT, “but if I don’t do it, and it works, I’m just going to kick myself every morning.”

And so he became the company’s CEO — and soon developed an almost messianic reverence for the mRNA technology.

Despite having never worked with RNA before, Bancel said he sat around the table with his core team in the early days of the company, dreaming up experiments. As a result, he is listed as a co-inventor on more than 100 of Moderna’s early patent applications, unusual for a CEO who is not a PhD scientist.

Though he’s been here several years now, Bancel stands out in the freewheeling startup hub of Kendall Square. He prefers tailored suits over the industry’s fleece-heavy wardrobe, and he doesn’t shy away from sweeping promises that might trouble CEOs more concerned with managing expectations.

Under Bancel, Moderna has been loath to publish its work in Science or Nature, but enthusiastic to herald its potential on CNBC and CNN, taking part in segments on the world’s most disruptive companies and the potential “cure for cancer.”

Bancel lays out those grand ambitions in an accent that bends his own company’s name into something more akin to the Italian city. In conversation, Bancel has a salesman’s skill of making complex concepts seem simple, but with an earnestness that keeps his spiel from feeling like a con.

He peppers his speech with Silicon Valley buzzwords, many of which are scrawled on a giant whiteboard in his spacious office. Messenger RNA “is like software,” he explained: If it works in one disease, it should work for thousands.

Most biotech startups focus on one or two leading drug candidates at first, pushing them through human trials before turning to another target. Moderna, by contrast, has nearly 100 projects going at once. With mRNA, “you can just turn the crank and get a lot of products going into development,” Bancel explained, flashing a smile as though he himself was bemused by the idea’s simplicity.

Resignations, dismissals, and churn
From the beginning, Bancel made clear that Moderna’s science simply had to work. And that anyone who couldn’t make it work didn’t belong.

The early Moderna was a chaotic, unpredictable workplace, according to former employees. One recalls finding himself out of a job when a quick-turnaround experiment failed to pan out. Another helped train a group of new hires only to realize they were his replacements.

“There was a kind of Jack Welch-ian, ‘We fire the bottom 10 percent’ from the very beginning,” said a former Moderna manager. “That’s probably the biggest HR difference between Moderna and virtually any other biotech, where they talk so much about developing their people.”

Moderna went through two heads of chemistry in a single year, according to former employees, and its chief scientific officer and head of manufacturing left shortly thereafter. Those who fell out of favor with Bancel would find themselves excluded from key meetings, pushed aside until they resigned or ultimately got dismissed, employees said.

“You want to be the guy who’s going to fail [patients]? I don’t. So was it an intense place? It was. And do I feel sorry about it? No.”

STÉPHANE BANCEL, MODERNA CEO

Most stunning to employees was the abrupt departure of Joseph Bolen, who came aboard in 2013 to lead Moderna’s R&D efforts.

Bolen was a big-name hire in biotech circles, an experienced chief scientific officer who had guided Millennium Pharmaceuticals to FDA approval for a blockbuster cancer drug. He’d been profiled in The Scientist, which dubbed him “the people’s CSO” for his ability to keep morale high and research focused. Landing him was a coup.

But two years into his tenure at Moderna, he abruptly stepped down last October, making no public statement save for changing his LinkedIn status to “resigned.”

“No scientist in his right mind would leave that job unless there was something wrong with the science or the personnel,” said a person close to the company at the time.

Insiders said Bancel had effectively pushed Bolen out, hiring parallel executives until Bolen was in charge of just “a postage stamp” worth of territory, as one former Moderna manager put it. Bolen declined to comment.

For his part, Bancel acknowledged the changes that limited Bolen’s power but insisted the parting was friendly. Bancel said he tried to convince Bolen to stay, but the scientist “voted himself off the island.”

Bolen wasn’t alone. Chief Information Officer John Reynders joined in 2013 to make Moderna what he called the world’s “first fully digital biotech,” only to step down a year later. Michael Morin, brought in to lead Moderna’s scientific efforts in cancer in 2014, lasted less than 18 months. As did Greg Licholai, hired in 2015 to direct the company’s projects in rare diseases. The latter two key leadership positions remain unfilled.

“You wonder,” influential biotech blogger Derek Lowe wrote last year, “if Moderna really is a rocket ship getting ready to launch and spray a formation of new drugs across the sky, then why are these people leaving?”

The company has a simple explanation: Moderna lives in dog years compared with other biotechs.

“We force everyone to grow with the company at unprecedented speed,” Moderna Chief Financial Officer Lorence Kim said. “Some people grow with the company; others don’t.”

Related: ‘Silicon Valley arrogance’? Google misfires as it strives to turn Star Trek fiction into reality
Bancel is sprightly in describing the company’s future, but his tone hardens on the topic of its formative years — Moderna 1.0, as he calls it.

“The people in the 1.0 team who did not really live the mission ended up either leaving or being asked to leave because they were not accomplishing what we needed them to accomplish,” he said.

Moderna’s internal turmoil came spilling messily into public view starting in late 2012, as more than a dozen harsh critiques popped up on Glassdoor, a website that allows a company’s employees — or anyone, for that matter — to write anonymous reviews of management and workplace culture.

The posts, full of invective for company leaders, eventually came to the attention of the board. “And you’d be lying to say it didn’t affect you emotionally,” said the company’s president, Dr. Stephen Hoge, a former emergency medicine physician whose tendency for self-deprecation cuts a disarming contrast to Bancel’s intensity. “Like, what if my dad sees that?”

The company sought to improve its workplace, and Hoge said the once-high turnover rate has fallen to within industry standards, though he declined to disclose specifics.

“You wonder, if Moderna really is a rocket ship getting ready to launch and spray a formation of new drugs across the sky, then why are these people leaving?”

DEREK LOWE, BIOTECH BLOGGER

Moderna — which now offers Silicon Valley-style perks like a daily catered lunch and iPhones for all employees — has roughly doubled in size each year, meaning most of the company’s current workforce of about 450 has joined since 2013. They’re spread out among three locations, and many are siloed off from top executives. Survey data from such junior employees helped vault Moderna to Science magazine’s list of top employers of 2015.

Those who buy in are all in: Some employees speak with respect bordering on awe about Moderna’s promise, with one likening the technology to “magic.”

The two current employees put forward by the company to talk with STAT sounded a note of pride at Moderna’s reputation for driving its staff hard.

“In a way, it’s a blessing in disguise,” said Edward Miracco, a senior scientist who started at Moderna in 2014. “It separates the wheat from the chaff.”

Not everyone is cut out to work at Moderna, where “things change daily, hourly,” said Dan Brock, an associate director who joined the company in February. “Everyone who comes here already kind of gets it.”

But the recent departures and vacancies suggest that turmoil continues in the top ranks — those who most closely deal with upper management, including Bancel.

“He believes in a bigger stick than carrot,” a former manager said. “Moderna has some growing up to do, no question about it.”

A gold rush for Moderna
Hoge, who joined the company in 2012, describes the early days of Moderna as “when we were living in the caves.” The company often had only enough cash to keep the lights on for six months at a time, he said. “The strategy was just to survive.”

Moderna 1.0, and life in the caves, came to a close in 2013, according to company lore.

That’s when Moderna — which had just 25 employees — signed a staggering $240 million partnership with UK pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. It was the most money pharma had ever spent on drugs that had not yet been tested in humans.

The agreement is commemorated in one of Moderna’s offices by a framed clipping from the New York Times. Page B7 of the March 21, 2013 edition: “AstraZeneca Makes a Bet On an Untested Technique.”

For AstraZeneca, the unprecedented deal came at a time of uncertainty. A series of clinical failures had led the firm to fire its head of research and lay off 1,600 scientists. Pascal Soriot, just six months into his tenure as CEO, was under pressure from investors to chart a new course. And Moderna, with its brash ambition to bring 100 drugs to clinical trials within a decade, gave Soriot a way forward.

The rich deal started a gold rush for Moderna. Everyone, it seemed, wanted in.

Before the end of 2013, Moderna would turn heads again with a $110 million investment round, followed by a high-dollar partnership with biotech giant Alexion.

In early 2015, Moderna disclosed a $450 million financing round, the largest ever for a private biotech company. This month, the company broke its own record, raising another $474 million.

The run-up was “biotech fervor to the extreme,” according to a venture capitalist not involved with the company, requesting anonymity to speak candidly. While bigger investors got to see all the company’s data from animal experiments, some of Moderna’s smaller investors put in funds based on just a peek, according to people familiar with the process. Moderna’s fundraising success had created a seller’s market: Why deal with the questions of one potential investor when it had 10 more lined up?

Afeyan, Moderna’s chairman and cofounder, insists the company’s investors have done their homework. To say they bought in without due diligence “would be a bit of an insult to these people,” he said.

“I hope they solve those challenges, because it’s not going to be good for the broader biotech industry in general if this thing implodes.”

BIOTECH INVESTOR

Though it has yet to reveal data from a single clinical trial, Moderna is now valued at $4.7 billion, according to Pitchbook.

That’s twice as much as Spark Therapeutics, the company widely expected to market the United States’s first gene therapy, which has shown signs in clinical trials that it can reverse blindness caused by a rare genetic disorder. Moderna is also worth billions more than Juno Therapeutics and Kite Pharma, startups developing novel treatments for cancer that have demonstrated promising results in early human trials.

Moderna has long shaken off rumors that it is soon to market its shares on Wall Street, with Hoge likening the company to a child star: “You don’t want to go through your adolescence publicly,” he told STAT.

But that’s about to change. Moderna’s next planned step is an initial public offering, according to a person close to the company. Bancel declined to say just when Moderna might go public, but the company has already prepared: In its latest filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Moderna changed its business structure from an LLC to a C corporation, completing a necessary step before mounting an IPO.

A strategic shift to less ambitious targets
With a public listing come required disclosures, and many are eager to see what Moderna’s been keeping under wraps all these years.

Outsiders and competitors, looking only at Moderna’s public statements, have noted a shift in strategy that might signal undisclosed setbacks.

From the start, Moderna heralded its ability to produce proteins within cells, which could open up a world of therapeutic targets unreachable by conventional drugs. The most revolutionary treatments, which could challenge the multibillion-dollar market for protein therapy, would involve repeated doses of mRNA over many years, so a patient’s body continued to produce proteins to keep disease at bay.

But Moderna’s first human trials aren’t so ambitious, focusing instead on the crowded field of vaccines, where the company has only been working since 2014.

First are the two vaccine trials for undisclosed infectious diseases. Coming next is a one-time treatment for heart failure, developed in partnership with AstraZeneca, followed by another experimental vaccine, for Zika virus, which several other pharma companies are also working to develop. And after that, Moderna is planning a human trial of a personalized cancer vaccine using mRNA, something it just came up with last year.

The choice to prioritize vaccines came as a disappointment to many in the company, according to a former manager. The plan had been to radically disrupt the biotech industry, the manager said, so “why would you start with a clinical program that has very limited upside and lots of competition?”

The answer could be the challenge of ensuring drug safety, outsiders said.

Delivery — actually getting RNA into cells — has long bedeviled the whole field. On their own, RNA molecules have a hard time reaching their targets. They work better if they’re wrapped up in a delivery mechanism, such as nanoparticles made of lipids. But those nanoparticles can lead to dangerous side effects, especially if a patient has to take repeated doses over months or years.

Novartis abandoned the related realm of RNA interference over concerns about toxicity, as did Merck and Roche.

“Now, as we’re going to human [trials], it’s pretty clear no one else is going to catch us.”

KENNETH CHIEN, SCIENTIST WHO WORKS WITH MODERNA

Moderna’s most advanced competitors, CureVac and BioNTech, have acknowledged the same challenge with mRNA. Each is principally focused on vaccines for infectious disease and cancer, which the companies believe can be attacked with just a few doses of mRNA. And each has already tested its technology on hundreds of patients.

“I would say that mRNA is better suited for diseases where treatment for short duration is sufficiently curative, so the toxicities caused by delivery materials are less likely to occur,” said Katalin Karikó, a pioneer in the field who serves as a vice president at BioNTech.

That makes vaccines the lowest hanging fruit in mRNA, said Franz-Werner Haas, CureVac’s chief corporate officer. “From our point of view, it’s obvious why [Moderna] started there,” he said.

Moderna said it prioritized vaccines because they presented the fastest path to human trials, not because of setbacks with other projects. “The notion that [Moderna] ran into difficulties isn’t borne in reality,” said Afeyan.

But this is where Moderna’s secrecy comes into play: Until there’s published data, only the company and its partners know what the data show. Everyone outside is left guessing — and, in some cases, worrying that Moderna won’t live up to its hype.

“Frankly, I hope that there’s real substance and I hope they solve those challenges, because it’s not going to be good for the broader biotech industry in general if this thing implodes,” said one investor not involved with Moderna.

And it could still go either way, former employees said. If Moderna’s promises come to fruition, it could be a pillar of the biotech industry. If they don’t, it could find a place among a short list of companies that have cast a shadow over the entire industry and left investors disillusioned.

“Either we’ll be talking about it as the next Genentech,” a former Moderna manager said, “or we’ll think, ‘Well, back then, first there was Turing, then there was Valeant, and then there was Moderna.”

Enough cash to absorb some setbacks
Moderna’s management and its investors are keeping the faith, pointing to the company’s pipeline of 11 drug candidates and more than 90 preclinical projects.

And with Moderna’s huge cash reserves — estimated at $1.5 billion — it can afford a few setbacks, proponents said. The company said it’s pouring money into its manufacturing operation, planning to spend $100 million this year on a new plant. Moderna has pioneered an automated system modeled on the software Tesla uses to manage orders, Bancel said: Scientists simply enter the protein they want a cell to express, and testable mRNA arrives within weeks.

“If we have a bump in the road in the clinic, we will not have to wait years to go back to the drawing board,” Bancel said.

That has always been part of the plan, former employees said, pointing to Bancel’s fascination with the tech industry. Uber and Amazon were not the first to come up with their respective business ideas, but they were the ones that built enough scale to ward off competition. And Moderna is positioning itself to do the same in mRNA.

“Now, as we’re going to human [trials], it’s pretty clear no one else is going to catch us,” said Dr. Kenneth Chien, a professor at Karolinska Institutet working with Moderna and AstraZeneca.

Dr. Tal Zaks, Moderna’s chief medical officer, promises that the company will soon break its silence on the publishing front. He said next year Moderna will disclose the animal data that helped get its two vaccines into the clinic. The company has also committed to publishing full results from all of its human trials, starting with the vaccine studies next year.

Moderna’s reticence to share data earlier is “not because we decided to be secret,” Zaks said. “This is the natural evolution of a platform. As we go into the clinic, we will be very transparent.”

For all the tumult at Moderna these past few years, Bancel said the company remains true to its mission statement: “Deliver on the promise of mRNA science to create a new generation of transformative medicines for patients.”

The message, which adorns the walls of Moderna’s offices, was first to be printed on posters, but Bancel insisted it be inscribed in paint.

“Because that,” he said, pointing to the first word, “is not ever going to change.”

I read that the US Government gave this company well over a billion dollars in grant funding before they even managed to release one working drug. You would think they got something back in return. Well maybe politicians did ...

But this was in 2016. And the technology was ummm, the same as it is right now. Feel free to get those booster shots folks. More fun to come. By "fun", I mean illness and death. If you were gullible and had faith in our health system such that you succumbed to the introduction of the poisons into your body (aka vaccine), please don't continue with the boosters. You are smarter than that ... by now.

[Risto the Great]

Another concern that shouldn't be overlooked is the willingness (or lack thereof) of the Libs to rescind this draconian law if it comes into effect, should they win the elections in November 2022. They are marginally better on some key issues compared to Labour, but both are part of the same bureaucracy and it wouldn't come as a shock if they maintain this law in future, despite their current opposition.

No government will ever cede powers gained.

[kompir]

From 2016:

https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/13/moderna-therapeutics-biotech-mrna/

I read that the US Government gave this company well over a billion dollars in grant funding before they even managed to release one working drug. You would think they got something back in return. Well maybe politicians did ...

But this was in 2016. And the technology was ummm, the same as it is right now. Feel free to get those booster shots folks. More fun to come. By "fun", I mean illness and death. If you were gullible and had faith in our health system such that you succumbed to the introduction of the poisons into your body (aka vaccine), please don't continue with the boosters. You are smarter than that ... by now.

Moderna is a piece of shit company led by psychopaths. When they burst onto the scene 11 years ago, there was something fishy about them back then; for a drug company to produce dud after dud after dud isn't a pharmaceutical company, they're either money laundering or a Ponzi scheme.

No government will ever cede powers gained.

This is the concern I have too.

Edit:

The Victorian Bar rarely makes any public comment, but they have come out with a scathing assessment of the proposed "pandemic" bill in Victoria:

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/victorian-bar-slams-appalling-new-pandemic-laws-20211027-p593n8.html

[Risto the Great]

What will you Victimorians be doing to protest Andrews' power grab?

[kompir]

Protesting won't cut it unless a million people march on Parliament and the Premiers office. It's almost at the point where more drastic action is required.

[Dove]

Simon Love on Twitter

14 top lawyers including 13 QC’s have penned an open letter concerned the pandemic bill which passed @VicParliament
last night will “may allow the Victorian government effectively to rule the State of Victoria by decree for the foreseeable future”
@10NewsFirstMelb
#springst


This cannot be ignored.

[YuriB]

NZ just said farewell to the small number of unvaccinated health staff and school teachers. Today was the deadline for getting the first dose.

What a loss.. How can we ever replace the teacher who hints that communist lizard-people are running the world? And we will fondly miss the midwife promoting moon crystals, yoga and essential oils as a cure for everything.. ;-)

[Risto the Great]

NZ just said farewell to the small number of unvaccinated health staff and school teachers. Today was the deadline for getting the first dose.

What a loss.. How can we ever replace the teacher who hints that communist lizard-people are running the world? And we will fondly miss the midwife promoting moon crystals, yoga and essential oils as a cure for everything.. ;-)

I'm more of a Dr Evil kind of guy myself:

https://rairfoundation.com/exposed-klaus-schwabs-school-for-covid-dictators-plan-for-great-reset-videos/

How is it that more than 190 governments from all over the world ended up dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in almost exactly the same manner, with lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination cards now being commonplace everywhere? The answer may lie in the Young Global Leaders school, which was established and managed by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, and that many of today’s prominent political and business leaders passed through on their way to the top.

The German economist, journalist, and author Ernst Wolff has revealed some facts about Schwab’s “Young Global Leaders” school that are relevant for understanding world events during the pandemic in a video from the German Corona Committee podcast. While Wolff is mainly known as a critic of the globalist financial system, recently he has focused on bringing to light what he sees as the hidden agenda behind the anti-Covid measures being enacted around the world.

Mysterious Beginnings
The story begins with the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is an NGO founded by Klaus Schwab, a German economist and mechanical engineer, in Switzerland in 1971, when he was only 32. The WEF is best-known to the public for the annual conferences it holds in Davos, Switzerland each January that aim to bring together political and business leaders from around the world to discuss the problems of the day. Today, it is one of the most important networks in the world for the globalist power elite, being funded by approximately a thousand multinational corporations.

The WEF, which was originally called the European Management Forum until 1987, succeeded in bringing together 440 executives from 31 nations already at its very first meeting in February 1971, which as Wolff points out was an unexpected achievement for someone like Schwab, who had very little international or professional experience prior to this. Wolff believes the reason may be due to the contacts Schwab made during his university education, including studying with no less a person than former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Wolff also points out that while Schwab was there, the Harvard Business School had been in the process of planning a management forum of their own, and it is possible that Harvard ended up delegating the task of organizing it to him.

The Forum initially only brought together people from the economic field, but before long, it began attracting politicians, prominent figures from the media (including from the BBC and CNN), and even celebrities.

Schwab’s Young Global Leaders: Incubator of the Great Reset?
In 1992 Schwab established a parallel institution, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow school, which was re-established as Young Global Leaders in 2004. Attendees at the school must apply for admission and are then subjected to a rigorous selection process. Members of the school’s very first class in 1992 already included many who went on to become important liberal political figures, such as Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Tony Blair. There are currently about 1,300 graduates of this school, and the list of alumni includes several names of those who went on to become leaders of the health institutions of their respective nations. Four of them are former and current health ministers for Germany, including Jens Spahn, who has been Federal Minister of Health since 2018. Philipp Rösler, who was Minister of Health from 2009 until 2011, was appointed the WEF’s Managing Director by Schwab in 2014.

Other notable names on the school’s roster are Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand whose stringent lockdown measures have been praised by global health authorities; Emmanuel Macron, the President of France; Sebastian Kurz, who was until recently the Chancellor of Austria; Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary; Jean-Claude Juncker, former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and President of the European Commission; and Annalena Baerbock, the leader of the German Greens who was the party’s first candidate for Chancellor in this year’s federal election, and who is still in the running to be Merkel’s successor. We also find California Governor Gavin Newsom on the list, who was selected for the class of 2005, as well as former presidential candidate and current US Secretary of Transportation Peter Buttigieg, who is a very recent alumnus, having been selected for the class of 2019. All of these politicians who were in office during the past two years have favored harsh responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and which also happened to considerably increase their respective governments’ power.

But the school’s list of alumni is not limited to political leaders. We also find many of the captains of private industry there, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and the Clinton Foundation’s Chelsea Clinton. Again, all of them expressed support for the global response to the pandemic, and many reaped considerable profits as a result of the measures.

Wolff believes that the people behind the WEF and the Global Leaders school are the ones who really determine who will become political leaders, although he stresses that he doesn’t believe that Schwab himself is the one making these decisions but is merely a facilitator. He further points out that the school’s alumni include not only Americans and Europeans, but also people from Asia, Africa, and South America, indicating that its reach is truly worldwide.

In 2012, Schwab and the WEF founded yet another institution, the “Global Shapers Community,” which brings together those identified by them as having leadership potential from around the world who are under 30. Approximately 10,000 participants have passed through this program to date, and they regularly hold meetings in 400 cities. Wolff believes that it is yet another proving ground where future political leaders are being selected, vetted, and groomed before being positioned in the world’s political apparatus.


Ernst Wolff
Wolff points out that very few graduates of the Global Leaders school list it on their CVs. He says that he has only seen it listed on one: namely, that of the German economist Richard Werner, who is a known critic of the establishment. Wolff suggests that the school seems to like to include even critics of the system among its ranks, as another name among its graduates is Gregor Hackmack, the German chief of Change.org, who was in its 2010 class. Wolff believes this is because the organization wants to present itself as being fair and balanced, although it also wants to ensure that its critics are controlled opposition.

Another thing that the Global Leaders graduates have in common is that most of them have very sparse CVs apart from their participation in the program prior to being elevated to positions of power, which may indicate that it is their connection to Schwab’s institutions that is the decisive factor in launching their careers. This is most evident when the school’s alumni are publicly questioned about issues that they have not been instructed to talk about in advance, and their struggles to come up with answers are often quite evident. Wolff contends that their roles are only to act as mouthpieces for the talking points that those in the shadows behind them want discussed in public debate.

Schwab’s Yes Men in Action
Given the growing discontent with the anti-Covid measures put into practice by the school’s graduates who are now national leaders, Wolff believes it is possible that these people were selected due to their willingness to do whatever they are told, and that they are being set up to fail so that the subsequent backlash can be exploited to justify the creation of a new global form of government. Indeed, Wolff notes that politicians with unique personalities and strong, original views have become rare, and that the distinguishing character of the national leaders of the past 30 years has been their meekness and adherence to a strict globalist line dictated from above. This has been especially evident in most countries’ response to the pandemic, where politicians who knew nothing about viruses two years ago suddenly proclaimed that Covid was a severe health crisis that justified locking people up in their homes, shutting down their businesses, and wrecking entire economies.

Determining exactly how the school operates is difficult, but Wolff has managed to learn something about it. In the school’s early years, it involved the members of each class meeting several times over the course of a year, including a ten-day “executive training” session at the Harvard Business School. Wolff believes that, through meeting their classmates and becoming part of a wider network, the graduates then establish contacts who they rely on in their later careers. Today, the school’s program includes courses offered over the course of five years at irregular intervals, which in some cases may overlap with the beginnings of some of its participants’ political or professional careers – meaning they will be making regular visits to Davos. Emmanuel Macron and Peter Buttigieg, for example, were selected for the school less than five years ago, which means it is possible they have been regularly attending Young Global Leaders-related programs while in political office and may in fact still be attending them today.

A Worldwide Network of Wealth & Influence
Graduates from the Young Global Leaders school, and Global Leaders for Tomorrow before them, find themselves very well-situated given that they then have access to the WEF’s network of contacts. The WEF’s current Board of Trustees includes such luminaries as Christine Lagarde, former Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and current President of the European Central Bank; Queen Rania of Jordan, who has been ranked by Forbes as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world; and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the largest investment management corporation internationally and which handles approximately $9 trillion annually. By tracing the connections between the school’s graduates, Wolff claims that you can see that they continue to rely on each other for support for their initiatives long after they participated in the Global Leaders programs.

Wolff believes that many elite universities play a role in the process determined by the WEF, and that they should no longer be seen as operating outside of the fields of politics and economics. He cites the example of the Harvard Business School, which receives millions of dollars from donors each year, as well as the Harvard School of Public Health, which was renamed the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health after it received $350 million from the Hong Kong-born billionaire Gerald Chan. The same is true of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, which became the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health after media mogul Michael Bloomberg donated $1.8 billion to the school in 2018.

Wolff states that the WEF’s influence goes far beyond those who have passed through the Global Leaders and Global Shapers programs, however, as the number of people who participate in the annual Davos conferences is much larger than many suspect; he mentions being informed that approximately 1,500 private jets bring attendees to the event each year, overloading Switzerland’s airports.

The Alliance of Big Business & Government
The main goal of the WEF’s activities, Wolff believes, is to facilitate and further high-level cooperation between big business and national governments, something which we are already seeing take place. Viviane Fischer, another participant in the Corona Committee podcast, points out that the British-based company Serco processes migrants for the British government and also manages prisons around the world, among its many other activities. The pharmaceutical industry’s international reach is also considerable: Wolff mentions that Global Leaders alumnus Bill Gates, for example, had long been doing business with Pfizer, one of the main producers of the controversial mRNA anti-Covid vaccines, through his Foundation’s public health initiatives in Africa since long before the pandemic began. Perhaps not coincidentally, Gates has become one of the foremost champions of lockdowns and the Covid vaccines since they became available, and The Wall Street Journal has reported that his Foundation had made approximately $200 billion in “social benefits” from distributing vaccines before the pandemic had even begun. One can only imagine what its vaccine profits are today.

Digital technology, which is now all-pervasive, is also playing a prominent role in the elite’s global designs. Wolff highlights that BlackRock, run by Global Leaders alumnus Larry Fink, is presently the largest advisor to the world’s central banks and has been collecting data on the world financial system for more than 30 years now, and undoubtedly has a greater understanding of how the system works than the central banks themselves.

One of the goals of the current policies being pursued by many governments, Wolff believes, is to destroy the businesses of small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs so that multinational corporations based in the United States and China can monopolize business everywhere. Amazon, which was led until recently by Global Leaders alumnus Jeff Bezos, in particular has made enormous profits as a result of the lockdown measures that have devastated the middle class.

Wolff contends that the ultimate goal of this domination by large platforms is to see the introduction of digital bank currency. Just in the past few months, China’s International Finance Forum, which is similar to the WEF, proposed the introduction of the digital yuan, which could in turn be internationalized by the Diem blockchain-based currency network. Interestingly, Diem is the successor to Libra, a cryptocurrency that was first announced by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, indicating that a global currency that will transcend the power of either the dollar or the yuan, and managed through the cooperation of Chinese, European, and American business networks, is currently being discussed. The International Finance Forum’s supervisory board includes such names as the WEF’s Christine Lagarde; Jean-Claude Trichet, the former President of the European Central Bank; and Horst Köhler, the former Head of the International Monetary Fund.

Wolff further explains that the lockdowns and subsequent bailouts that were seen around the world over the past two years left many nations on the verge of bankruptcy. In order to avoid an economic catastrophe, the governments of the world resorted to drawing on 650 billion special drawing rights, or SDRs, which are supplementary foreign exchange reserve assets managed by the International Monetary Fund. When these eventually come due, it will leave these same governments in dire straits, which is why it may be that the introduction of digital currency has become a sudden priority – and this may have been the hidden purpose of the lockdowns all along.

Wolff says that two European countries are already prepared to begin using digital currency: Sweden and Switzerland. Perhaps not coincidentally, Sweden has had virtually no lockdown restrictions due to the pandemic, and Switzerland has taken only very light measures. Wolff believes that the reason for this may be that the two countries did not need to crash their economies through lockdown measures because they were already prepared to begin using digital currency before the pandemic began. He contends that a new round of lockdowns may be being prepared that will finish off the world’s economies for good, leading to massive unemployment and in turn the introduction of Universal Basic Income and the use of a digital currency managed by a central bank. This currency might be restricted, both in terms of what individuals can spend it on as well as in the time frame that one has to spend it in.

Further, Wolff indicates that the inflation currently being seen around the world is an inevitable consequence of the fact that national governments, after taking loans from the central banks, have introduced approximately $20 trillion into the global economy in less than two years. Whereas previous bailouts were directed into the markets, this latest round has gone to ordinary people, and as a result, this is driving up the prices of products that ordinary people spend their money on, such as food.

Democracy Has Been Cancelled
The ultimate conclusion one must draw from all of this, according to Wolff, is that democracy as we knew it has been silently cancelled, and that although the appearance of democratic processes is being maintained in our countries, the fact is that an examination of how governance around the world works today shows that an elite of super-wealthy and powerful individuals effectively control everything that goes on in politics, as has been especially evident in relation to the pandemic response.

The best way to combat their designs, Wolff says, is simply to educate people about what is happening, and for them to realize that the narrative of the “super-dangerous virus” is a lie that has been designed to manipulate them into accepting things that run contrary to their own interests. If even 10% of ordinary citizens become aware of this and decide to take action, it could thwart the elite’s plans and perhaps open a window for ordinary citizens to take back control over their own destinies.

Perhaps, one day, you will realise you are the "expected result" from this agenda. Those who aren't following the narrative are also anticipated. Austria is dealing with them right now.

Which booster shot will you stop at YuriB? Lucky number 13th?

I wonder if Jacinda looks more trustworthy when she holds a baby or when she is standing next to Klaus Schwab. What do you think YuriB?

Perhaps you can tell her this: "Be wary of the company you keep for they are a reflection of who you are, or who you want to be..."

[Risto the Great]

By the way, the videos at the bottom of the above link are interesting. You will note that the interviewer, Reiner Fuellmich, and the Corona Investigative Committee with over 150 Lawyers globally have been taken down off YouTube...

You probably applaud it, YuriB. Mustn't have intelligent people interfering with the "experiment".

[kompir]

How long before AFL and NRL players drop on the field next year?

https://www.markerzone.com/news/index.php?no=63329

[Risto the Great]

How long before AFL and NRL players drop on the field next year?

https://www.markerzone.com/news/index.php?no=63329

The increased death rate of young sports men and women is staggering at the moment. Those in denial still can't (or refuse) to join the dots.

[Risto the Great]

Gibraltar is the most vaccinated place on Earth (100% of population fully vaccinated)



I blame the unvaccinated!


Meanwhile in New Zealand:



It is working folks. More jabs gets you higher on the graph. Keep going! There is a prize to be won!