Until just a few months ago, I doubt there were many American academics more solidly situated in the topmost ranks of our elite mainstream establishment than Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University.
In 1983 he gained Harvard University tenure at the remarkably young age of 28, then spent the next 19 years as a professor at that august academic institution; by the early 1990s the New York Times was already hailing him as the world’s most important figure in his field. Lured to Columbia University in 2002, he has spent the last couple of decades teaching there and also directing a couple of its research organizations, most recently the Center for Sustainable Development. TIME Magazine has twice ranked him among the world’s 100 most influential individuals, and for nearly twenty years he served as Special Advisor to several Secretary-Generals of the United Nations, while publishing many hundreds of articles and op-eds on a wide variety of subjects in our most influential media outlets.
It would be difficult to construct a more illustrious and establishmentarian curriculum vitae for an international academic figure, so in 2020 he was a natural choice to serve as chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission, established to investigate all aspects of the deadly worldwide pandemic.
Yet as he has subsequently explained in his interviews, over the course of the last couple of years he became increasingly suspicious that the true origins of the viral disease were being concealed. More than eighteen million people have died worldwide including over a million Americans, and rather than acquiescing in what he came to believe was an ongoing official cover-up, he broke with the establishment and made the courageous decision to bring the true facts to widespread public attention.
Although he has retained the subdued manner and careful phraseology of a mild academic, over the last few months the incendiary content of his published articles and his public statements have exploded across the global landscape, reaching many millions who might otherwise never have questioned what they were so uniformly being told across all in our mainstream media organs. His critics defending that orthodoxy must surely believe that he has gone dangerously rogue, and given the enormous weight of his past credibility, I suspect that the phrase “rogue elephant” has sometimes entered their thoughts.
From the earliest days of the Covid epidemic, an official narrative was promoted that the virus was natural and editors of the leading scientific journals closed their pages to any submissions that suggested otherwise. With no reputable academic papers challenging their perspective, the natural origins advocates were able to cite this silence as proof that their position represented the overwhelming scientific consensus, thereby intimidating most mainstream journalists into toeing that same line. A massive propaganda-bubble had been inflated and maintained by such administrative means.
However, as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Prof. Sachs had publication privileges in the prestigious PNAS journal, so in May he and a co-author published an important article documenting the highly suspicious characteristics of the Covid virus and calling for further investigation. This piece constituted a breakthrough, becoming the first and only paper published in a major journal that presented the very strong evidence of Covid bioengineering:
A call for an independent inquiry into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus Neil L. Harrison and Jeffrey D. Sachs • PNAS • May 19, 2022 • 2,800 Words Given his role as chairman of the Covid Commission, Sachs’ paper should have been treated as a bombshell, reaching the headlines of all our leading newspapers. But instead, it was almost totally ignored, as was the author’s public statements on the subject. But the following month, Sachs attended a small Spanish thinktank gathering, whose proceedings were soon made available on Youtube. Russia’s RT eventually ran a a small item highlighting Sachs’ presentation, and a short clip of his remarks soon went super-viral, retweeted out almost 11,000 times and accumulating over a million views.
A video clip that is viewed a million times has attracted an audience of cable news proportions, and Britain’s muck-raking Daily Mail could not resist covering the explosive story, though harshly slanting it against the suddenly controversial academic. Top Russian generals soon began citing Sachs as an authority in their public Defense Ministry briefings.
Although nearly all Western media outlets maintained their strict boycott of Sachs and his explosive accusations, a couple of prominent alternative journalists were willing to offer him a platform. During August, he began describing the outrageous Covid cover-up in interviews with Nathan Robinson of the Current Affairs webzine and on the popular podcast of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic Jeffrey Sachs • Current Affairs • August 2, 2022 • 4,300 Words Origins of the Covid Virus with Jeffrey Sachs Robert F. Kennedy Jr. • The Defender • August 20, 2022 • 54 minutes I was very impressed with Sachs’ forthright statements, and a few weeks ago I summarized the controversy in a column of my own:
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on the Covid Origins Cover-Up Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 29, 2022 • 1,400 Words
No sooner had the reverberations of Sachs’ Covid accusations died down than his remarkable candor engulfed him in an entirely different and even more immediate media controversy.
Having broken ranks with the political establishment over Covid, he soon began doing so on other important issues. During July and August he published a couple of opinion columns condemning our reckless policies towards Russia and China, with the former having already provoked a bloody and dangerous war in Ukraine and the latter periodically threatening to do the same over Taiwan.
Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster Jeffrey Sachs • Consortium News • July 1, 2022 • 1,300 Words The West’s Dangerously Simple-Minded Narrative About Russia and China Jeffrey Sachs • Common Dreams • August 23, 2022 • 1,000 Words In recent years our once-independent NATO allies have increasingly been treated as American vassals, with their seemingly-compromised political leadership regularly sacrificing their own national interests to support our demands, including our extremely aggressive policies against Russia. Such European subservience became most obvious in their wholehearted support of the severe anti-Russian economic sanctions imposed after the beginning of the Ukraine war, sanctions that have resulted in the devastating loss of the inexpensive Russian energy supplies so necessary to their industries.
With more than half of all German businesses fearful that they might be forced to permanently shut down, massive political pressure was mounting on that country’s leadership to reopen the Nord Stream pipelines with Russia. There were reports of secret negotiations under way to do exactly that, which would have produced a severe political defeat for NATO. However, that possibility was suddenly foreclosed after a series of underwater explosions severely damaged the Russian pipelines, a blow seemingly intended to render them completely inoperable. As I discussed in a recent column, America almost certainly played the central role in those attacks, which probably represented the greatest peacetime military destruction of civilian infrastructure in the history of the world.
American Pravda: Of Pipelines and Plagues Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 3, 2022 • 3,900 Words But although the evidence of American culpability was immediate and overwhelming, much of our lick-spittle Western media illogically blamed the Russians for the destruction of their own pipelines, and the story anyway never received a fraction of the coverage it warranted, with even much of the supposedly fearless alternative media avoiding the topic. An excellent segment on Tucker Carlson’s show set forth the crucial facts, but aside from his particular slice of the FoxNews audience, I suspect that even most educated Americans either remained largely unaware of the massive pipeline attacks or even vaguely blamed them on Vladimir Putin.
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