In this episode, I sit down with Brownstone Institute fellow Debbie Lerman to discuss her research into U.S. government documents and the origins of America’s pandemic policies.

The response to COVID—from lockdowns to mask mandates to vaccine mandates—was actually a national security response, not a public health response, she argues.

According to Lerman’s research, in a sharp break from official pandemic preparedness plans, the National Security Council (NSC) was put in charge of the pandemic policy in 2020. And Health and Human Services (HHS) was removed as the lead federal agency for the pandemic response and replaced with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), who “were like a deer in headlights,” she argues.

What really happened in the first few months of 2020?

And for years now, scientists have been working on mRNA technology, but prior to the COVID-19 vaccines, nothing had been approved. The pandemic turned into an opportunity, she says, and now—despite growing evidence of critical side effects from the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines—Moderna and BioNTech have dozens of new mRNA vaccines and therapeutics in development.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Debbie Lehrman, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Debbie Lerman:
Thank you so much for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:
Debbie, you’ve done some really fascinating research, from my perspective. You discovered that the U.S. pandemic response in terms of policy was actually led by the National Security Council, not HHS [U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services], as a lot of us had assumed for a long time. We’re going to get into that. Before we go there, your background isn’t researching the government. Please tell me about how you came to be doing this work.

Ms. Lerman:
That’s a good question. You’re right. I don’t have the background of somebody who is an investigative journalist or who is reading through government documents and trying to figure out how different agencies are doing different things. I didn’t know what any of those acronyms meant.

But when March, 2020 came along, I felt like everything that I knew and everything that I believed in went away. I really got a little crazy and I didn’t know what to do. Most people where I come from were all very much afraid of the virus and in favor of any measures that the government suggested that we take against it.

Mr. Jekielek:
They were ready to take those measures, basically.

Ms. Lerman:
They were absolutely ready and happy. Whenever I questioned it, they asked me if I was a Trumpist. That really got to me because I’m a socialist liberal Democrat. I was. They know that. My friends and my family know that I’ve always been that and never voted for a Republican, and didn’t like Trump at all.

But I also didn’t think with everything Trump said that we had to do the opposite. I also didn’t think that if you are looking at evidence and facts, that it has anything to do with Trump. There was such a disconnect between what I was saying and what their reaction was. That is what scared me.

I said, “I’m talking to you about facts and you’re coming back to me with some kind of either political or ideological response. There’s a disconnect between reality as I see it, and the reason that you think you’re doing things or I’m doing things.” That really, really disturbed me.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please tell me about your background, because I do think it’s relevant. I actually don’t think you were not qualified to do some really good in-depth research here. Please tell me about your educational background.

Ms. Lerman:
Sure.

Mr. Jekielek:
And your work.

Ms. Lerman:
In terms of education, I have an undergraduate degree from Harvard in English. My whole career was in writing. Yes, I am a writer. I did a lot of medical writing, and I knew how to read medical studies. I also knew how to translate complicated medical information and scientific information for a lay audience. I knew how to look at numbers.

The first thing I did when they talked about the pandemic was to look at the numbers. Why? I want to know how scary it is for me. I want to know, “Am I going to get it? If I get it, am I going to get sick and die?” That’s what everybody wants to know, first thing. I looked at the numbers coming out of Italy at the beginning when everybody was terrified.

Let’s say 20,000 people died in Italy. I said, “There’s 60 million people in Italy and 20,000 people died, or 20,000 people got sick. They were talking about tens of thousands of people that they were worried about. I said, “In a 60-million-person country, even 20,000 people getting sick or dying is not a reason to do anything at all, except increase the capacity of the hospitals, and find ways to treat them if you can.

There just didn’t seem to me to be a big emergency, and it seemed like the emergency was being fabricated. It also seemed to me that the people who were falling for it were those that I used to identify with. They were telling me that because I didn’t, I was somehow ideologically and politically wrong, and that I was not in their tribe anymore.

Mr. Jekielek:
What was that like?

Ms. Lerman:
It was horrible. It was really horrible because I felt lonely. I felt isolated. I don’t do social media, so I don’t do Twitter and I don’t do Facebook. A lot of people that have had the same experience that I did told me that they went onto the social media platforms and found like-minded people. I think those platforms are pretty destructive to democracy, which is a totally different topic, but that’s why I’m not on them.

It took me a while to find the like-minded people. What I did was to follow the real science, not, “the science.” I followed the actual numbers in science. The first week of the pandemic, the middle of March 2020, I was talking to a good friend and explaining that if this was an extremely contagious pathogen with everybody getting it and nobody dying, that means it has a very low infection fatality rate.

Everybody was saying 10, 5, or 2 percent, and throwing out all these percentages. She sent me the John Ioannidis article, March 17th, 2020, in Stat magazine. I read that article. I read it every day for two years because that article said, “We are basing our response to the pandemic on no knowledge and we don’t understand what’s happening. We don’t have the information, and our response is not proportional to what’s happening.”

That’s basically what he said. Now, he didn’t say only 10,000 people would die, which is how people have distorted what he said. He didn’t say he knew how many people were going to die. But he said within the range of possibility of how many people are going to die, nothing that we’re doing makes sense. And that’s how I felt.

Mr. Jekielek:
It gave you a sense of sanity at this point?

Ms. Lerman:
Just that article. Then, that article led me to another scientist. I was only following scientists at the time. I started following Ioannidis online. He led me to other scientists like Jay Bhattacharya and other scientists at Stanford where he worked. He also led me to Vinayak Prasad, who is another scientist from UCSF [University of California, San Francisco], who was giving podcasts and YouTube videos about the truth, basically.

He was saying what was actually happening, and what we should be doing, and what we should not be doing. Because what I was mostly terrified about was that what we were doing was extremely, extremely harmful. I started writing articles. The first article I wrote in March, 2020 was, “The Virus Doesn’t Scare Me, Our Response Does.” I sent it to newspapers as an op-ed. Obviously, nobody looked at it or responded.

Then, I sent it to friends. I said, “Don’t you think this is crazy? Here, I’m telling you, and I’m explaining the science. I’m explaining the numbers. I’m explaining why what we’re doing is not good and probably very, very harmful.” That’s when I would get the response, “Are you a Trumpist? What’s wrong with you? Have you completely changed your politics? They would say things like that.

They would just say, “Well, people are dying.” If I would say to somebody “Children don’t die of Covid,” the response that I got was so extreme. People would scream at me or get angry at me. So, I just stopped doing that. I stopped writing those articles because nobody wanted to read them.

When I found Brownstone, the first article that I sent to Brownstone was a letter that I had written to an art institution. I live in Philadelphia, which I had been affiliated with for a long time, where they were still requiring masks and they had vaccine mandates. I got the first two vaccines because I was so naive.

Even though I knew our whole response was wrong for some reason, which I can’t even fathom right now, probably I had succumbed to some of the propaganda. I thought, “Okay, I’ll get those vaccines and everything will go back to normal.”

Mr. Jekielek:
That was the messaging.

Ms. Lerman:
That was the messaging.

Mr. Jekielek:
That was the messaging. I forget exactly what it was.

Ms. Lerman:
It changed a lot.

Mr. Jekielek:
It did change a lot, but then we’ll be fine. It was ubiquitous.

Ms. Lerman:
Right. I probably wouldn’t do it again. But I did get the two first vaccines, and then nothing changed. Everybody still had to wear masks. Then, we started with all of the variants. Whoever heard of a variant? Then everybody started getting even crazier.

I wrote a letter to this organization and I said, “You have to stop with the mask mandates and the vaccine mandates. Because I come from a very liberal, Democrat background, I know what is important in that world. And I said, “You know what? This is also true.”

I wasn’t saying anything that was false, but I was using the levers that I thought might work in that world. I said, “It’s a racist policy. The vaccine mandates are a racist policy because,” and I gave the numbers, because I always use numbers, “the uptake in communities of color is 30 percent in Philadelphia, and the uptake in the white community is 80 percent. When you have a vaccine mandate, you’re actually excluding most of the communities that you are trying to bring in with your diversity and inclusion efforts.” They immediately dropped the vaccine mandate.

I didn’t succeed with the masks, because I couldn’t figure out a way to say that masks were racist. I sent that letter to Brownstone and I said, “Listen, I used this, and maybe other people can use it.” Five minutes after I sent it, Jeffrey Tucker from Brownstone sent me a one word email, and he said, “Okay.”

That changed my life because after he said okay to that article, I started writing all the articles that I had been writing in March, 2020—updated—now that I knew, two years later, how bad everything had been. I knew it was going to be bad. I didn’t know how bad it was going to be.

He started publishing the articles. Now, I was writing articles more from a philosophical perspective or an overarching perspective. What happened? What was the propaganda? What was the politics? Because politics played such a big role, at least in this country, for sure.

In each country, the politics played out in slightly different ways. I wrote a big article about the Covid catastrophe and what were the things that came together. The “Catastrophic Covid Convergence,” is what it was called. I said, “There were four things that came together.”

Mr. Jekielek:
I remember that piece, but please go on. This is very interesting.

Ms. Lerman:
It was panic, politics, propaganda and prophets, the four P’s. Panic; everybody was in fear. I worked on this article for a really long time to make sure that I got all of the different components, and that I explained it in a coherent way. By the time I finished the article, I realized that it had to have been a lab leak.

There’s no way there could have been that much panic in the population if it didn’t come from above, if there wasn’t a really powerful group of people or organizations that were really panicked. The only reason I can think of that they were panicked—because SARS-COV2 isn’t really that scary, it spreads really fast, but it doesn’t kill a lot of people—the only thing I can think of is that they knew it had escaped from a lab.

In my naive state at the time, I thought, “They panicked, even though in the real world it wasn’t killing a lot of people. They thought it was a potential bio-weapon, so it could kill a lot of people. They panicked.” They said, “We’re throwing out all of our pandemic preparedness plans. We’re going to just lock everything down, get a vaccine, and then everything will be fine.” That’s the panic part.

Then we had the politics, which in this country played right into it. Everybody who was opposed to Trump, with anything that Trump said about the pandemic. When he said, “Masks don’t work,” everyone said, “We’re all going to wear masks forever.” He said, “It doesn’t affect children.” Then, everyone said, “We’re going to close our schools forever.” It was kind of this…

Mr. Jekielek:
Do the opposite.

Ms. Lerman:
Do the opposite.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m going to comment very briefly.

Ms. Lerman:
Sure.

Mr. Jekielek:
A few people told me this, including former Trump administration officials that I’ve worked with or that I’ve interviewed. They said, “Yes, we think this is what the other side is doing. Whatever we wanted to do, they would just do the opposite.” I said, “But that is patently insane.” I refused to believe it. I said, “I refuse to believe your assertion here.” It has taken me another year since I first heard that.

Ms. Lerman:
Really?

Mr. Jekielek:
I was like, I think this is true. But that is so preposterous.

Ms. Lerman:
You didn’t realize it because you weren’t in the community of the people who were doing it. I was living there and I saw it happening in real time. I saw when Trump said that children don’t die of Covid, or similar things, sometimes the way he phrased them wasn’t exactly scientifically right, but he got the gist of it. Again, I’m not a Trump supporter and I don’t love Trump, but he said things that were right.

He said, “Kids aren’t affected by Covid.” That’s why whenever I said to somebody, “You understand that kids don’t die of Covid, right?” I knew the numbers of deaths and the numbers of hospitalizations. I knew all the numbers. That’s why they got so upset because he had said that. Now, I was repeating something that Trump said, and God forbid they would agree with anything that Trump said.

Mr. Jekielek:
Before we get to the other two, do you agree that this so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real thing?

Ms. Lerman:
Yes. Trump Derangement Syndrome segued perfectly into what I call Covid Derangement Syndrome. The way I define Trump Derangement Syndrome is that people got so emotionally attached. In fact, their identity became attached to hating Trump. It was no longer rational. It no longer mattered what he said.

The way I define it is if you have Trump Derangement Syndrome, you’re no longer able to evaluate what he says rationally. You can’t evaluate it rationally, because you have an emotional response. You have an identity-based response. You have a lot invested in it in terms of how you feel about yourself and how you define yourself.

That was so perfect because it led right into Covid Derangement Syndrome, which is the exact same thing, which is, “My identity as a good person, as a person who cares about my community, as a person who takes care of other people is dependent on my following every single thing that I’m told. I’m going to wear ten masks forever, and I’m going to wear them everywhere, even outside.”

Mr. Jekielek:
Do what you’re told by the anointed people.

Ms. Lerman:
Exactly.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right. But please, continue.

Ms. Lerman:
By the anointed people who are saying the opposite of Trump. The anointed people in the minds of the Covidly-deranged are the people who are saying the opposite of Trump. “I can’t do anything that Trump says, so I’m going to do everything religiously that the people who are saying the opposite are telling me to do,” even about opening schools by Easter. I was so hopeful when I heard Trump say, “We’re going to open everything by Easter.”

I don’t know if you remember that statement, but that statement was so hopeful to me. I said to my husband, I just can’t believe this. Not only is Trump right, but we have to do what he says. The opposition was so fierce because of the Trump Derangement Syndrome, which had turned into the Covid Derangement Syndrome, which was saying, “Are you kidding me? We can’t open at any time, basically. We can’t open at all until we get the vaccine.”

I don’t even know. They didn’t really have an endpoint. Maybe it’s when we get the vaccine or when we flatten the curve or when the hospitals have a certain number or don’t have a certain number. I never really understood. There really never was a good endpoint. That was one of the problems.

The politics played out so that Trump Derangement Syndrome, which was absolutely real, turned into Covid Derangement Syndrome, which is what prevented some people from seeing through some of the stuff, or who might have been wanting to open the schools. Children were one of the areas where people woke up a little bit earlier than on some other things. But they just couldn’t do it. They couldn’t do it, just because Trump said we should do it.

Mr. Jekielek:
You were going to tell me your other two P’s. But it’s the power of the repetition of information, propaganda, and indoctrination. This has been one of my lessons during this whole time period. But talking to you here, it’s really unbelievable in a way.

Ms. Lerman:
It is unbelievable. It’s so powerful and scary. The third P is propaganda. The propaganda that was happening was so strong and so powerful and so overwhelming, and it played on the Trump Derangement Syndrome. It played on people’s fears and identity politics and any performative acts that they could do to show virtue signaling. The propaganda just played right into all of that, and it worked.

It worked. I didn’t think in my lifetime that I would be a witness or a subject. We read about it in history—World War II, communist Russia, places where a whole population was subjected to an enormous amount of propaganda, and a lot of the population succumbed. It was bad.

I thought we learned from those lessons. We should know not to do that. We know that when somebody tells us something that doesn’t make any sense and that’s harmful to other people and our children, that we’re not going to do it. We’re going to say no, or we’re going to actually think independently. I’m still flabbergasted by it, but I understand better how strong the force of the propaganda was.

Then, the fourth thing is the prophets. Once all of that happened, there were the profit making companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the mask makers, the test makers, and the social media companies. The shift in wealth was just mind-boggling.

Mr. Jekielek:
It was trillions of dollars in upward transfer, the biggest wealth transfer in history by some order of magnitude.

Ms. Lerman:
I suddenly realized something after that article, and I started researching. The propaganda really got to me, and I started looking at who was doing it and why. All of a sudden, my whole structure of panic and politics and propaganda and prophets got inverted, because I realized that the propaganda, the prophets, and the panic all happened at the same time.

When I wrote that first article, I got some really interesting responses from people who worked in the Department of Defense and various associated industries and research. Somebody wrote to me who had done research for the Department of Defense, not on biodefense, but on something else. He said, “You’re a little naive when you say that there was panic from above because it was a lab leak. I don’t think they were scared. I don’t think they were panicked. They saw it as an opportunity.”

And a light bulb went on. I said, “That’s so interesting. That actually makes a lot more sense.” Because what if there was a whole system out there, or a whole network of for-profit companies, government organizations, and other interested entities that had all kinds of things that they wanted to do if there were to be a pandemic, and then a pandemic happened?

I’m not saying that they caused it. Some people would tell you they did it on purpose because they wanted to activate all of their plans. I think it was a leak. I don’t even think it matters whether it was or wasn’t, because when it happened, when there was the pandemic, I no longer think it was panic from above. Right now, I think that the prophets and the propaganda were all part of a plan that had already been in place, and it was just waiting for Sars-CoV-2 to happen.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m going to throw out one more thing before we continue. It could have been both. Having been in the China space for some years, there is an understanding, certainly with the Trump administration and Secretary Pompeo, that the CCP is capable of anything, and is ready to do anything. There’s no limit. You have to, “distrust and verify.” You see something coming out of there that looks like it might be a leak. My God, what could this be? I think there’s a very legitimate case for having-

Ms. Lerman:
Concern.

Mr. Jekielek:
Deep, deep concern and some kind of strong response. At the same time, there could also be a system that’s ready to take advantage of that, because they can make money hand over fist in this kind of a context. I’m saying it could be both.

Ms. Lerman:
It could be.

Mr. Jekielek:
Yes.

Ms. Lerman:
In this case, and I’ll agree with you, the CCP is a power to be reckoned with and not to be trusted. I actually don’t trust any information that they have put out about the virus; where it came from, where it didn’t come from, when it started, or when the first cases were detected. I don’t trust any of that.

But I also know that we were involved in the development of gain-of-function viruses. Some people say we were trying to get ahead of pandemics, so that we would know what the viruses were going to evolve into, and then we could develop vaccines ahead of time. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, because we have no idea what viruses are going to develop into in nature.

I’ve talked to people who have worked on that kind of research who say it doesn’t make any sense. But it does make sense if you think that your enemies are going to try to develop bio-weapons based on gain-of-function technology, or you want to develop that kind of capability yourself.

If you want to develop that kind of capability and you want to know what your potential enemies are trying to develop, there are ways you might do that. I know Andrew Huff worked for EcoHealth Alliance, who was working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and they were working on that kind of thing. I don’t think it was just the Chinese, I don’t think it was just the CCP.

It was the CCP and a bunch of western countries’ biodefense organizations working together. Germany was involved in Wuhan, not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but another institute in Wuhan that was looking at stuff like that. Brownstone has reported on that. France was one of the countries that actually created the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Mr. Jekielek:
Correct.

Ms. Lerman:
The United States was funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A lot of things were happening around there that made me think that everyone was in it together.

Mr. Jekielek:
You found that it was in fact the National Security Council that took control of pandemic policy, as opposed to what you would expect in a normal situation, which most of us thought that it would be HHS running the show.

Ms. Lerman:
Yes. I don’t know if you want to know the story of how I got to that research. I wrote the article that was really very general, and it was a very broad analysis of the panic and the propaganda. I wasn’t intending to get into the minutia of what was the pandemic policy before Covid? What did it become during Covid? Who was running it? Who were the people?

I really wasn’t interested in the particular people who were involved until Jeffrey Tucker at Brownstone said, “I need somebody to review Deborah Birx’s book about Covid.” I do anything that Jeffrey says. I took the book and started reading it, and after 50 pages I told my husband something really, really shady is going on here.

It’s hard for me to explain, but I’m a literature major. I don’t read books for what the words say. I read it for what they mean and the subtext. The subtext of what she was saying was, “I want you to believe something and I’m covering something up.” That’s how it came across to me.

In the intro to her book, she says, “I really cared about Africa. That’s all I really cared about.” But I got a call from my friend Matt Pottinger, who was the Assistant National Security advisor on China, and he told me to come to the White House. Actually, it was his wife that I used to work back in the eighties.

I said that none of this makes sense. Nobody who is an Assistant National Security Advisor to the President of the United States asks his wife, “Who did you work with in the eighties?” She tells him, “I worked with Deborah Birx and she was great. You should call her because she should really run the pandemic response.”

I don’t know. Maybe that makes sense to some people, but when I read that it made no sense at all. Why does the Assistant National Security Advisor to the President for China have anything to do with the pandemic?

Mr. Jekielek:
I know why. I can tell you.

Ms. Lerman:
We know why.

Mr. Jekielek:
I can tell you why. Because he’s someone who actually understands the CCP threat deeply. I know the guy. He understands it very well. He would be someone who would be thinking, “Oh my God, what is this?”

Ms. Lerman:
Right. But would he be the one who you would turn to, to lead or choose a leader for a public health pandemic response? Do you see what I’m saying? That’s where the disconnect was. I wasn’t worrying about whether this national security advisor was caring about Covid. Yes, he has to care about our relationship with China.

“Why didn’t they tell us about it? Were they covering it up? When did they know about it?” All of that. Why is he telling us that Fauci or Collins shouldn’t be leading the government task force, but it should be this other person who he’s bringing in? Why is that part of our public health response to a pandemic? That’s where my mind went.

It just didn’t make sense to me. All I was trying to figure out was why was our response so bad? Why did we make so many mistakes, intentional or unintentional? I don’t know. All of a sudden, I see that the person who is now put in charge of the task force is somebody who has no experience with anything except for AIDS.

She did AIDS research in the eighties, and then she was an AIDS ambassador for a few decades after that in Africa. No experience. No knowledge. There are so many people like John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya who have been doing this all their lives. They’ve been studying epidemiology, and yet, we’re putting Birx in charge of a public health task force.

I didn’t understand it. That’s why I started looking at the documents. Once I started looking at the documents, I found the closest thing that we have to a Covid pandemic response plan. As a democracy and as a country where we pay taxes for our government to be prepared for pandemics and all of that, we have the right to know the plan that our government has, and what plan they’re implementing.

I looked at all the plans that we had. We had a whole bunch of plans that were public health plans. We had a whole bunch of plans that were biodefense plans. There were plans that were started mostly after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks in preparation for a bioterror attack, which means somebody trying to release a virus that might kill a lot of people. We had all those plans, and then we also had the public health plans. I read all the plans, and I read everything that we were supposed to be doing.

The public health plans all said, “There’s no proof that masks work.” If we are talking about PPEs [Personal Protective Equipment] or NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions], that type of universal masking doesn’t work. Testing and quarantining doesn’t work. These are really fundamental things that every epidemiologist or virologist knows.

Because when you have an airborne respiratory virus that is very quickly transmitted, you can’t test and quarantine. You can test and quarantine when there’s three cases. You can’t test once it’s in the population, which it already was by January, 2020. It was already everywhere, and we knew it.

There are maps on the internet that show in January, it was in a bunch of countries and a bunch of states. If it’s in a bunch of countries and in a bunch of states, you cannot do testing and quarantining. Anyways, that’s what those plans said.

The plan that we had said that the states should be prepared to respond, depending on how many cases there are, but mostly how many hospitalizations there are, and how serious it is. We need to increase hospital capacity, not shut down to flatten the curve, so that too many people won’t go to the hospital. That’s not part of any pandemic preparedness plan.

The pandemic preparedness plan says we need to quickly step up and increase hospital capacity, so that we don’t have to shut everything down and flatten the curve. Those are all things that are in every plan that the government had. And who’s in charge? Like you said, it’s Health and Human Services, a big umbrella agency. Underneath Health and Human Services is the CDC, the NIH, and the NIAID, which is Fauci’s organization.

That’s the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. NIH is the National Institutes of Health. CDC is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They are supposed to be in charge. All of a sudden, Deborah Birx comes in and they say, “She’s just another public health person. She’s going to be in charge now.”

But Fauci and Collins are still responsible, and everybody thinks they’re the ones who are making the plan. I found the document, it’s called PanCAP-A. That was the plan they put together in 2018, and this is the government’s plan. When we are taxpayers paying our government to have plans, we also are paying to be able to see those plans. It is difficult to find these plans on the internet or anywhere else. They are really, really hard to find. Now, I think that’s really weird.

We have a public health crisis, we have a pandemic, and we don’t even have a piece of paper or a site from our government saying, “This is our plan.” Then, I found these plans. There is a March 13th version of the Pandemic Crisis Plan. On March 13th, 2020, you can see that they updated the 2018 plan for pandemic preparedness, which says all the things that I said.

“We have to be able to increase hospital capacity. Each state has to respond based on how things are happening. “ There is an awareness in pandemic planning that it’s not all happening at the same time everywhere, because the virus is spreading in different places at different times.

Some places like Utah or Texas might not have any cases for a few months, while New York is experiencing a huge explosion of cases. In that case, New York should be responding in a certain way, and Utah or Texas should be responding in a completely different way. That’s all in the plans.

But the March 13th, 2020 version of the plan has a few things inserted. There’s an org chart that’s in all the plans that says that the CDC is doing this, and that the NIH is doing that. Health and Human Services is the lead federal agency. Now, the lead federal agency is the government agency that’s designated as the agency in charge.

That means they make the policy. They decide what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. They get help from other agencies that are designated to help in different areas. FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] helps with on-the-ground help to different states that need the help at certain times. The Department of Agriculture helps if needed, and the Department of Transportation helps if needed. Each department is helping, but HHS is in charge.

All of a sudden, there was a new square on the org chart that said; Policy, National Security Council. Underneath that, very interestingly, it said; WMD, weapons of mass destruction. Why? First of all, why is the National Security Council suddenly in charge of pandemic policy? Second of all, why does it say weapons of mass destruction? What does this virus have to do with weapons of mass destruction? If it does have to do with weapons of mass destruction, why aren’t we being told about it?

That to me was mind-boggling. This document has a few footnotes and insertions, and that’s where you find the information. I’ve realized and I’ve heard this before, but I didn’t realize it until I started researching all the information, that what they don’t want you to know is hidden in the footnotes. The footnotes said that the National Security Council had a plan, but it wasn’t included in this document.

This was the old document. This was the CDC/NIH document that they had inserted a few things into. I started looking on the internet for their plan. I found out President Trump did something that was not reported anywhere. He invoked the Stafford Act. I had never heard of it before.

The Stafford Act is used when there’s a disaster like a hurricane or a flood to release funds for FEMA. It gives FEMA the ability to, and it allows the governor to declare a state of emergency. It starts the whole cascade of things that you need in order to help people when there’s a national disaster. There’s a whole list of natural disasters that FEMA is in charge of. A pandemic is not one of them.

Public health is not on the list of the things that they do. President Trump invoked the Stafford Act in all 50 states simultaneously. It had never been done before. This is in the public record. It’s not like I had to FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] any of these documents, but I had to dig. The National Security Council, who is now in charge of policy, is saying there is now a disaster in all 50 states at the same time.

This is exactly the opposite of what the actual pandemic preparedness document says. If you’re doing it in the public health way, all 50 states are completely different. A uniform blanket disaster is decreed on the entire country. On March 18th, 2020, I found this through Senate hearings on what went wrong during our initial pandemic response and also some FEMA documents from the Inspector General who was commenting on what they did wrong or what went wrong. HHS was taken off as lead federal agency for the pandemic response.

That to me was even more significant than the National Security Council taking over the policy. Because like you said, Matt Pottinger, knows the danger from China. This is also a national security issue. We have to worry about our relationships internationally. We have to worry about how this is going to impact our national security on a broader level, not just public health, as you might say.

But if the HHS, which is supposed to be the lead federal agency for pandemic response, isn’t even in charge of communications or implementation of policy, who is in charge? FEMA. FEMA was like a deer in headlights. Nobody told them this was going to happen. A few weeks before this happened, there’s an internal document saying, “We should be prepared if certain states need our help, but there’s nothing right now that we really need to worry about.”

They were totally unprepared and all of a sudden they’re in charge. There’s another new org chart in one of the Inspector General’s documents that shows that everything that the CDC, the NIH, and HHS were supposed to do as lead federal agency for pandemic response, now, FEMA had to do, with no preparation, no documents, and no history of doing anything like that. In their testimony to the Senate committee they said, “We shouldn’t have been put in that position. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

Nobody in that hearing asked why HHS was taken off and why FEMA was put in? FEMA is an agency that is under the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency are in charge of keeping us safe from wars and terrorism and things that threaten our national security.

They’re not in charge of keeping us healthy or safe from threats to our health. I didn’t have to FOIA any of those documents. I just found them by digging and digging and digging. Nobody else knew or was reporting about it. I didn’t sleep for a few days. I thought, “This is really crazy.” It got published on Brownstone. I thought, “Clearly somebody’s going to see this and it’s going to be news. People are going to care.”

No, nobody cared. I’m still really shocked. It meant that the response was not a public health response. It was a national security response. If it’s a national security response, that means it doesn’t follow the principles of public health. The number one principle of public health is to not panic, keep everybody calm, help the people who are affected by the health problem, solve the health problem, and let everybody else live their life. That’s what it is.

We did the opposite. We shut everything down. We threw everything out that we knew about masks not working, about testing, and quarantining when you have an airborne respiratory virus that’s already spread everywhere. All of a sudden case numbers became the metric of how worried we should be about this virus.

Case numbers mean absolutely nothing. Because if everybody gets Covid and nobody dies, then we could have 330 million cases and we wouldn’t care at all. They were also constantly talking about the cases in order to foment panic, and all of those things had nothing to do with public health. I realized we had been subjected to some kind of weird national defense exercise. Maybe they really were worried, because they thought it was a bioweapon, but it wasn’t a public health response.

All they cared about was shutting everything down until we had the vaccine. I called it, “quarantine until vaccine.” In order to get everybody to quarantine, because who’s going to agree to that, they had to panic. This is why my whole paradigm from the beginning got shifted.

The panic wasn’t from the top. The panic was induced by the propaganda. The people who induced panic with the propaganda also were interested in the profits and in everything that had to do with the development of the vaccines. I was looking at the public health documents for pandemic preparedness and also the bio-defense documents.

In the bio-defense documents, there is one thing that they care about. Again, this isn’t even assigning some kind of blame as if they had some really dark, evil purpose. Everybody was doing their job. The public health people got pushed out. The national security people said, “We’re taking over for whatever reason and our plan is that we’re going to keep everybody as separate as possible, so that as few people as possible get it until we have the vaccines.

For the past 20 years, we’ve been developing this amazing technology that we’ve been wanting to try called mRNA technology. We think that that’s the best way to deliver a medical countermeasure against a bioweapon. Medical countermeasures are different from vaccines in the sense that first and foremost, they’re developed in order to protect the troops and people on the front lines who might be attacked with a bioweapon.

Second of all, they have to be done really fast. In a document from 2003, Fauci said, “In 20 years, we want to go from bug to drug in 24 hours.” Bug to drug. Fantasy. He had billions and billions of dollars, though, that were devoted to that research. Then, DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] and all kinds of other organizations that work on medical countermeasures for the national security agencies and the Department of Defense had $5 billion a year devoted to this stuff.

In 2017, when they were starting to work on DNA and mRNA platforms, they said, “It’s not 24 hours bug to drug. It’s 60 days. We want a platform that in 60 days, no matter what is thrown at us, we’re going to be able to develop a countermeasure.” That’s in 2017. 2020 comes along. They are nowhere near getting anything out. Nothing that they’ve ever developed has ever worked.

People have been working on mRNA technology for a really long time, and have found they haven’t been able to develop any safe products. Because in order to deliver the mRNA to the bot to the cells, you have to do all kinds of things to it that make it really toxic. There were two main companies that were working on mRNA; Moderna, which was working closely with Fauci, and BioNTech in Germany.

They had developed them and they were working on them. BioNTech was working mainly on cancer, and Moderna was working mainly on these biodefense things. Those are all the facts that I know. My theory is that in January or even December, they knew about this virus and they already had the genetic sequence. They decided that for this mRNA technology they had been putting billions of dollars into for a decade or two, this is the chance.

What is the chance? The chance is that now we don’t have to go through the whole long, boring, annoying, regulatory process. If you think you have a platform that works and is going to deliver a miraculous way to protect the troops and also the population from anything in 60 days, you don’t want to wait 10 or 20 years with all the clinical trials and all the possibilities of failure to finally have something that works.

You think—and I’m giving them a lot of credit here because I’m saying that they really wanted this to work—that you can bypass all that regulatory stuff. If you could just bypass it, then you could show everybody that it really works. This is where the profits come in, but it’s also where an honest desire to have these platforms work also comes in.

It was predetermined—I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m researching it—from the beginning that the mRNA technologies were going to work no matter what. Unless everybody who got the shot dropped dead immediately, it was going to be a success. They got Pfizer to take over BioNTech. BioNTech had never been working on anything that had to do with viruses. They say they were doing some flu research, but 99 percent of their research was on cancer. Pfizer took over BioNTech. Moderna and Fauci and NIAID were already working together.

Once they decided that it was a medical countermeasure and that we were developing it in opposition to a bio-weapon, it no longer had to go through any of the regulatory steps that a vaccine would have to go through. A vaccine absolutely cannot be developed safely and effectively in less than ten years, and some people say five years. It takes years.

But if it’s a medical countermeasure, then you can present it differently. The process of manufacturing is called a demonstration. The actual thing that you’re manufacturing is a prototype. As a prototype, it doesn’t have to go through anything at all. I think that you know Sasha Latypova?

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m aware of her, yes.

Ms. Lerman:
She does amazing research. She combined my research about the fact that it was a national security response and that the Department of Defense was responsible for the vaccine research. The Department of Defense being responsible for the vaccine research is fact, and it’s in the public record. There were Army generals who were in charge of Warp Speed, not doctors, not researchers, and not public health people. It was run as a military operation.

Because of it being in the military framework and in the medical countermeasure framework as opposed to the vaccine public health framework, they were able to bypass everything, manufacturing hundreds of millions of vaccines when there wasn’t any infrastructure for that. There wasn’t anything that was prepared for that or set up for that. Definitely not by Moderna. Definitely not by BioNTech. Pfizer was able to scale up, and they also had a lot of vendors and a lot of subcontractors that they used for it. All of a sudden, in less than a year, you’re somehow able to manufacture millions and millions of vaccine doses safely and effectively?

It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense at all. But all they needed were the initial studies that said that it was 90 percent effective. Now, I’m reading the Moderna and the Pfizer books, and it’s 95, 96 percent effective in preventing death or serious disease in a very small number. They had lots of patients getting it, but only a few patients actually got sick or died.

The number of people you needed to give a vaccine to in order to prevent one or two deaths was huge. It doesn’t matter. They can still say that it’s 95 percent effective at preventing death, and then they can stop the trials with no long-term safety follow-ups, and no long-term efficacy follow-ups.

Even though we know that after a few months, the efficacy waned and possibly reversed, it didn’t matter because those vaccines were already successful. It means that the mRNA platform that they were so excited about works. It works. I’m not saying that it works. They are saying that they have proven that it works because they produced something that didn’t kill everybody right away.

They were able to show short term that it prevented some deaths, and that it prevented deaths to a certain percentage without any follow up. We know after the follow-up how it really turned out. Based on that success, Moderna and BioNTech now have dozens of mRNA vaccine trials going on, which I think is just astonishing.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is where the pandemic industrial complex, as you describe it, which is various agencies and industry working together closely comes in.

Ms. Lerman:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
As we finish up, please explain to me what that means, and where is this today?

Ms. Lerman:
That’s a good question because that brings us back to that original concept that I had and where it ended up. The propaganda, the prophets, and the politics all went together into this pandemic industrial complex. I’ll also add that it’s international. My research hasn’t been able to catch up to cover all the different countries. Where is it now? What’s happening now is that they have already baked in so much, because so many people are getting so much out of it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you mean financially?

Ms. Lerman:
Both financially and also in terms of validation. The biodefense efforts that so many billions and billions of dollars were poured into are validated. I’m putting all of this in quotes because I don’t think it’s true. But I think that they could say to themselves that it was because of the success of the vaccines. I actually think that where they are now is.

First of all, there’s all the money. There’s all the profits for the pharmaceutical industry and also for the NGOs like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that invested huge amounts of money in the vaccine effort and in the vaccine development. Even the government agencies that are involved have patents and have mechanisms by which they derive profits from the vaccines. A lot of it is money, and I’m not going to say it’s not. A lot of it is also this kind of hubris and lack of scientific rigor because they really, really wanted it to work.

Where we are now is that they have baked it into the National Pandemic Preparedness Plan that Biden just put out in 2022. In that pandemic preparedness plan, it’s really interesting, because it says, “This is the first time that we have combined our response in a biodefense and a public health sense.” They admitted, and this is on the website where they talk about it, that at one point we had the public health responses and the bio-defense response and they were separate. Now they’re the same. To me, that is scary.

Mr. Jekielek:
Absolutely fascinating. Any final thoughts as we finish, Debbie?

Ms. Lerman:
Thank you for letting me describe my research and my findings. It’s really important for people to understand this, and not on a theoretical level, but on a very practical level. Because all of the things that we did, the masking, the distancing, and the quarantining, none of that was a public health response.

All of the things that they said were for your public health were actually done so that you would be scared and so that you would stay home and so that you would comply with the plan of quarantine until vaccine, which is a national security plan. It’s not a public health plan. My deepest desire, and the reason that I’m doing all of this is so that people never agree to do it again.

Mr. Jekielek:
Here’s the thing that concerns me. There has been a profound break in trust with our agencies and our responses through all this. There may be a need for a proper biodefense national security response in the future. How do we deal with that, given what we know now?

Ms. Lerman:
That’s a great question. First of all, the risk of a bioterror attack or a bioweapons attack is much smaller than people think. Even if it were to happen, we would still have to respond in a way that makes sense. I hope that we now know that masks don’t work, they just don’t. They just physically don’t work. It doesn’t matter if it’s a bioweapon or the flu, if it is a respiratory virus, they do not work.

We know that testing and quarantining doesn’t work unless it’s a virus like Ebola where you can actually trace each case and quarantine. We need to learn, even if we have to respond to a bioweapons attack, that none of the things that we did were appropriate, whether it was an engineered virus or whether it was a virus that developed in nature.

We need to say, “Let’s go back to the drawing board to all the plans that we had before for public health. Because even if it’s a bioweapon, it’s still affecting your body and your health. It’s not a gun, it’s not a grenade, and you can’t protect yourself from it in any way other than how you would protect yourself from any virus, whether it was engineered or not.

Luckily, and this is actually a good thing, viruses that are very aggressive and that kill people really fast don’t tend to spread very fast because once they kill their host, it’s over. The viruses that spread the fastest and that infect the most people are the viruses that let their host live and let their host interact with a lot of other people. Viruses tend to be either very deadly or very transmissible.

If there was a bioweapons attack, and I’m saying this only out of my general knowledge of viruses, I don’t know what a potential bioweapon would be. In the history of humanity and viruses, we have not encountered a virus that spreads as fast as Sars-CoV-2 and kills as much as Ebola. People would like to develop it. I don’t think they’re going to be able to. Sars-CoV-2 might have been a bioweapon, but it wasn’t a very effective one, because it didn’t kill very many people.

Even if we are attacked by a bioweapon, we still have to respond in a public health way, because it’s still affecting our health and it’s still a virus. A public health response, no matter what it is, no matter who made it, no matter what their intent was, is to keep everybody calm, make sure that the most vulnerable people are protected, and let everybody else live their life.

Mr. Jekielek:
Debbie Lerman, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Lerman:
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Debbie Lehrman and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

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