by Lloyd Billingsley
CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky is departing at the end of June and Joe Biden has tapped former North Carolina health boss Dr. Mandy Cohen to replace her. More important than the identity of the CDC director is what goes on behind the scenes, and hints have been emerging.
In April of 2021, the CDC reassigned Dr. Nancy Messonnier, longtime director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). In a May 7, 2021 White House briefing, Walensky (pictured above) suddenly announced that Messonnier was stepping down.
“Dr. Messonnier has been a true hero,” Walensky told reporters. “And through her career, in terms of public health, she’s been a steward of public health for the nation. Over this pandemic and through a many-decade career, she’s made significant contributions, and she leaves behind a strong, strong force of leadership and courage in all that she’s done.”
Walensky neglected to mention Messonnier’s series of telebriefings in early 2020, conducted on January 17, January 24, January 29, January 30, February 3, February 5, February 12, February 25, and March 10.
In these sessions, not shown to the public, Messonnier warned that a “novel coronavirus” had emerged from the “Wuhan market” and the highly contagious new virus would “gain a foothold” in the United States. According to Messonnier, many people would be infected, and there was “no immunity.” Some reporters were curious about people traveling to the United States from Wuhan.
“That’s something I’m not at liberty to talk about today,” Messonnier said in the February 5 briefing, without revealing why that was so, or who was laying down the rules. On January 24, reporters who asked about China were told, “CDC has a team that’s been in China for many years where we work closely with the Department of Health in China.” There was information “from China” but Messonnier wasn’t giving it out.
“I think we should be clear to compliment the Chinese,” Messonnier said, “on the early recognition of the respiratory outbreak center in the Wuhan market, and how rapidly they were able to identify it as a novel coronavirus.” And so on, a veritable recitation of China’s talking points, but there was more to it.
In May of 2021, Walensky also failed to mention that “true hero” Nancy Messonnier was an officer of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), the CDC’s elite team of “disease detectives,” patrolling the world to prevent epidemics from arriving on American soil.
“EIS officers serve on the front lines of public health, protecting Americans and the global community,” the CDC claims. When diseases and public health threats emerge, “EIS officers investigate, identify the cause, rapidly implement control measures, and collect evidence to recommend preventive actions.”
In practice, as Peter Duesberg noted in Inventing the AIDS Virus, the EIS functions as a “medical CIA,” a support network for the CDC in government, academia, and media. For example, EIS veteran Lawrence Altman became a medical writer for the New York Times and in 2010 rendered a worshipful account of the intelligence service.
In 1995, after completing her residency in internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Nancy Messonnier went straight into the EIS. She shows up in the 2013 EIS conference report as a co-author of two studies on vaccine effectiveness, one in Burkina Faso and one in Washington, “among adolescents vaccinated with acellular pertussis vaccines.”
Messonnier’s Wikipedia profile shows the EIS officer in a jacket emblazoned with medals. According to the site, she was born Nancy Ellen Rosenstein, sister of Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department official who launched the investigation of President Trump for allegedly colluding with Russia.
Messonnier’s connection to Rosenstein, and her experience with the EIS, did not emerge at the outset of 2020. By October, the EIS did briefly expose itself.
“We are proud of our training and service in the EIS, promoting CDC’s vital mission to protect the health of the American people,” claims an October 14, 2020 “Open Letter by Epidemic Intelligence Service Officers Past and Present—in Support of CDC.” As the letter explains, “the US epidemic is sustained by deadly chains of transmission that crisscross the entire country.”
How the deadly epidemic managed to escape the intrepid EIS, land stateside, and crisscross the entire country the letter does not explain. The signers “express our concern about the ominous politicization and silencing of the nation’s health protection agency during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.”
In reality, the CDC was anything but silent—except on the EIS connections of Nancy Messonnier, their major mouthpiece on the pandemic. The 2013 conference she attended provides enlightenment on the CDC’s medical CIA.
“Fifty-seven of the new officers are women (70 percent), and 12 are citizens of other nations (15 percent),” explains Douglas H. Hamilton, director of the EIS division of applied science. “Besides the United States, this year’s officers represent Cambodia, China, Kenya, Mongolia, Nepal, Nigeria, Peru, South Korea, Taiwan, Uganda, and the United Kingdom.” (emphases added)
The CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service is actually a multinational body that includes “officers” from the People’s Republic of China. Embattled Americans might wonder which nation’s interests the Chinese EIS officers represent, and if any were on the CDC “team” working with China for many years.
The CDC’s intrepid disease detectives obviously failed to prevent the “novel coronavirus” from arriving in America, crisscrossing the country, and causing untold misery and death. The people have a right to wonder what the EIS officers, including any Chinese nationals, were doing at the time.
Remember, when reporters asked Nancy Messonnier about travel from Wuhan, she wasn’t “at liberty to talk about that.” The “true hero” and outgoing CDC boss Walensky needs to talk about it now, under oath, for as long as it takes.
Embattled Americans have a right to know which government official or politician slapped a gag order on Messonnier. The people also need to know the identities of all EIS officers in China in 2019 and 2020, their activities, travel schedules and a lot more. Biden CDC pick Dr. Mandy Cohen provides another opportunity.
Cohen is the lockdown promoter who once strapped on a mask bearing a portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime NIAID boss who claimed “I represent science.” Fauci also funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct the gain-of-function research that makes viruses more lethal and transmissible.
Fauci claims that the COVID virus arose naturally in the wild. By contrast, when former CDC director Robert Redfield found evidence of a laboratory origin, he got death threats. No word of any FBI investigation, but FBI Director Christopher Wray now assesses that “the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
In the confirmation hearing for Dr. Cohen, someone should ask the Biden pick if China, the EIS, Fauci and Messonnier ever said or did anything with which she disagreed. The struggle against white coat supremacy is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
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Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Hollywood Party and other books including Bill of Writes and Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation. His journalism has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Spectator (London) and many other publications. Billingsley serves as a policy fellow with the Independent Institute.
Photo “Rochelle Walensky Receives Her First Dose of the COVID-19 Vaccine” by Rochelle Walensky.
