Biden's Dicey Cancer Moonshot

In vowing to "end cancer as we know it" within 25 years, President Biden expressed hope that his utopian medical vision will finally unite and rally all Americans. That's because the country's second leading cause of death affects Democrats and Republicans in roughly equal numbers. Are there any other kind of people besides Democrats and Republicans?

Biden and the courtiers of the corporate press are hoping you won't notice that his "public/private" Cancer Moonshot Initiative effectively puts the immediate interests of capitalist predators above the interests of the cancer patients of the future. Why else would he appoint the vice president of a troubled research lab called Ginkgo Bioworks to run the new research bureau (ARPA-H) at the National Institutes For Health (NIH)? Could it be because Master of the Universe and philanthrocapitalist Bill Gates owns a major stake in Ginkgo as well as enjoying a longstanding major financial "partnership" with the NIH itself? So far, nobody's saying. 

Actually, Gates was one of the first investors in Ginkgo, before Harry Sloan, a former CEO of MGM, took the youngish company public last year with one of those shady SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) public offerings - whereupon smaller, subsequent investors (not Gates, of course) lost a lot of money and are now suing the firm for fraud in a class-action lawsuit. The plaintiff calls it "a colossal scam" and the company "a Frankenstein mash-up of the worst frauds in the past 20 years." If you didn't read or hear about this particular scandal in any mainstream media account of the Biden announcement, it's because the mainstream media didn't mention it. As we all know, if reliable mainstream media sources don't mention something, then it must not exist. At least Google searches haven't suppressed it, yet.

Sloan himself sits on the Board of Directors at Gingko. Not a bad gig for a guy who got his start in Hollywood doing entertainment law.

As a matter of fact, Joe Biden's praise of his own cancer initiative and his choice to lead it are eerily reminiscent of the time he got scammed into praising Elizabeth Holmes and her Theranos lab. You may remember that Holmes hoodwinked politicians and deep-pocketed investors alike with her outlandish claim she'd invented an i-Pod sized device that could analyze just one single drop of blood and diagnose a whole panoply of diseases. Here's what Biden gushed at his Kennedy Center event on Monday:

Imagine a simple blood test during an annual physical that could detect cancer early, where the chance of a cure are best.

Imagine getting a simple shot instead of a grueling chemo or getting a pill from a local pharmacy instead of invasive treatments and long hospital stays.

Imagine treatments beyond cancer. Bold approaches to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity, something Vice President Harris is laser — laser-focused on.

Imagine if more than 800 rural hospitals weren't at risk of closure  because they are "underperforming." Imagine if a recent study hadn't shown that cancer patients living in 160 poor counties weren't dying at 20 times the rate of those in better-off counties. Imagine if there was government-run single payer health insurance. Imagine if Joe Biden hadn't forgotten to implement a public health insurance option the minute he was elected president. Imagine if nobody called you a divisive unicorn whenever you called for a better, more equitable world.

  Meanwhile, I didn't mean to imply that Dr. Renee Wegrzyn herself is an unqualified fraudster like Elizabeth Holmes. In fact, her credentials seem impeccable - a Ph.D. in applied biology as well as previous revolving-door stints at DARPA, the government's Defense Advanced Research Agency and the Intelligence Advanced Research  Projects Agency Activity in the field of biosecurity. It's her current employer and its shadowy funding and shadowy research that deserve more scrutiny. Not that DARPA doesn't deserve a lot more scrutiny itself, come to think of it. 

Gingko's website does have a very Frankenstein-ish vibe, bragging that its aim is to "keep biology weird" by doing things like manufacturing its own cells and DNA. I can see why Bill Gates, who's been described as a "bio-predator" by author and activist Vandana Shiva for his crusade to data-mine plant DNA and alter seeds and patent them, thereby putting small subsistence farmers of the world out of business, is into proprietary human genetic engineering. It's just a hop, skip and a jump from the plant to the animal kingdom and all the glorious patents to be had by those in the know.

Coincidentally, US Bancorp of Delaware (Biden's home state) just  purchased almost 250,000 shares of Ginkgo stock.

But even the MIT Technology Review people have their doubts about the company and its CEO, Jason Kelly, who actually does sound like a clone of Elizabeth Holmes. Reporter Antonio Regolado writes,

Given Kelly’s spiel, it is surprising that 13 years after it was founded, Ginkgo can’t name a single significant product that is manufactured and sold using its organisms. To the company’s fans, that’s no problem. They say Ginkgo embodies the biggest trends in DNA science and surely will become the Intel, Microsoft, or Amazon of biology. Kelly has compared Ginkgo to all three. To skeptics, however, Ginkgo is a company with modest scientific achievements and little revenue, and its greatest talents lie in winning glowing press coverage and raising money.

Thanks a lot, Biden!

Tellingly, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was absent from the elite scrum at the Cancer Moonshot fest at the Kennedy Center. She recently launched an investigation and issued a scathing report on the "SPAC Hack" empire from which Gingko has achieved its dubious $15 billion valuation based upon zero accomplishments. Warren is sponsoring legislation which would sew up the loopholes that allow SPACs to make outlandish claims that enrich people like Bill Gates while bilking "everyday investors."