{"id":176695,"date":"2021-01-11T12:00:47","date_gmt":"2021-01-11T12:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=176695"},"modified":"2021-01-08T04:49:20","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T04:49:20","slug":"big-tech-and-big-pharma-merge-oracle-takes-over-vaccine-data-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/01\/big-tech-and-big-pharma-merge-oracle-takes-over-vaccine-data-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Tech and Big Pharma Merge: Oracle Takes Over Vaccine Data World"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The pandemic handed Oracle CEO Larry Ellison what he\u2019s wanted for decades \u2014 the power to curate the vast datasets housing our medical, financial and personal information.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>6 Jan 2021 – <\/em>As pandemic countermeasures obliterate the middle class and civil rights, Silicon Valley\u2019s billionaire robber barons are cashing in on the global economic collapse and the rise of the surveillance state.<\/p>\n

Now, one of these tech titans \u2014 a man with deep ties to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) \u2014 has claimed the golden ring: the key contract to manage all the personal, health and financial data that will allow government and industry to keep us in line as they build their New World Order.<\/p>\n

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will curate the vast datasets that house our medical, financial and personal information enabling Big Brother<\/a> to track and trace our movements, our purchases, our preferences and our vulnerabilities, and use that information to control civil populations, suppress dissent and punish disobedience.<\/p>\n

Ellison, whose estimated net worth of $87.7 billion<\/a> makes him the seventh-richest individual in the world, has just achieved a long-sought milestone. On Dec.15, Oracle, the tech company Ellison founded in 1977 with help from the CIA, issued a press release<\/a> announcing it \u201cwill serve as the CDC\u2019s [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] central data repository for all vaccination<\/a> data in the U.S. This \u2018national clearing house\u2019 system will receive data from all U.S. jurisdictions administering vaccinations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost 20 years since Ellison, in the wake of the 9\/11 terrorist attack, offered the government a proposal for a national security database \u201cthat collected everything possible to identify someone,\u201d the mogul appears to finally be sitting on cloud nine.<\/p>\n

Oracle\u2019s National Electronic Health Records Cloud dates back to the beginnings of the COVID-19<\/a> pandemic. In March 2020, a couple of weeks after letting President Trump use his estate near Palm Springs for a $100,000-a-plate golfing fundraiser, Ellison placed a call to the White House. According to a Forbes cover story<\/a> on Ellison, he \u201casked Trump if a clearinghouse existed for real-time data about treatment efficacies and outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within a week after the president asked \u201chow much?\u201d and Ellison said, \u201cfor free,\u201d the tech titan had brought together<\/a> a team of Oracle engineers \u201cto build a database and website registering coronavirus cases\u201d and work with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other agencies.<\/p>\n

The first public acknowledgment of Oracle\u2019s progress came on July 3, 2020, when the NIH\u2019s National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), overseen by Dr. Anthony Fauci<\/a>, launched the COVID-19 Prevention Trials Network (COVPN), aimed at enrolling thousands of volunteers in large-scale trials for a variety of investigational vaccines and monoclonal antibodies.<\/p>\n

Fauci achieved this by merging four existing networks, all researching HIV\/AIDS, something they would continue to do. \u201cThe network is expected to operate more than 100 clinical trial sites across the United States and internationally,\u201d according to the NIAID press release<\/a> which also stated \u201cthe COVPN website features a customized data collection platform, which Oracle (Redwood Shores, CA) built and donated, to securely identify potential trial participants.\u201d<\/p>\n

In August, a paper<\/a> published by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security proposed that the \u201cpassive reporting\u201d systems managed by the CDC and FDA ought to be revamped to forge \u201can active safety surveillance system directed by the CDC that monitors all [COVID-19] vaccine recipients \u2014 perhaps by short message service or other electronic mechanisms.\u201d<\/p>\n

By September, Operation Warp Speed<\/a> director Moncef Slaoui was telling<\/a> the periodical Science: \u201cWe\u2019re working super hard on a very active pharmacovigilance system, to make sure that when the vaccines are introduced that we\u2019ll absolutely continue to assess their safety.<\/p>\n

In October, Slaoui told the New York Times<\/a>: \u201cThe FDA is proposing that at least 50% of the individuals in the study population have at least two months of follow-up on safety before the vaccines are approved. And secondly, we are working really hard with the FDA and the CDC to make sure we have a very active pharmacovigilance surveillance system to allow us to continue to assess the safety of the vaccines as they are being used in the high risk population.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the Wall Street Journal reported<\/a> in a profile of Slaoui that he\u2019d said \u201ctracking systems will have to be \u2018incredibly precise\u2019 to ensure that patients each get two doses of the same vaccine and to monitor them for adverse health effects. Operation Warp Speed has selected the medical-distribution company McKesson\u00a0and cloud operators Google and Oracle to collect and track vaccine data.\u201d<\/p>\n

This marked the first time that Oracle\u2019s role was revealed to have expanded to include Operation Warp Speed.<\/p>\n

Oracle Chairman Ellison\u2019s lucrative government arrangements trace back to the data software pioneer\u2019s origins. In 1975, then in his early thirties, Ellison worked on a project for the electronics company Ampex in the Bay area, building a large terabit memory system<\/a> for the CIA.<\/p>\n

Ellison revealed in 2014<\/a> that the CIA not only became his firm\u2019s first customer for a \u201crelational database\u201d two years later, but that he adopted the name<\/a> from a CIA project called Oracle. \u201cThe news about our hot little database traveled around the intelligence community pretty quickly,\u201d Ellison was quoted as saying in the 2003 book, \u201cSoftwar<\/a>.\u201d \u201cIn a little over six months\u2019 time we had won several deals \u2014 the CIA, Navy Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence and the NSA [National Security Agency].\u201d<\/p>\n

By the turn of the millennium, Oracle had fought off competition from IBM and Microsoft to reach the financial pinnacle of database management. Two days after 9\/11, Ellison met with NSA Director Michael Hayden to talk about his proposed data surveillance system. He then went to see Attorney General John Ashcroft to discuss an idea for a national identification card.<\/p>\n

Writing an opinion piece<\/a> for the Wall Street Journal (October 18, 2001), Ellison reminded readers that the government already maintained thousands of databases to keep track of people as well as issuing IDs like Social Security cards and driver\u2019s licenses. Ellison wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe single thing we could do to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was integrated into a single national file. My company \u2026 has already offered to provide the necessary software for free \u2026 It\u2019s important these donations be made with no strings attached. The database would be maintained and run by the government alone, with no question of corporations benefiting \u2026 The good news is that a national database combined with biometrics, thumb prints, hand prints, iris scans or other new technology could detect false identities \u2026 We don\u2019t need to trade our liberties for our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a follow-up op-ed for the New York Times<\/a> in January 2002, Ellison thought this could be achieved in a few months because it was \u201ctechnically simple. All we have to do is copy information from the hundreds of separate law enforcement databases into a single database.\u201d<\/p>\n

In April 2002, along with Ashcroft, Ellison was a named recipient<\/a> of an annual \u201cBig Brother Award\u201d presented by Privacy International to the most notorious individuals who had done the most to threaten such liberties.<\/p>\n

By 2003, as the Patriot Act<\/a> brought an explosion in surveillance and data mining, the federal government accounted for about one-fourth of Oracle\u2019s billions in revenue.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe information about your banks, your checking balances, your saving balance is stored in an Oracle database,\u201d Ellison was quoted<\/a> in the 2004 book, \u201cThe Naked Crowd<\/a>.\u201d \u201cYour airline reservation is stored in an Oracle database. What books you bought on Amazon is stored in an Oracle database. Your profile on Yahoo! is stored in an Oracle database \u2026Privacy is already gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

That same year, Ashcroft \u2014 godfather of the Patriot Act \u2014 sued Oracle to prevent its acquisition of a multibillion-dollar intelligence contract. But after Ashcroft resigned from the second Bush administration, he founded a lobbying firm which Oracle then hired in 2005, allowing The Ashcroft Group to hit the ground running. With the group\u2019s help, Oracle went on to acquire the contract.<\/p>\n

One program that didn\u2019t last long was called Total Information Awareness<\/a> (TIA), overseen by the Pentagon\u2019s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which would later become a primary funder<\/a> of COVID-19 vaccine developer Moderna<\/a> and other of Fauci\u2019s favored companies.<\/p>\n

DARPA had conceived of TIA some years earlier. In addition to what Ellison specified needing, TIA wanted to collect Americans\u2019 medical records, drug prescriptions and even DNA, maintaining that the whole population needed surveillance to prevent not only future terrorist attacks, but bioterrorism and even naturally occurring disease outbreaks.<\/p>\n

Citizens\u2019 financial, travel and media consumption habits would also be managed in a \u201cpublic-private partnership\u201d with the NSA, CIA, private sector and academia. In a mirrored scenario to that now surrounding the pandemic, the \u201cinvisible enemy\u201d could be conquered.<\/p>\n

But the backlash was swift. The ACLU called TIA<\/a> \u201cthe closest thing to a true \u2018Big Brother\u2019 program that has ever been seriously contemplated in the United States. It is based on a vision of pulling together as much information as possible about as many people as possible into an \u2018ultra-large-scale\u2019 database.\u201d<\/p>\n

A year after its formation by DARPA, Congress defunded TIA in January 2003.<\/p>\n

But TIA never really went away. Various of its programs ended up divvied into a web of military and intelligence programs.<\/p>\n

In 2013, Ellison told CBS News<\/a> that the NSA\u2019s domestic spying program was \u201cessential.\u201d A revolving door between Oracle and the CIA, which began with Ellison himself, went on to include Leon Panetta, CIA director and then Defense Secretary under Obama, who joined Oracle\u2019s board in 2015.<\/p>\n

Oracle Labs, the research arm, invested in a partnership<\/a> with DARPA toward \u201ca vision for a \u2018macrochip,\u2019 an optically interconnected supercomputer.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the FDA revved toward emergency use approval<\/a> for the Pfizer<\/a> and Moderna vaccines late in 2020, linkages between the CIA and the Big Tech<\/a> companies escalated simultaneously. An earlier agency contract had gone to Amazon<\/a> in 2013, but on Nov. 20, it was reported<\/a> that the CIA \u201chas awarded its long-awaited Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E, contract to five companies \u2013 Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM.\u201d These companies \u201cwill compete for specific task orders issued by the CIA on behalf of itself and the 16 other agencies that comprise the intelligence community.\u201d At the moment, \u201cMicrosoft is the competitor closest to attaining authorization to host top-secret data.\u201d<\/p>\n

Procurement documents<\/a> issued by the CIA in 2019 indicated the expected value of the C2E contract could be worth tens of billions over the next decade-and-a- half.<\/p>\n

Then in mid-December, Oracle issued a press release<\/a> that said: \u201cBy working collaboratively with the CDC and the U.S. Department of Defense during the pandemic, Oracle was able to extend the capabilities of the Public Health Management Applications Suite to help manage nationwide distribution and to collect patient data around COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moving well beyond its original sketchy mandate with Fauci\u2019s NIAID, not only would Oracle\u2019s National Electronic Health Records Cloud be the CDC\u2019s new central data repository for vaccination data, but the company said<\/a> it was \u201ccurrently in discussions with dozens of countries around the world to adopt Oracle\u2019s Public Health Management Applications Suite to modernize their national public health infrastructure and thus enable efficient COVID-19 vaccine distribution, therapeutic monitoring and diagnostic testing \u2026 This is just the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n

It had been a productive and ultimately very profitable year for Ellison and Oracle. Also in mid-December, Ellison announced that his company was leaving Silicon Valley for a new headquarters in Austin, Texas, while he himself was moving to the Lanai Hawaiian island that he owned. Ellison had stepped down as Oracle CEO in 2014, but stayed on as chief technical officer. At the start of the pandemic, on March 23, his stock in the company (and he owned 35 percent of it) had dropped 11 percent. But shortly before he closed the government deal collecting all the vaccine data, his fortune rose $2.5 billion in a single week, bringing Ellison\u2019s net worth to an estimated $81.5 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This was despite a delay in his pending buy-in to the global social media platform TikTok, \u201can app for teens, filled with goofy dancing and lip-synching videos\u201d as the Wall Street Journal described it<\/a> \u2014 but a highly lucrative, and controversial, one.<\/p>\n

Last spring, around the time he started calling COVID-19 the \u201cChina virus,\u201d President Trump had ordered TikTok\u2019s Chinese parent company Bytedance to either sell its American operation or be banned on U.S. shores, because the data it gathered somehow threatened national security. Suddenly Microsoft, Twitter and Oracle were reportedly negotiating bids to China\u2019s billionaire entrepreneur Zhang Yming.<\/p>\n

One aspect of TikTok that would doubtless have interested Ellison is the app\u2019s use of artificial intelligence to shoot people news based upon their reading habits. \u201cPowered by algorithms that can make its video feed addictive,\u201d TikTok had turned into a global sensation, downloaded more than 2 billion times worldwide and with a $100 billion valuation. For more than a year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis<\/a>, \u201cthe app tracked users using a tactic banned by Google, which enabled it to collect unique identifiers from millions of mobile devices without letting users opt out.\u201d While TikTok said it had stopped the practice and \u201cpromised to create a firewall between China and overseas users,\u201d that\u2019s apparently why Trump got so worried about possible Chinese government access to TikTok\u2019s American user data.<\/p>\n

In September 2020, Oracle announced<\/a> it had reached agreement with TikTok for a 12.5 percent stake in the U.S. operation while also providing cloud services and security for the app. Walmart<\/a> bought an additional 7.5 percent, and Trump declared victory for the new TikTok Global, which will likely go public once the dust settles and the sales are approved by the U.S. and China.<\/p>\n

\u201cOracle hopes to use the TikTok deal as another model to provide security and cloud services to other companies down the road,\u201d CNBC reported<\/a> in September. Or, as happened less than two months later, to the federal government.<\/p>\n

Could there have been an ulterior motive behind Oracle\u2019s plunge into kiddie social media? At the end of August, the Journal of Adolescent Health published an article<\/a> headlined \u201cTik Tok and Its Role in Covid-19 Information Propagation.\u201d The NIH website would reprint<\/a> it in November. Noting that the pandemic had generated the near-complete sudden closure of U.S. educational institutions in the spring, \u201cnoneducational screen time among young people has greatly escalated\u201d and \u201csocial media have played a large role in youth resocialization in a pandemic society \u2026 Given social media\u2019s ability to propagate factually inaccurate medical information at an alarming rate,\u201d and given TikTok\u2019s more than 45.6 million active users in the U.S., the paper\u2019s authors decided to analyze the 100 most popular videos earmarked with hashtags for COVID-19 and coronavirus.<\/p>\n

These had reached as many as 93.1 billion views, \u201cdemonstrating the platform\u2019s immense ability to encourage sharing.\u201d Only a handful seemed to have provided misleading information, while \u201cvideos by healthcare professionals were few in number \u2026 [but] often among the most widely \u2018liked\u2019 and shared across the board. The distribution suggests that demand on TikTok for more healthcare-related voices currently outpaces supply. TikTok has shown itself to be a viable means for practitioners to educate and dispel myths about COVID-19 to a broad and diverse adolescent demographic,\u201d according to the article.<\/p>\n

Some in the public health community took notice. \u201cA growing number of scientists and doctors are making viral videos on TikTok to provide information on COVID-19 vaccines,\u201d Scripps reported<\/a> on Jan. 1. The group called itself Team Halo, with a goal \u201cto try and reduce hesitancy.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the \u201cdozens of health experts from all over the world,\u201d director of the Harvard Immunology Graduate Program, Dr. Shiv Pillai, went into a great deal about the messenger mRNA<\/a> used to develop the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, explaining \u201cwhy it\u2019s safe and effective, as well as the side effects that would be simple to pinpoint.\u201d Pillaj used poetry to get his message across: \u201cThe vaccine it will change our lives. To get a shot is to be smart. To make this virus bite the dust, let us all just do our part.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Scripps, in other videos<\/a>, Pillai talks about a child he treated as an intern. The boy died in his hands from tetanus because he wasn\u2019t vaccinated.<\/p>\n

Go to Original – childrenshealthdefense.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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