An Essay on the Failing Bio-Capital-Security Complex

 An essay on the failing bio-security complex, with implications drawn for liberal-democratic biopolitics.

As I discuss and document in this recent post, Bio-economy and thanatopolitics, the 21st century was supposed to be the century of the life sciences, especially bio-engineering.

Biden endorsed the 21st century bio-economy in the "Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy." September 9, 2022. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/09/12/executive-order-on-advancing-biotechnology-and-biomanufacturing-innovation-for-a-sustainable-safe-and-secure-american-bioeconomy/ 

But the promise of bio-capital foundered on the practical realities of engineering life (e.g., see Kaushik Sunder Rajan Biocapital: The constitution of postgenomic life and Erica Borg & Amedeo Policante's Mutuant Ecologies: Manufacturing life in the age of genomic capital).

Bio-engineering faces challenges of delivery (i.e., vector) and deliverable (including synthetic mRNA, DNA(fragments), contaminants.

Vectors for delivering DNA and mRNA are especially hazardous, whether viral or lipid nano-particle (e.g., PEG). 

Vectors and/or deliverables cause inflammation and clotting problems, which have been documented in scientific and medical publications (see my summary here), as well as in media coverage prior to 2020. Newly documented problems are especially alarming, such as DNA fragments in the Pfizer vaccine and frameshifting problems with protein synthesis caused by mRNA vaccines.

Yet, scientific and medical research and critics were ignored or de-platformed. Anecdotal (but authentic) subjective accounts of  vaccine adverse events were labeled "mal-information" by the newly appointed truth brokers, leading to alleged "mal-informants" being discredited, de-platformed and stigmatized. 

What were elevated institutionally were the promise and enforced delivery of experimental "vaccines," which tested the bio-tech-biosecurity phantasy of remotely engineering in situ cellular synthesis by delivering a "vaccine."

The bio-tech century would be delivered regardless of its readiness or its ethics. 

The acceptable discourse about the origins, hazards and governance of the SARS-CoV2 virus was highly filtered and constrained. Dissenters of many origins were de-platformed, ousted and symbolically annihilated.

The mediated campaign of "safe and effective" was highly profitable for those bio-economy "stakeholders" whose time had arrived for demonstrating the full potential of their tech, with the threat of the virus used to rationalize all manner of ethical violations of medical and democratic principles.

Increasing documentation of the hazards of the mandated experimental transfection-based vaccines pulls back the curtain on the mantra of" safe and effective" that was delivered through a media/social-media campaign whose engineering exceeded the propaganda campaigns of the 20th century world wars.

That propaganda campaign used fear, de-humanization, scapegoating and gas-lighting to enforce its agandas. Just as elements of the legacy media and their publics demanded the unvaccinated be dragged away into concentration camps, the propaganda campaign tempered in 2012, but did not fully withdraw and continued to push endless boosters, despite evidence that risks for adverse events accumulates across exposures.  

Today, the public has become restless as their biovitalities are failing due to the hazards of the spike protein (both viral and vaccine-induced) and the dangerous delivery vectors, as well as the psychological trauma of four years of propaganda designed to incite fear of biological and social contagion. 

Adverse events have escaped engineered containment. Biological, psychological and social adverse events from the great experiment are cascading, with unknown, but surely adverse, events before us.

The bio-capital-security complex is on the defensive. Beware because it seeks to administer all life, including genetic and molecular "building" blocks at the micro scale and  psycho-social fields at the macro scale.

 

RELEVANT RESEARCH

Porter, H. (2016). Ferreting things out: Biosecurity, pandemic flu and the transformation of experimental systems. BioSocieties (2016) 11, 22–45. doi:10.1057/biosoc.2015.4; published online 30 March 2015

Abstract: At the end of 2011, microbiologists created a scientific and media frenzy by
genetically engineering mutant avian flu viruses that transmitted through the air between ferrets,
the animal most widely used to model human flu. Though the studies offered new evidence of
avian flu’s pandemic potential, they were nevertheless restricted from publication because of
concerns about their possible threat to human health and security. 

In this article, I examine the mutant flu controversy to show how nascent biosecurity regulations engender transformations in experimental systems; namely, in the use and interpretation of experimental organisms, and in the establishment of a culture of security among a globalizing community of scientists. 

Drawing on analyses of academic publications, interviews with microbiologists and biosecurity regulators, and ethnographic observations at a biosecure laboratory, I show how these experimental transformations
are structured by the local demands of scientific production as well as by broader concerns
about biosecurity made visible in formal and informal regulations on scientific conduct. I further
argue that while the controversy signals unprecedented controls over publication in the biological
sciences, such controls build upon and extend on-going shifts in scientific thought and practice in
the wake of pandemic threats.

MY RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS

Nadesan, M. (2022). Crises Narratives Defining the Covid-19 Pandemic: Expert Uncertainties and Conspiratorial Sensemaking. American Behavioral Scientist. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221085893

Nadesan, M. (2021). Technological Utopia, End Times and the SARS-CoV-2 Crisis: A Genealogy of Crisis Ideoscapes and Mediascapes. Communication +1, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.7275/x6qx-0r31. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol8/iss1/8/

Nadesan, M. (2011, 2008). Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life. New York: Routledge. First published 2008. Reprinted in paperback and electronic forms with a 2011 Reprint edition publication date.

Nadesan, M. (2013) The demise of liberal biopolitics: Wealth accumulation and disposable populations. In Claudio Colaguori (ed.) Security, Life and Death: Governmentality and Biopower in the Post-9/11 Era. De Sitter Publications.