Interview with Debbie Lerman

Biodefense, Not Public Health: The Hidden Architecture of Global Control

I think I first came across Debbie Lerman when she did her wonderful investigation of Michael Lewis's magnificent propaganda piece, The Premonition, which I covered here.

The COVID operation revealed the skeletal structure of our Empire—a biodefense apparatus masquerading as public health, coordinated through NATO, and executed with military precision. Debbie Lerman, once a self-described "typical progressive liberal," followed the evidence where others refused to look. She identified February 27, 2020 as the moment the switch flipped—when public pronouncements of "remain calm" transformed overnight into panic-porn and lockdown advocacy. Her research exposes not just a propaganda campaign, but an entire global governance structure implementing bioweapon response protocols on civilian populations.

Lerman's pattern-recognition skills, honed through years as a visual artist, allowed her to see what others missed: a biodefense global public-private partnership imposing a "lockdown-until-vaccine" strategy on a world that never needed it. In this interview, she maps the architecture of deception that transformed once-free societies into compliance laboratories—and warns that the structures enabling this catastrophe remain firmly in place, merely awaiting their next deployment.

With thanks to Debbie Lerman.

Debbie Lerman's Substack

1. Debbie, your journey from being a self-described "typical progressive liberal" NPR listener to investigating the military aspects of the COVID response is quite striking. What was the specific moment or realization that first made you question the mainstream narrative?

It’s funny to me when people ask that, because I thought any progressive liberal who actually believed in the values of truth, scientific and academic integrity, free speech, bodily autonomy, informed consent, and the Constitution would have behaved exactly like I did – questioning and opposing the nonsensical, tyrannical COVID response measures. But I quickly learned that, while my values hadn’t changed at all, my former “tribe” got propagandized into abandoning, and even betraying, their professed core beliefs. The fact that this type of brainwashing could happen to people I know and love was the biggest shock of my life.

Now, to answer your question: When the media started reporting on a “novel coronavirus” in China in early 2020, I naturally asked myself the question that I assumed everyone would ask: How dangerous is this for myself, my family and the people I care about? I read the reporting from China, and I looked at the numbers of cases and deaths in February and March 2020, and I learned that this was like many other respiratory viruses that mostly threaten people who are old and sick. I also saw that even in the high-risk group, the virus affected a minority of people. So I stopped worrying about it and assumed the public health apparatus would deal with it as they had with every other emerging pathogen in the last 100 years: monitor for outbreaks, treat people if they were sick, and leave everyone else alone.

Given my understanding that the virus posed little to no threat to most people, I knew the media and public health officials were lying as soon as they started saying that the virus was dangerous for everyone, and that we had to do something other than just wash our hands and stay home if we were sick. I knew that masking, social distancing and lockdowns were the exact opposite of actual public health measures, which emphasize the importance of staying calm and maintaining normal societal functioning, even when there is a disease outbreak. This was a huge shock, because I thought the media – and the government officials who were speaking through it – were interested in my well-being. I’ll never make that mistake again.

2. You've written extensively about how the National Security Council, rather than public health agencies, was in charge of COVID policy. What led you to focus on this particular aspect of the pandemic response?

I took the pandemic response very personally because, as explained above, it alienated me from many people I cared about, and it completely overturned my entire understanding of pretty much every institution I used to trust, including government, media, medicine, academia, and the arts. Instead of standing up for the rights of citizens and opposing unscientific tyrannical mandates, all these institutions not only succumbed to the propaganda but actively participated in it. And so many of my friends and neighbours were completely brainwashed. I wanted to find an answer to this terrifying question: Why was every institution I used to trust now actively trying to harm me, my family, my community and my country?

At first I just tried to analyze the social, psychological and political forces that might have contributed to the catastrophic response, and I wrote an article about it that received positive feedback. I thought maybe China had covered up an outbreak, like they had done in the past, and that maybe the virus came from a lab, which is why the politicians and public health leaders were so panicked. I received an email from a reader who suggested my analysis was naïve: that it might not be panic, but rather intentional machinations of officials and agencies, specifically those in the military industrial complex, who might have had solutions – like “medical countermeasures” -- looking for problems. I put a pin in that, because at the time I had never seriously entertained a single “conspiracy theory” about anything in my entire life. If you had said “deep state” to me at the time, I would have had very little idea of what that even meant.

Then I read Deborah Birx’s truly awful, but also shockingly revelatory, book -- Silent Invasion.

It was the first non-fiction book I had read in many years, yet it read like pure fiction! As a novel reader, I focus not just on getting information from the text, but more importantly on what is going on beneath the surface, in the subtext: what are the hidden motivations and agendas of the characters and the author? In Deborah Birx’s case, it became obvious almost from the first page that she was trying to draw attention away from certain things, while lying about others.

You can follow my journey through Birx’s book in four articles:

How Did Deborah Birx Get the Job?

Dr. Birx’s Fake Science Revealed in Her Own Words

It Was Birx. All Birx.

Debi Does Lockdowns

Through this analysis, I came to the conclusion that public health agencies were not actually in charge of the pandemic response, and that Deborah Birx came from someplace else: the national security apparatus. Which meant I had to focus my research on that.

3. Your work often emphasizes the distinction between public health and biodefense responses. Could you explain why this distinction is so crucial for understanding what happened?

This is probably the most important, and least understood, aspect of the Covid response: It had nothing to do with public health.

Public health aims to take into consideration all aspects of people’s physical, emotional and social well-being, and tries to maximize and protect them. It is never supposed to focus exclusively on one small aspect of health to the exclusion of all others. Accordingly, as explained above, for every novel disease outbreak before Covid, the world had followed the public health paradigm: identify clusters of patients with serious/life-threatening symptoms, treat their symptoms with available medicines, isolate them from others if necessary, increase healthcare capacity on a local level as necessary, and let everyone else go on with their lives.

This type of disease outbreak preparedness worked remarkably well to limit the number of deaths from even very deadly pathogens, like Ebola, MERS, and H1N1 influenza, to an average of no more than about ten thousand a year worldwide between 2000 and 2020. [ref]

Think about that: Using the time-tested tools of public health, we were able to keep the risk of anyone dying from a novel disease outbreak at or near zero for many years leading right up to Covid. There was no public health reason to change our approach for SARS-CoV-2.

Enter biodefense.

Biodefense is the military/intelligence field that deals with biological warfare and bioterrorism. These are types of threats the involve using deadly pathogens to intentionally kill people. An example is the anthrax attacks in 2001, which involved letters containing a lethal bacterium that killed 5 people.

The biodefense response to a bioweapon involves quarantining the affected people/areas and rushing medical countermeasures to try to counteract the effects of the bioweapon. This is the response that was imposed on the entire world for Covid: lockdown-until-vaccine. The problem is that this response is intended for the temporally and geographically limited nature of a bioterror or biowarfare response. It is absolutely, positively NOT intended for the entire population of the planet over many months and years.

When we understand this distinction between a public health and a biodefense response, we understand that all the measures we were told were “scientific” by the public health officials during the Covid catastrophe were actually the exact opposite: they were intended to keep everyone panicked and isolated in order to increase compliance with the administration of the countermeasures.

You can read about what a public health response to Covid would have looked like in the article What If There Had Been No Covid Coup?

And you’ll find a detailed discussion of the biodefense global public-private partnership that ran the lockdown-until-vaccine response in The Catastrophic Covid Convergence – Revisited.

4. Your research shows how emergency declarations were made before significant case numbers existed. How did you discover this temporal disconnect and what does it suggest?

Many emergency declarations in many countries were made in March 2020, when there were barely any cases or deaths in those countries. Examples are included in the The Covid Dossier. These nearly simultaneous declarations, in and of themselves, raise questions about why so many countries would go to such extremes for a virus that had barely affected them and that was already known to endanger a very small segment of the population.

But the biggest discrepancy between declaration and actual emergency was the February 4th declaration of emergency by the HHS Secretary for the purposes of issuing Emergency Use Authorization for countermeasures. As I explained in the article What is EUA?, this type of emergency authorization is intended only for situations in which there is a national security threat of an attack with a CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) agent or a disease caused by such an agent. On February 4, 2020 there were no deaths and fewer than a dozen confirmed cases in the U.S. of what was later called COVID-19.

This means there was a very clear disconnect between the known health threat posed by SARS-CoV-2 and the declaration of an emergency involving a weapon of mass destruction. The million-dollar question here is: What was the HHS Secretary’s emergency declaration for EUA based on? Which leads to the most important unanswered questions of the Covid response: Were the pandemic response planners treating the novel virus as if it were a killer bioweapon? If so, did they truly believe there was a CBRN threat, or did they just use that as an excuse to unleash the lockdown-until-vaccine biodefense response? I think every journalist and every government official in every country should be trying to find the answers to these questions.

5. Your analysis of the Means siblings' rapid rise to prominence is quite detailed. What motivated you to investigate their background so thoroughly, and what did your artistic sensibility bring to understanding their story?

I appreciate your insight in connecting my Means analysis to my artistic sensibility. During the decade before Covid, when I worked as a visual artist combining digital, photographic, and sculptural media, one of my greatest pleasures was to identify and create patterns. I did a whole project on quilts, involving multiple layers of images, patterns and meanings. Here are two examples, where I created digital prints that looked like life-size 3D quilts, and in which the classic quilt patterns are composed of pictures of fabrics with nontraditional images like guns, money, steaks, and pills.

I’m including these examples for two reasons: 1) to show off my art (the pursuit of which I sadly abandoned when Covid turned the art world into a competition to see who could be most compliant with tyranny); and 2) to make the point that I’m deeply interested in layers of pattern and meaning beyond the mere surface of objects, people, and social and political phenomena.

Thus, when I immersed myself in Covid-related investigations, I found I was applying the same pattern recognition skills to various research topics, in particular the censorship and propaganda industrial complex.

I discovered fascinating patterns in how information is suppressed and how propaganda is disseminated. One pattern involves people who are presented as earnest public servants, but who are acting on behalf of hidden agendas. With these types of people, I found three identifying characteristics: 1) a strange and/or dubious “origin story” that purports to explain how they became public authorities on a certain topic; 2) a “personal tragedy story” that fits way too perfectly into their reason for taking on the public role; and 3) a disjointed, self-contradictory and sometimes nonsensical aspect to the discourse they use to explain the topic on which they are supposed to be authorities.

Deborah Birx was the first public figure I investigated who alerted me to this pattern. Charity Dean, a character in Michael Lewis’ Covid book, The Premonition, (about which I wrote a detailed analysis) also fits the bill.

I had already done deep dives into these characters, and others, when the Means siblings appeared on the scene seemingly out of nowhere. I immediately recognized the pattern, but I did not want to do an in-depth investigation of them, because it takes a huge amount of time and concentration, and I was working on other projects. But when I saw so many people falling for their act, and when they seemed to be succeeding in subverting and diluting the grass roots energy of the Covid-fuelled medical freedom movement, I couldn’t resist and took the plunge. The results are here and here.

6. You've written about the specific date of February 27, 2020, as a crucial turning point. Why do you consider this date so significant in the pandemic response?

This is a great follow-up to the question about patterns, because in my research I noticed a significant propaganda pattern that happened before and after February 27, 2020: Before that date, the media and government officials were mostly treating the “novel coronavirus” as they would any other public health concern: They were telling people to remain calm, they said masking was ineffective and unnecessary, and they were even criticizing the draconian lockdown measures taken by the Chinese government.

Then, on 2/27/20, an invisible switch seemed to flip, and a torrent of panic porn, accompanied by very carefully devised memes and slogans, was unleashed everywhere simultaneously. Suddenly, the Chinese response became a model of excellence and the only rational way to respond to the virus that, just days before, was not supposed to pose a serious threat. When you look at the before-and-after messaging you get a sense of whiplash, which is an indication that this was not a spontaneous turn in the narrative, but rather an intentionally planned and implemented pivot. And it happened all over the world simultaneously.

2/27/20 was also the date on which Deborah Birx, representing the biodefense cabal, replaced the public health officials at the helm of the U.S. Government’s response.

7. In your research, you've found similar patterns of military/intelligence coordination across multiple countries. What surprised you most about these parallel responses in different nations?

Once I got over the shock of the US Government’s pandemic response being coordinated by the national security apparatus, I was not that surprised to find that the same thing happened everywhere. Maybe it’s because we were already following the playbook laid out by China, and the WHO was heavily involved in disseminating the lockdown-until-vaccine messaging, so it was clearly an international effort.

If anything, I was surprised and frustrated that so few journalists -- not just in the U.S. but in other countries -- were pursuing this once-in-a-lifetime story. I spent a lot of time trying to cajole some prominent non-U.S. contrarian writers on Substack and elsewhere to pursue parallel investigations to mine in their own countries, to little avail. Eventually, I did manage to work with a few excellent journalists in the U.K., and when I discovered the work of Dutch and German researchers on this topic, I was struck with the idea of putting it all together in what eventually became the COVID Dossier, on which I collaborated with Sasha Latypova.

8. Your work suggests that NATO played a significant role in coordinating the global COVID response. Could you elaborate on the evidence that led you to this conclusion?

I would say we’re still in preliminary stages of proving significant NATO involvement in the response, but the evidence does point in that direction. Generally speaking, in order to achieve the uniform lockdown-until-vaccine response while invoking the same types of emergency laws in so many allied countries, it seems very likely that mutual biodefense agreements, consortia, and structures were activated during Covid. One example of such an apparatus is NATO’S Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defence Centre of Excellence.

We also have specific evidence of NATO involvement from two countries so far:

1) In Holland, the Minister of Health said in parliament in October 2024 that her country’s pandemic policy had to “comply with NATO obligations.”

2) In Italy, FOIAed documents revealed a NATO-affiliated General participating in a meeting of the special “Comitato Tecnico Scientifico” that was established on February 5, 2020 (before any Covid cases or deaths occurred in Italy) to address the “epidemiological emergency” caused by the novel coronavirus.

We are hoping more evidence from more countries emerges regarding NATO involvement in/coordination of the global pandemic response.

9. You've written about what you call the "Biodefense Global Public-Private Partnership." How did you develop this framework for understanding the pandemic response?

The genius writer who most influenced my thinking in this area is CJ Hopkins – an American playwright, novelist and political satirist living in Germany. I highly recommend his Consent Factory essay collections – he has a new one coming out soon. (I know you admire him too!) He has been writing about what he calls “GloboCap” or “Global Capitalism” for nearly 10 years, but I only discovered him during Covid, and I was blown away. His theory of what has been happening in the world in the last few decades provides the best explanation that I have found for how the Covid catastrophe happened. Here’s a summary he wrote in 2017 and recently posted on his Substack:

We have entered an epoch in which historical events are primarily being driven, and societies reshaped not by sovereign nation states acting in their national interests but by supranational corporations acting in their corporate interests. Paramount among these corporate interests is the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism, and the elimination of any impediments thereto.

Global capitalism, since the end of the Cold War (i.e, immediately after the end of the Cold War), has been conducting a global clean-up operation, eliminating actual and potential insurgencies, mostly in the Middle East, but also in its Western markets. Having won the last ideological war, like any other victorious force, it has been “clearing-and-holding” the conquered territory, which in this case happens to be the whole planet. Just for fun, get out a map, and look at the history of invasions, bombings, and other “interventions” conducted by the West and its assorted client states since 1990. Also, once you’re done with that, consider how, over the last fifteen years, most Western societies have been militarized, and their citizens placed under constant surveillance, and an overall atmosphere of “emergency” fostered, and paranoia about “the threat of extremism” propagated by the corporate media.

I’m not suggesting there’s a bunch of capitalists sitting around in a room somewhere in their shiny black top hats planning all of this. I’m talking about systemic development, which is a little more complex than that, and much more difficult to intelligently discuss because we’re used to perceiving historico-political events in the context of competing nation states, rather than competing ideological systems … or rather, non-competing ideological systems, for capitalism has no competition.

Along with Hopkins’ structural understanding of global capitalism, I found “The Disillusioned Blogger” Iain Davis’s discussion of what he calls “The Global Public Private Partnership” to be extremely helpful in understanding Covid. Davis provides a list of all the elements that combine to form a “network of stakeholder capitalists and their partners” which, as he writes, “comprises global corporations (including central banks), philanthropic foundations (multi-billionaire philanthropists), policy think tanks, governments (and their agencies), non-governmental organisations, selected academic and scientific institutions, global charities, labour unions and other chosen ‘thought leaders.’”

When I mapped Davis’ list of capitalist stakeholders and their partners onto the specific entities involved in the Covid response, I was able to conceptualize the Biodefense Global Public Partnership (and its manifestation on a national level) as a giant TOO-BIG-TO-FAIL conglomerate:

10. In your investigation of the Legacy.com obituary deletions, what initially prompted you to look into this database, and what do you make of their response to your inquiries?

I was alerted to the Legacy.com story by a citizen journalist who wrote to the Brownstone Institute, where I am a Fellow and contributor, about his discovery that the website had purged millions of obituary records overnight in 2024, among other strange eliminations.

The researcher, who writes under the pseudonym csofand, was frustrated because he had found a potential bombshell story, but he had reached out to a number of independent journalists and Substackers and none wanted to pursue it. I was very familiar with this type of frustration, having failed to get anyone with a mainstream or mainstream-adjacent platform to investigate the biodefense nature of the Covid response. So I was more than happy to help get the Legacy.com story out to as large an audience as possible.

What csofand discovered is that the website billed as the largest obituary database in the world had removed millions of entries in the years following the rollout of the Covid shots – which made both of us suspect that the reason had something to do with the deaths caused by the jabs.

When we queried the site, we received a generic response that seemed insufficient to explain the large deletions. When we followed up with more specific questions, they refused to answer.

I think if they had been acting in good faith and deleting records, as some readers suggested, as part of a “de-duplication” effort, they would have given us that explanation. The fact that they did not, and that the deletions found by csofand were so huge and anomalous, suggests that there might have been an effort to reduce the overall number of death records in order to obscure the effects of the mRNA “vaccines.”

11. You've expressed concerns about the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement. What are the key differences you see between the original medical freedom movement and its current incarnation?

I feel unqualified to discuss “the original medical freedom movement” because I think it started long before I was aware of it, with the courageous “anti-vaxxers” who were sounding the alarm about childhood vaccines many years ago. I was not part of that original movement, but I started working alongside many of its warriors during Covid, so I’ll discuss it starting in 2021-2022.

At the time, we were raising the alarm about everything totalitarian, unscientific and harmful in the Covid response – masking, distancing, lockdowns – and above all the injuries and deaths caused by the mRNA injections. It was an all-consuming effort, and we were battling against a gargantuan censorship and propaganda industrial complex aimed specifically at manufacturing consensus around the lockdown-until-vaccine response.

We talked a lot about how, in this fight, there was no longer a left vs. right/Republican vs. Democrat – we knew we were battling a global cabal that used political divisions to divert attention from its own machinations. Or I thought we knew that.

When RFK Jr dropped out of the Presidential race and endorsed Trump (which, by the way, I believe was not necessarily a spontaneous choice driven simply by the difficulty of getting on the ballot – but that’s a conspiracy theory I have yet to investigate), a new entity was created called MAHA, which is a corporate branded political organization (you can see the fingerprints of the public relations and marketing consultants all over it), created to ensure the election of Donald Trump, by coopting the medical freedom movement’s Covid momentum and converting it into political capital.

You can see this very clearly in a clip Shanon Joy shared on her show, when she interviewed me about the Meanses. Watch here, starting at minute 46:00.

Instead of the medical freedom cohort of doctors, nurses, scientists, journalists, and many others who were maligned, cancelled, fired, and persecuted for fighting against Covid mandates, MAHA highlights its “influencers” who are TikTok celebrities and entrepreneurs advocating for healthy food and other health-related lifestyle issues, and making a lovely living doing so. Here’s an article from the New York Post that shows the face of MAHA – which could not be farther from the faces of the actual medical freedom fighters of the Covid era.

In terms of messaging, MAHA eliminated everything Covid-related, replacing our struggle to expose the evils of the Covid response and mRNA products with a generalized mission to “make America healthy again” by fighting the “chronic disease epidemic” caused by the “toxic soup” of chemicals in our environment and food.

It’s a diabolically clever and extremely successful strategy: MAHA uses true issues that have been discussed for many decades, like chemicals in food and regulatory capture by pharma – who doesn’t want to fix those, right? -- to smother any discussion of the specific harms caused by Covid measures and countermeasures and the legal, social and geopolitical structures that enabled those harms to happen. So, for example, instead of looking at how the lockdowns increased depression and suicidality in teenagers, they talk about how teenagers are in a “spiritual crisis” caused by a million bad things in our society. Instead of exposing the levels of heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disease and death caused by mRNA shots, they talk about how all those things are part of the chronic disease epidemic that’s been plaguing us for decades.

The one issue MAHA may be willing to address, to placate all the real medical freedom fighters who willingly and enthusiastically joined its ranks, is the childhood vaccine schedule.

Would that make the erasure of Covid and mRNA products as topics of conversation worthwhile? Some of the original medical freedom fighters might think so, and I understand their position.

But for me, who just discovered medical freedom as a major issue during Covid, it seems like a poor trade-off. Especially since all those legal, social and geopolitical structures that enabled the catastrophe are still firmly in place. I’m also frightened because the MAHA propaganda has been as successful as the Covid propaganda in making the same exact topics taboo.

12. What current projects are you focused on and how can readers stay connected with your ongoing investigations into the pandemic response and related topics?

Thank you so much for asking and for supporting my work!

Readers can follow me on Substack at debbielerman.substack.com.

I’m currently working on updates to the Covid Dossier, and I’m also looking at the technology and ideology behind globalist technocratic endeavors. I would like to explain to a non-tech audience what AI can and cannot do, and what is and is not achievable from a scientifically realistic perspective in the “transhumanist” agenda.

There are also endless uninvestigated conspiracies beaconing to be exposed. I’ll have to see how many of them I can get to.

I appreciate you being here.

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