Until just a few months ago, I doubt there were many American academics more solidly situated in the topmost ranks of our elite mainstream establishment than Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University.

In 1983 he gained Harvard University tenure at the remarkably young age of 28, then spent the next 19 years as a professor at that august academic institution; by the early 1990s the New York Times was already hailing him as the world’s most important figure in his field. Lured to Columbia University in 2002, he has spent the last couple of decades teaching there and also directing a couple of its research organizations, most recently the Center for Sustainable Development. TIME Magazinehas twice ranked him among the world’s 100 most influential individuals, and for nearly twenty years he served as Special Advisor to several Secretary-Generals of the United Nations, while publishing many hundreds of articles and op-eds on a wide variety of subjects in our most influential media outlets.

It would be difficult to construct a more illustrious and establishmentarian curriculum vitae for an international academic figure, so in 2020 he was a natural choice to serve as chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission, established to investigate all aspects of the deadly worldwide pandemic.

Yet as he has subsequently explained in his interviews, over the course of the last couple of years he became increasingly suspicious that the true origins of the viral disease were being concealed. More than eighteen million people have died worldwide including over a million Americans, and rather than acquiescing in what he came to believe was an ongoing official cover-up, he broke with the establishment and made the courageous decision to bring the true facts to widespread public attention.

Although he has retained the subdued manner and careful phraseology of a mild academic, in recent months the incendiary content of his published articles and his public statements have exploded across the global landscape, reaching many millions who might otherwise never have questioned what they were so uniformly being told by all our mainstream media organs. His critics defending that orthodoxy must surely believe that he has gone dangerously rogue, and given the enormous weight of his past credibility, I suspect that the phrase “rogue elephant” has sometimes entered their thoughts.

From the earliest days of the Covid epidemic, an official narrative was promoted that the virus was natural and editors of the leading scientific journals closed their pages to any submissions that suggested otherwise. With no reputable academic papers challenging their perspective, the natural origins advocates were able to cite this silence as proof that their position represented the overwhelming scientific consensus, thereby intimidating most mainstream journalists into toeing that same line. A massive propaganda-bubble had been inflated and maintained by such administrative means.

However, as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Prof. Sachs had publication privileges in the prestigious PNAS journal, so in May he and a co-author published an important article documenting the highly suspicious characteristics of the Covid virus and calling for further investigation. This constituted a breakthrough, becoming the first and only paper published in a major journal that presented the very strong evidence of Covid bioengineering.

• A call for an independent inquiry into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus
  Neil L. Harrison and Jeffrey D. Sachs • PNAS • May 19, 2022 • 2,800 Words

Given his role as chairman of the Covid Commission, Sachs’ paper should have been treated as a bombshell, reaching the headlines of all our leading newspapers. But instead, it was almost totally ignored, as was the author’s public statements on the subject. However, the following month, Sachs attended a small Spanish thinktank gathering, whose proceedings were soon made available on Youtube. Russia’s RTeventually ran a brief item highlighting Sachs’ presentation, and a short clip of his remarks soon went super-viral, retweeted out almost 11,000 times and accumulating over a million views.

A video clip that is viewed a million times has attracted an audience of cable news proportions, and Britain’s muck-raking Daily Mail could not resist covering the explosive story, though harshly slanting it against the suddenly controversial academic. Top Russian generals soon began citing Sachs as an authority in their public Defense Ministry briefings.

Although nearly all Western media outlets maintained their strict boycott of Sachs and his explosive accusations, a couple of prominent alternative journalists were willing to offer him a platform. During August, he began describing the outrageous Covid cover-up in interviews with Nathan Robinson of the Current Affairs webzine and on the popular podcast of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

• Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic
  Jeffrey Sachs • Current Affairs • August 2, 2022 • 4,300 Words
• Origins of the Covid Virus with Jeffrey Sachs
  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. • The Defender • August 20, 2022 • 54 minutes

I was very impressed with Sachs’ forthright statements, and I summarized the developments in a column of my own.

• Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on the Covid Origins Cover-Up
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 29, 2022 • 1,400 Words

No sooner had the reverberations of Sachs’ Covid accusations died down than his remarkable candor engulfed him in an entirely different and even more immediate media controversy.

Having publicly broken ranks with the political establishment over Covid, he soon began doing the same on other important issues. During July and August he published a couple of opinion columns condemning our reckless policies towards Russia and China, with the former having already provoked a bloody and dangerous war in Ukraine and the latter periodically threatening to do the same over Taiwan.

• Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster
  Jeffrey Sachs • Consortium News • July 1, 2022 • 1,300 Words
• The West’s Dangerously Simple-Minded Narrative About Russia and China
  Jeffrey Sachs • Common Dreams • August 23, 2022 • 1,000 Words

In recent years our once-independent NATO allies have increasingly been treated as American vassals, with their seemingly-compromised political leadership regularly sacrificing their own national interests to support our demands, including our extremely aggressive policies against Russia. Such European subservience became most obvious in their wholehearted support of the severe anti-Russian economic sanctions imposed after the beginning of the Ukraine war, sanctions that have resulted in the devastating loss of the inexpensive Russian energy supplies so necessary to their industries.

With more than half of all German businesses fearful that they might be forced to permanently shut down, massive political pressure was mounting on that country’s leadership to reopen the Nord Stream pipelines with Russia. There were reports of secret negotiations under way to do exactly that, which would have produced a severe political defeat for NATO. However, that possibility was suddenly foreclosed after a series of underwater explosions severely damaged the Russian pipelines, a blow seemingly intended to render them completely inoperable. As I discussed in a recent column, America almost certainly played the central role in those attacks, which possibly represented the greatest peacetime military destruction of civilian infrastructure in the history of the world.

• American Pravda: Of Pipelines and Plagues
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 3, 2022 • 3,900 Words

But although the evidence of American culpability was immediate and overwhelming, much of our lick-spittle Western media illogically blamed the Russians for the destruction of their own pipelines, and the story anyway never received a fraction of the coverage it warranted, with even much of the supposedly fearless alternative media avoiding the topic. An excellent segment on Tucker Carlson’s show set forth the crucial facts, but aside from his particular slice of the FoxNews audience, I suspect that the vast majority of Americans either remained largely unaware of the massive pipeline attacks or even vaguely blamed them on Vladimir Putin.

Then a few days later, Bloomberg TV invited Sachs to share his concerns over the Ukraine war. His hosts were flabbergasted when he flatly declared that America had probably destroyed the Russian pipelines, even mentioning that top journalists had privately told him the same thing, although none of those vital facts could ever appear in their own newspapers.

As a consequence of Sachs’ candor, the interview was cut short—with Sachs “yanked off air” in the words of the hostile New York Post—but the entire segment was watched at least a couple of hundred thousand times on Youtube and the short clip of Sachs’ Nord Stream remarks soon went super-viral on Twitter, viewed more than 4 million times in one Tweet and another million times across a couple of others.

Ironically enough, Bloomberg TV may have been prompted to interview Sachs because the latter had suffered a ferocious attack a few days earlier in the Atlantic. Neocon writer James Kirchick had bitterly denounced Sachs for being a member of the “Anti-war Camp,” grouping him together with a long list of other prominent figures across the ideological spectrum—ranging from Ron Paul to John Mearsheimer to Noam Chomsky—all of whom had become very concerned about our growing military confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.

A perfect example of the bizarre state of the American media landscape was that although Kirchick himself possessed no serious foreign policy expertise, being primarily focused upon Gay Rights activism, he was provided a major platform to revile and ridicule individuals whose distinguished careers in that field had begun before he was even born. More than a dozen years earlier, Kirchick had similarly flagellated leading critics of George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War.

Although the bulk of the Atlantic hit-piece was aimed at demonizing the prominent academics, journalists, and public policy experts fearful of war with Russia, a couple of paragraphs of opprobrium were also heaped upon the Grayzone, a left-leaning alternative media website and Youtube channel run by Max Blumenthal and focused upon foreign policy issues. Although quite popular, the Grayzone appears to operate on a tiny shoestring budget, relying upon the small donations of its viewers, so it was quite churlish for Kirchick to smear it as “opaquely financed,” given that he was leveling that insinuation from a media platform under tight Neocon control but owned and lavishly funded by the multi-billionaire widow of Steve Jobs.

• How the Anti-war Camp Went Intellectually Bankrupt
  Critics of U.S. foreign policy from both ends of the ideological spectrum have found common cause in supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
  James Kirchick • The Atlantic • September 29, 2022 • 2,500 Words

The scurrilous Atlantic denunciation may have helped get Sachs invited onto Bloomberg TV, ultimately allowing millions to discover the true facts of the Nord Stream pipeline attacks. There may have been another unforeseen consequence of its simultaneous attacks against both the Grayzone and Sachs, with the former soon arranging an interview of the latter. On Sunday morning, the media outlet released two outstanding segments with the Columbia professor, separately focused on the Ukraine war and the Covid origins controversy, and these have already accumulated more than 100,000 views after less than a day. The Grayzone possesses a great deal of influence and credibility in alternative media circles, and I would hope that these interviews lead to an avalanche of additional coverage for Sachs in other outlets, many of which seem to have previously shied away from the explosive charges he had been making.

The first Grayzone segment was descriptively entitled “End Ukraine Proxy War or Face Armageddon,” and some of Sachs’ crucial points may have surprised his listeners. As he emphasized, America is actually already at war with nuclear-armed Russia in Ukraine, given that we are providing all the funding, military equipment, and command and control facilities for the forces fighting and killing Russian troops on Russia’s own border, as well as supplying unknown numbers of direct combat participants. This is an extraordinarily dangerous situation that would have been considered almost unimaginable during the days of our original Cold War, and our recent destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines was merely the latest manifestation of this undeclared but very real conflict.

Although American leaders may seek to hide their responsibility behind the supposedly independent decisions of the Ukrainian government, this is a transparent fig-leaf. Ukraine’s political leadership is merely our puppet regime, totally financed and controlled by our own government, and pretending otherwise is simply a propaganda-ruse aimed at deceiving our gullible public.

The second, slightly shorter Grayzone segment focused on the Covid origins issue, and provided Sachs the best opportunity he has yet had to present the important facts he uncovered while running the Covid commission. Just a couple of days earlier, he had also been interviewed on physicist Steve Hsu’s podcast discussing the same subject. I would highly recommend both these interviews to anyone interested in understanding the true origins of the viral epidemic that killed more than a million Americans and disrupted the lives of many billions around the world during the last couple of years.

When I’d previously discussed Sachs’ remarkable Covid disclosures back in August, I’d closed with a few paragraphs summarizing the role he seems to be playing in the public discussion and how his positions related to my own.