Six Ways of Looking at Fractal Mechanics


 

 

Gundermann, Christian. 2024. “The COVID Emergency as Autoimmune Disease.” Catalyst: 
Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1): 1–37.  

http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 

© Christian Gundermann, 2024 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons 
Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license 

 

                                                                                                                                             

 

 
The COVID Emergency as Autoimmune Disease 

 

 

Christian Gundermann   

Mount Holyoke College 
cgunderm@mtholyoke.edu 
 
 

Abstract 
This article analyzes the United States biosecurity state’s orchestration of the COVID-
19 phenomenon into a public health emergency, tracing the legal platforms that 
made this mobilization possible. Leaning on the longstanding reverberations 
between political and biological discourses around immunology, I argue that the polis 
entered into a state of autoimmune disease where its public/private biosecurity 
organisms attacked its own body politic. COVID-19 constitutes the culmination of a 
development that had been in the making for several decades. Besides parsing the 
central legislative inventions that form the basis of this operation, the article analyzes 
the most central medical countermeasure deployed as the ostensible remedy to the 
public health emergency. A novel technological platform (mRNA transfection) is 
introduced as the solution to the threat of infection (falsely promising immunity). This 
platform is equally built on autoimmune logic, not traditional immunity. Unlike 
previous vaccine technologies, synthetic mRNA transfections coerce the body’s cells 
to produce the antigen against which the immune reaction is mounted. The immune 
system will then attack those cells that express the antigen, the most publicly 
acknowledged example being myocarditis. The feedback loop between biological and 
political discourses on autoimmune disease has begun to restructure societies 
globally. 

 
 

Keywords  

autoimmune disease, COVID-19, biosecurity state, transfection, public health 
emergency  
 
 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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It is not surprising that for the virus one speaks of war. The emergency 
measures obligate us in fact to life in conditions of curfew. But a war 
with an invisible enemy that can lurk in every other person is the most 
absurd of wars. It is, in reality, a civil war. The enemy is not outside, it 
is within us.   
—Giorgio Agamben, quoted in Cynthia L. Haven,“Giorgio Agamben 
on Coronavirus: ‘The Enemy Is Not Outside, It Is Within Us’”” 
 
Today, America would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles 
to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true 
if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, 
whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is 
then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this 
evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented 
with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the 
guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World 
Government. 
—Henry A. Kissinger, at the 1991 Bilderberg Conference 
 
Americans live in a cavern of fear, a psychic, numbing force 
manufactured by the so-called entertainment industry, reified by the 
psychological industry, and buttressed by the coercion industry…The 
state’s coercive apparatus of “public safety” is erected as a needed 
protective counterpoint.  
—Mumia Abu-Jamal, quoted in Dylan Rodríguez, “The Political Logic 
of the Non-profit Industrial Complex" 
 
The human body is mortal by nature. Hence illnesses are inevitable. 
Why does a man only go to the doctor when he is ill, and not when he 
is well? Because not only the illness, but even the doctor is an evil. 
Under constant medical tutelage, life would be regarded as an evil and 
the human body as an object for treatment by medical institutions. Is 
not death more desirable than life that is a mere preventive measure 
against death? 
—Karl Marx, “On Freedom of the Press”  
 

 

Preliminaries  
Many of the figureheads of the COVID-19 public health establishment are familiar 
faces from the AIDS epidemic. That medicine is an overtly political practice has 
again become abundantly clear since 2020. The nexus between politics and 
medicine that will be explored here more specifically is autoimmune disease, both 
as a metaphor for health emergency politics and as a bodily logic in relation to the 
COVID countermeasures. Autoimmune disease was initially denied by 
immunology for nearly half a century: “The idea of autoimmune disease—a 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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destructive reaction of the immune system against one or another of the body's 
own constituents—was unthinkable” (Mackay 2010, A252). The history of 
immunity and the “immune system” has a long political trajectory, never too far 
from political violence and war logics (Neocleous 2022, 58). To state my central 
contention upfront, it is useful to analyze the political and scientific events of the 
COVID crisis along immunological, and specifically autoimmunitary, lines: not 
only because of the longstanding entanglements of politics and immunology; not 
only because COVID emerged as an infectious disease and therefore an 
immunological problem; not only, further, because there is a special argument to 
be made about autoimmune disease and transfection (the gene technology 
employed in the majority of COVID “vaccines"); but mainly perhaps because the 
terror that governments and their emissaries have begun to visit upon their 
populations in the “free West” (much like the long-familiar state terror in many 
countries of the Global South and East) have turned to public health and 
biomedicine as their main vectors of implementation. Perhaps like in psychiatry, 
pharmaceutical substances and digital technologies have become the new 
straightjackets, superseding the classical biopolitical institution of the mad house. 
The more overt violence of classical biopolitics, which, in the name of safety, has 
sought to exert control and surveillance, and enforce compliance, is 
paradigmatically superseded by biomedical and high-tech procedures (Preciado 
2012, 34).  
 
The period between the emergence of the US federal public health response to 
the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s and the appearance of COVID in 2020 
constitutes the historical moment in which the public/private apparatus of 
“pandemic emergency response” is built and refined along neoliberal lines, 
conjoining massive corporate interests with the centralization of political power. 
This is what I will call the antibody industrial complex, which has not only 
transformed the legal and political frameworks of the American polis over this 
period in question, but also bent a significant portion of immunology and virology 
to its purposes. Mark Neocleous recently summarized the tremendous paradox 
between security and lethal violence against the very body politic that 
securitization is meant to protect: “Sovereignty thrives on fictions, most notably 
the fiction of immunity. But it equally thrives on the fiction of security. Perhaps 
that is why security and immunity live and kill together, even to the extent of 
destroying the very body we think they are protecting” (2022, 30). We must 
understand the security/violence nexus to grasp how this system of health-based 
public safety operates. Like the infamous drug cartels (more overtly acting in 
countries where all semblance of the rule of law has already been eviscerated), the 
public-private health juncture (governments, corporations, philanthropist 
foundations) protects and oppresses. It protects those who do its bidding and 
annihilates those who defy it. It also protects and oppresses those who do its 
bidding in less conspicuous ways. In the name of security, its authoritarian goal is 
ultimately to convert constitutional rights into permissions that are granted rather 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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than guaranteed. Under the emergency provisions, the citizen is habituated to 
applying for permissions, exemptions, provisional freedoms if available. As such, 
the authoritarian state of emergency is of course all too familiar to populations in 
the Global South (a geographic designation linked to the history of colonialism 
and racism), but also to racialized and/or immigrant populations within the “free” 
West/North for whom constitutional rights were never a reality. This 
“uncontrollable search for security” (Neocleous 2022, 28) will be shown to be at 
the heart of how the system catapulted people into panic and compliance in 2020. 
Particularly the “middle managers” would have been driven by this security logic 
of their actions that implemented the countermeasures (“keeping people safe,” 
“saving lives”), even if this cannot be true for the elites, lead scientists, and upper 
echelons of the government agencies who have carefully constructed the legal, 
political, and scientific entrapments over the period in question, and have always 
disposed of the data that proved their harmful effects.   
 
The first part of this article will explain the history of public health politics as an 
autoimmune disease where the state as metaphoric immune system turned 
against the body politic by means of profound legal, institutional, and scientific 
transformations. The second part will analyze in technical terms how transfection 
(mRNA “vaccination”) as a technology applied to public health operates in 
lockstep with this same autoimmune turn—that is, how it represents a heightened 
degree of autoimmune logic in comparison with older forms of immunization to 
the point where immunity is no longer even the investigational end point.   
 

PART I 

Setting the Stage for 2020 
Even though Jacques Derrida is one of the more prominent recent voices to have 
employed immunology, and particularly autoimmunity, for philosophical and 
political purposes, his use of the terms, as Warwick Anderson and Ian R. Mackay 
have noted, is “eccentric” (2014, 149), off center of immunological discourse. 
Furthermore, Derrida’s commentary on autoimmunity in the 9/11 context 
becomes useful for my purposes only to the extent to which I interpret its 
“eccentricity” in light of a certain unspeakability of the ideas that Derrida might 
have intimated. 
 
In the interview “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” in which Derrida, in 
conversation with Giovanna Borradori, analyzes the significance of the 9/11 
attacks for the rise of the “autoimmunitary,” one of the central terms, terrorism, is 
defined as “autoimmunitary terror” in the 9/11 era (Derrida 2003, 96). Now more 
than twenty years ago, Derrida anticipated future “autoimmunitary” terror to 
happen at a nano-scale: “Nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more 
powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. They 
are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria” (102). Ultimately, terrorism 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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now “covers a new concept and new distinctions” because the inside/outside, the 
friend/foe, the self/other, the visible/invisible distinctions have all been breached 
to an unprecedented extent (102). In some sense, 9/11 violence is autoimmunitary 
because Bush’s “war on terror” that ensues in the aftermath of the attacks is only 
in appearance engaging the old immunitary rhetoric of war, reprisal, and justice, 
but in reality is already itself a “perverse effect of the autoimmunitary” in that it 
“ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks do 
disarm” (99). The war on terror ushered in government-run surveillance programs; 
legal suspension of the very foundation of immunitary logic, the habeas corpus 
(Cohen 2008, 110); the creation of global deterritorialized “black holes” (torture 
centers that exist outside of political space and time), and thus the destruction of 
many notions of justice and law guaranteed by the Constitution of the United 
States. 
 
While Neocleous shows Derrida’s understanding of autoimmunity to be confused, 
particularly around the distinctions between autoimmunity and autoimmune 
disease (2022, 25–26), in my reading Derrida’s discourse remains so “messy,” 
“eccentric,” and contradictory because he never explicitly analyzes the literal 
connection of 9/11 with the “nanotechnologies” and the “micrological” (Derrida 
2003, 102) to which he alludes “eccentrically.” Why was 9/11 terrorism more 
“autoimmunitary” than previous instances of terrorism? His brief and cryptic 
allusions seem to be withdrawn as quickly as they are made. Did Derrida decide to 
“stay in his lane” (philosophy) because the political terrain was too “hot”? Was the 
chance of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist” too much of an aversive for him to 
be clearer?  
 
Let’s remember that the attacks on September 11, 2001, were followed on their 
heels by the anthrax attack on Congress on September 18, 2001. It was an anthrax 
component of 9/11 that would have provided the link to Iraq, delivering the 
justification for its invasion without having to engage in the drawn-out and 
contrived seeding of the weapons-of-mass-destruction narrative. It did provide 
the link for building up an entire “bioterrorism” branch, and extensive legislation, 
for the US security agencies. However, instead of implicating Iraq, the anthrax 
attacks linked right back to the US government, which had developed anthrax as 
a bioweapon since the demise of the Soviet Union. Ultimately, the FBI framed 
Bruce Ivins, who was a military scientist at Fort Detrick, one of the Army’s Medical 
Research Institutes of Infectious Diseases. Ivins allegedly committed suicide, 
which facilitated the framing of him as a “lone wolf” in committing the attacks, 
exculpating Stephen Hatfill, the original main suspect.1 Many have contended 
that the attack could not have been carried out by one person. For the purposes of 
this article, I am unable to dive any deeper into 9/11 and its anthrax component, 
which was an important relay in the intensification of US government 
developments that Derrida may have understood as “autoimmunitary” in this 
interview: “pandemic preparedness,” the development of countermeasures that 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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are always “dual purpose” (both weapon and countermeasure), and the need to 
experiment with these countermeasures on sectors of the US population. 
Experimental anthrax vaccines that were mandated on US Department of 
Defense (DoD) personnel are a case in point, and the District Court ruling in Doe 
#1 v. Rumsfeld that struck down the mandates left no doubt about this in pointing 
out that US soldiers had been used as “guinea pigs.”2 Suffice it to say that 
Derrida’s commentary makes a lot more sense when read as a reference to the 
involvement of the US government in the weaponization of microorganisms, and 
the various forms of aggression against its own citizens enshrined in the Patriot 
Act. Terrorism, then, is not so much random acts of violence perpetrated by 
outsiders to the community (or even insiders who are “other-able”), but rather the 
terror that the state (as “immune system”) visits on its own body politic; the kind 
of state-sponsored terror that citizens of many nations around the globe most 
readily associate with the term terrorism; a terror that is often supported, 
organized, and financed by US security and intelligence bureaucracies; a terror 
that has struck out against Black and Indigenous populations for centuries. With 
9/11, this violence comes home to roost in the “homeland,” as allegorized by the 
creation of the quasi-military Department of Homeland Security in 2002. 
 
To suggest that the United States, and to various degrees the Western world 
more broadly, has been taken over by an overt autoimmune pathology, is to 
employ a productive metaphor. The autoimmune model becomes productive 
particularly in dialogue with Neocleous’s conceptual framework on security, state 
power, and immunity where the immune system is understood as a kind of 
“sophisticated ‘intelligence community,’” a “paranoid system of corporeality” 
(2022, 47). To be clear, however, I do not wish to argue that the condition is a 
fateful and mysterious illness that has no intention, no planned execution, and 
therefore no redress. Unlike Mattias Desmet’s theory of mass formation 
developed in The Psychology of Authoritarianism (2022), which suggests a 
spontaneous and undirected structural mechanism of fear and irrationality within 
populations, I plan to demonstrate that the collective state of panic—of 
inflammatory “cytokine storm” of the body politic—was carefully orchestrated by 
an “immune system” that had turned against its own “tissues.”  
 

Conspiracy 
To leave no doubt, I am actually engaging in conspiracy analysis. A few words to 
rehabilitate the useful legal term conspiracy. The dictionary offers as one of the 
definitions of conspiracy “the action of plotting,” and a plot is a plan to do 
something illegal or harmful. The underlying basis of pharmocracy—a term coined 
by the medical anthropologist Kaushik Sunder Rajan (2017) to analyze the legal, 
political, and scientific structures that have produced a transnational pharmaco-
biotech-medico-governmental industrial complex (equal in economic power to 
formations like the weapons-military-intelligence industrial complex, and deeply 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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embedded within the latter) is a conspiracy. Pharmocracy is a global conspiracy, 
rooted in the United States and a few Western European countries as the centers 
of neoliberal empire, to produce and implement research that results in the 
prescription, particularly in the US population, of the highest amount of drugs 
possible while erasing the evidence of their harms. Joseph Dumit has described 
this phenomenon as “prescription maximization” and understands it as creating 
structures that guarantee “the overall availability of an individual’s metabolism for 
the maintenance of pharmaceutical flows” (2012, 82). Much of the “evidence-
based” framework of this pharmocratic paradigm, and the authoritarian and 
“protective” (securitizing) role of biomedicine and public health within it, forms 
the basis for pandemic politics through which the channels for vast new 
pharmaceutical flows are fulfilled. But without acute danger, there is no use for 
protection. The prominent academic immunologist and vaccine-development 
entrepreneur Anne De Groot leaves no doubt as to the role of fear in the 
implementation of such pharmaceutical flows: “The market for vaccines is driven 
by perception, not by actual need…When the perception of risk for disease is 
lower, or the disease is less prevalent, so too, demand wanes, and concern about 
potential side effects may eventually drive the demand for a vaccine (and its 
return on investment) towards zero” (De Groot and Berzofsky 2004).   
 
Even classical capitalism itself is already a conspiracy to sell us products we don’t 
need and that often harm us, or at the very least hook us into dependency. The 
neoliberal, International Monetary Fund–centered seduction into debt and 
subsequent coercion and extortion of Global South nations is another major 
conspiracy. These conspiracies are precisely why regulatory agencies exist, but 
with the autoimmune turn, these agencies have been largely bought through 
regulatory capture. Regulatory capture, however, will be shown to be too mild 
and too imprecise a concept to deal with the autoimmune turn, mainly because 
the government bureaucracies that enact these policies are no longer victims of 
corrupt corporate power, but have themselves become the motor of this dynamic. 
In addition, the autoimmune turn, which culminated in the COVID crisis, also 
follows a new structure of subjectivity itself. In what Paul Preciado (2012) has 
called the pharmacopornographic era (post 1950s), capitalist conspiracies are no 
longer implemented through “external products” to the subject, but through the 
molecular invention of human subjects that are themselves constructed through 
the product: the selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) subject, the 
contraceptive pill subject, the statin subject, the vaccine subject, and now the 
mRNA subject. Dependency—that is, the collapse of individual constitutionally 
guaranteed sovereignty—is now manufactured at the level of cells, tissues, 
proteins, nucleic acids.  
 
It is always conspiracies, at the highest levels of industry and government, that 
sell us harmful and expensive phenomena that, without fraud-induced fear, no 
one would want, like, say, war (for example against Iraq, made palatable by 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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means of the neocons’ “weapons-of-mass-destruction conspiracy”). Conspiracy 
analysis is and must be about discovering the fraud that underpins the 
construction of these phenomena (most notably statistical, legal, and scientific 
fraud). Why would critical intellectuals fall for the thought-terminating cliché of 
the “conspiracy theorist,” now more widespread than ever among academics and 
other liberal elites, which was coined by the US military/intelligence complex 
already nearly seventy years ago to shut down investigations into its own 
involvement in crimes. In other words, there has been plenty of time to think this 
through critically, and dare I say to “do one’s own research,” the condemnation of 
which is another thought-terminating cliché that has been successfully deployed 
since 2020  to enforce authoritarian expertism. Of course, these public/private 
conspiracies overtly and covertly also conspire to terminate critical thinking, 
throwing billions of dollars of government grants and direct propaganda 
payments at academics and journalists to force their practice into narrow 
disciplinary expertism. The Sartrian expert technicien du savoir, produced by 
means of these elaborate incentive structures, will not look beyond the horizon of 
their own narrow terrain and thus deliver the deployable narrow knowledge 
required for the conspiracies to work without getting in the way of the larger 
scheme. 
 

The Accusation of “Conspiracy Theorist” as Horror Autotoxicus 
It is well known that immunology failed to entertain the possibility of the 
existence of autoimmune diseases for half a century. This denial was 
metaphorized in Paul Ehrlich’s expression horror autotoxicus (1906, 82). The idea 
that the body’s “security forces” could possibly attack their “own” tissues had to 
reek of “conspiracy theory.” Immunology was strongly influenced in its scientific 
search for truth by Western cultural prejudice concerning the notions of selfhood 
and nation state (Mitchell 2017, 88). Could it be that the same cultural mechanism 
of denial, the need for a “safe interior,” the foundational taboo against doubting 
the goodness and safety of “one’s own” group, is at the root of continued and 
repeated dismissals of evidence that “our own” security forces have turned 
against us? Is the accusation of engaging in “conspiracy theory” equivalent to 
Ehrlich’s dismissal of autoimmune disease because it would constitute an 
unacceptable horror? Can Tuskegee now be acknowledged only because it wasn’t 
done to “us” but to a racialized “other,” and so biomedicine and public health can 
be seen as reformed now that it nominally embraces “diversity, equity, and 
inclusion” and anti-racism, even when similar types of experimentation continue, 
and once again primarily on the backs of racialized “others” taking the form of a 
“selective genocide” (Rajan 2017, 3)? 
 
Curiously we see the same need to project the enemy outward even and 
especially in attempts to shed light on conspiracies, such as the recent Sunday 
Times article that finally openly names COVID-19 as a bioweapon, but then fails to 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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acknowledge US and Western involvement in its creation and puts the blame on 
China (Calvert and Arbuthnott 2023). Even the potential for world war is evidently 
preferable to facing the truth about “our own immune system.” Ultimately, even 
the early dismissal of lab origin hypotheses in 2020 in favor of a National Institute 
of Allergy and Infectious Diseases–directed “consensus” on zoonosis follows this 
logic of horror autotoxicus: nature as humanity’s ultimate exteriority is being, and 
has for decades been, demonized and weaponized to advance the securitization 
of humanity by the antibody industrial complex as the successor complex and 
upgrade to the cold-war military industrial complex. This weaponization is “dual 
purpose”: viruses, microorganisms, and various naturally occurring molecular 
substances are turned into both bioweapons and countermeasures (drugs, 
biologics) through gain-of-function and biomedical research. On the other hand, 
the demonization of nature in zoonotic explanations, rooted in racist and 
colonialist ideologies, projects millenary cultural practices of interacting with 
“nature” such as “wet markets” and “bushmeat consumption” as dangerous and 
barbaric (while white Global North populations are tied into practices of factory 
farming, slaughterhouses, and hunting, which are deemed civilized, safe, and 
effective). The projective logic of horror autotoxicus (“it’s nature/virus, not your 
immune system”) in these explanatory models for pandemics is self-evident.   
 

The Necessary Augmentation of the Immune System 
The mRNA subject (and the vaccine subject more broadly) is said to have an 
immune system understood as in and of itself hapless (“naive” and incompetent in 
the face of “novel” pathogens). The scientific construction of this concept of the 
immune system can be historicized along the period in question from the 1980s 
onward and maps onto the development of a  national vaccine program, 
culminating in the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA). The 
NCVIA immunized pharmaceutical corporations against vaccine-related liability, 
stimulating them to produce an increasing amount of vaccines at greater speed, 
putting the industry in the role of Neocleous’s ambassador: “The servants of the 
state who conduct its violence do so as its ambassadors. As such, they have 
inherited the kind of immunity historically granted to the figure of the 
Ambassador. They are protected” (2022, 29). Why exactly this term “servants of 
the state” is so particularly fitting for the role of the pharmaceutical industry will 
become more fully transparent as I discuss the nature of the COVID-related 
contracts between the government and the pharmaceuticals below. In any case, 
the NCVIA paves the way toward a more and more capacious legal framework 
that aims at eclipsing the foundational medical concept of informed consent. This 
development comes to full fruition during the rollout of the “COVID-19 vaccines” 
where the precise content of the products is unknown to both healthcare 
professionals and recipients (to be more fully explained in the vaccine section 
below).  
 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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This altered scientific understanding of the immune system largely bypasses the 
innate immune system and downplays the role of natural acquired immunity. In 
fact, the immune system is presumably built (“educated,” “taught”) through this 
biotech product and the specific B-cell-derived antibodies it produces. The almost 
exclusive focus on B-cell-derived antibodies in the definition of immunity is 
another feature of the workings of the antibody industrial complex, reducing the 
complexity of the immune system to the easily quantifiable concept of 
immunoglobulins seropositivity. 
 
As can be appreciated in the controversies around the “hygiene hypothesis” 
(Bloomfield et al. 2016), natural infection as an immunity mechanism has been 
repudiated by this new conception of the immune system that requires the 
public/private protective intervention for human and nonhuman organisms to be 
viable, supplanting evolution and natural biology. Just as Preciado shows the 
contraceptive pill to have supplanted gender/sex, Viagra to have become erection, 
SSRIs mental health (2012, 34), vaccines come to equal immunity. Due to this 
antibody-industrial-complex-sponsored concept, a mass panic could break out 
around SARS-CoV-2 as a “novel” pathogen (even though it had less than a 1 
percent mortality rate in the non-elderly). Why? It was portrayed as killing 
potentially all of us because we presumably had no immunity against the “novel” 
virus, as if cross-coronavirus immunity didn’t exist, as if no one had an innate 
immune system, as if natural immunity could not be developed. A “novel” virus 
plus no vaccine equals doom.  
 

The Four Pillars of Emergency 
Between 1983 and 2015, a legal structure was erected that enables the 
autoimmune aggressions of the antibody industrial complex against the body 
politic. This complex is a security arrangement to be understood as a corporate, 
military, intelligence, public health, and academic partnership under federal 
bureaucratic orchestration. Like is the case with all origin stories, it is hard to 
pinpoint a definitive moment in time as there are always precursors. That being 
said, I suggest 1983 with the Public Health Service Act as the most concrete 
starting point. The frame of the edifice that housed the COVID response was 
completed in 2015 with military contract legislation called Other Transaction 
Authority/Agreement (OTA), although other meaningful additions were added 
after 2015. Significant portions of the frame were established as amendments and 
expansions to existing health emergency legislation during the years following 
9/11. This edifice is further buttressed by the creation of several new federal 
agencies under the umbrella of the existing public health, military, and 
intelligence bureaus (such as the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, the 
Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency, or BARDA, the 
Defense Threat Reduction Agency, or DTRA, the Administration of Strategic 
Preparedness and Response, or ASPR, and Public Health Emergency Medical 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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Countermeasures Enterprise, or PHEMCE); and the restructuring and repurposing 
of some agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or 
DARPA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and the National 
Security Agency, or NSA, all of whom played a major role during the COVID crisis. 
The Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise (2006/2019), 
in particular (a sub-agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services 
(HSS)–sponsored Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, 
created in 2006) is of special interest here because it exemplifies the proliferation 
of the public/private partnership concept under executive branch government 
leadership in the wake of 9/11. It appropriates public funds to economically 
benefit private corporations, while blending the spheres of medicine, biowarfare, 
governance, and private interests. The main legal pillars of the frame that I have 
decided to focus on are four: (1) the above mentioned Public Health Service Act of 
1983 (and its subsequent amendments); (2) the introduction of Expanded Access 
Use (EAU) and Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) legislation to enable the 
deployment of unapproved products, initiated in 1997; (3) the Public Readiness 
and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act of 2005; and (4) the OTA legislation of 
2015. 
 

Health Emergencies 
Modern public health emergency legislation began to be installed in 1983 with an 
amendment to the Public Health Service Act of 1944 (codified as Public Law no. 
98-49, 97 Stat. 245). Here a section 319a  titled “Public health emergencies” is 
inserted (42 USC 247b), which already reserves new extraordinary powers to “the 
Secretary of Health and Human Services,”  to be further significantly amended in 
2000 as the Public Health Threats and Emergencies Act (42 USC 201 note). This 
amendment reworked and expanded the aforementioned section 319 (“Public 
Health Emergencies” 42 USC 247d) of the 1983 Public Health Service Act, and 
established a working group on bioterrorism ‘countermeasures’ research and 
development. It was then again amended in 2002 in the wake of 9/11 as the Public 
Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act (Public Law 
107-188, 116 Stat. 594). The reason why it is important to situate the beginning of 
the construction of this grid in 1983, even though much of its current content was 
added or amended in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is because the 1980s 
timestamp coincides with crucial developments in virology, immunology, and 
genetics/genomics toward a promise of ever-increasing control over the human 
body, as well as over viral and microbial ecologies in which it exists. Beyond the 
capacity for genetic sequencing, two specific technologies have played a central 
role in the COVID crisis: the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test (1985) and the 
cloning of RNA viruses by copying them onto cDNA plasmids (becoming common 
practice from the late 1970s on). The latter is crucial both for the weaponization of 
RNA viruses and for the production of biologic countermeasures. In close quarters 
with biological weapons development, genetically oriented biomedicine 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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(primarily in cancer- and AIDS-related research) begins to develop and implement 
ideas around humans as hackable organisms, and legal frameworks develop 
alongside these discourses of fear, control, and securitization. It is no coincidence 
that vaccines stand at the center of this operation. As a preventative technology, 
they are the quintessence of the promise of security, of securing the future from 
potential harm and exploiting future potential economically. They instantiate 
both the late capitalist stock market investment in “futures” (as projections of 
value rather than its present reality), and fear-based governance that 
paternalistically promises security.  
 
In its essence, the creation of Public Health Emergency (PHE) and its juridical 
inscription in the act of the same name (in its definitive version of 2000) allows an 
authoritarian takeover of the executive branch from the legislative and judicial 
branches of government. The HHS Secretary has sole discretion to declare a PHE 
and to implement countermeasures (21 US Code 360bbb-3). This is arguably a 
form of coup d'état centered in the HHS Secretary. 
 

Emergency Use Authorization 
In 1997 the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act was passed (Public 
Law 105-115, 111 Stat. 2296), which begins to pave the way toward EUA under 
PHE through so-called Expanded Access Use (EAU) to unapproved drugs, 
biologics, and devices (21 CFR 312.300). Ostensibly, this legislation was 
introduced to facilitate access to new experimental drugs, but such access was 
limited to scenarios where a patient with a serious or life-threatening disease, for 
which no alternative therapy is available, applies for EAU with their licensed 
physician, carefully calculating their individual risk-benefit profile. A permission 
granted under EAU assumes that the drug has already achieved Investigational 
New Drug (IND) status, meaning there are clinical trials being conducted, but that 
the applicant has no access to enroll in an existing clinical trial. The application 
also requires approval by an institutional review board, indicating further careful 
consideration and informed consent.  
 
Reinterpretations subsequently took this law out of its original conservative 
contexts for individual patients with life-threatening illnesses, and enabled it to 
become EUA under PHE, allowing access to medical countermeasures outside 
regulatory law. It became one of the pillars of the regulatory quagmire of the 
COVID operation where medical countermeasures were universally applied to 
millions of healthy citizens on the sole discretion of the HHS Secretary without 
consideration of their medical history, lifestyle, age, or informed consent. An EUA 
under PHE does not require the product to have IND status, to be approved by an 
institutional review board, or to include the informed consent of the recipient. 
After PHE was declared in March 2020, the complex equivocations between EAU 
and EUA legislation could easily produce the impression in health professionals 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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and the general public that EAU requirements (IND status, clinical trials, informed 
consent) were applicable to the COVID countermeasures under EUA when they 
were not. This equivocation became the basis for the following: 
 

• EUAs for over a hundred different commercial PCR tests were issued alone in 
the first five months since PHE was declared (Murrin, 2022). M any of them are 
now no longer in existence and it is near impossible to verify the primers used 
in them. This means we cannot know which exact proteins each of them 
tested for, opening a loophole for statistical fraud about infection rates. 

• EUAs were issued for the use of experimental and highly problematic antivirals 
in hospital protocols. The primary example here is the drug Remdesivir, the 
history of which would warrant an entire investigation in its own right. Not 
unlike AZT in late 1980s AIDS politics, Remdesivir was a dangerous and failed 
drug, meaning it had never been successfully used for anything despite 
numerous attempts and had a poor safety record, yet remained under patent 
and provided the grounds for huge profits for Gilead Sciences, a corporation 
with a long history of tight government connections. 

• An equivocal regulatory game became possible around EUA, EAU, and fully 
licensed product (FLP) concerning the transfection products (mRNA 
“vaccines”) to be analyzed in greater detail below.  

 

The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act 
The PREP Act constitutes a key piece of legislation for the implementation of the 
COVID policies. It presents a complex set of additions and amendments to the 
existing health emergency legislation. In brief, consider the following features: 

 
• The act gives legal immunity to anyone involved in the production, 

distribution, transportation, and administration of COVID countermeasures. 
As such, it contradicts the legal standards set at the Nuremberg trials because 
it legalizes an “I just followed orders” defense. 

• It centralizes decision-making power in the HHS Secretary who simply “makes 
a determination”: “if the Secretary makes a determination that a disease or 
other health condition or other threat to health constitutes a public health 
emergency…” he or she may then order “the manufacture, testing, 
development, distribution, administration, or use of one or more covered 
countermeasures” (42 USC 247d-6d).  

• Liability protection includes death, injury, disability, loss of property, and 
more, caused by the administered countermeasures, and liability standards 
are set at an unprecedented degree: “willful misconduct,” which implies both 
proof of intention, and temporal proximity. 

• In combination with the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (Public Law 107-296, 
116 Stat. 2135), the PREP Act embeds public health within a growing network 
of federal agencies, coordinating action between the Department of Health 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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and Human Services, the Department of Defense, the Department of 
Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, the Federal Emergency 
Management Agency, and the Department of Justice (with several sub-
agencies that function as links, such as the Biomedical Advanced Research 
and Development Authority, the Defense Advanced Research Projects 
Agency, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Administration for 
Strategic Preparedness and Response, and Accelerating COVID-19 
Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (“ACTIV”), formerly known as 
“Operation Warp Speed”), thus militarizing public health.  

 

Other Transaction Authority (OTA) 
The final cornerstone of the edifice snapped in place with the 2015 OTA legislation 
applicable to DoD contracting. The use of OTA for medical countermeasures first 
emerged in 2015 at the kick-off event for the public/private Medical CBRN 
(chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear) Defense Consortium (MCDC). The 
MCDC is the national equivalent of the global Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness 
and Innovation. As the MCDC webpage states, “the usage of an OTA allows 
government to partner with the MCDC to leverage cutting edge R&D and develop 
prototypes for commercial sources. This gives MCS [Medical Countermeasures 
Systems] an agile and flexible way to develop medical countermeasures using 
new and innovative technology” (n.d.). This “flexibility” is achieved because an 
OTA procurement arrangement is not a contract, or grant, or other form of legally 
regulated tool. Under OTA, the DoD can order and pay for medical 
countermeasures without needing to adhere to good clinical practices or current 
good manufacturing practices (CGMP). This means that such countermeasures, 
legally named “prototype” (a term normally reserved for weapon systems), exist 
outside of the regulatory framework overseen by the FDA for pharmaceutical 
products. The July 2020 base contract between DoD and the MCDC, which legally 
establishes Operation Warp Speed, is explicitly framed under OTA. “The U.S. 
Army Contracting Command-New Jersey (ACC-NJ) is entering into a Section 815 
Prototype Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) with the Medical CBRN Defense 
Consortium (MCDC),” and the product to be financed for $10 billion is referred to 
as a “prototype” (U.S. Army 2016/2020). In other words, the COVID transfection 
prototypes that were the result of this OTA (referred to as June and July 2020 
attachments seven and eight to the 2016 base contract), and were injected into 
the majority of the US population, are not legally pharmaceutical products, while 
the FDA engaged in theatrics to convince the population that it was being given 
(and mandated) pharmaceutical products that were being regulated. Thus, the 
label “safe and effective,” reserved for FDA-approved and -regulated products, 
was arguably used illegally. Its use under OTA amounts to government deceit. 
CGMP, a central aspect of regulatory law, which guarantees quality control, 
consistency, and efficacy and safety of all pharmaceutical products, including 
biologics, was obliterated through OTA.  



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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What essentially this four-pillared frame of PHE offers is a military/civil and 
public/private joint venture to bypass the Constitution, existing health and 
contracting regulations, and shift power away from Congress and the courts to 
the unelected sector of the executive branch and its corporate partners. Unlike a 
declaration of war, for example, which has to be authorized by vote in Congress, 
this legislation transfers power exclusively to the HHS Secretary without 
validation by representatives of the voting public. As such, it replaces 
constitutional rights of citizens with a permissions-based management of 
populations. Pivotal for this arrogation of power is 21 USC 360bbb-3, 
Authorization for medical products for use in emergencies.3 Both the 
determination to declare a public health emergency, and the issuance of an EUA 
for products that diagnose, treat, or prevent such an emergency, are here put in 
the hands of a single person, who may base this determination on “scientific 
evidence….if available” (emphasis added).4 What if it isn’t? What if, say, scientific 
evidence were simply “out-of-scope” as is the case for a prototype under OTA? 
Well, then the Secretary makes a determination anyway, based on the sole power 
invested in him or her by Congress through 360bbb-3. Pfizer and Moderna may 
not even be the manufacturers of BTN162b2 and Spikevax, respectively, just as 
Pfizer does not conduct its own clinical trials. The OTA for COVID prototype 
medical countermeasures, signed between the US DoD and the public/private 
MCDC, involves hundreds of defense subcontractors, and offers no such 
certainties. Like Coke and Pepsi, like Camel and Marlboro, Pfizer and Moderna 
may simply be recognizable branding tools utilized in the production of Preciado’s 
synthetic-molecular pharmacopornographic subjectivities. Are you a Pfizer dude? 
A Moderna kid? Just as the hormone-industrial complex decoupled gender from 
nature in Preciado’s analysis, the mRNA subject is the current endpoint of a 
carefully orchestrated production of the human immune system as necessarily 
augmentable. The innate and adaptive evolutionary immune systems have been 
superseded, upgraded, trans-humanized. There is to be no alternative to the 
transfection-based Pfizer and Moderna subjects. Is that the real reason why the 
control group was unblinded and eliminated in the theatrical Pfizer clinical trials in 
2020? Is there to be no well-controlled scientific evidence as to whether the 
prototypes work (better than evolutionary nature) and what their dangers are? 
For those radical old-timers who, despite best propagandistic efforts, still 
remember the concept of natural immunity after infection, we offer “hybrid 
immunity” as a semi-synthetic compromise. Pharmacopornographic biotech 
strives to replace nature in every biological context with a commercial synthetic 
product for everyone: lab meat, synthetic breastmilk, injectable hormones, 
industrial neurotransmitters, transfected immunity. Nevertheless, transfection, 
like most political phenomena in the US, comes in two fake flavors: beef or 
chicken? Republican or Democrat? Pfizer or Moderna? And we are encouraged to 
fight it out. Freedom in permissions-based authoritarian capitalism is all about the 
illusion of choice, if available.  



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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Jackson v. Ventavia: It’s an OTA, Stupid5
 

Brook Jackson is a pharmaceutical whistleblower who worked as a clinical trials 
supervisor for Ventavia Research Group, a company subcontracted by Pfizer to 
conduct some of its phase three clinical trials for its mRNA shots. Jackson 
reported significant irregularities in the trials (including violations of clinical trial 
regulations and safety standards, and data fraud) first to her employer, who 
ignored her, then to the FDA on September 25, 2020. She was fired from her 
position at Ventavia on the same day for not being “a good fit” (Thacker 2021). 
After her report to the FDA, Jackson received a phone call from an FDA inspector, 
informing her that no further information could be given. On December 10, 2020, 
Pfizer submitted its application for EUA for the mRNA product, without a mention 
of the occurrences that Jackson had reported, and the very next day, the FDA 
granted EUA. On January 8, 2021, Jackson filed a False Claims Act complaint with 
the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas against Ventavia and Pfizer. 
On April 22, 2022, Pfizer filed a motion to dismiss. On March 31, 2023, Judge 
Michael Truncale granted Pfizer’s motion to dismiss. Of greater interest than 
Jackson’s allegations and her detailed documentation of fraud committed by 
Pfizer/Ventavia, however, is what this case has brought to light about the 
pandemic response in a broader sense. Pfizer’s motion to dismiss has brought the 
paperwork between the DoD and its contractors (among them Pfizer) into public 
focus, and for many citizens that alone is still news altogether, assuming as many 
did that the mRNA vaccines were ordinary pharmaceutical products, 
manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry and regulated by the government’s 
agencies. In granting Pfizer’s motion, and dismissing Jackson’s complaint, Judge 
Truncale’s ruling puts a significant dent in the public pandemic response narrative, 
despite defeating Jackson’s cause against Pfizer. Truncale’s disturbingly cynical 
self-positioning and his equivocal legal argumentation destroy the legal and 
ethical basis on which the complaint was built. By annihilating this basis, it 
simultaneously eviscerates assumptions held by most of the general public 
concerning the mRNA vaccines and the rule of law. 
 
The plaintiff’s allegations, articulated under the False Claims Act, assumed that 
Pfizer defrauded the US government by breaking the regulatory rules set forth for 
pharmaceutical products. More fundamentally, it assumed that vaccine safety and 
efficacy was material to the government’s interests. Truncale, in turn, shows that 
the government was at no point defrauded, citing several different reasons. 
Analyzing the OTA between the DoD and its contractors, he points out that Pfizer 
was under no obligation to even conduct clinical trials because the product in 
question was a “prototype”: “Such prototype agreements are executed under the 
DoD’s ‘Other Transaction Authority’ and, as a statutory matter, are not subject to 
FAR [Federal Acquisition Requirements]”6 Truncale equally confirms Pfizer’s claim 
that “the Government did not condition payment on compliance with FAR 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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requirements or FDA regulations”7, only to deliver a specified number of 
“prototype” injections by an agreed upon date, which they did. He concludes that 
to litigate against a contractor for fulfilling its legal obligations is “unavailing”8 
(40).  
 
Truncale’s text painfully reveals that Jackson’s main conceptual mistake was not 
to have understood the legal construct of the OTA and to have assumed, like 
much of the general public, that the Pfizer “vaccine” was a pharmaceutical 
product, and that therefore regulatory law applied, and that the breaches of 
regulatory law that she documented should have been material. The judge never 
takes issue with any of her allegations, and in fact calls them “well-pleaded facts” 
throughout.9 In a breathtaking dismissal of the relevance, or materiality, of such 
facts Truncale simply states, “Continued payment by the federal government 
after it learns of the alleged fraud substantially increases the burden on the relator 
in establishing materiality…The well-pleaded facts in Ms. Jackson’s Amended 
Complaint cannot plausibly shoulder that burden.”10 In other words, the facts 
concerning pharmaceutical regulations don’t matter. What matters is that Pfizer 
and the government agree, which they clearly do because the government paid 
and keeps paying, and there is nothing more to it. The government ordered a 
prototype. It received a prototype. It paid. End of story.  
 
The district judge leaves no doubt, either, about his own positioning vis-à-vis the 
government: “The United States itself has taken the unusual step of filing a 
Statement of Interest Supporting Dismissal of the Amended Complaint.”11  In 
other words, Truncale is doing as told, as a judge in an authoritarian system 
would. Is this not leaving a clear record of the chain of command in a system in 
which the judiciary branch has no independence? One wonders, furthermore, who 
exactly “the United States” is. He rounds off this implicit analysis of his own role 
when he affirms: “Ms. Jackson is in effect asking this Court to overrule the DoD’s 
decision to exercise Other Transaction Authority to purchase Pfizer’s 
vaccine…This Court will not veto the DoD’s judgment concerning mission 
effectiveness during a national emergency”12  In line with the perception of his 
own role, he lectures Jackson that she must not “second guess decisions made by 
those empowered through the democratic process to shape public policy.”13 The 
invocation of the “democratic process” adds a facetiously dissonant tone to the 
judge’s opinion, particularly in view of the fact that none of the decision-makers in 
question are elected members of the government, let alone that the very 
“democratic process” actually depends on the public “second guessing” those that 
are “empowered.”14 
 
Perhaps against his own intentions, Truncale’s refutation of the whistleblower’s 
naively optimistic belief that regulatory law is material and should trump raw 
power reveals many of the more caustic aspects of the COVID operation. Not only 
does it open the door to future, more on-target, legal strategies, the judge’s ruling 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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and the case’s focus on official documents actually opens a window on the truth of 
the “autoimmune disease” that has befallen the body politic that, to the date of 
his “Order and Opinion,” could not easily be found in a more striking form in the 
public record. 
 
There is another major reveal from Truncale’s gob smacking text. Truncale’s own 
argumentative structure performatively mimics the duplicitous legal structure 
that the government has put in place surrounding the “vaccine,” duplicitous here 
to be understood as both “deceitful” and “twofold.” In a mind-boggling twist of 
logic, the judge (basically just following government narrative) plays the FDA 
against the DoD, asserting that Jackson doesn’t understand that the two are not 
the same. She complained to the FDA in September 2020, but the FDA didn’t 
purchase the prototype (and didn’t have an OTA with Pfizer, the DoD did), and so 
the DoD is entitled to claim that it didn’t know of her report to the FDA about the 
fraud until February 2022. Jackson then points out that the OTA contains a clause 
that the product needs to achieve FDA authorization. However, the judge 
counters that suing the FDA for false claims isn’t an option because it is the DoD 
that is Pfizer’s OTA partner, not the FDA. And the whole problem is that Jackson 
sued Pfizer for defrauding the government, which, according to Truncale, it never 
did. Pfizer followed orders and complied with the OTA it had signed with the DoD. 
Separately, it achieved EUA with the FDA, based on (allegedly fraudulent) clinical 
trial data, but the OTA has no care for how the EUA is achieved, as long as it is 
achieved, because it is technically “out-of-scope.” No regulations apply. Here 
another equivocation plays out: EUA under PHE is not the same as EAU, which 
requires IND status, clinical trials, informed consent, and internal review board 
supervision.  
 
In her evident lack of comprehension of the duplicitous structure set up by the 
government, Jackson alleges that the FDA, as well, has been defrauded by Pfizer. 
To this, the judge responds that the FDA had full knowledge of all her “well-
pleaded facts” since September 2020, but then proceeded with three EUA’s from 
December 2020 on, and has to this day never revoked its approval of Pfizer’s 
product. EUA, unlike EAU, does not require clinical trials. Jackson’s fraud reports 
about the theatrical clinical trials are immaterial. “The Government’s unbroken 
chain of authorization and payments in the face of Ms. Jackson’s allegations does 
not support an inference that the alleged misrepresentations were material.”15 
Clinical trial related facts just don’t matter. In other words, if the “government" 
(the DoD? the FDA?) thought something was wrong with the product as far as 
their goals with it, they would have acted upon the knowledge she gave them, but 
they didn’t. The fact that they didn’t means that Jackson’s facts were 
“immaterial.” The prototype did exactly what the government intended. Needless 
to say, what that intention is remains in the shadows, but clearly it is not an 
intention based on valid and legal clinical trials, which are the preconditions of a 
safe and effective pharmaceutical product. There was never an investigation. The 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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facts were ignored, along with the many who died of, or were maimed by, the 
prototype, no matter whether they reported to the government’s surveillance 
systems, no matter in how many Senate hearings they (or their survivors) 
testified. 
  
Why then not simply waive the FDA regulatory stipulations altogether? Why 
bother with discussions and votes on the FDA’s vaccine advisory board? Why did 
the DoD lawyers write those requirements into the OTA in such a duplicitous 
manner where they seem to matter and they don’t? As the discussion of an 
additional lawsuit currently under way will demonstrate, this equivocation played 
a crucial, and allegedly deadly, role in the COVID countermeasures rollout.  
 

Watts v. Austin: Getting on Target16 
George Watts Jr. was a twenty-four-year old college student who submitted to 
the Pfizer transfection to satisfy a college mandate. The second injection made 
him very ill, and five and a half weeks later he died. Unlike many other comparable 
cases, against prevailing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 
recommendations, his family had an autopsy performed. The autopsy report 
concludes “to a reasonable degree of medical certainty” that “the ‘Primary Cause’ 
of death is ‘Covid-19 vaccine-related myocarditis.’”17 A nasopharyngeal 
postmortem test further ascertained that Watts was not infected with COVID-19. 
Watts was healthy, young, and had no pre-existing medical conditions. His case is 
so unambiguous, and therefore free of any possible alternative interpretations, 
that it makes for an irrefutable model court case. After exhausting the legal 
remedy provided by the HHS’s Countermeasure Injury Compensation Program 
and being ignored within the legal response period, on May 31, 2023, his parents 
proceeded to file for damages with U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia. 
The location of this litigation is significant because this court ruled two decades 
earlier in Doe #1 v. Rumsfeld against the DoD’s violation of service members’ 
informed consent when the DoD strong-armed soldiers into submitting to an 
experimental anthrax vaccine. Watts v. Austin has, as of this writing, not been 
adjudicated.  
 
What I wish to emphasize in my discussion here is that this is most likely the first 
instance of litigation concerning the COVID-19 countermeasures operation that 
aims at the right target, the United States Department of Defense. As mentioned 
earlier, the whistleblower case against Pfizer was ill-construed in targeting Pfizer. 
In the wake of its dismissal, the plaintiff of Watts v. Austin savvily addresses both 
the OTA contractual nature of the military prototypes deployed, and the PREP 
Act, which indemnifies any and all participants in COVID countermeasures. 
Jackson’s case was doomed from the beginning, misunderstanding the entire 
legal framework that I traced above, and counting on the naive assumption that 
the government would want to learn about safety and regulatory breaches. Watts 



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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v. Austin states outright that it is known that the government is fully aware of the 
unprecedented number of severe adverse events and that it is monitoring them 
through detailed data collection. Jackson’s misguided assumption was the 
government was being defrauded by Pfizer and did not know the facts she was 
revealing. Furthermore, the Watts’ complaint is unambiguous from the outset on 
the role of the bureaucratic cluster of security agencies that came together in 
Operation Warp Speed under DoD leadership, and then hones in on the one 
possible limit to the liability shield provided by the PREP Act: willful misconduct. 
 
The construction of a legal argument around willful misconduct, allegedly 
committed by the DoD, focuses, among other things, on one more instance of 
what I have called duplicitousness in discussing Jackson’s case above. Two things 
were deployed while it was made to look like one and vice versa. In arguing that 
the DoD committed willful misconduct when luring George Watts Jr. into 
accepting a fatal experimental injection, the plaintiff demonstrates that the DoD 
did so by means of a deceitful maneuver. The Pfizer prototype was distributed, 
and continued to circulate throughout 2021 and most of 2022 until it was replaced 
with the “bivalent booster,” as an unapproved EUA experimental vaccine 
(BTN162b2), while also being introduced as an FLP on August 23, 2021 
(“Comirnaty”). The trickery consists in that Comirnaty—what a strange corruption 
of the word “community”—was never available in the US. Public campaigns 
championed the “Pfizer vaccine” as “fully approved,” making people believe that 
they were receiving a product that had gone through rigorous testing, and had 
therefore earned the legal label “safe and effective,” while what they really 
received was the unapproved experimental prototype BTN162b2. The 
government had deceived Watts by means of this bait-and-switch strategy. He 
waited until after August 23, 2021, to receive the FLP, but received the EUA 
prototype with fatal outcome, so the plaintiff contends. The complaint argues in 
detail, by documenting various public appearances of DoD leaders, how the term 
“safe and effective” was deployed “in massive, deliberate deception and 
exaggeration…making the majority of the country (including Mr. Watts) 
unknowing participants in its mass human experiment.”18 In calling attention to 
the BTN162b2/Comirnaty equivocation, the case lifts the veil on a duplicitousness 
that cuts in both directions: the two products are both one (and the same) and 
two (separate entities). Propagandistically it allowed the government to “borrow” 
the label of “safe and effective” for the EUA prototype by claiming both were 
essentially the same, while it protected itself by maintaining a legal difference 
between the two products. In this context, the equivocation between EUA and 
EAU was exploited as well. The original conservative EAU legislation prohibits the 
coexistence of EAU for an IND and full licensing of a product (FLP). EUA under 
PHE does not. By making Comirnaty unavailable, no arm was ever injected with 
anything but the experimental military prototype. Whether, as the complaint 
claims, the FDA-approved product Comirnaty is actually really “safe and effective” 
is immaterial because, for all we know, it is a legal chimera.  



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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The complaint then contextualizes the subject matter of involuntary human 
experimentation both in the anthrax vaccine precedent Doe #1 v. Rumsfeld and 
the Nuremberg judgments against Nazi medical experimentation. In Doe #1 v. 
Rumsfeld (2003), the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia had struck 
down the DoD vaccine mandate of an experimental (i.e., unapproved) vaccine for 
service members. Watts v. Austin claims that both the COVID-19 vaccination 
campaign and the anthrax vaccine mandate “eviscerate[ed] informed consent,” 
which this Court has found constitutes a violation of federal law.19 Doe #1 v. 
Rumsfeld, which is cited here, actually went so far as to pronounce that “the 
United States cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as 
guinea pigs for experimental drugs” (Doe v. Rumsfeld 2003, section 81). In Watts 
v. Austin’s argumentation, the violation of informed consent as a foundational 
ethical principle in the practice of medicine is grounded in the Nuremberg code. 
Having recourse to a Supreme Court ruling on United States v. Stanley (1987), 
which refers to the Nuremberg code in the context of a case about the DoD’s LSD 
experimentation on a soldier and categorically declares that “experimentation 
with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable” as a “first 
principle” (section 687),20 Watts v. Austin suggests that the “DoD’s mass 
experiment” may constitute “a crime against humanity.”21  
 
Unlike Jackson’s suit, Watts v. Austin does not assume that the US government is 
the unwitting victim of corporate fraud. Quite the opposite: Pfizer, as evinced by 
the OTA, is merely a contractor in Operation Warp Speed under DoD leadership, 
fulfilling its legal obligations, which are clearly “out-of-scope” of regulatory 
pharmaceutical law. In autoimmunitary times, the simple notion of regulatory 
capture has been superseded by something much more insidious. The high stakes 
set by the only opening within the PREP Act that makes legal action possible, 
“willful misconduct,” necessitate that any potentially successful legal strategy 
must aim high. As spelled out by the law, willful misconduct implies an “act or 
omission that is taken…intentionally to achieve wrongful purpose” and, 
furthermore, “in disregard of a known and obvious risk that is so great as to make 
it highly probable that the harm will outweigh the benefit.”22 For this reason, the 
complaint had to outline in great detail that the government has meticulously 
collected data on severe adverse events since the rollout began, and continued 
with its “mass experimentation” despite the immediate evidence that the 
prototype it had deployed constituted a “known and obvious risk.” Watts v. Austin 
aims much higher than did United States v. Pfizer, whether or not it has any 
chance of succeeding in court. Its potential success lies in the legal precedents 
that have documented, and punished, the history of reckless DoD 
experimentation on service members. The difference is one of scale. From anthrax 
to COVID, military “guinea pigs” were replaced by civilian lab rats, reminiscent of 
Neocleous’s discussion of violence against non-combatant targets in modern 
warfare (2022, 312).   



 
Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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PART II 

SARS-CoV-2 and mRNA “Vaccines”: Autoimmune Logic 
Before I proceed with the second, more biomedically centered, section of this 
article, a clarification is in order that I write without formal training in medicine, 
biology, or chemistry. In medical contexts, the right to speak at all seems 
increasingly reserved for disciplinary “experts” who offer “settled” truths 
presented as “consensus,” a form of consensus that has ousted scores of 
censored, discredited, and smeared dissidents of distinguished expertise. Cursed 
with a temperament that has always favored dissidence and “biodefection,”23 my 
ambition is to raise questions and doubts, and to make connections that have not 
been made in the mainstream. The “vaccine question” has been especially vexed 
and polarizing ever since the antibody-industrial complex took hold of medicine 
and obliterated robust discussion, not just of technical details, but of larger 
philosophical frames. 
 
While this section is about some of the specific aspects of the novel transfection 
methodology purportedly utilized for immunization purposes, I do see the COVID 
“vaccines” emerging from a line of traditional vaccines that are in themselves not 
unproblematic. Autoimmune disease as an adverse result of vaccination has been 
known for decades.24 It was largely the autoimmune Guillain-Barré syndrome that 
caused the recall of the swine flu vaccine during the 2009 pandemic, a recall for 
what now seem to be surprisingly low numbers of adverse events. More broadly 
even, only dissidents seem to address the question why the industry standard for 
vaccines against respiratory viruses, foremost influenza before COVID, is an 
intramuscular injection where the body encounters the antigen at a highly 
counterintuitive location, and arguably with ineffective and unsafe consequences. 
Intramuscular vaccination arguably confuses the immune system by forcing it to 
encounter antigens in a place where it is set up to deal with mutations and 
malignancy, not infection. Effective immunity to respiratory viruses is primarily 
mucosal, not humoral. The immune system, in general, encounters foreign 
antigens at the body’s three major epithelial boundaries with the outside world: 
the skin, the respiratory system including nasal mucosa, and the digestive tract. 
Who started the intramuscular injection trend and why isn’t the mainstream 
questioning it on basic immunological knowledge of the immune system? As I 
understand it, the IgG antibodies produced by intramuscular injection are too 
large to cross the blood/lung barrier, and cannot be where the action would be 
needed. In immunology, it is understood that it was the innate immune system 
(especially dendritic cells) in connection with T-cells that provide immunity, and 
B-cell derived antibodies “mop up” the debris after infection is defeated. Is it that 
the convenience of measuring seropositivity for immunoglobulins has come to 
stand in for “immunity” most obviously for commercial reasons and to further the 



 
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     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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“politics of immunity” (Neocleous 2022)? Is it because the antibody market has 
one of the largest, most lucrative shares of the pharmaceutical pie?  
 
However, the precipitous introduction of transfection through mRNA and 
adenovirus vector technologies in 2020 also ushered in a fundamental change to 
the definition of “vaccine” and “immunization” on the CDC’s webpage. Before 
September 2021, the CDC defined a vaccine as a product that “stimulates a 
person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” (Jones 2022, 
emphasis added). After September 2021—which is to say at the moment where 
the official narrative that the transfections would prevent infection and 
transmission began to fall apart—the definition of “vaccine” reads as follows: “A 
preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases” 
(CDC 2021, emphasis added). The move away from immunity as the central 
purpose of vaccination is obviously the most striking shift, but at the same time 
the epidemiological bar is significantly lowered here in general. Many substances 
“stimulate immune responses,” such as vitamins, hormones, medications, or the 
consumption of alcohol or sugar. Are they all to be understood as vaccines now? 
At the same time, a stronger emphasis is placed on “protection” in the post-
September 2021 definition, a term that is arguably bolstering the paternalism of 
the corporate and bureaucratic institutions that market these experimental EUA 
products. The more precise scientific term immunity (untenable as a claim for the 
products as of mid-2021) is replaced with an emotional one: immunization is 
defined as a “process by which a person becomes protected against a disease” and 
vaccination “produce[s] protection” instead of immunity (CDC 2021, emphasis 
added). Along the lines of Neocleous’s thinking, immunity and its long 
metaphorical connection to warfare is replaced with “protection” perhaps 
because such a substitution “replicates a broader liberal position which is happy to 
critique war and its tropes but less comfortable with a critique of security” (2022, 
42). What could be a better way to disguise the security state’s violence than to 
dress it up as protection?  
 
There are several aspects of the mRNA COVID injections that participate in 
autoimmune logic where, as Neocleous defined it so succinctly, “the body…is 
threatened, damaged, and ultimately destroyed from within by its own immunity-
security” (2022, 27). It would be interesting to speculate why public health 
eschewed the technically precise term transfection when referring to their 
prototype. By suggesting an “autoimmune logic” inherent to transfection, I am 
casting a wider net than strictly the causation of autoimmune diseases in a narrow 
sense, and am referring to a more general immune dysregulation that includes 
inflammation syndromes (such as myocarditis);25 immune suppression including 
undesirable IgG4-based immune tolerance leading to infection, reactivation of 
latent viruses, and cancers; as well as immune-system-induced blood clotting and 
resulting heart attacks and strokes. Some of these phenomena are already built 
into certain features of the human response to the spike protein of the SARS-2 



 
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     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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virus itself,26 others appear to be linked to the gene-therapy-based technologies 
themselves (although we will see that it is also the specific combination of mRNA 
and synthetic spike that has produced specific damage). Early on in the pandemic, 
the scientific literature was replete with studies and evidence of the inflammatory 
nature of the spike antigen (see, e.g., Khan et al. 2021; Simon et al. 2021). There 
are now also studies emerging that contradict CDC statements that the spike 
protein that is expressed after injection with mRNA products is “harmless,” or that 
“our cells break down the mRNA and remove it” (in what time frame?) (CDC, n.d.). 
This is a statement that would be true for natural mRNA, but the synthetic mRNA 
employed in the COVID products is codon-optimized, and natural pyrimidine 
nucleoside uridine has been replaced with pseudo-uridine. Both technologies 
stabilize the molecule and prevent it from being broken down by the innate 
immune system, a fact that was known already much before the massive 
transfection rollout (see Karikó et al. 2005).  
 
In contrast to the CDC publication, a seminal 2022 study finds “vaccine mRNA and 
spike antigen up to 8 weeks postvaccination in some cases” (Röltgen et al. 2022, 
1025); that is, they do not remain at the injection site, and are not simply “broken 
down and removed.” Palmer and Bhakdi (2021), who analyzed a Japanese 
document on one of Pfizer’s pre-clinical pharmacokinetics experiments on rats, 
also show both the extraordinary ubiquity of the synthetic mRNA throughout the 
rats’ bodies, and the accumulation of it in specific organs. This analysis provides 
understanding for some of the human adverse events reported in the wake of the 
rollout. In addition, there are other hyperinflammatory ingredients in the mRNA 
products, such as the lipid nanoparticles that are used to transport the mRNA into 
cells. This technology is also novel in medicine, and there is no long-term data 
available (Ndeupen 2021).   
  
Since the toxicity of the spike protein was well established in the literature soon 
after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, one wonders why the manufacturers of all 
the COVID vaccines, not only the mRNA varieties, would have not only focused so 
narrowly on the spike protein as the only antigen around which to construct the 
products, but why even to have focused on it at all. CDC guidance is, once again, 
not helpful: “Spike proteins are ideal targets for vaccines” (CDC, n.d.). Why? The 
spike protein represents the most cytotoxic antigen of the coronavirus, and also 
the most unstable one. In addition to safety concerns, this also affects efficacy. It 
means that a vaccine focused on the spike protein rather than the much more 
stable nucleocapsid protein, for example, which remains conserved across not 
only different SARS-CoV-2 variants but most coronaviruses, will always already be 
outdated (Wang et al. 2023). Coupled with another, traditional, immunization 
platform (i.e., the direct delivery of the antigen plus adjuvant) the focus on spike 
may have been a risky one, but it would have introduced the negative in known 
and manageable doses. The mRNA platform, in turn, introduces an altogether 
new logic, which coupled with the known toxicity of spike, redoubles its dangers. 



 
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     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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As it stands, it is completely unknown in which quantities the lipid nanoparticles, 
the mRNA, and the spike antigen remain in the body of transfected patients 
(Trougakos et al. 2022). Fascinating new research is also beginning to draw 
connections between spike, mRNA, and the gut microbiome (Hazan et al. 2022). 
The concern then arises that microbiota may also be transfected and produce 
spike protein.   
 
More specifically, one central argument about an autoimmune logic in the mRNA 
prototypes focuses on transfection as a technology itself. In the medical dissident 
discussions of the last years, a major rift has opened between those who reject the 
entire mRNA platform as incompatible with human health, and those who 
consider the problem to be the choice of the spike protein for which the 
transfections code. The latter camp leaves the door open for future “better 
protein choices,” and fails to question the technology itself. Many, if not all, 
vaccines (and other platforms) in the immediate future are scheduled to be 
changed to transfection, connecting the technology to massive economic 
interests. A series of litigations throughout the 2010s culminating in the Amgen v. 
Sanofi27 Supreme Court decision in 2023 on current antibody patents has thrown 
traditional biologics-related patent law into crisis to the point where transfection 
may offer an attractive legal bypass and continuation of economic growth. In 
other words, what is at stake is much broader than the topic of mRNA-based 
COVID prototypes, which may have been launched as an unprecedentedly 
massive involuntary experimentation to establish the previously unsuccessful 
transfection technology. The critics of the spike protein choice implicitly accept 
what the antibody industrial complex is currently celebrating as a revolution, and 
which is clearly one of the main reasons behind the dogged insistence on pushing 
this experimental technology onto the majority of the world’s population at “warp 
speed.”  
 
Another faction, however, sees the main problem with transfection technology 
itself. My argument concerning an autoimmune logic in transfection is based on 
this critique, and is fundamentally very simple: transfection makes human cells 
express a foreign protein.28 The expression of a foreign protein by a human cell 
unleashes an autoimmune cascade of events that has been explained by Palmer 
and Bhakdi (2021) in their call to discontinue the mass experiment. They illustrate 
the effect of immune surveillance on the transfected cells: “an immune response 
will be mounted against that [foreign] protein and against the cells that produce 
it. This response is mediated by cytotoxic T-lymphocytes (CTLs, T-killer cells)” 
(2021, 3). They explain the occurrence of blood clotting not simply as a 
consequence of the spike protein’s cytotoxicity, but of the cytotoxic effects of the 
immune response to transfection itself: “If the vaccine is expressed in the cells 
that line the blood vessels—the endothelial cells—the vascular lesion caused by 
the immune attack will again set off blood clotting” (3). Although censored and 



 
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     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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punished after the rollout of the mRNA injections, this insight into the genesis of 
autoimmune dynamics in reaction to tissue damage is not novel or 
groundbreaking. In fact, as Vanderlugt and Miller showed already in 2002, “tissue 
damage during an immune response can lead to the priming of self-reactive T 
and/or B lymphocytes, regardless of the specificity of the initial insult” (85). Why 
were these well-known, and also common-sensical, facts about immune function 
buried with such overwhelming force at the rollout of the transfection platform? 
 
Another particularly troubling aspect of immune dysfunction produced by the 
mRNA products, IgG4-based immune tolerance, has been described by Irrgang et 
al. (2022) and Seneff et al. (2023). The switch to IgG4 is basically what in lay 
parlance is called “desensitization." Irrgang et al. found that “IgG4 antibodies 
among all spike-specific IgG antibodies rose, on average, from 0.04% shortly after 
the second vaccination to 19.27% late after the third vaccination” (2022, 1). The 
logical conclusion is that repeated transfection within a short time frame such as 
recommended by public health officials, and required to achieve seropositivity, 
eventually leads to desensitization to the antigen. Seneff et al. explain that this 
development, replacing IgG3 antibodies with IgG4 after repeated COVID 
transfection “is immune suppressive. IgG4 plays a pathological role in many 
different diseases, including cancer, autoimmune diseases, allergies, and helminth 
infection” (2023).29 Furthermore, in an analysis of the data available on the CDC’s 
own Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), Seneff et al. raise the 
troubling observations that “COVID-19 vaccines accounted for 96% of all cases in 
VAERS in 2021 where ‘lymphoma’ was listed as a symptom. Since 2021, a total of 
50 cases of pancreatic carcinoma have been reported in VAERS, all of which were 
associated with COVID-19 vaccines” (2023). 
 
Immune suppression as a result of IgG4 expression may perhaps also account for 
findings from a recent Cleveland Clinic study with nearly fifty thousand 
participants that showed negative efficacy for the very COVID-19 disease against 
which the transfections are supposed to protect. The study concludes that “being 
‘up-to-date’ on COVID-19 vaccination by the CDC definition was not associated 
with a lower risk of COVID-19 than not being ‘up-to-date’.” (Shrestha et al. 2023, 
8).   
 

“Autoimmune” Political Attacks on Regulation and Quality Control 
Returning to the irregular legal contracts for the production of the transfection 
products through OTA, EUA, and the PREP Act (and equivalents in several other 
countries), I will point to a few specific biological data points that link to my 
previous discussion of the legal framework that undergirds the COVID operations. 
This time, my observations hinge primarily on the question of CGMP, a regulatory 
framework bypassed by OTA and EUA. In my discussion of some of the aspects of 
the biology of the transfection products above, the foundational assumption is 



 
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     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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still that we know what the products contain—that is, that the publication of 
contents and mechanisms of action by the presumed manufacturers are accurate 
and complete, or that the manufacturers are even able to characterize their 
products with precision. Very few independent analyses of the products have 
been conducted, and the few that have, are small scale. Keep in mind that, in the 
US these products are owned by the DoD from the moment of production until 
they have been injected into arms. The few independent instances of analysis 
have revealed astonishing surprises. One of them is a recent analysis by the 
molecular biologist and genetic sequencing expert Kevin McKernan, who found 
DNA contamination in vials (consistent with the likely use of cDNA plasmid-based 
cloning of RNA in the production process) with far-reaching implications for the 
safety of the products.30 Two of the main risks of bacterial DNA contamination are 
carcinogenicity, as well as the long-denied integration into the human genome.31 
 
Along with Brook Jackson’s whistleblower complaints in September 2020 with 
subsequent legal complaint in early 2021, one of the other first official reports 
about major irregularities concerning Pfizer’s BTN162b2 came from a data leak at 
the European Medicines Agency (EMA, the European equivalent of the FDA in the 
US) in January 2021 shortly after the FDA had issued the first EUA for Pfizer’s 
product. The EMA server was hacked and several emails between regulatory 
officials and Pfizer executives were anonymously shared with journalists, among 
them the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Under discussion was the fact that the 
nucleic acid content of the product was far below the declared specifications, and 
an unknown amount of uncharacterized truncated and modified mRNA was found 
in the products. Interestingly, the exclusive area of concern addressed in the BMJ 
article that discusses the debacle is efficacy. (Tinari 2021) Even though truncated 
species of RNA are well known to be dangerous and implicated in carcinogenicity 
and other disease processes,32 vaccine safety concerns in 2020 and 2021 remained 
so taboo that they could apparently not be addressed: “‘The complete, intact 
mRNA molecule is essential to its potency as a vaccine,’ professor of 
biopharmaceutics Daan J.A. Crommelin and colleagues wrote in a review article in 
The Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences late last year. ‘Even a minor degradation 
reaction, anywhere along an mRNA strand, can severely slow or stop proper 
translation performance of that strand and thus result in the incomplete 
expression of the target antigen’” (Tinari 2021). All the agencies contacted by 
Tinari for the BMJ stonewalled the investigation: “In subsequent correspondence, 
FDA, EMA, and Canadian government department Health Canada all stated that 
specific information related to the acceptability criteria is confidential” (Tinari 
2021). As expected, Pfizer also blocked all scrutiny, and Moderna “declined to 
respond to any of the BMJ’s questions” (Tinari 2021). What emerged in the leaked 
documents is also that regulators across the various countries were under 
considerable pressure to issue EUAs (and legal equivalents) in short order. As 
documents obtained through freedom of information act requests from the 
Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (the British FDA) 



 
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demonstrate, the regulatory process was by-passed in the UK in similar ways to 
how it happened in the US through OTA contracting and emergency legislation, 
which concentrates the power exclusively in the HHS Secretary. “All the Covid 
vaccines and therapeutics authorisation decisions were taken by the Licensing 
Minister and were not delegated” (MHRA Customer Services 2023). This means 
the MHRA’s concerns as regulatory agency, similar to the ones the EMA had 
expressed internally, were immaterial to the rollout of the product, and the 
minister of health, Matt Hancock, alone decided to go forward with the rollout. 
 
Ultimately, the EMA settled for lower purity in negotiations with Pfizer than the 
one originally specified. The question of impurities, specifications, and 
manufacturing standards, however, seems uncontrollable with a product that is 
legally exempt from pharmaceutical regulation through EUA and OTA, is a 
military prototype owned by the DoD, and is produced at a scale and speed that 
are considered by pharma insiders to be impossible to be handled according to 
CGMP. There are several “nitty-gritty” details revealed by pharmacologist Luz 
Maria Gutschi in her recent sworn testimony before the Canadian National 
Citizens Inquiry (Gutschi 2023).  Gutschi, who is an expert in regulatory law and 
production standards, speaks about the extreme fragility of RNA, and the sheer 
impossibility to scale-up production safely. She mentions many “pedestrian” 
details that make such a large-scale operation practically unfeasible, such as the 
fact that lipid nanoparticles conglomerate through various freeze and thaw cycles 
in the distribution chain, and shaking will disintegrate them. The purification 
process with magnetic beads that extracts RNA from the cDNA plasmids in which 
it was generated is extremely difficult to perform in large quantities, which 
possibly accounts for the DNA contamination discussed above.  
 
Gutschi further analyzes the data leak of early 2021, and draws attention to the 
discrepancy that EMA regulators noticed in late 2020 between the Pfizer product 
that had been used in clinical trials and the commercial product BTN162b2 that 
was about to be rolled out. She makes two important points. First, when the 
impurities were noted, under normal regulatory circumstances, and since Pfizer 
was unable to clarify the discrepancy in a satisfactory manner, new clinical trials 
would be ordered, which did not happen. Second, BTN162b2 falls into the 
category of a pro-drug, meaning that what is injected into recipients is not the 
active agent (spike protein) but a substance that produces it (mRNA). In pro-drug 
regulation, the manufacturer needs to characterize carefully what exactly the pro-
drug produces in the body, where it does so, and how much of it in a given time 
frame. None of those data points were ever delivered by the manufacturers, and 
in fact the spike protein for which the mRNA presumably codes was never fully 
characterized. 
 
Although it has not been peer reviewed, a study by Veenstra et al. (2022) 
addresses this astounding regulatory disaster, over a year after billions of doses 



 
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     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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had been injected into arms. As the authors write, there has been “extensive 
research around mRNA vaccines and their proposed utility…but none describe the 
characteristics of the full-length protein obtained from the modified/synthetic 
mRNA that is part of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. In this paper, we 
provide the first data characterizing the actual proteins produced…” (2022, 2). 
Perhaps more astoundingly even, they state, “In communications with Moderna 
and Pfizer-BioNTech regarding the proteins expressed by their synthetic mRNA 
vaccines, each company’s medical information group disclosed that they had not 
examined the protein dynamics more than 48 hours post-transfection in cell 
culture” (Veenstra et al. 2022, 8).   
 
A study by Banoun (2023) examines the regulatory limbo into which mRNA 
transfections were thrown by classifying them as “vaccines,” even though their 
mode of action “should classify them as gene therapy products (GTPs).” (2023, 1) 
The author proposes that “the wide and persistent biodistribution of mRNAs and 
their protein products,” which would have had to be studied had the products 
been classified as GTPs, “raises safety issues” (2023, 1). All of these unknowns, 
failures to characterize, and derelictions in comprehensive study, ultimately 
underscore the factual nature of the “conspiracy theory” statement that no one 
knows what is in the vials, and explain partially the wide and uneven scattering of 
severe adverse events (SAE) across batches and sometimes even individual doses.  
 
A recent Danish study by Schmeling, Manniche, and Hansen (2023) found an 
unprecedented variability of SAEs in correlation with specific batches of the Pfizer 
transfection product. This study, published in the European Journal of Clinical 
Investigation, once again confirms, and puts into mainframe scientific discussion, 
data that had previously been vilified as “conspiracy theory” (“How Bad,” n.d.). 
Schmeling et al. found that some batches had nearly no associated adverse 
events at all. This is a finding that, in a recent evaluation of Schmeling et al., the 
German organic chemistry professor Gerald Dyker summarized as “maybe in fact 
something like placebos” (Dyker and Matysik 2023). Other batches, however, are 
associated with unprecedented rates in the magnitude of 8,000 SAEs per 80,000 
doses, or one in every ten. SAEs refer to deaths and permanent or long-term 
maiming, which seems to have occurred in 10 percent of all recipients of specific 
batches. What the study fails to consider, however, is that some batches were 
likely applied to different age and comorbidity demographics, such as in nursing 
homes. Much more detailed investigations based on all-cause mortality, which 
bypass the inherent bias in studies based on diagnoses, are needed. In the 
meantime, such unexplained variability speaks to the complete absence of quality 
control and regulation. No pharmaceutical product has ever been allowed to stay 
on the market with such a safety profile. For the sake of this associative statistical 
analysis, it is irrelevant whether those SAEs have been proven to be causative. 
The point is simply that the variability in outcomes is unheard of for a regulated 



 
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     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

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product. One batch of aspirin would never cause one thousand times the number 
of reported SAEs than another without regulatory intervention.  
 

No Conclusion 
Most of the quoted accredited experts who are beginning to come forward within 
mainstream professional and academic venues, and are diagnosing the various 
failures of regulatory law and have begun raising the alarm about irregularities 
that occurred as early as late 2020 in the interactions between regulatory 
agencies and manufacturers, seem to be unaware of the OTA set up and military 
nature of the operation. Most of them speak as if the products in question were 
pharmaceuticals. Most of them analyze and publish data as if, as Judge Truncale 
stated so cynically in United States v. Pfizer, they were “material.” What is 
strikingly absent in all of this important analysis is the bigger “autoimmune” 
picture of the global security formations that I have tried to put into the frame.  
 
There is no final conclusion to this article because the processes of investigation 
into what has happened since the COVID pandemic was announced in 2020 have 
not concluded, and indeed on an almost daily basis, new facts and understandings 
emerge, and I expect them to continue. However, what has not changed since I 
began to work on this material is the fundamental insight into what I call the 
autoimmune turn within the security apparatuses of the state and its public-
private structures, particularly in relation to the antibody-industrial complex that 
began to be weaponized in the 1980s. The Cold War seems to have turned inward 
targeting the body politic, and it has chosen to do so molecularly. The 
duplicitousness that I have diagnosed at various junctures of the COVID 
operations is perhaps of the same ilk as the one Neocleous finds at work in the 
politics of immunity when he points out, “So: we live in an age of noncombatant 
immunity designed to provide civilians with some semblance of security, that is 
also an age of collateral damage in which civilians appear to lack any meaningful 
security…How is it possible that immunity is a human right ascribed to 
noncombatants, codified in international law and adhered to by liberal democratic 
states, and yet so many noncombatants are being killed by those same states?” 
(2022, 312). Indeed, how is it possible?  
 

Notes  
 
1 Hatfill is a physician and bioweapons expert, and later came to play an advisory 
role on COVID matters in Trump’s White House. 
 
2 Doe #1 v. Rumsfeld, 297 F.Supp.2d 119, 135 (D.D.C. 2003). 
 
3 Authorization for Medical Products for Use in Emergencies , 21 U.S.C.S. 
§360bbb-3 (2004).  
 



 
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4 21 U.S.C.S §360bbb-3(c)(2). 
 
5 I am using this abbreviated reference to the court case, whose full citation is 
United States ex rel. Jackson v. Ventavia Rsch. Grp., LLC, 667 F. Supp. 3d 332 (E.D. 
Tex. 2023).  
 
6 Id. at 351. 
 
7 Id.  
 
8 Id. at 362. 
 
9 Id. at 351. 
 
10 Id. at 363. 
 
11 Id. at 362. 
 
12 Id. at 352. 
 
13 Id. at 362. 
 
14 Id.  
 
15 Id. at 361. 
 
16 I am using this abbreviated reference to the complaint, whose full citation is 
Watts v. Austin, Sec’y, Dep’t of Def. (May 31, 2023) (1:2023cv01544). The text of 
the compliant can be found at 
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23831826-watts-v-dod (Accessed 
November 10, 2023. 
 
17 Id. at 2.  
 
18 Id. at 18.  
 
19 Id. at 17. 
 
20 United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669, 687.   
 
21 Watts v. Austin at 19.  
 
22 42 U.S.C. 247d-6d(c)(1)(A)(iii).  
 

https://plus.lexis.com/api/document/collection/cases/id/67X5-T071-FCYK-22KT-00000-00?cite=667%20F.%20Supp.%203d%20332&context=1530671
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23831826-watts-v-dod


 
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23 I make reference here to Ruha Benjamin’s (2016) attractive concept of the 
“biodefector” who practices “informed refusal” at a historical moment where the 
foundational principle of informed consent is being eviscerated in medical 
contexts.  
 
24 See, for example, Ian R. Mackay’s historical discussion of vaccine-induced 
autoimmune encephalomyelitis (2010, A253).   
 
25 Consider a 2022 Israeli study that demonstrates that it is not SARS-CoV-2 
infection itself that causes myocarditis (as CDC officials have claimed), but most 
definitively the mRNA injections (Tuvali et al. 2022). 
 
26 An interesting study to consider here is David Simon et al. (2021), which studies 
patients with hyperinflammatory autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid 
arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease who are on biologic cytokine inhibitor 
drugs. When infected with SARS-CoV-2, these patients appeared to be protected 
from severe illness because the biologic agents appear to mitigate the 
hyperinflammatory response to the virus. In this sense, COVID-19 acts similarly to 
a hyperinflammatory or autoimmune disease. However, as the seminal study by 
Röltgen et al. demonstrated, “histological analysis of draining LN [lymph node] 
shows…in severe COVID-19 compared with mRNA vaccination, higher quantities, 
and persistence of spike antigen accumulated in the GCs [germinal centers] of 
mRNA vaccinees and detectable vaccine RNA in GCs for up to two months post-
second dose” (2022). In other words, presumably safe transfection produces even 
higher amounts of spike antigen than severe COVID-19.  
 
27 Amgen Inc. v. Sanofi 143 S. Ct. 1242 (2023).  
 
28 This is true as well for the cells of pets and livestock, since the rollout of mRNA 
technology is already progressing rapidly in veterinary practice (see, e.g., Merck’s 
Animal Health platform, “Sequivity RNA Particle Technology,” 2018, 
https://www.merck-animal-health-usa.com/offload-downloads/merck-sequivity-
white-paper). 
 
29 In an earlier, pathbreaking study Seneff et al. (2022) found “evidence that 
[mRNA] vaccination induces a profound impairment in type 
I interferon signaling,” which could potentially present causal links to cancer, 
neurodegenerative disease, and a host of other human health problems. 
 
30 McKernan (2023) writes, “8/8 monovalent vaccines sourced from a single case 
from a single lot of Pfizer monovalent vaccines all fail the EMA specification of 
3030:1 RNA:DNA (330ng/mg DNA/RNA). They are over the limit by an order of 
magnitude (18-70 fold). The DNA contamination is very consistent and the vial to 

https://www.merck-animal-health-usa.com/offload-downloads/merck-sequivity-white-paper
https://www.merck-animal-health-usa.com/offload-downloads/merck-sequivity-white-paper
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/interferon


 
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     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1)                                                         Christian Gundermann, 2024 
 

33   

 
 
vial ratio of RNA:DNA is very consistent within the same lot of monovalent 
vaccines.” 
 
31 There is evidence as well from an older Swedish in-vitro study that mRNA from 
Pfizer’s product is, despite the CDC’s denials—without any clinical evidence, the 
CDC claims that “they [mRNA COVID-19 vaccines] do not affect or interact with 
our DNA” (CDC 2022)—reverse transcribed into human DNA in the liver within as 
little as six hours after exposure to the transfection products, and that liver cells 
then show changes in gene expression of long interspersed nuclear element-1, a 
protein associated with aging and tumor suppression (Aldén et al. 2022). Another 
study that addresses the risk of reverse translation and integration into the 
human genome is Beaudoin et al. 2022. 
 
32 See, for example, Romano et al.: “Small non-coding RNAs, in particular, have 
been the focus of many studies in the last 20 years and their fundamental role in 
many human diseases is currently well established. Inter alia, their role in cancer 
development and progression, as well as in drug resistance, is being increasingly 
investigated” (2017, 485). 
 
 

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Author Bio 
Christian Gundermann is an associate professor in the gender studies department  at 
Mount Holyoke College. His areas of specialization include pharmocracy as Empire at 
the molecular level, the critique of biomedicine, veterinary, and alternative medicine, 
as well as critical animal studies, especially animal training, the history of equitation, 
and horse breeding.  

 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2022.12.018

	The COVID Emergency as Autoimmune Disease
	Abstract
	Keywords
	Preliminaries
	PART I
	Setting the Stage for 2020
	Conspiracy
	The Accusation of “Conspiracy Theorist” as Horror Autotoxicus
	The Necessary Augmentation of the Immune System
	The Four Pillars of Emergency
	Health Emergencies
	Emergency Use Authorization
	The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act
	Other Transaction Authority (OTA)
	Jackson v. Ventavia: It’s an OTA, Stupid
	Watts v. Austin: Getting on Target

	PART II
	SARS-CoV-2 and mRNA “Vaccines”: Autoimmune Logic
	“Autoimmune” Political Attacks on Regulation and Quality Control

	No Conclusion
	Notes