The Pandemic Profiteers

ISD’s founding board included General the Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank — former Chief of the Defence Staff and former director of N M Rothschild & Sons. The organization that declared public discussion of “the Rothschilds” to be far-right conspiracy thinking had a Rothschild bank director on its own board. ISD’s funding included grants from the Gates Foundation and Open Society Foundations — the respective philanthropies of two of the four individuals the report declared off-limits for public scrutiny. Amazon — Jeff Bezos’s company, the fourth name on ISD’s list — was among the tech companies that collaborated with ISD on research projects. None of these conflicts of interest were disclosed in the report.

Open Society’s involvement did not stop at ISD. On November 17, 2025, the Washington Free Beacon reported that Open Society Foundations had awarded a $250,000 grant for fiscal year 2024 to the Center for Countering Digital Hate–the group behind the “Disinformation Dozen” list–answering, at least in part, the long-standing question of who was funding CCDH. Subsequent investigation exposed more than twenty dark money backers flowing through the Arabella Advisors network, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, seven anonymous Prism trusts, and donor-advised fund structures that, by design, permit donor identities to remain permanently undisclosed in domestic political operations.³⁸ ³⁹ The funder whose name was declared off-limits for public discussion was simultaneously funding both the organization that declared the prohibition and the organization that enforced it.

The following year, the Center for Countering Digital Hate — CCDH, co-founded in 2018 by Morgan McSweeney (then preparing Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign) and Imran Ahmed — published what it called the “Disinformation Dozen” report. Its claim: that just twelve named individuals were responsible for “almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content” circulating on social media. The named individuals included Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dr. Joseph Mercola, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, and this author.

CCDH’s methodology was not new. It was an export. The organization had been forged in the internal war over Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, where the political faction that would produce both McSweeney and Ahmed had deployed a specific technique: framing political opposition as moral contagion — in that case, antisemitism — to delegitimize an entire political faction without engaging its actual positions. The campaign against Corbyn-aligned Labour members did not primarily argue that their economic or foreign policy views were wrong. It argued that their presence was dangerous — that tolerating them made the party complicit in hate. That framing succeeded: Corbyn was ultimately suspended from the parliamentary party, allies were removed from positions of influence, and the Overton window inside Labour was reset by redefining the boundaries of acceptable association rather than acceptable argument. CCDH’s “Disinformation Dozen” report applied the identical architecture to a new domain. The target changed from socialist Labour MPs to American health publishers. The accusation changed from antisemitism to “anti-vaccine disinformation.” The mechanism — blacklisting named individuals as vectors of moral contamination, demanding institutional severance from them, and treating the act of defending them as evidence of complicity — was identical.

Within months, the White House press secretary and US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy were citing the report publicly. President Biden declared at a press conference: “These 12 people are out there giving misinformation. It’s killing people.” Facebook moved to deplatform those named. Twitter followed. The stigmatization was global and rapid.

Facebook’s own internal analysis subsequently found that CCDH’s statistics were exaggerated by a factor of at least 1,300. A Facebook executive privately described the report as a “faulty narrative, without evidence.” No correction was issued by CCDH. No retraction was sought by the officials who had cited it. The Disinformation Dozen had already served their function as a pretext.

Tens of thousands of secondary and tertiary reports amplifying CCDH’s fraudulent report circulated around the world, never to be corrected.

Then the escalation began.