Susie Wiles Is a Lobbyist for Big Pharma. She’s Also a Key Advisor to President Trump. That’s a Problem.
Liam Sturgess | May 9, 2024
By Liam Sturgess, The Kennedy Beacon
On April 26, former president Donald Trump revisited one of his most controversial pet projects: Operation Warp Speed. This time, he dragged his political opponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the fray.
“His Views on Vaccines are FAKE, as is everything else about his Candidacy,” wrote the former president about Kennedy in a post on Truth Social. This ignited significant backlash from Trump’s base, highlighting the extent to which they disagree with him on COVID-19 vaccines.
Robert Barnes, a constitutional lawyer and outspoken Trump supporter, who also represents Kennedy in multiple legal efforts, wrote, “whoever wrote this for you should be fired immediately. RFK has been right about vaccines.” Other commenters sought clarification on which of Kennedy’s views the former president felt were “fake.”
Operation Warp Speed, which expedited the development and rollout of experimental gene therapy products in response to COVID-19, saw unprecedented profits for Pfizer and Moderna, as noted by senator Bernie Sanders. Speed came at the cost of compromised clinical trials, with needles entering arms under Emergency Use Authorization with only two months of safety data on the FDA’s books. As a result, tens of thousands of Americans report suffering vaccine injuries, as even The New York Times is now reporting.
Given the increasingly vocal opposition to the COVID-19 vaccination program, including among his base, why does Trump continue to demand acclaim for his role in pushing the shots through?
We find the answer in Susie Wiles, who appears to be the connective tissue between Trump and Big Pharma. On April 26, Politico published a lengthy profile identifying Wiles as “The Most Feared and Least Known Political Operative in America,” currently serving as Trump’s “most important adviser,” his “de facto campaign manager,” and “in essence his chief of staff for the last more than three years.”
The article paints Wiles as a soft-spoken, approachable grandmother figure with a long career specializing in political machinations. Daughter of legendary NFL play-by-play man and notorious drinker Pat Summerall, Wiles’ early work in Republican politics earned her the label “indispensable,” both to her clients and the media, to whom she frequently leaks inside information. As Politico admits, her allegiances are not clear: “The Wiles M.O… was and remains hard for [her colleagues] to describe.”
Wiles is also a seasoned lobbyist; her LinkedIn profile summarizes her leadership roles at multiple corporate and political lobbying firms since the mid-1980s, allowing her to sway Trump’s psyche with her conflicts of interest.
Wiles became co-chair of lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs in February 2022. As highlighted by Wholistic News, Mercury’s clientele includes Pfizer; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which spearheaded vaccine funding and distribution efforts during the COVID-19 crisis – a role also played by the United Nations Foundation, another Mercury client; and Gilead Sciences, developer of the equally-rushed COVID-19 “therapeutic,” remdesivir, as critiqued in Science.
Mercury’s president, John Gallagher, is a strategic advisor for Tishman Realty. The company’s chairman, Dan Tishman, is Honorary Chair Emeritus of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which, as I noted earlier this month, went on the attack against Kennedy last month. General counsel Max Sandlin, described as a “top Democratic strategist,” served as high-level deputy to former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, whose Big Pharma-funded AMERIPAC recently launched a campaign calling for Kennedy to drop out of the 2024 race, as reported by The Kennedy Beacon.
Ashley Bauman, managing director for Mercury’s Tampa office, was a senior communications adviser at the Democratic National Committee. Senior vice president Andrea Mead was Biden’s press secretary during his vice presidency. D.C. managing director Clay Middleton worked on the Biden-Harris transition team, according to The State. Another senior VP, Fabiola Rodriguez, “managed a press team responsible for advancing the Biden-Harris messaging priorities” at the Department of Education, while Andy Vargas is a “longtime aide to Vice President Kamala Harris” and worked on the Biden-Harris campaign.
Mercury’s senior team is further peppered with pharmaceutical lobbyists and executives. Adina Mincher, director of governmental compliance, worked in sales and marketing for GlaxoSmithKline. Tony Moffett, a Mercury partner, was “the top government affairs executive at The Monsanto Company.” Managing director Tammy Gordon, was director of digital experience for Novavax, promoting its COVID-19 vaccine product “in forty countries” (before running digital communications for Biden’s 2020 campaign in Florida).
https://thekennedybeacon.substack.com/p/new-study-finds-exposure-to-glyphosate
Then there’s Kuae Noel Kelch, Mercury’s vice president of media relations. She is national president of Mocha Moms, a non-profit organization through which she advocates for “global vaccines” via the Shot@Life campaign. Shot@Life is run by the aforementioned United Nations Foundation (UNF), which played a leading role in arranging and funding the global response to the declared COVID-19 pandemic—particularly the prioritization and rapid rollout of novel vaccines.
In March 2020, the UNF launched the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund to help the World Health Organization “accelerate research and development of vaccines and therapeutics.” The fund reportedly raised over $254 million by August 2021 with significant funding from Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. The UNF also led a fundraising effort for the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-Accelerator), an initiative “to accelerate the development, production, and equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines”.
This boon for the pharma/biotech industry was only possible because of the unprecedented “testing” campaign – yet another pandemic money grab for clients of Wiles’s firms. Prior to joining Mercury, Wiles worked at Ballard Partners, a “lucrative, well-connected” firm whose client list includes multiple manufacturers of COVID-19 tests. This includes Nanobiosym, a military-funded genetic diagnostics company, as reported by Nanotechnology Now. Robert Langer, co-founder of Moderna, sits on Nanobiosym’s advisory board. Nanobiosym has received substantial backing from the Unreasonable Group, a public-private incubator partnered with the State Department and Johnson & Johnson, and subsidized by the likes of Bill Gates and Google.
Given these immense financial interests, it’s not hard to ascertain which forces drive the “Wiles M.O.” The majority of Americans have already decided they want somebody new in the White House, reports the Associated Press. However, Politico notes “the even greater power [Wiles] might have if Trump wins later this year,” offering a glimpse into the aggressively pro-Big Pharma platform circling a second Trump presidency.
As The Kennedy Beacon headlines editor Louis Conte wrote in his May 3 article, “neither President Biden nor former president Trump have said anything about the chronic disease epidemics that Americans are facing,” compounded as a result of the mass COVID-19 vaccination campaign.
But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan are committed to addressing the new wave of suffering by Americans, brought to you by Trump, Biden, Pfizer, and their Big Pharma colleagues.
