Author’s note: The subject matter of this article is an ongoing affair of an extremely controversial nature whose full consequences, to persons and to institutions, cannot be known at the time of writing. Upon consideration of the legitimate risks of incurring further harm and psychological distress to the (potentially former) Pfizer director referred to here, this article will refrain from including information pertaining to its subject’s personal identity, even in cases where this has been verified as factual.

Depending on who you ask, Project Veritas is either a guerrilla journalism outfit or a far-right activist group (a direct quote taken from the first line of the group’s Wikipedia page). PV insists upon describing itself as a team of dedicated investigative journalists, but it is true that these investigations preferentially target institutions and government agencies that are deeply unpopular among the American right-wing (not only far-right radicals, but also moderate conservatives). Yet the double-whammy exposé released this week in two instalments in late January was aimed at an arguably higher target than the group has ever hit before: a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company that is more globally influential, and controversial, than many independent countries could ever hope for. That company of course is Pfizer—but it is the videos themselves we will concern ourselves with here. The first of the two 10-minute videos, which can be seen in full here, targets Pfizer employee Jordon Walker,^[1] who is listed on Pfizer’s internal directory and message board as ‘Director, Worldwide R&D Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning’. It features clips of Dr Walker, cobbled together from at least two separate interactions, in which he is seen relaxing over drinks with another man described as a ‘Project Veritas Journalist’ in the context of what appears to be a romantic date (something Walker himself later confirmed).

In these clips, Walker casually confirms the existence of a confidential and secret research program within Pfizer to create novel mutational strains of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus which causes the disease called COVID-19) in-vitro, using laboratory experiments on live monkeys progressively exposed to more virulent strains of the virus. This method of artificially inducing mutations in viruses or proteins using a simulacrum of natural selection in-vitro is called directed evolution (a term used by Walker himself) and when it is utilized to make a viral strain that is more effective (in infectivity or lethality) than its parent, it would be referred to as a form of gain-of-function research—a practice whose legality and ethicality have been called into question in the last two years. The objective of this research program, according to Walker, is to create more infective strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, so that vaccines which protect against infection from these strains can be created pre-emptively in Pfizer laboratories. The ‘cash cow of COVID-19, as Walker calls it, can therefore be maintained to preserve the company’s profits well into the foreseeable future.

Within hours of Project Veritas releasing this video on YouTube, it had accumulated almost half a million views, and virtually all references to Dr Walker on the internet had been removed. A LinkedIn page associated with Dr Walker and detailing his previous academic and career history is now gone. References to Walker on Pfizer webpages have utterly disappeared. In what appears to be a concerted campaign of erasure, evidence of Walker ever having been a Pfizer employee is now inaccessible to the casual internet user—yet thanks to internet archive tools, this evidence is still retrievable. What is incontrovertible is that Dr Walker did indeed work for Pfizer, and did indeed direct research on mRNA scientific planning. Yet, as shocking as his admissions of illicit and unethical research programmes within the company may be, these admissions are not the most shocking part of this story.

At this stage, there are readers who will have viewed the footage, and those who have not. But what exactly did they see? We are treated here to a video, recorded in secret, over multiple dates between two gay men, one of whom is seen confiding in his counterpart regarding confidential matters that are likely secret to most within Pfizer. Setting ethics aside for a moment, consider what goes into making such a video. By using a gay man (or at least a gay-passing man) as their field agent, Project Veritas have demonstrated that they are sending these agents into the field to gather intelligence based on a thorough prior assessment of who the mark is, what their preferences are, and how to get them relaxed; in other words, this is no longer simply investigative journalism, but something more. Yet it is the second video, which was released about 12 hours ago and remains accessible on Project Veritas’ YouTube channel, that reveals the sheer depth of their infiltration into Dr Walker’s private life. This video was recorded on Thursday evening in New York City, only a day after the first video’s release put Walker into a persona-non-grata status with his (potentially former) employer, with all references to his Pfizer employment already scrubbed from the internet. Here, Walker has sought out the company of a close friend and confidant to spend time with, given the devastating events of the previous day. Unbeknownst to him, this second individual is also a Project Veritas employee, who is engaged in the very same deception as before.

The events that follow are somewhat chaotic. The ‘close confidante’ appears to depart from the restaurant or café, upon which a full camera crew, accompanied by Project Veritas CEO James O’Keefe, enter the venue. This induces what appears to be a panic attack in Dr Walker, after which repeated displays of severely erratic behaviour ensue toward both restaurant employees and the journalist group confronting him. As the confrontation continues to escalate on both sides, Dr Walker grabs an iPad out of the hand of one of the journalists, and attempts to destroy it, protesting that the use of such a device to record him is illegal.

What follows from here is a bona fide mental breakdown: Dr Walker, having been disoriented by the preceding events, proceeds to engage in erratic dialogue with the restaurant guests, employees, and owner, disclosing irrelevant details pertaining to his surveillance by Project Veritas that none of them are able to comprehend. Subsequently, he exits the venue and flags down a random car, in the mistaken belief that its occupants belong to the same group which confronted him within the restaurant.

What Project Veritas has recorded—rather, created—here, for all of us to see, should not be seen as an episode of mental deficiency by a particular Pfizer employee who is simply down on his luck. This entire drama, played out in all its ugly glory for a global audience on YouTube, was planned, prepared for, instigated, and executed by Project Veritas as an organization – it is a monster of their making. To compromise their intended target in Pfizer—a pharmaceutical giant impervious to harm by conventional means—Veritas utilised subterfuge and deception to create what can only be described as a Truman Show experience for an unwitting Pfizer employee, in which even his closest confidants he sought out after the worst day of his career were themselves part of the conspiracy that took him down in the first place.

This is no ‘journalism’—these are the tactics of the CIA and the KGB described in Cold War history books, played out in the 21st century in domestic contexts.

This use of artificial relationships—both sexual and social—to gather compromising intel (kompromat, in Russian) is extensively narrated in the novel Red Sparrow, where Russian and American operatives compete against each other using sexual attraction as a tool to secure the intelligence their respective countries demand of them.

This is not the first instance where Project Veritas has used the ‘honeypot’ method to collect confidential information from their targets through surreptitious hidden camera recordings, but the effort behind the tactic is itself worth a second thought. Gay or straight, individuals all have criteria unique to themselves for matters such as sexual attraction, friendship, and trust. It is unlikely, one would think, that the very first Project Veritas ‘journalist’ sent to spy on Dr Walker was the very same one who would record the video footage that is now plastered across the internet to testify to Pfizer’s misdeeds. It would probably require tasking multiple ‘journalists,’ over a significant period of time, presenting themselves to the mark in environments such as a favourite bar or nightclub, or on an application such as Tinder or Grindr, to create the opportunity for an initial interaction between the hunter and the hunted to take place—and to take place in a manner realistic enough to make the ensuing subterfuge possible.

So exactly how many homosexual ‘Project Veritas journalists’ were recruited and charged with initiating Dr Walker into a honeypot trap for the purposes of discrediting Pfizer? And exactly how far were they authorized to go in their scheme? Deceiving their target by falsely advertising sexual interest? Certainly. Overt flirting? Likely. Sending or receiving nudes? Possibly. Taking their target to bed as a means by which to win trust? It isn’t something we can discount. By operating in states where two-party consent laws are absent, Project Veritas is able to engage in what eerily resembles a Soviet-era spy operation as a means by which to gather incriminating information on its targets—the individual mark used to do so is more or less incidental.

Equally incidental, it would appear, are the individuals used in its increasingly extravagant exposés. If the tactics used by Project Veritas in their grand plan to expose Pfizer are normalised, then it is not unlikely that the same kind of targeting and manipulation of specific individuals who mean nothing to the corporations they are employed by will continue. It is deeply ironic that American conservatives decry the Big Tech attack on individual privacy, yet it is Project Veritas—not Antifa, or the Democratic Party—that infiltrated the personal and romantic life of a gay man to the extent that his most trusted acquaintances were themselves part of the show, just so they could attack a pharmaceutical company that never cared about him at all.

Thanks to István Kiss for his contributions to this article.

^[1] The Pfizer director featured in the two Project Veritas videos appears to go by Jordan Trishton Lee, listed as an alias on the company’s internal employee directory, and used by Walker in a personal email address.