NEWS RELEASE

1/11/01 

Mark Shwartz, News Service (650) 723-9296; e-mail: [email protected] 

Biological warfare: an emerging threat in the 21st century 

Why is biophysicist Steven Block so concerned about smallpox? 

After all, more than 20 years have passed since the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the eradication of this highly contagious and incurable disease. 

"Simply put, smallpox represents a direct threat to the entire world," says Block, a professor of biological sciences and applied physics at Stanford. 

He points out that, although the disease has been eliminated in the wild, frozen stocks of smallpox virus are still maintained by the governments of the United States and Russia. 

If rogue politicians or terrorists were to get hold of the remaining supplies, "the consequences could be disastrous," he warns.

But Block is haunted by more than the threat of a smallpox attack. 

He points to some two dozen conventional biological agents -- including anthrax, Ebola and typhus -- plus an unknown number of genetically engineered organisms that terrorists could unleash on an unsuspecting public. 

"We're tempted to say that nobody in their right mind would ever use these things," he says, "but not everybody is in their right mind!" 

Block paints a disturbing picture of the international bioterrorist threat in an article published in the Jan./Feb. issue of American Scientist magazine. 

His expertise in biological warfare stems from his work with JASON, an organization of primarily academic scientists who dedicate a portion of their time to solving national security problems. Members of JASON often serve as consultants to the Defense Department and other U.S. agencies 

"In my opinion," he writes, "the terrorist threat is very real, and it's about to get worse." 

Block argues that the United States and other developed countries should be doing more to prevent the spread of biological weaponry, which he calls "a serious threat to peace in the twenty-first century." 

He saves his harshest criticism for his fellow biologists, most of whom have remained silent on the issue. 

"Where are the biological scientists willing to go on the record about bioweapons?" he asks. 

Anthrax

Biological weapons are "the poor man's atom bomb," writes Block in American Scientist. 

He argues that bioweapons offer terrorist groups and "rogue states" (such as Iraq and North Korea) an affordable way to counter the overwhelming military superiority of the United States and other nuclear powers. 

The agent of choice for most biological warfare programs, writes Block, is anthrax. Anthrax bacteria produce extremely lethal spores, and breathing in large numbers can lead to inhalation anthrax -- a disease that usually is fatal unless treated with large doses of a penicillin-type antibiotic immediately after exposure. 

Anthrax spores are easy to produce and can remain viable for more than 100 years if kept dry and out of direct sunlight. 

Their long shelf life makes them "well suited to weaponization in a device that can deliver a widespread aerosol," Block notes. 

Anthrax also is relatively easy and safe to handle. 

"Airborne spores remain infectious until they fall to the ground, where most become inactivated by sunlight," Block writes. 

"Anthrax is not very communicable," he adds, "thereby reducing the risk that it will spread beyond the intended target. Moreover, a well-established vaccine exists that can prevent the onset of the disease, allowing it to be used safely by the aggressor." 

"Black biology"

If anthrax, smallpox and other "conventional" biological agents aren't frightening enough, Block also raises the specter of "black biology" -- a shadowy science in which microorganisms are genetically engineered for the sole purpose of creating novel weapons of terror. 

"The idea that anybody can brew this stuff in their garage vastly overstates the case," he says, "but any technology that can be used to insert genes into DNA can be used for either good or bad." 

Block points out that genetic maps of deadly viruses, bacteria and other microorganisms already are widely available in the public domain. Last summer, for example, a leading scientific journal published the entire genetic code for the cholera pathogen. And legitimate researchers are now in the process of mapping the genomes of more than 100 other microbes -- including the bacteria that cause anthrax, the plague and typhoid. 

Any scientist bent on destruction could use this information to attempt to clone extremely virulent strains of bacteria and viruses, Block contends. 

He also points out that there are plenty of underpaid microbiologists in the world who might be eager to work for unscrupulous clients -- producing incurable "designer diseases," such as penicillin-resistant anthrax, or "stealth viruses" that infect the host but remain silent until activated by some external trigger, such as exposure to a normally harmless chemical. 

History lessons

Biological warfare is as old as civilization, observes Block, but it was international revulsion over the widespread use of poisonous mustard gas during World War I that finally led to a 1925 treaty banning bioweapons during future wars. 

"Disappointingly," Block writes, "neither the U.S. nor Japan ratified the treaty before the advent of World War II, when anthrax and other bioweapons were secretly being developed by both countries -- as well as by Germany, the U.S.S.R [now Russia] and Great Britain." 

During the Second World War, the Japanese military killed thousands of Chinese prisoners by subjecting them to experimental doses of anthrax, cholera, plague and other pathogens. Evidence also exists of a deliberate tularemia -- or rabbit fever -- attack by Soviet forces against German troops in 1942, although some experts say the incident never occurred. 

After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union launched full-scale bioweapons programs, which included the development of aerosol sprays capable of delivering bacterial and viral agents by plane or ballistic missile. 

"Both sides also stockpiled plenty of anthrax," adds Block. 

In 1969, President Richard Nixon issued an executive order unilaterally and unconditionally ending America's bioweapons program, and all U.S. stockpiles were destroyed by 1972. 

That same year, 160 nations signed a treaty banning all use of biological and chemical weapons. And 143 countries eventually ratified the treaty, including the United States, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Libya and North Korea. Fifty-two nations have not signed on, including Israel, Egypt and Somalia. 

Failed treaty

Despite its noble intentions, says Block, the 1972 treaty lacks any significant provisions for enforcement or verification. As a result, a number of signatories to the treaty have maintained active bioweapons programs. 

"I'm fairly confident that the U.S. has stopped producing biological weapons," he says, "but the Soviet Union carried out ultra-secret bioweapons work right up until it collapsed in 1990." 

In 1979, 100 people and countless livestock died following the accidental release of anthrax spores from a bioweapons plant in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk -- one of 40 such facilities that operated in the former Soviet Union. 

Russia's dismal economic situation raises the question of how out-of-work bioweapons scientists are managing to find gainful employment now, observes Block. 

"Some experts contend that a low but significant level of bioresearch still exists today," he adds. 

Block's ultimate nightmare is that terrorists could somehow get access to the smallpox viruses being kept on ice at the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology -- a fear bolstered by the testimony of a former official in the Russian biowarfare program, who claimed that smallpox-based weapons were being manufactured there as recently as 1992. 

Iraq also has violated the 1972 bioweapons treaty by mass-producing weapons-grade anthrax and conducting research on a wide variety of other biological agents -- including botulism, rotavirus and gangrene-inducing bacteria. Details of the Iraqi bioweaponry program only came to light in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. 

All told, Block estimates that about a dozen countries are believed to have active bioweapons programs. 

Terrorist threat

Although Block is concerned about the bioweapons buildup in Iraq and other nations, he believes a greater threat comes from terrorist groups willing to risk an out-of-control epidemic and eager to suffer casualties for the good of "the cause." 

A recent example was the 1995 sarin gas attack inside the Tokyo subway by the Japanese apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo. The widely publicized assault, which killed 13 people and hospitalized thousands, had been preceded by a series of failed botulism and anthrax assaults near the Imperial Palace, a Tokyo airport and two U.S. military bases. 

"Groups like Aum Shinrikyo are willing to use biological agents inefficiently just for the terror and propaganda value," Block contends. 

"If anthrax were released haphazardly in a major U.S. city and produced only a handful of cases, the public fear and disruption that would ensue might alone bring about the intended effect," he adds. 

Solutions

During fiscal year 2000, the Clinton administration allocated $1.4 billion to combat both biological and chemical warfare -- a good beginning but not enough, according to Block, who believes more should be spent beefing up America's anti-terrorist intelligence effort and its emergency response capability. 

Block also supports the development of hi-tech devices capable of instantaneously detecting lethal bacteria and viruses in the environment, and he encourages the production and stockpiling of new vaccines ­--a hot-button issue in Washington, D.C. these days. 

The anthrax vaccine has stirred the most controversy. The U.S. military wants to inoculate all 2.4 million active and reserve troops, but no one knows if the current vaccine will provide immunity against inhalation anthrax ­ the type commonly used in bioweapons. Questions of safety, along with a scandal involving the corporation that distributes the anthrax vaccine, have led to a sharp reduction in the military's vaccination effort. 

As for smallpox, routine vaccinations in the United States ended in 1980, the year the virus was officially eradicated, so few Americans still have immunity today. The Centers for Disease Control will make 40 million new doses of the vaccine available beginning in 2004, but critics say that, in the event of a multi-city terrorist attack, hundreds of millions of doses will be needed to prevent the often fatal disease from spreading throughout the country. 

On the diplomatic front, Block argues in favor of strengthening the 1972 bioweapons treaty -- "giving it some 'teeth,'" he says, by requiring reciprocal international inspections to assure treaty compliance. 

"Embarrassingly," he notes, "the United States itself has steadfastly resisted certain attempts to establish provisions for inspections" -- in part to protect the interests of large American pharmaceutical and biotech companies against industrial espionage. 

"As the world's remaining superpower," Block maintains, "the United States bears the unique responsibility to take the moral high ground in this process, assuming a leadership role in support of meaningful weapons treaties." 

He also makes a strong plea to his fellow biologists to break their silence and take a stand against the proliferation of biological weapons. 

"Some folks simply do not take the threat seriously," he observes, "but they should. Others worry about provoking a widespread public backlash against biotechnology in general that might have a chilling effect on their own legitimate biological research." 

None of these excuses stands up to close scrutiny, Block contends, adding that the time to act is now before disaster strikes. 

"We should not have to wait for the biological equivalent of Hiroshima to rally our defenses," he concludes. 

-30- 

By Mark Shwartz 

 

-----------------

 

This article was published nearly 20 years ago....

a few questions need to be asked, including WHY THE CORONAVIRUS NOW considering that the Chinese have been eating "bat soup" and use Pangolins for centuries?

 

Remember also that in order to attack Saddam, anthrax was released in the USA from an AMERICAN LABORATORY...

More to come...

 

Whatever the origin of the coronavirus, it is — and has become — a bioweapon. Way before Bill Gates warned us in 2015 about biological pandemics, biological warfare — an emerging threat in the 21st century — was the topic of the article above in 2001...

We also have to realise that four years ago Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan said at the Council on Foreign Relations that “advances in genome editing pose a threat to national security and may be used to create biological weapons"...

"Nowhere are the stakes higher for our national security than in the field of biotechnology," Brennan stated. "Recent advances in genome editing that offer great potential for breakthroughs in public health are also a cause for concern because the same methods can be used to create genetically engineered biological warfare agents.”


The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Health Affairs Acting Director Aaron Firoved had also testified in Congress that synthetic biology and gene editing offer terrorist organisations potential to modify organisms for malicious purposes such as manmade pathogens that can rapidly cause disease outbreaks.  Subnational terrorist entities such as Daesh would have few compunctions in wielding such a weapon, Brennan noted.


Brennan called on the international community to create national and global strategies to counter such threats, along with the consensus of laws, standards and authorities that needed to counter the threat.

This was a huge admission and a proposal for a massive reset and implementation of controls… The biolabs weaponry had never stopped. New pathogens were developed in order to "find antidotes”… 

The United States biological weapons program had officially began in spring 1943 on orders from U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. Research continued following WW2 as the U.S. built up a large stockpile of biological agents and weapons. Over the course of its 27-year history, the program weaponised and stockpiled the following seven bio-agents (and pursued basic research on many more):

• Bacillus anthracis (anthrax)

• Francisella tularensis (tularemia)

• Brucella spp (brucellosis)

• Coxiella burnetii (Q-fever)

• Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VEE)

• Botulinum toxin (botulism)

• Staphylococcal enterotoxin B


Throughout its history, the U.S. bioweapons program was secret. It was later revealed that laboratory and field testing (some of the latter using stimulants on non-consenting individuals) had been common. The official policy of the United States was first to deter the use of bio-weapons against U.S. forces and secondarily to retaliate if deterrence failed.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon ended all offensive (i.e., non-defensive) aspects of the U.S. bio-weapons program… But was this the end of US biowarfare?


In September 2016, Russia exposed the US claim that Russia was a "major threat" not only to the USA but to its "European allies”, and had used this as a pretext for the deployment of many NATO troops alongside Russia's borders. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov thus reminded that Washington opposed the idea of tightening international control over biological weapons.


America's staunch opposition to Russian efforts to create a monitoring mechanism for the execution of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) indicated that the US may be conducting biological research that is "not entirely peaceful.”

Lavrov added that Russia was developing a supervisory mechanism for the observance of the BTWC, stressing that most countries support this move, while the US actively opposes it.

"It is known that the US has a number of joint research programs with our neighbouring countries in the field of biological research..." Lavrov .

We need to remind ourselves of the anthrax affair as an addition to motivation for war against Saddam, in Iraq, a war that led to much grief in the Middle-East today. Some letters containing Anthrax (Bacillus anthracis) were sent to various people across the United States. Some people died of a horrible death. Saddam was blamed for this. But the FBI, probably too eager at the time to search for the origin of this Anthrax spread, soon discovered that the Bacillus anthracis was American… The Americans had supplied Saddam during the 1980s with Bacillus anthracis, but even at the time before extended “genomic” knowledge, the Saddam Anthrax had a recognisable imprint. The FBI knew that the Anthrax used in the letters were not from Saddam, yet the US government still blame Saddam for the deed. Eventually, the FBI traced the origins to a man in a pathogen lab, Ivins. Bruce Ivins, deemed a patriot, conveniently killed himself before being arrested. Or was he killed?… We’ll never know.

Question: What has been one of the main priorities of the USA, recently? A priority that the US has also tried to make the Europeans do the same, somewhat secretly? 

Answer: close borders to immigrants and refugees. stop the Islamic spread

What is the main objection to being so ruthless? Compassion, guilt, anti-racism and “globalisation”.

How do you achieve “closed borders” without being racist, guilty and non-compassionate?

You know the answer: you’re now confined to your house, the police roam the streets — and so far, there has been less than flu death in the USA (more than 10,000 in the last three months), than death from the coronavirus worldwide (10,000).
But data from China shows that each coronavirus (Covid19) case seems to infect around 2 to 2.5 additional people. That's higher than the flu. The average patient spreads the flu virus to about 1.3 others. Meanwhile the flu is also a corona virus (type A and B).

So, we’ve been ordered to shut down. Borders closed.

There will be a massive economic reset. The US is going to spend $1.5 trillion to make sure people survive… This is on top of regular $1 trillion deficit for the yearly budget. 

Health precautions are paramount. Increasing the level of fear is essential…

Now, where did the coronavirus come from?

This is the million dollar question which we will answer in the next instalment, for free…

GL.

The religious nuts are going nuts about their power to heal the sick and bury the dead… You need the professional paternoster-pushers, here, to pray for redemption in a time of crap, on this natural planet...

And not only the Christian loonies, but let’s start with them...:

Folks, this is a wake-up call from God Almighty if I have ever seen one. It’s time to pray.

I don’t mean casual prayer. I am talking about fervent, storm-the-gates-of-Heaven type of prayer that calls out to God in desperation and urgency.

We need God in America today. We need him to eradicate what President Trump has called, “An invisible enemy”.

In the Bible, prayer stopped storms, calmed waves, healed the sick, raised the dead and even stopped time. Scripture reminds us, “With God, all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26)

https://www.christianpost.com/voices/america-its-time-to-pray.html

——————————

Here come the islamists:

Pandemic or no, Muslim sages and scholars will continue to remind those they advise and counsel that the importance of drawing closer to God remains paramount and unimpeded. Indeed, at a time when we are all called upon to be more aware of our responsibilities to one other, doing so in ways that recollect God’s Immanence and Transcendence, His Compassion and Subtle Love — well, the pandemic may well bring out aspects of spiritual wayfaring that we might never have realised before.

Dr H.A. Hellyer is senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a visiting professor at the Centre for Advanced Studies on Islam, Science and Civilisation in Kuala Lumpur. He is currently on the steering committee for a multi-year EU-funded project on ‘Radicalisation, Secularism and the Governance of Religion’, which brings together European, North African and Asian perspectives with a consortium of 12 universities and think-tanks.

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/islam-drawing-near-to-god-amid-the-coronavirus-pandemic/12077014

——————————————————

Both of these opportunistic religious writers are beyond the pale… But religion is about deceit and the promise of something that can NEVER BE VERIFIED. We can be grateful that they did not use yet that this pandemic was the work of god to test our resolve and belief in Him (godot is male). Gus is a fierce atheist....

So let’s investigate the caper, without fear of favour. This from the ABC:

Coronavirus has been the topic of conversation for months, but when you stop and think about it, how much do you actually know about the virus?

There may be some things you don't know, but feel like it's too late in the piece to ask about. 

But they aren't dumb questions and you're not the only one asking them.

Here are some of the questions people are asking Google right now. 

Coronavirus update: Follow all the latest news in our daily wrap
What is a coronavirus?

COVID-19 is the disease caused by just one type of coronavirus.

Coronavirus is the name for a big group of viruses that cause illnesses.

These range from the common cold and gastrointestinal infections, to more severe diseases including SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome). 

The "corona" part of their name is for the corona, or crown, of surface proteins that the virus uses to penetrate the cells of its host.

Some coronaviruses can infect humans and others can infect animals like bats and camels. 

That's what happened in the case of SARS and MERS.

Civet cats transmitted SARS to humans, while MERS was passed on via dromedary camels.

How did coronavirus start?

It's thought it originated in bats.

But the thinking is the virus could have infected humans through another animal. 

The first human cases of coronavirus were linked to a seafood and live animal market in Wuhan, in China's Hubei province.

Read more:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-19/how-did-coronavirus-start-how-long-will-it-last-google-questions/12068500

"The first human cases of coronavirus were linked to a seafood and live animal market in Wuhan?"

Where did the information come from? Doctors? Chinese doctors? Chinese officials? Sick people? Chinese media? Do we trust the Chinese media on this subject when for the past few years, the West has poopooed the said media for being a bearer of false news and/or being slanted? Was there an official from WHO to record patient zero and verify the information? 

We need more sciences and less godot. We need to take information with a grain of salt, a spoonful of vinegar and sugar to smooth our hiccup...

Wuhan’s bio lab:
Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world's most dangerous pathogens

Maximum-security biolab is part of plan to build network of BSL-4 facilities across China.

 

Editors’ note, January 2020: Many stories have promoted an unverified theory that the Wuhan lab discussed in this article played a role in the coronavirus outbreak that began in December 2019. Nature knows of no evidence that this is true; scientists believe the most likely source of the coronavirus to be an animal market.

• David Cyranoski

22 February 2017 Updated: 

1. 23 February 2017

WUHAN, CHINA

A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The move is part of a plan to build between five and seven biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs across the Chinese mainland by 2025, and has generated much excitement, as well as some concerns.

Some scientists outside China worry about pathogens escaping, and the addition of a biological dimension to geopolitical tensions between China and other nations. But Chinese microbiologists are celebrating their entrance to the elite cadre empowered to wrestle with the world’s greatest biological threats.

“It will offer more opportunities for Chinese researchers, and our contribution on the BSL‑4-level pathogens will benefit the world,” says George Gao, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology and Immunology in Beijing. There are already two BSL-4 labs in Taiwan, but the National Bio-safety Laboratory, Wuhan, would be the first on the Chinese mainland.

The lab was certified as meeting the standards and criteria of BSL-4 by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS) in January. The CNAS examined the lab’s infrastructure, equipment and management, says a CNAS representative, paving the way for the Ministry of Health to give its approval. A representative from the ministry says it will move slowly and cautiously; if the assessment goes smoothly, it could approve the laboratory by the end of June.

BSL-4 is the highest level of biocontainment: its criteria include filtering air and treating water and waste before they leave the laboratory, and stipulating that researchers change clothes and shower before and after using lab facilities. Such labs are often controversial. The first BSL-4 lab in Japan was built in 1981, but operated with lower-risk pathogens until 2015, when safety concerns were finally overcome.

The expansion of BSL-4-lab networks in the United States and Europe over the past 15 years — with more than a dozen now in operation or under construction in each region — also met with resistance, including questions about the need for so many facilities.

The Wuhan lab cost 300 million yuan (US$44 million), and to allay safety concerns it was built far above the flood plain and with the capacity to withstand a magnitude-7 earthquake, although the area has no history of strong earthquakes. It will focus on the control of emerging diseases, store purified viruses and act as a World Health Organization ‘reference laboratory’ linked to similar labs around the world. “It will be a key node in the global biosafety-lab network,” says lab director Yuan Zhiming.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences approved the construction of a BSL-4 laboratory in 2003, and the epidemic of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) around the same time lent the project momentum. The lab was designed and constructed with French assistance as part of a 2004 cooperative agreement on the prevention and control of emerging infectious diseases. But the complexity of the project, China’s lack of experience, difficulty in maintaining funding and long government approval procedures meant that construction wasn’t finished until the end of 2014.

The lab’s first project will be to study the BSL-3 pathogen that causes Crimean–Congo haemorrhagic fever: a deadly tick-borne virus that affects livestock across the world, including in northwest China, and that can jump to people.

Future plans include studying the pathogen that causes SARS, which also doesn’t require a BSL-4 lab, before moving on to Ebola and the West African Lassa virus, which do. Some one million Chinese people work in Africa; the country needs to be ready for any eventuality, says Yuan. “Viruses don’t know borders.”

Gao travelled to Sierra Leone during the recent Ebola outbreak, allowing his team to report the speed with which the virus mutated into new strains1. The Wuhan lab will give his group a chance to study how such viruses cause disease, and to develop treatments based on antibodies and small molecules, he says.

The opportunities for international collaboration, meanwhile, will aid the genetic analysis and epidemiology of emergent diseases. “The world is facing more new emerging viruses, and we need more contribution from China,” says Gao. In particular, the emergence of zoonotic viruses — those that jump to humans from animals, such as SARS or Ebola — is a concern, says Bruno Lina, director of the VirPath virology lab in Lyon, France.

Many staff from the Wuhan lab have been training at a BSL-4 lab in Lyon, which some scientists find reassuring. And the facility has already carried out a test-run using a low-risk virus.

But worries surround the Chinese lab, too. The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times, notes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Tim Trevan, founder of CHROME Biosafety and Biosecurity Consulting in Damascus, Maryland, says that an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. “Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important,” he says.

Yuan says that he has worked to address this issue with staff. “We tell them the most important thing is that they report what they have or haven’t done,” he says. And the lab’s inter­national collaborations will increase openness. “Transparency is the basis of the lab,” he adds.

The plan to expand into a network heightens such concerns. One BSL-4 lab in Harbin is already awaiting accreditation; the next two are expected to be in Beijing and Kunming, the latter focused on using monkey models to study disease.

Lina says that China’s size justifies this scale, and that the opportunity to combine BSL-4 research with an abundance of research monkeys — Chinese researchers face less red tape than those in the West when it comes to research on primates — could be powerful. “If you want to test vaccines or antivirals, you need a non-human primate model,” says Lina.

But Ebright is not convinced of the need for more than one BSL-4 lab in mainland China. He suspects that the expansion there is a reaction to the networks in the United States and Europe, which he says are also unwarranted. He adds that governments will assume that such excess capacity is for the potential development of bioweapons.

“These facilities are inherently dual use,” he says. The prospect of ramping up opportunities to inject monkeys with pathogens also worries, rather than excites, him: “They can run, they can scratch, they can bite.”

Trevan says China’s investment in a BSL-4 lab may, above all, be a way to prove to the world that the nation is competitive. “It is a big status symbol in biology,” he says, “whether it’s a need or not.”

Nature

 

542,

 

399–400

 

(23 February 2017)

 

doi:10.1038/nature.2017.21487

https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to-study-world-s-most-dangerous-pathogens-1.21487

——————————————

Question: why did the virus appear in Wuhan, not in Beijing or Shanghai, considering that the only biolab in China is in WUHAN? 
Answer: coincidence, my friend…
Question: and by the way, did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Robert Redfield mentioned that some of the troops had the virus back in America, before it was made public in Wuhan, after the Wuhan Military Games?…

Answer: coincidence, my friend… who knows...

Question: How can the virus jump from Pangolin to Bats? And from Bats to people?

Answer: coincidence, my friend… plus bat soooouuuup!

How long have the Chinese eaten bat soup? Like 1000 year-old eggs, probably more than 1000 years?

Answer: coincidence, my friend… A naughty bat that had pissed on a pangolin, etc... Here in Aussieland we know that bats, especially the big flying foxes, carry germs that can kill you. and we love them but stay clear...


Meanwhile in Pommyland:

Porton Down is a science park in Wiltshire, England, just northeast of the village of Porton, near Salisbury. It is home to two British government facilities: a site of the Ministry of Defence's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) – known for over 100 years as one of the UK's most secretive and controversial military research facilities, occupying 7,000 acres (2,800 ha)[1] – and a site of Public Health England.[2] It is also home to other private and commercial science organisations, and is expanding to attract other companies.
21st century[edit]
Until 2001 the military installation of Porton Down was part of the UK government's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) when it was split into QinetiQ, initially a fully government-owned company, and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl). Dstl incorporates all of DERA's activities deemed unsuitable for the privatisation planned for QinetiQ, particularly Porton Down.
In 2013 Dstl scientists tested samples from Syria for sarin, which is still manufactured there, to test soldiers' equipment.[1]
Public Health England have planned since September 2015[7] to transfer their Porton Down staff to Harlow, and in July 2017 it had bought a vacant site from GSK (GlaxoSmithKline), aiming to consolidate operations there in 2024[8]
Site names[edit]
The location's government use has been split into two separately controlled locations since 1979: the original military establishment under the Ministry of Defence, and the site to the south under the Department of Health, which had been opened in 1951 for the Microbiological Research Establishment, then in 1979 transferred to the Ministry of Health to focus on public health research, with the Defence aspects returning to the then-titled Chemical Defence Establishment.[9]

Porton Down has been involved in human testing at various points throughout the Ministry of Defence's use of the site. Up to 20,000 people took part in various trials from 1949 up to 1989:[18]


From 1999 until 2006, it was investigated under Operation Antler. In 2002 a first inquest and[19] in May 2004, a second inquest into the death of Ronald Maddison during testing of the nerve agent sarin commenced after his relatives and their supporters had lobbied for many years, which found his death to have been unlawful.[20] The Ministry of Defence challenged the verdict[21] which was upheld and the government settled the case in 2006.[22] In 2006, 500 veterans claimed they suffered from the experiments.[23]


In February 2006, three ex-servicemen were awarded compensation in an out-of-court settlement after they had claimed they were given LSD without their consent during the 1950s.[18][24] In 2008, the MoD paid 360 veterans of the tests £3m without admitting liability.[1]


Secrecy[edit]
Most of the work carried out at Porton Down has to date remained secret. Bruce George, Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Defence Select Committee, told BBC News on 20 August 1999 that: 

I would not say that the Defence Committee is micro-managing either DERA or Porton Down. We visit it, but, with eleven members of Parliament and five staff covering a labyrinthine department like the Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces, it would be quite erroneous of me and misleading for me to say that we know everything that's going on in Porton Down. It's too big for us to know, and secondly, there are many things happening there that I'm not even certain Ministers are fully aware of, let alone Parliamentarians.[25]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porton_Down

—————————

US Military Bio-labs in Ukraine, Production of Bio-weapons and “Disease Causing Agents”

 

Ukraine turned into the proving ground for the new generation of US biological weapons, European mass media report.

 

In 2015, American alternative media outlet InfoWars accused the Pentagon of developing new types of biological weapons in secret military laboratories in Ukraine. The facilities were constructed under the terms of the bilateral agreement signed between the Ministry of Health of Ukraine and the Department of Defense in 2012.

Today thirteen American military bio-labs operate in Ukraine, The International Mass Media Agency reports. They employ only American specialists being entirely funded from the budget of the Department of Defense. Local authorities have pledged not to interfere in their work. These military labs are reported to be mainly involved in the study and production of disease-causing agents of smallpox, anthrax and botulism. The facilities are located in the following Ukrainian cities: Odessa, Vinnytsia, Uzhgorod, Lviv (three), Kharkiv, Kyiv (four), Kherson, Ternopil.

The network of military bio-labs in Eastern Europe gives the hawks the opportunity to avoid the Geneva Convention of 1972 on the prohibition of development, production and stockpiling of biological and chemical weapons the US Senate ratified in 1973. So we witness the blatant violation of international laws.

Local media in Ukraine have frequently reported about splashes of contaminant diseases in that country since the beginning of the 2010s, the time American military facilities were opened. Western European media also express concern over splashes of contaminant diseases in that country this summer and point at American bio-labs as pockets of infection.

 

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/ivendurepos/blog/200817/la-menace-biologique-creee-par-washington

 

Experts warn this kind of weapon may be captured by terrorists due to the lack of security measures in Ukraine, the country being suffered from frozen conflict with pro-Russian rebels in its Eastern part and ongoing political turmoil after the flee of the Kremlin-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych in February, 2014. Latest terrorist acts in Europe show the jihadists are looking for new methods of attacks. Use of bio-weapons in densely populated regions will bring catastrophic consequences.

 

Chemical and biological weapons may be dangerous for the whole world because of their infectious effect. Modern diseases can travel through countries and reach any continent with just one plane passenger. And that is the big problem. Despite the remoteness of potential objects of infection from the territory of the United States, viruses still can reach the North American continent.

 

Goran Lompar is a free journalist and postgraduate at University of Donja Gorica, Montenegro.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-military-bio-labs-in-ukraine-production...

——————————

So far, if you wiv mee, a bat that had fucked a pangolin ended up in a soup sounds like a holiday-maker's tent on the far side of the moon… That removed? Oh yes. Not impossible though. My next door neighbour says he’s been there a few times — the moon that is, not Wuhan. But we’re gullible people, aren’t we? We rather believe that the virus jumped the nature strip a couple of times, rather than it be manufactured by nasty people, in labs that are so watertight that nothing leaks out… Nothing! Rubbish, effluents, pockets? I know my pockets despite being washed, turned inside out, still carry hundred year old fluff in these impossible corners…

NO-ONE IS GOING TO ADMIT THAT THE VIRUS HAS ESCAPED from their labs. 

———————

So far in a region of about 20 million people, 11 million in Wuhan, 3,130 death have been attributed to the coronavirus (Covid 19) with 1.4 per cent death in proportion to infected people. BUT THE REGION WAS PLACED IN QUARANTINE EARLY. No-one in, no-one out. 

As of Friday 20 March, COVID-19 has sickened 245,000 globally and led to 10,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

https://fortune.com/2020/03/20/coronavirus-death-rate-wuhan-china/


Pray the gods of monkeys that a more virulent pathogen does not appear on the horizon (yet)… (I guess it won't for a while). It's a pity the news on the internet cannot be used like newsprint as toilet paper...


Read from top.


Read also:
http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/38406

Thanks to Beijing’s censorship, news about the coronavirus came too little too late in order to successfully contain the outbreak. Even though the coronavirus has to date been far less lethal than the flu, its long incubation period has ensured its spread as asymptomatic carriers spread around the globe. The Chinese government’s silence has at best created uncertainty and raised many questions. At worst, the silence has bred conspiracy.

After Tom Cotton raised questions in a Fox News interview about whether the coronavirus originated in a Chinese biological warfare or military laboratory, the press criticized the Republican Arkansas senator for allegedly dabbling in conspiracy. However, with so many unanswered questions, a bit more caution might be warranted on the part of the press.

It is just as irresponsible to trust any information put forward by the Chinese government as it is to voice theories absent evidence.

After all, there have been Cold War corollaries to what Wuhan now experiences that remain relevant today. In the Wall Street Journal, Yaroslav Trofimov offered a highly personal account of living through Chernobyl as rumor spread that the accident was far more serious than the government acknowledged. Trofimov’s essay was useful to understand the nature of a government that would not hesitate to lie in order to save face, but Chernobyl may not have been the most relevant example to Wuhan.

The ignoble honor belongs instead to Sverdlovsk, today’s Yekaterinburg, in Russia’s Ural Mountains.

In January 1980, reports surfaced of an “outbreak of disease” in the city. U.S. intelligence reports suggested that an anthrax outbreak originated at a biological weapons facility located nearby, and American assessments placed the casualty account above 1,000. Satellite imagery showed that a building in the suspect military complex was abandoned after the incident. The Soviet government blamed tainted meat, and many of those critical of U.S. foreign policy worried that the truth (a Soviet violation of the Biological Weapons Convention) might undercut any chance for Cold War detente. However, evidence pointed to inhalation anthrax rather than the less contagious gastric variety. Witnesses and emigres reported quarantines, something necessary for spread-through-inhalation disease rather than foodborne disease.

It took glasnost and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union to learn the truth. In 1990, the Russian press exposed the KGB cover-up at Sverdlovsk and, two years later, Russian President Boris Yeltsin acknowledged that the Soviet Union had maintained a biological weapons program.

Back to China. However the coronavirus began (perhaps natural mutation or man-made assistance), only two things are certain. First, autocrats lie. Journalists are foolish to take any Chinese (or Russian, or Iranian, or Turkish) statement at face value. Second, China may have ratified the Biological Weapons Convention back in 1984, but there is substantial evidence that it is in violation of that commitment.

The events in Wuhan, regardless of the truth about the coronavirus, put Chinese laboratories in the limelight. For those who believe it important to gauge policy to reality rather than wishful thinking, that is positive. Indeed, while the press piles onto Cotton, it seems that political animus and point-scoring may be obscuring a far more important story.

 

Read more:

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/was-coronavirus-a-bioweapon-we-dont-know-but-...

 

Read from top.

 

Note: Journalists are foolish to take any Chinese (or Russian, or Iranian, or Turkish) statement at face value? Yep, and these include the Western media — a media that spread the "Saddam has Weapons of Mass Destruction" mantra with the zeal of liars, forgers and porkyists — or naive idiots, if we want to be generous... The Western media would not know anything about the dark conspiracies in which they were (are and will be) the clarion for.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russia is concerned by how close Pentagon-funded biological warfare labs are to its borders at the same time as it battles the coronavirus, a Foreign Ministry source told reporters on Sunday.

The official slammed US authorities for blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic and manipulating its data on the virus, and in turn, accused the United States of spinning the global health crisis into political attacks.

"We do have questions for the US. It would be nice to hear its justification for placing so many labs near Russia and China, instead of its playing propaganda games with the coronavirus", the official said.

He admitted that Russia had no credible information on a US role in the emergence of the deadly virus, which was first reported in China last December, but said globalisation made transmission of viral diseases "a matter of hours".

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/russia/202003291078751261-russia-concerned-by-pr...

 

Note: This map was originated in the USA, and Crimea is still marked as Ukrainian. It is Russian despite what the West is harping on about. There is no way to verify the bonafide of this map which does not come from the article above, but from Mark Shwartz (see at top).

 

Read rom top.

The Pentagon’s top general has said that US intelligence has looked into the possibility that the coronavirus outbreak could have started in a Chinese laboratory, but that the “weight of evidence” so far pointed towards “natural” origins.

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, was speaking on the day of a Washington Post report about state department cables in 2018 in which US diplomats raised safety concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) which was conducting studies of coronavirus from bats.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/covid-19-origin-lab-genera...

The weight of evidence from the Pentagon is not worth a rabbit's digested salad ball... (you thought I was going to write "fart" didn't you?)... The Pentagon boffins are the geezers who brought you the "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" rubbish, the Anthrax affair, the destruction of Libya (then one of the most advanced country in Africa), the regime change in Syria (until the Rooskies decided there was enough carnage), Yemen by supporting a little tinpot under false pretences, and many other crudities where guns and bombs are involved. 

So yes, we don't believe the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley any more than god created man and woman from dust and an "entrecote"...

Read from top.

US officials are reportedly looking into the possibility that the coronavirus did not originate in a wet market in Wuhan but actually escaped from a lab experimenting on the deadly illness.

There is “increasing confidence” among officials that the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab is the original site of the virus after a report said Embassy officials warned in January 2018 about inadequate safety there, according to Fox News.

President Trump did not directly address the “theory” during a White House press conference on Wednesday.

“It should be no surprise to you that we have taken a keen interest in that and we’ve had a lot of intelligence take a hard look at that,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Fox about the Wuhan lab.

“I would just say at this point, it’s inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural, but we don’t know for certain.”

 

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2020/04/15/us-officials-investigating-whether-coronav...

 

We've be on this for a while now... The bet is 80 per cent for the biolabs and 10 per cent for the "wet markets". The other 10 per cent is unknown. In regard to the biolabs the bets are 35 per cent from US biolabs (including Ukraine), 60 per cent from the Wuhan biolab and 5 per cent from an unknown biolab in Pakistan.

 

Read from top... Read also and note the date: 

some controversies, fake news or targeted double-cross...

It’s been billed as a right-wing nut-job conspiracy theory: the idea that the coronavirus accidentally escaped from a virology facility in Wuhan, China. Originally the virus was thought to have originated in Wuhan at a so-called wet market.

In fact, those who have dared to discuss such a possibility—a seemingly logical one, as not just one but two virology centers are in the Wuhan area—such as Senator Tom Cotton and Fox News Host Tucker Carlson, have been ridiculed in just about every way imaginable.

But the idea might not end up being such a grassy knoll after all. A growing body of evidence, some circumstantial, some more concrete, suggests that at the very least, the theory warrants an investigation.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-if-the-coronavirus...

 

Read from top.

 

I will repeat Gus' betting odds:

We've be on this for a while now (on this site)... The bet is 80 per cent for the biolabs and 10 per cent for the "wet markets". The other 10 per cent is unknown. In regard to the biolabs the bets are 35 per cent from US biolabs (including Ukraine), 60 per cent from the Wuhan biolab and 5 per cent from an unknown biolab in Pakistan.

The novel coronavirus may have first passed to humans somewhere in southern China months before the outbreak in the city of Wuhan, a new study found, cutting against widely held theories about the origins of the pandemic.

Mapping a “network” of coronavirus genomes and tracing mutations over time, a team of researchers led by a Cambridge University geneticist determined the first Covid-19 infection may have come as early as September in a region south of Wuhan, noting the pathogen could have been carried by humans well before it mutated into a more lethal form.

“The virus may have mutated into its final ‘human-efficient’ form months ago, but stayed inside a bat or other animal or even human for several months without infecting other individuals,” geneticist Peter Forster told the South China Morning Post. He leads the ongoing yet to be peer-reviewed research, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Then, it started infecting and spreading among humans between September 13 and December 7, generating the network we present in [the study].

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/486194-study-coronavirus-southern-china/

 

Read from top.

 

Could this study be designed to steer us away from the "getting hotter" theory that the virus started in the Wuhan lab? One has to be prepared for anything... Be alert, keep distancing, wash your hands with soap every 20 minutes... (I used to wash them every 30 minutes and was thinking I was a compulsive mad nut)...

The West’s wish to pin the blame on China (and probably the bill too) for the Covid-19 pandemic has been reportedly incarnated in a 15-page dossier compiled by intelligence agencies, which has now leaked, according to reports.

The document, described by the Australian newspaper the Sunday Telegraph, was prepared by “concerned Western governments.” The publication mentions that the Five Eyes intelligence agencies are investigating China, pointing to the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK.

The authors of the research found some pretty strange ways to paint China’s response to the outbreak in a negative and even sinister way. For instance, despite a presumed requirement for brevity in such a short paper it refers to a study which claimed the killer coronavirus had been created in a lab.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/487661-china-covid-dossier-leaked/

 

 

Okay... Now we know the virus did NOT come from China. Why? With the professionals of disinformation, MI6, the CIA and the Murdoch media (the Sunday Telegraph of all toilet paper), telling us it came from the Wuhan lab in China, it has to be believed it came from somewhere else.

MI6, the CIA and the Murdoch media were the principal actors of disinformation on the Saddam has weapons of mass destruction mantra. They feed on rubbish and dish out porkies. THEY CANNOT BE BELIEVED. 

 

Thus the alternative is the "wet markets" which is vaguely plausible but the better alternative is the virus came from a warfare bio-lab in the West. There could be many explanations of purpose for this. We shall leave them for another time.

 

 

Read from top.

 

From Catte Black

 

Now, dear reader, I know you’re not a member of an institutionally sociopathic elite caste, trying to extend your power back to the good old days of supreme monarchs ordained by God himself.

But imagine you were.

Imagine you were one of the richest people to ever exist, and your vast network of wealth and influence was based on some imaginary money and the widely cultivated belief that “there is no alternative”.

Now imagine the lies which secure your position are suddenly and violently challenged. Imagine Yellow Vested protests in the streets of Paris, an independence referendum in Catalonia. Anti-globalists, on the left and right, surging in popularity all around the world.

Imagine Brexit and Bitcoin and PirateBay and the myriad tiny ways people won’t do what they’re told.

What you’re suffering from is a loss of control of the narrative. What you need, really, is a new story. Something to instil everyone with a sense of common purpose. To frighten them, and distract them and keep them busy. 

You need a threat, something that will make everyone “come together”. To put aside “divisions” and “hate” and all work together to face a “common enemy”

And enemies, like cakes and lemonade, are always far more satisfying when you make them yourself.

Here are the 10 steps you should employ, if you want to turn an unthreatening virus into a global power grab.

 

1. Start with a poorly defined virus, add an inaccurate test for it, and encourage as many terminally or critically ill people as possible to be repeat testeduntil they test positive.
2. Report your inevitably very high death rates and get vague about whether these people died OF the virus or simply WITH it.
3. Create a ‘response’ to the ‘crisis’ that rolls out a vast network of authoritarian measures, some of which have been in planning for a long while, and only a minority of which have any possible application to pandemic-prevention. (Make sure to cancel elections until further notice and to hugely increase police powers of arrest and surveillance)
4. Shut down your hospitals to all but ‘covid cases’. Cancel elective surgeries, kidney dialysis, cancer treatments, normal GP consultations and all “non-emergency healthcare”. Thus inevitably increasing all-cause mortality.
5. Change your laws in numerous ways to allow almost all of these new deaths to bypass normal checks and balances and be easily diagnosed as ‘covid-19 related’, either with the inaccurate test or simply by ‘clinical presentation’.
6. In case some attending medics are reluctant to go along with this, change the law to allow a single MD, who may never even have seen the patient in question, to diagnose covid19 at his/her own discretion. 
7. Report the startling numbers of ‘new cases’ you find as a result of these various manipulations, as evidence for how essential the new authoritarian measures are for ‘saving lives’.
8. With no sense of irony introduce mandatory Do Not Resuscitate (DNR)s for any demographic you consider useless eaters. (If challenged talk about human suffering, limited healthcare resources and ventilators)
9. Don’t forget to add any ensuing deaths to the covid19 totals. 
10. Make sure the media calls anyone who questions any part of this a ‘conspiracy theorist’.

 

Not only will these ten steps allow you to create a quasi-fascist police state, but the chattering classes will actually criticise you for not being enough of a police state and beg for more.

No doubt some will say this is excessively cynical, maybe even ‘conspiratorial’. But is it?

Since February 2020 we have dedicated this site to bringing you the factual reality of the entity called the “covid19 pandemic”. We have done this using official statistics and data, and the ignored testimony of experts in the field.

What has the orthodox story brought, in the same time frame?

The claim for this being a unique pathology requiring unique levels of intervention is being made every day, in virtually every mainstream outlets, many alt news outlets and by virtually every major government and health-related NGO.

It’s a deafening cacophony, a 24/7 bullhorn of fear and certitude, a fog of headlines and speculation and ‘what ifs’ and ‘some experts claim’ and forests of unsourced or unexplained numbers.

But what is it based on? What data, what statistics, what observations are forming the basis of this narrative?

Is there anything solid behind the noise?

Despite the atmosphere of panic being generated, and despite frequent usage of epithets like ‘deadly virus’ in the popular press, no one is claiming covid19 kills a lot of people.

In fact quite the opposite, as we pointed out recently. The very same sources that are promoting the need for unique action over this virus will tell you in the next breath that there is nothing uniquely dangerous about it at all. 

According to the UK’s chief medical officer, 80% of those infected will get no symptoms or a mild cold, only a tiny minority will even need treatment in hospital, and even of those, the vast majority will survive.

So, what, in actual real-world terms, is being claimed? If the problem isn’t that this virus kills a lot of people, what is the problem? 

The only response to that is to talk about health services being overrun due to the ‘R0’. As if you can take that number in isolation and have it mean something. 

It’s nonsense. A high R0 is not concerning if the virus is harmless to most people who encounter it. The common cold has an R0 of between 2-3, pretty much the same as SARSCOV2. It also can kill vulnerable people, sometimes in large numbers. 

So, if this argument makes sense we should be locked down permanently for fear of catching a sniffle.

The R0 argument used to get additional cred from referring to the Imperial model and its prediction that the health service would be overrun if some kind of lockdown was not enforced.

But this is more than problematic. The Imperial model has now been widely discredited, and its author, Neil Ferguson, exposed as a serial incompetent, or serial data-fudger for the govt or the Gates Foundation. It can no longer be used to support either the claim for uniqueness or the argument for lockdown. There is nothing to show it does either very well if at all.

Which means the entire ‘flatten the curve’ meme is also discredited, by the way. Far from being overrun, the NHS is virtually shut down, apart from those almost empty covid19 wards. Yet apparently it’s going to take the UK govt 12 months to get elective surgeries back. 

Because, you know, reasons. 

Covid19 reasons. 

NOT an opportunistic bid to finally shut down and privatise or otherwise commandeer the NHS.

That’s definite.

Seriously though, people. If you think there is any coherence, rational thought or data behind the global, Gatesian official position – please tell me where it is.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/19/10-steps-to-turn-a-pandemic-into-the...

 

 

Read from top.

 

Gus: Methinks that the slow reopening of the societies around the world has nothing to do with the number of Covid19 cases increase or reduction. It is most likely that some leaders, under instruction from the string-pullers behind the scene, see that "what was this all about?" could start to infect the mind of the mobs.  These power guys (and girls) want to avoid the next stage of populace fear: despair that overtakes submission. Despair can instil far more trouble than fear, as it can lead to more deaths or more "real" revolutions. The system leaders and their string-pullers are very aware of this, from having studied history books.

So reopening the system SLOWLY is the only way as not to show the whole charade was a FARCE, as if being cautious was still part of the treatment. Social distancing will stay on for a while, despite your ability to enjoy the sun with 10 people at 1.5 metre, on the terrace of a nearly bankrupted restaurant... Meanwhile the arts are dead, awaiting for a complete revival through the fog of inane decoration... We shall see... 

 

 

Investigative journalist Sam Husseini has had a storied career asking world leaders questions they would prefer to dodge, on subjects ranging from missing weapons of mass destruction to very real nuclear stockpiles. Now he takes on the “elephant in the room”: the extreme dangers posed by bio-research facilities not just in China, but all over the world…

The Intervieweee: Sam Husseini is a Jordanian-Palestinian writer and political activist. He is the communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a Washington DC-based nonprofit group that promotes progressive experts as alternative sources for mainstream media reporters.

The Interviewer: John Kirby is the director of FOUR DIED TRYING, a feature documentary and series on the major assassinations of the 1960’s and their calamitous impact on the country. To join the struggle for justice for Dr King, Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedy.

Follow Journeyman Pictures on youtube or visit their website for more of their award-winning factual content.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/30/watch-perspectives-on-the-pandemic-7/

 

Read from top.

A new peer-reviewed study shows that the Covid-19 outbreak started as a faulty experiment in China, the ex-head of MI6 says. The paper he cited was reportedly “watered down” to remove accusations against Beijing.

“I do think that this started as an accident,” Sir Richard Dearlove, who led Britain’s top spy agency, MI6, from 1999 until 2004, told the Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast.

It raises the issue, if China ever were to admit responsibility, does it pay reparations? I think it will make every country in the world rethink how it treats its relationship with China and how the international community behaves towards the Chinese leadership.

Dearlove suggested that the virus was not released deliberately, but rather accidentally leaked when Chinese scientists were experimenting on bat coronaviruses. To back up his claims, he cited a recently-published peer-reviewed study by a British-Norwegian team which claimed to have found “inserted sections placed on the SARS-CoV-2 Spike surface” that allow the virus to come into contact with human cells.

The ex-MI6 chief told the Telegraph that the study was rewritten several times. The research paper originally said that the novel coronavirus should be called the “Wuhan virus” – the name of the Chinese city where it was first recorded – and claimed to have proven that the virus was “engineered,” the newspaper reported, citing an earlier draft of the study.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/490714-mi6-china-lab-coronavirus/

 

Read from top.

 

A Red Herring?... see also:

conspiracy of competitors? in If a door isn’t bolted, is it properly shut? ...

 

This does not mean that it came from Wuhan, but has been a "manufactured" virus and that the Poms are trying to blame the Chinese for it... though it could have come from any of the many warfare labs around the globe...

Sir Richard Dearlove, former chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), earlier cited a scientific report suggesting the COVID-19 pandemic had originated due to the respiratory virus “escaping” from a laboratory in China.

UK government officials have dismissed as “fanciful” earlier claims by former head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) Sir Richard Dearlove that the coronavirus was man-made at a Chinese lab before accidentally escaping it due to biosecurity flaws and setting off a global pandemic, reports The Sun.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesman slammed Dearlove’s Richard's comments, saying:

“We've seen no evidence the virus is man-made.”

A government official was quoted as adding:

“These are fanciful claims. World leading scientists in the UK, US, and the World Health Organisation have said numerous times... the virus was natural in its origin and likely moved into the human population through natural transfer from animals – not through a specific accident or man-made incident.”

UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock echoed the statements regarding Sir Dearlove's claims, saying there was "no evidence" to support the theory that the COVID-19 virus originated at a laboratory.

Key Elements ‘Man-Made’

Sir Richard Dearlove, who led MI6 from 1999 to 2004, previously claimed during The Telegraph's Planet Normal podcast that a peer-reviewed scientific report published by a Norwegian-British research team suggested the COVID-19 pandemic had been sparked by the novel respiratory virus “escaping” from a laboratory in China.

Dearlove cited the research as saying clues had been discovered in the genetic sequence of the virus that seemed to suggest its key elements were man-made.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/uk/202006051079525460-downing-street-shoots-down...

 

Read from top.

 

...

In the U.S. the person most visibly in charge of the COVID-19 response is Anthony Fauci, who is the long-time director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Like Redfield, Dr. Fauci is a Catholic and has said that values he learned in his Jesuit education continue to guide him.

After weeks of Fauci having led the coronavirus response in the U.S., it was learned that his NIAID had funded “gain of function” research at the Wuhan laboratory where the SARS-COV-2 virus is suspected of having originated. Fauci’s response to questions about that inexplicable coincidence was simply to denounce “conspiracy theories” rather than addressing the questions directly, much as others did when questioned about 9/11 foreknowledge.

Whether SARS-COV-2 was genetically engineered in a laboratory, like the NIAID-funded Wuhan lab, is a subject that has become of interest to many scientists. The Wuhan laboratory is not the only place the U.S. supports work like this, however, as the Pentagon funds such labs in 25 countries across the world. Located in places such as Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South East Asia, and Africa, these labs isolate and manipulate viruses like the bat coronaviruses from which SARS-COV-2 originated. This bat-research program is further coordinated by a group called EcoHealth Alliance.

 

Read more:

https://digwithin.net/2020/06/03/coronavirus-scare/

Note: 

Gain-of-function mutation: a mutation that confers new or enhanced activity on a protein.

Loss-of-function: mutations, which are more common, result in reduced or abolished protein function.

 

Note:

Dr. Anthony Fauci "is" an adviser to President Donald Trump (who wants Fauci to get sacked) and something of an American folk hero for his steady, calm leadership during the pandemic crisis. At least one poll shows that Americans trust Fauci more than Trump on the coronavirus pandemic — and few scientists are portrayed on TV by Brad Pitt.

But just last year, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.

In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.

Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.

SARS-CoV-2 , the virus now causing a global pandemic, is believed to have originated in bats. U.S. intelligence, after originally asserting that the coronavirus had occurred naturally, conceded last month that the pandemic may have originated in a leak from the Wuhan lab. (At this point most scientists say it's possible—but not likely—that the pandemic virus was engineered or manipulated.)

Read more:

https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741

 

Read from top.

 

Note (written by Gus March 23 2020, see: a convenient inconvenience...): 

Question: What has been one of the main priorities of the USA, recently? A priority that the US has also tried to make the Europeans do the same, somewhat secretly? 

Answer: close borders to immigrants and refugees. stop the Islamic spread...

The novel coronavirus may have first passed to humans somewhere in southern China months before the outbreak in the city of Wuhan, a new study found, cutting against widely held theories about the origins of the pandemic.

Mapping a “network” of coronavirus genomes and tracing mutations over time, a team of researchers led by a Cambridge University geneticist determined the first Covid-19 infection may have come as early as September in a region south of Wuhan, noting the pathogen could have been carried by humans well before it mutated into a more lethal form.

“The virus may have mutated into its final ‘human-efficient’ form months ago, but stayed inside a bat or other animal or even human for several months without infecting other individuals,” geneticist Peter Forster told the South China Morning Post. He leads the ongoing yet to be peer-reviewed research, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Then, it started infecting and spreading among humans between September 13 and December 7, generating the network we present in [the study].

 

 

Though the virus is thought to have transmitted from bats to another host animal – pangolins are a popular candidate – and finally to humans, the new findings could overturn prevailing ideas as to precisely how, when and where it made the interspecies leap. Initial theories posited the jump to humans took place at a wet market in Wuhan, but the new study has called that into question, suggesting Covid-19 might have originated south of the central-Chinese city.

If I am pressed for an answer, I would say the original spread started more likely in southern China than in Wuhan.

Any solid conclusions, however, could only be made after analyzing more bats and other potential host animals, as well as tissue samples from early patients, Forster cautioned.

“But it is the best assumption we can make at the moment, pending analysis of further patient samples stored in hospitals during 2019,” the researcher told Newsweek in a separate interview.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/486194-study-coronavirus-southern-china/

 

 

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Here, one must be aware that a study of this kind is yet unconclusive... This study would help dispel the lab theory which to say the least is abit too close for comfort. Please note that Fauci's organisation paid the chinese lab to do gain-of-function research...

 

See also: 

of conspiratorial sheep...

Donald Trump’s ex-adviser Steve Bannon has doubled down on the man-made nature of the coronavirus, claiming that Chinese “virus experts” have defected to the West and are now cooperating with intelligence agencies.

The explosive allegations were made by Bannon in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail. Describing the Wuhan outbreak as nothing less than a “biological Chernobyl,” he pointed the finger at the city’s secretive laboratory as the source of the virus.

The facility has been “horribly run and terribly mismanaged,” Bannon claimed, adding that “it’s not that hard for these viruses to get out.”

“I know that certain defectors are working with the FBI here to try to knit together what happened” he said, referring to the Wuhan institute. And Western spy agencies “have electronic intelligence, and … have done a full inventory of who has provided access to that lab,” he claimed.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/494542-bannon-wuhan-lab-coronavirus/

 

Is this our "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" Covid19 disinformation or has this got any legs?

 

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One of the conspiracy theories that have plagued attempts to keep people informed during the pandemic is the idea that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory.

But the vast majority of scientists who have studied the virus agree that it evolved naturally and crossed into humans from an animal species, most likely a bat.

How exactly do we know that this virus, SARS-CoV-2, has a “zoonotic” animal origin and not an artificial one?

The answers lie in the genetic material and evolutionary history of the virus, and understanding the ecology of the bats in question.

 

An estimated 60 per cent of known infectious diseases and 75 per cent of all new, emerging or re-emerging diseases in humans have animal origins.

SARS-CoV-2 is the newest of seven coronaviruses found in humans, all of which came from animals, either from bats, mice or domestic animals.

Bats were also the source of the viruses causing Ebola, rabies, Nipah and Hendra virus infections, Marburg virus disease, and strains of Influenza A virus.

The genetic makeup or “genome” of SARS-CoV-2 has been sequenced and publicly shared thousands of times by scientists all over the world.

If the virus had been genetically engineered in a lab there would be signs of manipulation in the genome data.

This would include evidence of an existing viral sequence as the backbone for the new virus, and obvious, targeted inserted (or deleted) genetic elements.

But no such evidence exists.

It is very unlikely that any techniques used to genetically engineer the virus would not leave a genetic signature, like specific identifiable pieces of DNA code.

The genome of SARS-CoV-2 is similar to that of other bat coronaviruses, as well as those of pangolins, all of which have a similar overall genomic architecture.

Differences between the genomes of these coronaviruses show natural patterns typical of coronavirus evolution.

This suggests that SARS-CoV-2 evolved from a previous wild coronavirus.

One of the key features that makes SARS-CoV-2 different from the other coronaviruses is a particular “spike” protein that binds well with another protein on the outside of human cells called ACE2.

This enables the virus to hook into and infect a variety of human cells.

However, other related coronaviruses do have similar features, providing evidence that they have evolved naturally rather than being artificially added in a lab.

Coronaviruses and bats are locked in an evolutionary arms race in which the viruses are constantly evolving to evade the bat immune system and bats are evolving to withstand infections from coronaviruses.

A virus will evolve multiple variants, most of which will be destroyed by the bat’s immune system, but some will survive and pass to other bats.

Some scientists have suggested that SARS-CoV-2 may have come from another known bat virus (RaTG13) found by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The genomes of these two viruses are 96 per cent similar to one another.

This might sound very close, but in evolutionary terms this actually makes them significantly different and the two have been shown to share a common ancestor.

This shows that RaTG13 is not the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2.

In fact, SARS-CoV-2 most likely evolved from a viral variant that couldn’t survive for a long period of time or that persists at low levels in bats.

Coincidentally, it evolved the ability to invade human cells and accidentally found its way into us, possibly by means of an intermediate animal host, where it then thrived.

Or an initially harmless form of the virus might have jumped directly into humans and then evolved to become harmful as it passed between people.

Genetic variations

The mixing or “recombination” of distinct coronavirus genomes in nature is one of the mechanisms that brings about novel coronaviruses.

There is now further evidence that this process could be involved in the generation of SARS-CoV-2.

Since the pandemic started, the SARS-CoV-2 virus appears to have started evolving into two distinct strains, acquiring adaptations for more efficient invasion of human cells.

This could have occurred through a mechanism known as a selective sweep, through which beneficial mutations help a virus to infect more hosts and so become more common in the viral population.

This is a natural process that can ultimately reduce the genetic variation between individual viral genomes.

The same mechanism would account for the lack of diversity seen in the many SARs-CoV-2 genomes that have been sequenced.

This indicates that the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 could have been circulating in bat populations for a considerable amount of time.

It then would have acquired the mutations that allowed it to spill over from bats into other animals, including humans.

It is also important to remember that around one in five of all mammal species on Earth are bats, with some found only in certain locations and others migrating across vast distances.

This diversity and geographical spread makes it a challenge to identify which group of bats SARS-CoV-2 originally came from.

There is evidence that early cases of COVID-19 occurred outside of Wuhan in China and had no clear link to the city’s wet market, where the pandemic is thought to have begun.

But that isn’t evidence of a conspiracy.

It could simply be that infected people accidentally brought the virus into the city and then the wet market, where the enclosed, busy conditions increased the chances of the disease spreading rapidly.

This includes the possibility of one of the scientists involved in bat coronavirus research in Wuhan unknowingly becoming infected and bringing the virus back from where their subject bats lived.

This would still be considered natural infection, not a laboratory leak.

Only through robust science and the study of the natural world will we be able to truly understand the natural history and origins of zoonotic diseases like COVID-19.

This is pertinent because our ever-changing relationship and increasing contact with wildlife is raising the risk of new deadly zoonotic diseases emerging in humans.

SARS-CoV-2 is not the first virus that we have acquired from animals and certainly will not be the last.

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2020/07/15/coronavirus-came-from-bats/

 

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https://theconversation.com/heres-how-scientists-know-the-coronavirus-came-from-bats-and-wasnt-made-in-a-lab-141850

 

 

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The coronavirus pandemic has thrust virologist Shi Zhengli into a fierce spotlight. Shi, nicknamed “Bat Woman,” heads a group that studies bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), in the Chinese city where the pandemic began. Many have speculated that SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen that causes COVID-19, accidentally escaped from her lab—a theory promoted by U.S. President Donald Trump. Some have even suggested it could have been engineered there.

China has forcefully rejected such claims, but Shi herself has said very little publicly—until now. On 15 July, Shi emailed Science answers to a series of questions about the virus' origin and her research. In them, she hit back at speculation that the virus leaked from WIV. She and her colleagues discovered the virus in late 2019, she says, in samples from patients who had a pneumonia of unknown origin. “Before that, we had never been in contact with or studied this virus, nor did we know of its existence,” Shi wrote.

“U.S. President Trump's claim that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from our institute totally contradicts the facts,” she added. “It jeopardizes and affects our academic work and personal life. He owes us an apology.”

Shi stressed that over the past 15 years, her lab has isolated and grown in culture only three bat coronaviruses related to one that infected humans: the agent that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which erupted in 2003. The more than 2000 other bat coronaviruses the lab has detected, including one that is 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2, are simply genetic sequences that her team has extracted from fecal samples and oral and anal swabs of the animals. She also noted that all staff and students in her lab recently tested negative for SARS-CoV-2, challenging the notion that one of them triggered the pandemic.

Shi was particularly chagrined about the 24 April decision by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), made at the White House's behest, to ax a grant to the EcoHealth Alliance in New York City that included bat virus research at WIV. “We don't understand [it] and feel it is absolutely absurd,” she said.

Shi's responses—available in full at scim.ag/ShiZhengli—are “a big contribution,” says Daniel Lucey of Georgetown University, an outbreak specialist who blogs about SARS-CoV-2 origin issues. “There are a lot of new facts that I wasn't aware of. It's very exciting to hear this directly from her.” The answers were coordinated with public information staffers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, of which WIV is part, and evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research suspects they were “carefully vetted” by the Chinese government. “But they're all logical, genuine, and stick to the science,” he says.

Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, who has long urged for an investigation into the possibility that a lab accident spawned the pandemic, is unimpressed, however. “Most of these answers are formulaic, almost robotic, reiterations of statements previously made by Chinese authorities and state media,” Ebright says.

Shi's responses come at a time when questions about how the pandemic originated are increasingly causing international tensions. Trump frequently calls SARS-CoV-2 “the China virus” and has said China could have stopped the pandemic in its tracks. China, for its part, has added an extra layer of review for researchers who want to publish on the pandemic's origins and has asserted that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in the United States. Calls for an independent, international probe into the origin are mounting, and two researchers from the World Health Organization are now in China to discuss the scope and scale of a possible mission. Lucey says Shi's answers to Science's questions could help guide the investigation team.

PETER DASZAK of the EcoHealth Alliance, who has long worked with Shi, describes her as social, open, and something of a goodwill ambassador for China at meetings, where she converses in both French and English. (She's also a renowned singer of Mandarin folk songs.) “What I really like about Zhengli is that she is frank and honest, and that just makes it easier to solve problems,” he says.

Shi studied at Wuhan University and WIV, then earned a Ph.D. at the University of Montpellier II in France. She returned to WIV in 2000, initially focusing on viruses in shrimp and crabs. A turning point in her career came in 2005, when she published a study in Science with Daszak and other researchers from China, Australia, and the United States. The paper reported the first evidence that bats harbored coronaviruses closely related to the lethal virus that jumped from civets to humans and caused the worldwide outbreak of SARS in 2003.

Daszak has continued to work with Shi and her WIV team to sample wild animals and hunt for more coronaviruses. They have published 18 more papers together. Shi “is extremely driven to produce high-quality work,” Daszak says. “She will go out in the field, and gets involved in the work, but her real skills are in the lab, and she's one of the best I've worked with in China, probably globally.”

Shi told Science her lab was thrust into the pandemic on 30 December 2019, the day her team first received patient samples. “Subsequently, we rapidly conducted research in parallel with other domestic institutions, and quickly identified the pathogen,” she wrote.

It didn't long take for suspicions and rumors to arise, first on China's social media sites and then in Western media. On 2 February, Shi posted a note on her own social media site saying SARS-CoV-2 was “nature punishing the uncivilized habits and customs of humans,” and that she would “bet my life that [the outbreak] has nothing to do with the lab.” Partly as a show of support for Shi, Daszak and 26 other scientists from eight countries published a statement of solidarity with Chinese scientists and health professionals in The Lancet in February. In a March Nature paper that analyzed SARS-CoV-2's genetic makeup, Andersen and other evolutionary biologists argued against it being engineered in a lab.

In her written answers to Science, Shi explained in great detail why she thinks her lab is blameless. WIV has identified hundreds of bat viruses over the years, but never anything close to SARS-CoV-2, she says. Although much speculation has centered on RaTG13, the bat virus that most closely resembles SARS-CoV-2, differences in the sequences of the two viruses suggest they diverged from a common ancestor somewhere between 20 and 70 years ago. Shi notes that her lab never cultured the bat virus, making an accident far less likely.

Some suspicions have focused on a naming inconsistency. In 2016, Shi described a partial sequence of a bat coronavirus that she dubbed 4991. That small part of the genome exactly matches RaTG13, leading some to speculate that Shi never revealed the full sequence of 4991 because it actually is SARS-CoV-2. But Shi explained that 4991 and RaTG13 are one and the same. The original name, she says, was for the bat itself, but her team switched to RaTG13 when they sequenced the entire virus. TG stands for Tongguan, the town in Yunnan province where they trapped that bat, she said, and 13 for the year 2013.

That's “a very logical explanation,” says Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney. Shi's reply also clarified to him why 4991 held such little interest to her team that they didn't even bother to sequence it fully until recently: That short genetic sequence was very different from SARS-CoV, the virus that caused the 2003 outbreak. “In reading this the penny dropped: Of course, they would have been mainly interested in bat viruses closely related to SARS-CoV … not some random bat virus that is more distant,” Holmes says.

Shi mentioned other factors that she says exonerate her lab. Their research meets strict biosafety rules, she said, and the lab is subject to periodic inspections “by a third-party institution authorized by the government.” Antibody tests have shown there is “zero infection” among institute staff or students with SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses. Shi said WIV has never been ordered to destroy any samples after the pandemic erupted.

Labs that presumably had strict biosafety rules have had accidents: The SARS virus escaped from several labs after the global outbreak was contained in 2003. And even if everyone in the institute tested negative for the virus today, an infected person could have left WIV months ago. Still, Holmes says, the answers are “a clear, comprehensive, and believable account” of what occurred at WIV.

BUT THEN where did the virus come from? Shi concurs with the scientific consensus that it originated in bats and jumped to humans either directly or, more likely, via an intermediate host. Her lab tested samples from Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which Wuhan officials initially fingered as a possible origin because some early patients had links to it, and found RNA fragments from the virus in “door handles, the ground and sewage,” she wrote—but not in “frozen animal samples.” But the market's role was called into question when two papers revealed that up to 45% of the first confirmed patients—including four of the five earliest cases—did not have any links to it. “The Huanan seafood market may just be a crowded location where a cluster of early novel coronavirus patients were found,” Shi says.

Researchers from WIV and Huazhong Agricultural University didn't find the virus in farmed animals and livestock around Wuhan and in other places in Hubei province, she wrote. Years of surveillance in Hubei have never turned up bat coronaviruses close to SARS-CoV-2, she said, leading her to believe the jump to humans happened elsewhere.

Shi provided few details on China's efforts to pin down the origin. “Many groups in China are carrying out such studies,” she wrote, using multiple approaches. “We are publishing papers and data, including those about the virus's origins.”

Daszak supports the push for an international research effort—which he cautions could take years—and says Shi's group should play a prominent role in it. “I hope and believe that she will be able to help WIV and China show the world that there is nothing to these lab escape theories, and help us all to find the true origins of this viral strain,” he says. Shi ended her answers on a similar note. “Here, I would like to make an appeal to the international community to strengthen international cooperation on research into the origins of emerging viruses,” she said. “I hope scientists around the world can stand together and work together.”

 

Read more:

 

Science  31 Jul 2020:

Vol. 369, Issue 6503, pp. 487-488

 

 

Pravda.Ru editor-in-chief Inna Novikova interviewed Igor Nikulin, a microbiologist, adviser to UN ex-secretary general Kofi Annan on bacteriological and chemical weapons.

"You say that this coronavirus is unique for having four elements from the human immunodeficiency virus. What does this mean for the infected patients, what does this mean for the planet? Does it mean that all those infected with Covid-19 will become HIV carriers?

"No. HIV elements enable the novel coronavirus to penetrate into human cells, in particular into the deep parts of the lungs and cause various severe complications. A person who has had coronavirus will not be infected with HIV. By the way, a strange thing has recently happened: first incidents of recurrent infection were reported in China. It turns out that they do not have antibodies to this virus. There's no immunity. This is another indication of the fact that COVID-19 is a virus that did not come from the wild. It had been created by someone for some specific purposes.

"The Chinese Institute of Virology in Wuhan belongs to the 4th degree of bioprotection. It is supposed to withstand the impact of tactical nuclear weapons. No bat could escape from there. It took the Chinese more than a month to realize what they came across with.

"The first case was detected on November 17, but they announced the onset of the epidemic only on December 31. They did not know what they were dealing with. Even if they were doing something at that institute, even if there were some sort of a leak - the Chinese administration would have been informed accordingly."

"So you say that that this is an American "creation". Trump initiated the law to fight against the use of vaping devices, when it started spreading in the United States back in August of 2019. It turns out that Trump knew nothing about what was happening in reality, that it was not the vaping, but a leak of biological weapons. Do you think it was a leak after all?"

"I think it was. Why did they close Fort Detrick then? In 2014, President Barack Obama signed a moratorium for the research on influenza viruses - SARS and MERS. Such studies in the United States were officially banned. At the very least, the government funding of this kind of research was prohibited.

"Someone in the administration realized that they represent an extreme danger for all of humanity. The Americans calculated that by the end of February, 2.8 million people would be infected in the world and 100,000 would die. It was their forecast, a mathematical model.

"Did they make a mistake?"

"No. They turned a blind eye on it. As soon as China realized the problem, the Chinese administration took most stringent measures immediately. China took unprecedented measures that no one has ever made before.

"The Chinese are a disciplined nation. The Chinese Communist Party organized everything clearly and rigidly."

"Indeed. The Chinese managed to overcome the disease with such cruel quarantine measures. They demolished bridges and blocked roads to stop people from traveling. Unfortunately, the Italians did nothing.

"Is the virus in Italy the same as it is in China, or is it a modification of it?"

"It could be. Former Deputy Minister of Defense of Germany said that the Americans patented the virus in 2015."

"So there must be documents."

"Of course. Most likely, this is some kind of closed database."

"Why patent a virus?"

"They patented Ebola for some reason. I don't know why they are doing this, for what purpose. But, nevertheless, this is a fact. The Anglo-Saxons can't help but take what they consider theirs. This is the foundation of the Anglo-Saxon system. The early bird catches the worm."

Читайте больше на https://english.pravda.ru/world/144467-covid_usa_patent/

 

 

As well:

July 2019, an unknown respiratory illness outbreak happened in Virginia, U.S. patients' symptoms included fever, cough, body ache, wheezing, and general weakness, according to ABC News. The disease sickened dozens of residents and killed at least two people at Greenspring Retirement Community in Springfield. An expert said it was less likely for a respiratory outbreak to happen in July than in the winter.

One month later, the deadly germs research lab was shut down in a U.S. Army biological laboratory in Fort Detrick, one hour's drive from the Greenspring Community.

Speculation over COVID-19's origin continues to grow, with some people demanding that the U.S. government disclose more information on the lab's closure that may be connected to the outbreak.

However, the Centers for Disease Control（CDC）could not provide more specific details due to "national security reasons," the New York Times reported.

Is there any relationship between the Greenspring Community and the Fort Detrick？A stringer from the U.S. went to the two locations to find more.

 

Read more:

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-18/Residents-around-US-Fort-Detrick-biolab-keep-silence-about-suspected--XZ6kzR79yE/index.html

 

 

See also: patent/US20120251502A1

Human Ebola Virus Species and Compositions and Methods Thereof AbstractCompositions and methods including and related to the Ebola Bundibugyo virus (EboBun) are provided. Compositions are provided that are operable as immunogens to elicit and immune response or protection from EboBun challenge in a subject such as a primate. Inventive methods are directed to detection and treatment of EboBun infection.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120251502A1/en

 

 

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The Donald Trump administration regularly traded barbs with Chinese officials over the origins of the deadly coronavirus flare-ups across the world, with the ex-POTUS insistently referring to the novel infectious disease as “the Chinese virus”, much to Beijing’s annoyance.

The US has “a very strong reason to believe” the Chinese military was conducting some classified experiments on animals in the Wuhan virology laboratory where there must have been an outbreak of a flu-like disease in the autumn of 2019, Matthew Pottinger, a deputy national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, has alleged on CBS News’ “Face the Nation”.

He said “the ledger on the side of the explanation that said [the outbreak] resulted from some kind of human error far outweighs the side of the scale that says this was some natural outbreak”, adding that the experiments could have gone all the way back to at least 2017.

Pottinger assumed that the Chinese authorities could have had tangible reasons to cover up the virus' spread, but doctors working there were well aware and openly spoke about a highly contagious virus that travelled “silently” from one person to another.

“We had about a dozen [Centres for Disease Control and Prevention] officers in China”, Pottinger said. “We had lots of CDC officers in the United States that deal with Chinese doctors. … They said this thing is not going to be like SARS. It is going to be like the 1918 flu pandemic because it is spreading silently”.

He lamented the fact that US officials “were a little bit too credulous”, given the fact that they were “waiting to be fed information when we were not going to get that information” from the Chinese Communist government, which, the ex-official remarked, didn’t turn to the country’s own CDC to deal with the matter, but rather “to the military”.

“Our CDC did not have relations established with the Chinese military. So the director of the Chinese CDC, based on public reporting, didn't know either… that this thing was circulating until the last day of December", Pottinger said.

The Trump administration didn’t mince its words all throughout the year 2020 when commenting on the alleged origins of the virus, openly charging that China, where the first flare-up was registered in December 2019, was responsible for the deadly pandemic.

Trump frequently referred to the COVID-19 pathogen as the “Chinese virus”, saying 184 countries were suffering because of it, while it “could have been solved very easily when it was just starting”. Chinese officials, however, hit back at the time, stressing they moved to notify the world about the virus' spread and rushed to recommend ways to tackle the disease as soon as they worked them out and verified all the relevant information.

The World Health Organisation, which declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on 11 March 2020, is still looking into the possible origins of the novel virus spread, having announced so far that the zoonotic (animal) source of SARS-CoV-2 remains unknown.

Yet, its report published in late March 2020 states that a large proportion of the initial cases in late December 2019 and early January 2020 had a direct link to the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan, where seafood, wild, and farmed animal species were sold. The pandemic has so far claimed over 2.4 million lives around the world.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/society/202102221082153074-theres-evidence-chinese-military-was-responsible-for-covid-19-pandemic-ex-deputy-nsa-say/

 

MARGARET BRENNAN: Welcome back to "Face the Nation." Matthew Pottinger was the Deputy National Security Adviser during the Trump Administration and one of the first people inside the White House to sound the alarm about the coronavirus as it emerged last year. He had previously worked as journalist in China, and later a Marine Corps intelligence officer. Yesterday he spoke with us in what he said was the spirit of sharing information about what he thinks still needs to be fixed within the government to deal with future pandemics.  

POTTINGER: The Chinese government was not sharing useful data with anyone in the world. The World Health Organization was parroting misinformation about this virus. They were- they were claiming that it is not featuring significant human-to-human spread. They continued for weeks, even months, to claim that there was not a significant amount of asymptomatic spread. So that misled our public health experts. I was able to call doctors on the ground in China in late January. And they were already telling me, look, this thing spreads asymptomatically. Half of the cases or more are asymptomatic. That was a different story from what the Chinese government was telling.

MARGARET BRENNAN:  Why is it that you were seeing and hearing things from doctors that the official health organizations were not getting?

POTTINGER: We had about a dozen CDC officers in China. We have lots of CDC officers in the United States who deal with Chinese doctors. I had covered the SARS epidemic back in 2003 when I was living in China, writing for The Wall Street Journal. So I dusted off some of my old contacts and talked to Chinese doctors who had firsthand information about this pandemic. And they were very open. They said, yeah, this thing is not going to be like SARS 2003. It's going to be like the 1918 flu pandemic because it's spreading silently.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Was the administration being intentionally misled here or was it a problem in terms of how our own public health officials consumed information?

POTTINGER: We were a little bit too credulous. We were- we were waiting to be fed information. When the nature of that regime meant that we were not going to get that information, they- they had a strong incentive to mislead their own public and the rest of the world about the nature of this virus.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So the World Health Organization has said that COVID-19 was circulating in Wuhan, China in late 2019. Why didn't U.S. health officials or U.S. intelligence know earlier about this threat?

POTTINGER: Well, U.S. intelligence wasn't focused on these kinds of questions. They were relying on the CDC. The problem was the Chinese Communist Party did not turn to their CDC to deal with this crisis. They turned to their military. And our CDC did not have relations established with the Chinese military. So the director of the Chinese CDC, based on public reporting, didn't know either. I mean, the Chinese CDC director did not know that this thing was circulating until the last day of December, which is incredible when you think about that. So it looks like the Chinese CDC to some extent was cut out because the Chinese Communist Party turned to its military to try to cover this thing up, to try to contain it until it was too late.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So the Biden administration and their national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said he has deep concerns about the World Health Organization's recent report and Chinese interference in it.

POTTINGER: Look, the World Health Organization made all sorts of- of un-untruthful or misinformed claims about this virus. So the WHO has a lot to answer for. When it comes to this investigation into the origins, unfortunately, we're seeing a panel that's been sent to China that is deeply conflicted. You have people who were hand selected by the Chinese government. They had a veto over who could come in.

MARGARET BRENNAN: U.S. intelligence has said COVID, according to wide scientific consensus, was not man-made or genetically modified. You are not in any way alleging that it was, are you?

MATT POTTINGER: No. If you weigh the circumstantial evidence, the ledger on the side of an explanation that says that this resulted from some kind of human error, it far outweighs the- the side of the scale that says this was some natural outbreak. We have very strong reason to believe that the Chinese military was doing secret classified animal experiments in that same laboratory, going all the way back to at least 2017. We have good reason to believe that there was an outbreak of flu-like illness among researchers working in the Wuhan Institute of virology in the fall of 2019, but right- immediately before the first documented cases came to light.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So what you're referring to is some information that the State Department declassified right before the end of the Trump administration. And it said that--

POTTINGER: Right.

MARGARET BRENNAN: --you have reason to believe a COVID-like disease was circulating in autumn of 2019 in China. Is there evidence to back up that assessment?

POTTINGER: There is. And that was a very carefully crafted statement, carefully crafted so as not to overstate the case that- that it was making. The case it was making was for following up on these important leads.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Let's unpack some of what you were saying about the response here at home. It's- it's been widely reported that you went into the Oval Office alongside National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien and told President Trump at the end of January that this would be the greatest national security threat that he ever faced. Did he understand the gravity of what you were saying at that time?

POTTINGER: I think he did. That was something that Robert O'Brien told the president. To the president's credit, he decided to shut down travel from China.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Around that same time, though, the American public is being told that this is not a direct threat to them. Robert O'Brien was on FACE THE NATION saying exactly that: 

ROBERT O'BRIEN FTN 2/2/20: Right now, there's- there's no reason for Americans to panic. This is something that is low risk, we think, in the U.S.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Is that what you thought at the time?

POTTINGER: I thought that it was going to be potentially quite- quite devastating. You could match that against quotes from- from a great number of public health experts in this country and abroad who were saying similar things because we did not have hard evidence from the Chinese government that this thing was- was as dangerous as it was. So my view was, let's prepare for the worst.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So in preparing for the worst inside the National Security Council, you started telling your staffers to wear masks. Yet the American public wasn't told definitively by the CDC to wear masks until April, why?

POTTINGER: Remember, we misjudged the nature of this thing to think that it was like flu, one of the mistakes that followed on from that was the misjudgment by public health officials in this country to- to not advocate for the widespread generalized use of face coverings, cloth masks, surgical masks and what have you. That was, they feared shortages, rightly. We'd put all of our mask making supply chains into, guess where, China. And China was not making it easy for us to get access to- to additional supplies. So the CDC, that was an understandable thing to do. But it then made the mistake of conflating that with a- a set of advice that masks don't work effectively for the general public. That was a big mistake. Robert O'Brien and I weren't really willing to wait. And so we thought that the risk of a outbreak in the White House could be potentially devastating for the United States. It would- it would- that would create a national security risk. And so in early April, we started looking for supplies of masks. I ended up calling a foreign government. I called some senior officials in Taiwan just to- just to ask for lessons learned. Taiwan had done better than probably any other country in the world at containing this- this virus. And so in the course of my conversation, I asked whether they had masks available. They agreed to send a shipment of half a million masks just a couple of days later. We put those masks into the national stockpile so they'd be available to frontline medical workers. I made sure that one box got delivered to the White House and was disseminated through the NSC and- and the White House medical unit.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So you knew enough to call a foreign government to ask for masks, but the American public wasn't being told yet to wear them and the president wasn't wearing them. How do you make sense of that?

POTTINGER: Yeah, it's frustrating. The- the mask misstep cost us dearly. It was the one tool that was widely available, at least homemade, you know, cotton masks were widely available. It was the one effective, widely available tool that we had in the arsenal to- to deal with this. But public health officials were stuck in this sort of flu mentality. It- it was- it was a- it was a grave misstep. The other really grave misstep, and this is the one that I think we haven't rectified yet, and we've got to rectify it. It has to do with the collection and analysis of critical data about how this virus is spreading in real time, so that we can stay ahead of it, ensure that- that we don't get sucker punched by a new variant that could compromise the effectiveness of our- of our vaccine. And this is an area where the Centers for Disease Control has stumbled very, very badly. I know that the new director, Dr. Walensky, is- is working hard on trying to get- get a far greater number of samples of this virus genetically sequenced, which is critical. We- everyone should give as much support to her in that endeavor as possible. But there are cultural and organ- organizational problems that still need to be rectified at the CDC. If we're- if we're going to have a chance at success, both in bottling up this pandemic and also preventing the next one.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Inside the White House, the commander in chief himself got COVID. Matt, I mean, as a national security risk, did you ever look and say who exposed him and figure out how that happened?

POTTINGER: I mean, it was a terrible day, I was- I was overseas when we got the news that the president had been infected. It was scary.

MARGARET BRENNAN: But was it- should there have been a real contact tracing effort within the White House to pin down the source of the outbreak? I mean, wasn't that a national security lapse?

POTTINGER: You've got to remember at that moment you- we had- we had multiple cases. It may have had to do in part with the- the quality of the tests that we were using. There was a range of different tests that the White House was using to screen staff. Some were more effective than others. But I- I'm not certain that there was a failure to do that kind of contact tracing.

MARGARET BRENNAN: We'll be back in a moment with more of our interview. Stay with us. 

----

MARGARET BRENNAN: We want to go back to our conversation with former Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger.

MARGARET BRENNAN: I've heard you on all the criticisms of the CDC and you've highlighted some really specific areas for them to improve.

POTTINGER: My view is that they should establish a new super body for pandemic preparedness and response within the CDC, probably move it from Atlanta into Washington, D.C., so that- that- that person who's in charge of that can also be attached to the White House.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So this is your prime reform to the CDC to prevent us from being sucker-punched the next time?

POTTINGER: That's- that's one of them. The other one would be to create a centers for lessons learned like- like- like the military has for each of its service branches. You have a quasi-independent body of investigators who can go in and talk to anybody and everybody, collect lessons learned in real time and then report. It's important that the director of the CDC and the other senior leadership actually listen to those reports and implement the- the lessons learned so that you've got a living organization that's learning. That is not, unfortunately, what the CDC is today. There's- so the final thing really about the CDC is cultural. The CDC has developed over the years, even though it's got great talent in there and- and well-meaning people and a lot of expertise, it's developed an academic kind of mindset.

MARGARET BRENNAN: When you say the CDC, are you talking about Director Redfield?

POTTINGER: Bob Redfield did the very best that he could with what he had. I'm talking about institutionally in the- in the belly of this institution, the CDC was unwilling to- to partner with industrial labs to do tens of thousands of sequences so- so that you could actually see where this thing was going. They wanted to do it internally. And- and I think the reason for that is they want the data themselves so that they can publish. There's a very powerful incentive within CDC culture to partner with academic institutions rather than private institutions and- and to collect data, submit for peer review articles that burnish your credentials. That's a very slow process. That's not the- the kind of incentive you want for dealing with a fast moving pandemic.

MARGARET BRENNAN: How much of this is a question of if this should be handled by public health officials at all, or whether a pandemic should be handed over to intelligence officials and handled like a national security threat?

POTTINGER: The intelligence community does need to prioritize the collection of intelligence on these kinds of bio threats rather than relying strictly on- on sister-to-sister relationships between our CDC and public health officials in other countries. But I don't think that the intelligence community is going to be able to do more than that critical role of collecting and analyzing the information. 

MARGARET BRENNAN: You're clearly thinking a lot of what could have been done differently. Do you think that the Trump administration did the best it could?

POTTINGER: We had an impeachment, the first impeachment trial taking place as the coronavirus task force was meeting at a time when the country wasn't focused on- on this pandemic. People in the White House were. People at Health and Human Services and at the CDC were. I- I never encountered anyone at a senior level who was not deeply seized by the- the major weight of what we were facing. I do think that people did their best. I'm doing this Hot Wash, as I call it, in the- in the spirit of trying to help understand that the narrative that it was all political failures at the top is not true. And so what I'm trying to- to bring to light here is that we have a deeper problem with the permanent government in how we are organized culturally and- and organizationally to deal with this pandemic and with future ones. I want us to succeed at getting better. 

MARGARET BRENNAN: Matt Pottinger, thank you very much for your time.

POTTINGER: Thank you. Thanks a lot, MARGARET.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Our full interview is available on our website as well as on our Face the Nation podcast platform.  We'll be back in a moment with former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

 

Read more:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-matt-pottinger-on-face-the-nation-february-21-2021/

-------------------------

 

7th International Military Sports Council 

Military World Games

Top U.S. military athletes are in Wuhan, China, participating in the 2019 Military World Games, which promote peace by uniting service members from nations around the globe through sports.

 

https://www.defense.gov/Explore/Spotlight/CISM-Military-World-Games/

 

 

See also: 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/38406

 

CT* = conspiracy theory

 

Read from top.

 

 

 

The Pandemic Is Receding in the Worst Hotspots. Will It Last?

LONDON — A month ago, the pandemic looked bleak. More than 750,000 coronavirus cases were tallied worldwide in a single day. Infections surged across the entire United States. New variants identified in the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa threatened the rest of the world.

But the last month has brought a surprisingly fast, if partial, turnaround. New cases have declined to half their peak globally, driven largely by steady improvements in some of the same places that weathered devastating outbreaks this winter.

Cases are an imperfect measure, and uneven records and testing mask the scope of outbreaks, especially in parts of Africa, Latin America and South Asia. But fewer patients are showing up at hospitals in many countries with the highest rates of infection, giving experts confidence that the decline is real.

“It’s a great moment of optimism, but it’s also very fragile in a lot of ways,” said Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “We see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s still a long tunnel.”

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/22/world/coronavirus-world-turnaround.html

...

 

China’s Foreign Ministry on Monday night latched onto The Australian’s reporting of the 2015 book to argue that it was the US that was researching bio-weapons.

“The argument [shows] that it is the US that is researching the technology of genetic engineering applied to bio-warfare and bio-terrorism,” said foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.

Ni said the coverage adds to an atmosphere of anxiety as China-Australia relations fall to their lowest level in decades.

“Our debate should be evidence-driven and not by pure falsehood,” he said. “The theory is ridiculous. It is like saying I can divine US military secrets by reading some random book from Amazon.”

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/going-viral-how-a-book-on-amazon-inspired-the-latest-covid-conspiracy-20210512-p57r6e.html

 

Read from top.

 

Read also:

sleuthing coronavirus covid-19...

 

Denying the possibility that the Covid-19 virus is an escaped bio-weapon, is like denying that "Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction" because the CIA invented the "proofs" to suit a warmongering administration. This was the case... We swim in conspiracy and deceit all the time and the possibilities that Covid-19 was a bio-weapons has to be explored. It is possible that Covid-19 was a natural occurence but WE KNOW THAT BIO-WEAPONS have been manufactured for many years. Bio-lab modified ANTHRAX for example was supplied to Saddam Hussein by the USA when he was at war with Iran (which the US hated and still hate). Read from top AGAIN. 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!

 

by Gordon Duff

 

Analysis of the worldwide COVID pandemic by a team of former intelligence officials from a number of nations has been ongoing for since January 2020. Findings are reported to clients under the highest security. Even the names of the clients are highly classified.

A number of things are tracked and assessed using open-source material primarily but not exclusively.

• Anomalies in the spread of COVID 19 and the potential for bioweapon targeting.
• Anomalies in the production and distribution of vaccines and their potential use, even therapeutically, as weapons of war
• Dark funding behind the anti-Vaxx and anti-science movements
• Patterns of investment that indicate foreknowledge of pandemic vectors.
• Patterns in social media postings intended to undermine efforts to limit the pandemic.
• Patterns in “dark financed” media (Fox-Carlson-Murdock for one) that parallel “black propaganda” programs of certain intelligence agencies
• Widespread gross indifference and profiteering by corporations and individuals that follow patterns of “deadly influence” and “guilty foreknowledge.”
• Patterns in hoaxes and conspiracy theories that show “operational coordination.”

Analysis of these factors has yielded sufficient modeling to support a single hypothesis with a number of sub-facets:

• COVID 19 was likely purposefully released after creation and or distribution from more than one research facility in China, Europe and the US
• Governments, including and especially that of the US under Donald Trump, were fully complicit.
• Early policies of said governments between October 2019 and April 2020 not only guaranteed the success of the pandemic but followed an operational plan.
• That operational plan involves re-engineering at a planetary level, altering “expectations” for key world populations and “conditioning” for “dark political outcomes.”

Beyond this, the same hypothesis has determined that COVID 19 is likely a test or “dry run” for more specific vectors. For some background, from Stewart McMillan’s “Bio-warfare over Cuban Skies, from 1998:

Once again, the world is on the brink of another war – this time, supposedly, because the US thinks Saddam Hussein may be hiding biological weapons stockpiles. That the US already has its own such stockpiles – and uses them – is less well-known.

Could the US government be so hypocritical as to threaten military strikes because Saddam Hussein might potentially be making weapons of biological warfare, even as it was being accused of deploying similar weapons against another nation?

Still leading the league

The US leads the development and production of bacteriological and chemical weapons on a worldwide scale. Their use by the US military in the wars in Korea and Viet Nam is well documented by US government documents and the by media. What is not as well documented is US use of such weapons in covert operations. On the official books, all US biological weapons were destroyed in 1972, after signing of the Biological Weapons Convention. In this way, the US is much like Iraq. Unofficially, however, research, development and use of biological weapons by the US government has long been suspected, and recently, a strange incident involving a US plane has brought the subject to light once again.

On October 21, 1996, an S2R crop-dusting plane registered to the US State Department was en route from Florida to Colombia via Grand Cayman island. The plane was flying over an area known as the Giron Corridor, heavily travelled by international aircraft. The plane had Cuban permission to overfly, supposedly being part of a regularly scheduled US narcotics eradication operation.

Flying over the same area was the regular flight of CU-170 Cubana de Aviacion from Havana to Las Tunas. The pilots noticed the US plane flying in an almost parallel direction to them, 1,000 feet above. The Cuban pilot saw a “white or greyish mist,” as they put it, discharged from the plane in an intermittent fashion some seven times. The Cuban pilot immediately reported the discharge of unknown substance to Flight Control.

The Cuban Air Controller made contact with the US plane. The Cuban Air Controller’s tape records them asking if the aircraft was having any technical problems, to which the American pilot answered “No.” When asked what type of plane it was, the answer was “a single-engine AY-65.” Which it was not; it was a an S2R. How strange that a pilot would forget what kind of plane he was flying.

On December 18, 1996, the first sign of a foreign insect pest occurred in a potato plantation on the Lenin State Horticultural Farm. Samples were sent to the Central Quarantine Laboratory of the National Pest Control Centre, the insect being totally unknown to Cuba. An investigation identified the organism as Thrips palmi karay.

Trouble with Thrips

Thrips palmi is indigenous to Asia. Since 1985, it has spread across certain Caribbean countries such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. It infects practically all crops, weeds and ornamental plants. It is self-propagating in the field and is easily transferred when transporting any plant material or soil. It is resistant to temperature changes and many insecticides. In short, it is an agriculturalist’s nightmare.

Could the two incidents be connected? The Cuban government certainly believes so and has organized considerable amounts of information to prove it, information which it submitted, in a formal complaint, to the UN.

After registering its complaints with US diplomats, the Cuban government complained to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, charging that Thrips “strikes and severely damages practically every crop and is also resistant to a considerable variety of pesticides.”

We will, similarly, look at ASF, African Swine Fever and its use as a bioweapon, from Dr. Steinbock for FX Trade (2019):

The costly and deadly African swine fever is penalizing food security in China and more than half a dozen Asian countries. Despite the official ASF story, the virus has been used as a bioweapon in the past. The suppression of such bio-threats requires multipolar cooperation.

On August 20, Agriculture Secretary William Dar confirmed the BAI report on the growing death rate of pigs raised by farmers in their backyards. The Philippines is tightening biosecurity awaiting lab results.

Along with Myanmar, Philippines may prove the most recent target of the Asian swine fever (ASF). The virus is already present in six Asian countries: Cambodia, China, DPR Korea, Lao PDR, Mongolia and Vietnam. Current losses represent more than 10% of the total pig population in China, Vietnam and Mongolia, respectively.

But how did the African swine fever (ASF) outbreak start?

The official ASF narrative

The ASF is a devastating hemorrhagic fever of pigs with mortality rates close to 100 percent. It causes major economic losses, threatens food security and limits pig production in affected countries. There is no vaccine against the virus. It persistently infects its natural hosts, warthogs, bush pigs, and soft ticks, which likely act as a vector with no disease signs.

Historically, the first African swine fever outbreak took place in Kenya in 1907. The first spread of ASF outside Africa was to Portugal in 1957, presumably as a result of waste from airline flights being fed to pigs near Lisbon airport. Outbreaks of ASF were reported subsequently in other European countries.  

Cuba was the first country in the Caribbean region to report infection with ASF in 1971. It was believed to have been introduced from Spain. ASF was further reported in the late 1970s in several Caribbean island countries and in Brazil 1978. Presumably, it was introduced from Spain or Portugal through food waste carried by transcontinental flights.

After a decade or more relative quiet, the ASF in 2007 spread to Georgia in the Caucasus and thereafter widely to neighboring countries, including Armenia, Azerbaijan and several territories in Russia. After another decade of quiet, the number of ASF outbreaks suddenly soared after September 2018, especially in China, although it had not been detected in China or Asia before. Since then, over 2.8 million hogs have been culled globally due to ASF, although according to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE). Industry observers believe the actual number is much higher.

That’s the conventional wisdom, which implies that ASF remained restricted to Africa until the late ‘50s. In reality, ASF had arrived in North America already in the early 1950s, when Fort Terry, a US biowarfare facility in Plum Island New York, housed seven deadly virus strains.

Now we get to the crux of the matter:

ASF in biological warfare

After World War II experimentation, US biological warfare was launched for offensive purposes. During the Cold War, ASF attracted great interest among anti-animal viruses, such as foot and mouth disease and cattle plague. By 1954, according to biowarfare historians, three viruses were available as agents for the destruction of food-bearing animals, including ASF.

Between the mid-1960s and late ‘90s, Cuba accused the United States of 10 biological warfare attacks following serious infectious disease outbreaks. None were proven conclusively, but several probably occurred. In 1971, pigs in Havana hog farm were diagnosed with ASF virus, which spread and caused half a million pigs to be slaughtered. Cuba suffered food shortage. The UN labeled the outbreak the “most alarming event” of 1971.

In 1977, the investigative journalists of Newsday, a Long Island daily, reported the virus was delivered from a US army base in the Panama Canal Zone; the site of joint Army-CIA covert operations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Reportedly, anti-Castro saboteurs, backed by the CIA, had introduced ASF into Cuba six weeks before the outbreak to destabilize the economy. US Army denied involvement. Nevertheless, Norman Covert, historian of Fort Detrick, Maryland – the center of US biowarfare from the mid-50s to late ‘60s – has said that CIA had access to these laboratories. Later, a CIA document confirmed that biological warfare was used in efforts to destabilize Cuba.

Such efforts did not end with the Cold War. In 2000, neoconservatives behind the Bush administration flirted with the idea of “politically useful” ethnic bioweapons. That led Russia in 2007 to ban all exports of human bio samples.

In October 2018, Russian Defense Ministry claimed that the spread of viral diseases from Georgia, including African swine fever since 2007, could be connected to a US lab network. In the area, more than 70 Georgians had died in mysterious conditions, which Moscow attributed to US toxins or bioweapons. Russia believed bio agents violated the prohibition of biological weapons.

The lab network is part of the Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), which is funded by Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The CBEP labs are located in 25 countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia, including Philippines.

As Pentagon denied that US was developing biological weapons in the labs, Vladimir Shamanov, head of Russia’s State Duma Defense Committee, called for a “comprehensive evaluation” suggesting “joint inspections.” Yet, these multilateral demands have been ignored.

In its 2020 multimillion-dollar budget, the DTRA characterizes the program in Asia by its biosecurity functions, but also as “the partner of choice in a region competing against Chinese influence.” So while virus outbreaks operate across borders, multilateral cooperation is shunned for geopolitics.

ASF is one of several diseases suspected of being created and released though this pattern of laboratories that Russia believes the US is running along its borders. Both Veterans Today and New Eastern Outlook have published materials by former US Army NBC (Nuclear-Biological-Chemical) warfare officer Jeffrey Silverman relating to these labs, particularly the “Lugar Lab” in Tbilisi, Georgia.

In fact, these reports have elicited attacks on both individuals and media sources that carry them by “truth-telling” organizations dark funded by NATO and western intelligence agencies.

Such efforts are taken by professional intelligence analysts as supporting evidence that not only are the assertions made about the Tbilisi facility and others of genuine substance, but that intent is show that such operations are to be continued or intensified.

By “continued and intensified” we may well be speaking of COVID 19 itself or something far worse. You see, COVID 19, and it can be tracked to Tbilisi where graduate students from the region would spend summers in bat caves getting virus samples for “research.”

Previous reports on that facility found it to be run by military and intelligence agencies and, in actuality, not an “agricultural research” facility at all.

Analysis has also found a pattern of “black operations” using chemical and biological weapons in the region with similar players, including Ukrainian intelligence officials, tied to not only bioweapons but delivery of sarin gas to special operations groups to be deployed in false flag attacks in Syria. From Jeffrey Silverman, 2014:

Jeffrey Silverman interviewed by Maia Chubinishvili

On August 27, 2013 the famous American political investigator and principal editor of the ex-US State Department and intelligence service publication Veterans Today, Gordon Duff, published an article entitled “US Contractors Cited for Syrian Chemical Attacks,” and a video entitled “Syrian Gas Attack Proof Syrian Army Has No Involvement.”

The commentary to the video states, “The video which you are watching right now was filmed in Syria and shows the chemical weapons which were sent from Georgia. The US is standing behind all this.  Former US Senator Richard Lugar is the person whose assistance made it possible to transport weapons from Georgia via Turkey into Syria, with the support of the United States and Turkey.  Look at the weapons contained in the video and observe how they have been made operational.] A US chemical weapons programme supplies the Syrian rebels with weapons of mass destruction. A team of investigators has determined that chemical weapons were supplied from this region, which is under US control. They followed the trail of these chemical weapons to the Georgian Republic. Turkish Army subdivisions transported them to Al-Qaeda terrorists operating in Syrian territory.

Journalists Jeffrey Silverman and Lika Moshiashvili are credited with having discovered the secret and illegal operations taking place in the US-controlled Central Reference Laboratory (CPHRL) in the Tbilisi suburb the Alekseevka Settlement.” As soon as this scary information was made known to the public, Georgia & World contacted Tbilisi based American journalist and researcher Jeffrey Silverman.

Silverman: I learned back in 2004 about the Bechtel National Project bio storage facility in Georgia from US Defense contractors, including Turkish ones. They were working at the lab facility being constructed near Tbilisi airport. I then started deeply investigating the facility with Georgian and Norwegian journalists.  My first questions were, why near the airport and why in Georgia?

I soon realised that the US government and the Department of Defense, DoD, wanted to study new infectious strains, such as Anthrax, which were evolving in the wild amongst cattle herds in rural regions of Georgia. It should be mentioned that this small country and Tbilisi were once centre stage to the Soviet Union’s system of bioweapons research, for both animal and plant warfare.

I have been able to access the design plans for the facility and, through speaking to contractors and whistle blowers, I have learned that the US Department of Defense operates a network of labs in Georgia and that they have an offensive capacity.

Some even go so far as to claim that the US government is using Georgia and its population as part of ongoing research. I also suspect this, and that is why I am trying to obtain solid proof of this allegation right now.

The question is whether Georgians are being utilised for sinister bio programmes and vaccine field trials. This may be difficult to prove, but even the United States has experimented on its own population over the years, and it can use the population of Georgia as part of field trials for vaccines without their full informed consent.

A number of labs, strewn across Eastern Europe, are linked like an umbilicial cord to the Biological Weapons Proliferation Prevention (BWPP) programme and various projects within it. This programme provides a cover for what is most likely an offensive programme. If the strains they are investigating turn out to be antibiotic resistant, this implies they are conducting ongoing research into special organisms that can eat bacteria and attack infections that are antibiotic resistant, which can be quickly accessed.  Whoever has the capacity to release these controls the bioweapons battlefield.

For months, many months now, official channels in the US and elsewhere have alluded to certain abnormal aspects to COVID 19. This is all a percentage game, from a scientific standpoint, look at factors of the likelihood of a virus migrating between species, or traveling magically from state to state like an ISIS (banned in Russia) terrorist heading to Syria from across the globe.

Please excuse the analogy, I can’t help myself.

Simply put, the science does say that a laboratory “accident” is a “likely” source for COVID 19. Those who choose not to follow this subject publicly after veiled pronouncements and allegations do so to “avoid panic.” This is always the excuse when those things happen that might alter the accepted narrative fed to the public and it is why conspiracy theories have found such fertile ground nowadays.

There was certainly COVID research in Wuhan but also at the alleged US run bio-weapons lab in Tbilisi, Georgia that has been reported widely and censored widely as well.

The most startling research was done at the University of North Carolina. Here, a US team made up of top “former” bio-warfare experts created one or more SARS COV2 viruses as part of a USAID (CIA) study to “assess US vulnerability to a bio-warfare attack” From ProPublica:

“From Jan. 1, 2015, through June 1, 2020, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reported 28 lab incidents involving genetically engineered organisms to safety officials at the National Institutes of Health, according to documents UNC released to ProPublica under a public records request. The NIH oversees research involving genetically modified organisms.

Bottom of Form

Six of the incidents involved various types of lab-created coronaviruses. Many were engineered to allow the study of the virus in mice. UNC declined to answer questions about the incidents and to disclose key details about them to the public, including the names of viruses involved, the nature of the modifications made to them and what risks were posed to the public, contrary to NIH guidelines.

UNC said in a statement that it ‘notified the proper oversight agencies about the incidents and took corrective action as needed.’”

Conclusion

When we say, “behind closed doors” we refer to that “other side of the mirror” that differentiates what is told to the public or to most elected officials and, in particular military and intelligence “hacks” and the “dark world” that really exists.

Briefings only go to selected “trustworthy” individuals representing the world’s great financial powers and the clandestine organizations, some totally unheard of, that wield unimaginable power over events. Yes, these things exist and, quite frankly, there are few that will dispute a word of this.

In the process of disseminating otherwise unavailable information such as we are dealing with here to an audience unlikely to be able to properly contextualize same may well be considered “experimental” in itself.

To push that process along, we will look at some possible conclusions.

• Powers much greater than any single government may well be using bioweapons to alter not just world events but history itself.
• COVID 19 may be only a test and that many odd occurrences that have “accidentally” allowed the pandemic to run wild aren’t accidental at all

And here we will end.

 

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2021/05/17/covid-as-a-bioweapon-hard-questions-from-behind-closed-doors/

 

Read from top.

 

 

Free Julian Assange Now @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

 

By F. William Engdahl  — 13 November 2020...

 

Bill Gates is actively financing and promoting new untested vaccines supposed to keep us at least somewhat safe from a ghastly death from the novel coronavirus and supposedly allow us to resume somewhat “normal” lives. The Pharma giant Pfizer has now announced what they claim were spectacular results in initial human tests. They use an experimental technology known as gene editing, specifically mRNA gene-editing, something never before used in vaccines. Before we rush to get jabbed in hopes of some immunity, we should know more about the radical experimental technology and its lack of precision.

 

The financial world went ballistic on November 9 when the pharma giant Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, announced in a company press release that it had developed a vaccine for Covid19 that was “90%” effective. The controversial US head of NIAID, Tony Fauci, rushed to greet the news and the EU announced it had purchased 300 million doses of the costly new vaccine. If you believe financial markets, the pandemic is all but past history.

 

 

Suspicious events

 

However it seems Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, doesn’t share the confidence of his own claims. On the day his company issued its press release on the proposed vaccine trials, he sold 62% of his stock in Pfizer, making millions profit in the deal. He made the sell order in a special option in August so it would not appear as “insider selling”, however he also timed it just after the US elections and the mainstream media illegitimately declared Joe Biden President-elect. It seems from appearances that Bourla had a pretty clear conflict of interest in the timing of his press release on the same day.

Bourla lied and denied to press that his company had received any funds from the Trump Administration to develop the vaccine when it came out they contracted in summer to deliver 100 million doses to the US Government. Further adding to the suspect actions of Pfized was the fact the company first informed the team of Joe biden rather than the relevant US government agencies.

But this is far from the only thing alarming about the much-hyped Pfizer announcement. 

 

 

The German Partner

 

Pfizer, famous for its Viagra and other drugs, has partnered with a small Mainz, Germany company, BioNTech, which has developed the radical mRNA technique used to produce the new corona vaccine. BioNTech was only founded in 2008. BioNTech signed an agreement with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in September, 2019, just before announcement in Wuhan China of the Novel Coronavirus and just before BioNTech made its stock market debut. The agreement involved cooperation on developing new mRNA techniques to treat cancer and HIV. Curiously that press release, “The Gates Foundation sees BioNTech potential to ‘dramatically reduce global HIV and tuberculosis’” 05. September 2019, has now been deleted.

BioNTech also has an agreement with one of the largest drug producers in China, Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd (“Fosun Pharma”) to develop a version of its mRNA vaccine for novel coronavirus for the Chinese market. Ai-Min Hui, President of Global R&D of Fosun Pharma said in an August statement, “Dosing the first Chinese subject with BNT162b1 marks a milestone of the global co-development program in China. We are closely working with BioNTech and regulatory authorities to evaluate the safety and efficacy of BNT162b1 and other mRNA vaccine candidates…”

This means that the same German biotech company is behind the covid vaccines being rushed out in China as well as the USA and EU. The vaccine is being rushed through to eventual approval in an alarmingly short time. 

Both US and EU authorities and presumably also Chinese, waived the standard animal tests using ferrets or mice and have gone straight to human “guinea pigs.” Human tests began in late July and early August. Three months is unheard of for testing a new vaccine. Several years is the norm. Because of the degree of global panic engendered by WHO over the coronavirus, caution is thrown to the wind. Vaccine makers all have legal indemnity, meaning they can’t be sued if people die or are maimed from the new vaccine. But the most alarming fact about the new Pfizer-BioNTech gene edited vaccine is that the gene edited mRNA for human vaccine application has never before been approved. Notably, two year peer reviewed tests with mice fed genetically modified corn sprayed with Monsanto glyphosate-rich Roundup first showed cancer tumors after nine months as well as liver and other organ damage. Earlier Monsanto company tests ended at three months and claimed no harm. A similar situation exists with the gene edited mRNA vaccines that are being rushed out after less than 90 days human tests.

 

 

“Explicitly experimental”

 

Dr. Michael Yeadon replied in a recent public social media comment to a colleague in the UK, “All vaccines against the SARS-COV-2 virus are by definition novel. No candidate vaccine has been… in development for more than a few months.” Yeadon then went on to declare, “If any such vaccine is approved for use under any circumstances that are not EXPLICITLY experimental, I believe that recipients are being misled to a criminal extent. This is because there are precisely zero human volunteers for…whom there could possibly be more than a few months past-dose safety information.”

Yeadon is well qualified to make the critique. As he notes in the comment, “I have a degree in Biochemistry & Toxicology & a research based PhD in pharmacology. I have spent 32 years working in pharmaceutical R&D, mostly in new medicines for disorders of lung & skin. I was a VP at Pfizer & CEO…. of a biotech I founded (Ziarco – acquired by Novartis). I’m knowledgeable about new medicine R&D.” He was formerly with Pfizer at a very senior level. 

 

 

Human guinea pigs?

 

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is experimental and far from guaranteed safe, despite the fact that Pfizer, the EU and the notorious Dr Tony Fauci seem ready to roll it out even before year end to hundreds of millions of humans. 

The experimental technology is based on a rather new gene manipulation known as gene editing. In a major article in the 2018 New York Council on Foreign Relations magazine, Foreign Affairs, Bill Gates effusively promoted the novel gene editing CRISPR technology as being able to “transform global development.” He noted that his Gates Foundation had been financing gene editing developments for vaccines and other applications for a decade.

But is the technology for breaking and splicing of human genes so absolutely safe that it is worth risking on a novel experimental vaccine never before used on humans? Contrary to what Bill Gates claims, the scientific answer is no, it is not proven so safe. 

In a peer reviewed article in the October, 2020 journal Trends in Genetics, the authors conclude that “the range of possible molecular events resulting from genome editing has been underestimated and the technology remains unpredictable on, and away from, the target locus.”

Dr. Romeo Quijano, retired professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the College of Medicine, University of the Philippines Manila, noted some of the dangers of the experimental gene editing when applied to human vaccines. Quijano warns of, “the danger that the vaccine might actually “enhance” the pathogenicity of the virus, or make it more aggressive possibly due to antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), as what happened with previous studies on test vaccines in animals. If that should happen in a major human trial the outcome could be disastrous. This serious adverse effect may not even be detected by a clinical trial especially in highly biased clinical trials laden with conflicts of interest involving vaccine companies. Even when a serious adverse event is detected, this is usually swept under the rug.” He cites the case of another Gates mRNA vaccine candidate, Moderna, where “three of the 15 human experimental subjects in the high dose group suffered serious and medically significant symptoms. Moderna, however, concluded that the vaccine was “generally safe and well tolerated,” which the corporate-dominated media dutifully reported, covering-up the real danger…”

He notes, “Exogenous mRNA is inherently immune-stimulatory, and this feature of mRNA could be beneficial or detrimental. It may provide adjuvant activity and it may inhibit antigen expression and negatively affect the immune response. The paradoxical effects of innate immune sensing on different formats of mRNA vaccines are incompletely understood.” Quijano adds, “A mRNA-based vaccine could also induce potent type I interferon responses, which have been associated not only with inflammation but also potentially with autoimmunity… and may promote blood coagulation and pathological thrombus formation.”

Quijano writes in the extensively documented article, “among other dangers, the virus-vectored vaccines could undergo recombination with naturally occurring viruses and produce hybrid viruses that could have undesirable properties affecting transmission or virulence. The…possible outcomes of recombination are practically impossible to quantify accurately given existing tools and knowledge. The risks, however, are real, as exemplified by the emergence of mutant types of viruses, enhanced pathogenicity and unexpected serious adverse events (including death) following haphazard mass vaccination campaigns and previous failed attempts to develop chimeric vaccines using genetic engineering technology.”

Bill Gates, the mRNA vaccine makers including Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, and their close allies such as Dr. Tony Fauci of the NIAID are clearly playing fast and loose with human lives in their rush to get these experimental vaccines into our bodies. Notably, the same Dr. Fauci and his NIAID owns the patent on a vaccine for dengue fever known as Dengvaxia, marketed by Sanofi-Pasteur and promoted as an “essential” vaccine by Tedros’ WHO since 2016. Robert F. Kennedy jr. noted that Fauci and NIAID “knew from the clinical trials that there was a problem with paradoxical immune response,” but they gave it to several hundred thousand Filipino kids anyway. It was estimated that as many as 600 vaccinated children died before the government stopped the vaccinations.

Clearly the well-established Precautionary Principle–if in serious doubt, don’t– is being ignored by Fauci, Pfizer/BioNTech and others in rushing to approve the new mRNA vaccine for coronavirus. Messenger RNA technology has yet to produce an approved medicine, let alone a vaccine.

 

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2020/11/13/what-s-not-being-said-about-pfizer-coronavirus-vaccine/

 

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.+++++++++++++++!!!

 

 

...

 

On Wednesday, Facebook ­revised its policy of banning posts suggesting the coronavirus was man-made — because the COVID situation is, er, “evolving,” as a spokesman told Politico.

Gee, thanks. The flip-flop comes more than a year after the social-media giant banned a well-reasoned Post opinion column by China scholar Steven Mosher that speculated about a potential lab leak. Will our columnist receive an apology? Of course not. But it’s the American people who should be holding the Menlo Park ­tyrants to account.

Think about it: If you were Xi Jinping, and you wanted to deploy an information-control operation over the origins of COVID-19, you couldn’t have done better than to just let Facebook, working in conjunction with America’s bottom-feeding “fact-checking” industry, do its thing.

The Chi-Coms, after all, were held in odium in the US eye long before the first COVID cases arrived: How much more effective — and devious — to have a gazillion-dollar US tech firm shut down public inquiry into the ­virus’ origins, and that with the help of well-credentialed “experts” and “fact-checkers.”

 

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2021/05/27/facebook-and-its-censorious-fact-checkers-have-utterly-discredited-themselves/

 

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The point here is "something is not quite right"... Geneticists could secretly know that the Covid-19 that is infecting humans "is slightly different from the one that infects bats regularly". This would demand a serious analysis of provenance. We know that Viruses mutate and this is a possibility that in a few bats (of the same colony), the virus mutated naturally and jumped species. But it is also possible that — with MANY LABS around the world working on such viruses,  for increase-of-function, they infected humans in the labs — or they infected a few bats that were released by accident. Say for example that some bats are dead in a lab, thrown in a rubbish bin and you can guess the rest. We shall know now in 88 days (90 days since the Biden request). What we also don't know, is which LAB could this have come from (if the lab hypothesis is the correct one)? The Chinese are blaming Fort whatiszname, a "leaking" germ-warfare lab, "mostly" working on countering germ warfare... Will we ever know? I'm afraid not, but the Yanks will blame the Chinese nonetheless...

 

Meanwhile:

 

assange2

 

We are recently informed by the Wall Street Journal, quoting an unidentified source, that three Chinese scientists who were working in the Wuhan Virus Laboratory became ill with a Covid like illness in November of 2019. Ah Ha! Surely they must have been working with the responsible virus in the laboratory, got themselves infected and then spread the infection into the local community. As we had not heard of such events previously the Chinese must have been hiding this crucial information.

 

The ‘Leak’ controversy

The politicisation of the Covid pandemic has many individuals and even countries,(e.g.the US) determined to blame China for the global spread of Covid-19. While Chinese officials and a sluggish WHO could have warned the world  a week or so earlier than they did, of the likelihood that a new corona virus was infecting humans, there is no evidence that China was responsible for the  earliest infections of humans with this virus nor responsible for the subsequent pandemic.

We know that infection of people in China with the SARS-Cov-2 virus did not start in Wuhan. Pre the super spreader event in the Wuhan wet market the new corona virus was infecting  people 500 kms north of that city. At this time retrospective studies of blood samples around the world revealed the presence of antibodies to the Covid virus in Europe and America. The virus had a global presence by the time the Chinese brought the news of this threat to the world’s attention.

The recent two week investigation of the probable origin of the new SARS virus by a team of international scientists who went to China and met with local scientists resulted in a consensus view that the most likely scenario involved evolution of the virus in an animal source (Bats?) with subsequent infection of another animal species producing changes that provide the virus with its ability to infect humans.

....

 

While Chinese officials have been, perhaps understandably, defensive and less than forthcoming at times, this has not been the case with the internationally respected scientists who head up the Wuhan Laboratory. Wang Yanyi, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, called claims the virus came from her lab a ‘pure fabrication. Speaking on Chinese state broadcaster CGTN recently  she said “We have three strains of live viruses in our laboratory, but their highest similarity to Sars-Cov-2 only reaches 79.8 percent. There was an “obvious difference” between the new virus and the ones held in their laboratory. She reported that they first received samples of the new coronavirus on December 30, 2019. Until then “like everyone else, we didn’t even know the virus existed”.

As is the case with many of the world’s leading virologists, she expressed frustration that the ‘leak’ controversy was receiving more attention than was the need for action to address the likelihood of future pandemics. Professor Shi warned that the  coronavirus is just the “tip of the iceberg” and urged countries to urgently ramp up their research into the threat of deadly zoonotic diseases; those passed from animals to humans.The risk is clearly associated with humans encroaching  on wilderness lands and exposing themselves to the exotic micro-organism hosted by ‘wilderness’ animals they don’t normally encounter.

 

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/the-hunt-for-man-made-coronavirus-is-counter-productive/

 

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No More Funding Chinese Gain-Of-Function Research

 

Sen. Paul's moratorium on taxpayer dollars going to dangerous experiments in Chinese labs is a good start, regardless of COVID's origins.

 

Yesterday the Senate passed an amendment put forward by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) that would ban funding of gain-of-function research in China. The amendment is co-sponsored by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN), and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). 

This targeted moratorium on funding in Paul’s amendment comes as the lab-leak hypothesis concerning the origins of COVID-19 finally receives mainstream attention and acceptance. 

 

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/no-more-american-funded-chinese-gain-of-function-research/

 

 

THE POINT HERE is that the US has been funding research on gain-of-function (read increasing lethality) of virus, in the US, in Ukraine and also in Wuhan lab, China. It is difficult to believe that a lab specialising in viruses, in China or anywhere else for that matter, has NEVER SEEN SUCH A "bat" VIRUS as COVID-19 BEFORE, especially after studying bats and their viruses for yonks... The fact that antibodies to COVID-19 had been discovered to have been in existence before the "Wuhan infection" throughout the world, from the US to Italy, may only be an indication that a weaker, non-gain-of-function Covid virus exists naturally, but suddenly there was a "switch". Natural or artificial acceleration of lethality? With this come a number of more potentially deadly variants — and we should consider this evolution as weird, to the point of being borderline natural... We shall follow...

 

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW ###############!!!@@@@@@@@!!!

 

...

Gilles Demaneuf is a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome ten years ago, and believes it gives him a professional advantage. “I’m very good at finding patterns in data, when other people see nothing,” he says.

Early last spring, as cities worldwide were shutting down to halt the spread of COVID-19, Demaneuf, 52, began reading up on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease. The prevailing theory was that it had jumped from bats to some other species before making the leap to humans at a market in China, where some of the earliest cases appeared in late 2019. The Huanan wholesale market, in the city of Wuhan, is a complex of markets selling seafood, meat, fruit, and vegetables. A handful of vendors sold live wild animals—a possible source of the virus.

 

That wasn’t the only theory, though. Wuhan is also home to China’s foremost coronavirus research laboratory, housing one of the world’s largest collections of bat samples and bat-virus strains. The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s lead coronavirus researcher, Shi Zhengli, was among the first to identify horseshoe bats as the natural reservoirs for SARS-CoV, the virus that sparked an outbreak in 2002, killing 774 people and sickening more than 8,000 globally. After SARS, bats became a major subject of study for virologists around the world, and Shi became known in China as “Bat Woman” for her fearless exploration of their caves to collect samples. More recently, Shi and her colleagues at the WIV have performed high-profile experiments that made pathogens more infectious. Such research, known as “gain-of-function,” has generated heated controversy among virologists.

 

To some people, it seemed natural to ask whether the virus causing the global pandemic had somehow leaked from one of the WIV’s labs—a possibility Shi has strenuously denied.

 

On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

 

The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.”

 

The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find.

 

Demaneuf began searching for patterns in the available data, and it wasn’t long before he spotted one. China’s laboratories were said to be airtight, with safety practices equivalent to those in the U.S. and other developed countries. But Demaneuf soon discovered that there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occuring at a top laboratory in Beijing. Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated, had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor. A graduate student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.

Demaneuf published his findings in a Medium post, titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a review of SARS Lab Escapes.” By then, he had begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de Maistre. A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busy debunking the notion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a “laboratory” at all. In fact, the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office.

Having connected online, Demaneuf and de Maistre began assembling a comprehensive list of research laboratories in China. As they posted their findings on Twitter, they were soon joined by others around the world. Some were cutting-edge scientists at prestigious research institutes. Others were science enthusiasts. Together, they formed a group called DRASTIC, short for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19. Their stated objective was to solve the riddle of COVID-19’s origin.

State Department investigators say they were repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box.”

At times, it seemed the only other people entertaining the lab-leak theory were crackpots or political hacks hoping to wield COVID-19 as a cudgel against China. President Donald Trump’s former political adviser Steve Bannon, for instance, joined forces with an exiled Chinese billionaire named Guo Wengui to fuel claims that China had developed the disease as a bioweapon and purposefully unleashed it on the world. As proof, they paraded a Hong Kong scientist around right-wing media outlets until her manifest lack of expertise doomed the charade.

 

Read more :

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins

 

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See also:

 

sleuthing coronavirus covid-19...

 

big pharma fights the generic vaccines...

 

 

Free Julian Assange Now %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%!!!!!)))

 

From Glenn Greenwald

 

One of the most significant events of the last two decades has been largely memory-holed: the October, 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S. Beginning just one week after 9/11 and extending for another three weeks, a highly weaponized and sophisticated strain of anthrax had been sent around the country through the U.S. Postal Service addressed to some of the country's most prominent political and media figures. As Americans were still reeling from the devastation of 9/11, the anthrax killed five Americans and sickened another seventeen.

As part of the extensive reporting I did on the subsequent FBI investigation to find the perpetrator(s), I documented how significant these attacks were in the public consciousness. ABC News, led by investigative reporter Brian Ross, spent a full week claiming that unnamed government sources told them that government tests demonstrated a high likelihood that the anthrax came from Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program. The Washington Post, in November, 2001, also raised “the possibility that [this weaponized strain of anthrax] may have slipped through an informal network of scientists to Iraq.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) appeared on The David Letterman Show on October 18, 2001, and said: “There is some indication, and I don't have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may -- and I emphasize may -- have come from Iraq.” Three days later, McCain appeared on Meet the Press with Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and said of the anthrax perpetrators: “perhaps this is an international organization and not one within the United States of America,” while Lieberman said the anthrax was so finely weaponized that “there's either a significant amount of money behind this, or this is state-sponsored, or this is stuff that was stolen from the former Soviet program” (Lieberman added: “Dr. Fauci can tell you more detail on that”).

In many ways, the prospect of a lethal, engineered biological agent randomly showing up in one's mailbox or contaminating local communities was more terrifying than the extraordinary 9/11 attack itself. All sorts of oddities shrouded the anthrax mailings, including this bizarre admission in 2008 by long-time Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen: “I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.” At the very least, those anthrax attacks played a vital role in heightening fear levels and a foundational sense of uncertainty that shaped U.S. discourse and politics for years to come. It meant that not just Americans living near key power centers such as Manhattan and Washington were endangered, but all Americans everywhere were: even from their own mailboxes.

The FBI first falsely cast suspicion on a former government scientist, Dr. Steven Hatfill, who had conducted research on mailing deadly anthrax strains. Following the FBI’s accusations, media outlets began dutifully implying that Hatfill was the culprit. A January, 2002, New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof began by declaring: “I think I know who sent out the anthrax last fall,” then, without naming him, proceeded to perfectly describe Hatfill in a way that made him easily identifiable to everyone in that research community. Hatfill sued the U.S. Government, which eventually ended up paying him close to $6 million in damages before officially and explicitly exonerating him and apologizing. His lawsuit against the NYT and Kristof was dismissed since he was never named by the paper, but the columnist also apologized to him six years later.

A full seven years after the attack, the FBI once again claimed that it had found the perpetrator: this time, it was the microbiologist Bruce Ivins, a long-time “biodefense” researcher at the U.S. Army’s infectious disease research lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Yet before he could be indicted, Ivins died, apparently by suicide, to avoid prosecution. As a result, the FBI was never required to prove its case in court. The agency insisted, however, that there was no doubt that Ivins was the anthrax killer, citing genetic analysis of the anthrax strain that they said conclusively matched the anthrax found in Ivins’ U.S. Army lab, along with circumstantial evidence pointing to him.

 

But virtually every mainstream institution other than the FBI harbored doubts. The New York Times quoted Ivins’ co-workers as calling into question the FBI’s claims (“The investigators looked around, they decided they had to find somebody”), and the paper also cited “vocal skepticism from key members of Congress.” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), one of the targets of the anthrax letters, said explicitly he did not believe Ivins could have carried out the attacks alone. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and then-Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), a physicist, said the same to me in interviews. The nation’s three largest newspapers — The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal — all editorially called for independent investigations on the grounds that the FBI’s evidence was inconclusive if not outright unconvincing. One of the country’s most prestigious science journals, Nature, published an editorial under the headline “Case Not Closed,” arguing, about the FBI’s key claims, that “the jury is still out on those questions.”

 

When an independent investigation was finally conducted in 2011 into the FBI’s scientific claims against Ivins, much of that doubt converted into full-blown skepticism. As The New York Times put it — in a 2011 article headlined "Expert Panel Is Critical of F.B.I. Work in Investigating Anthrax Letters" —  the review “concludes that the bureau overstated the strength of genetic analysis linking the mailed anthrax to a supply kept by Bruce E. Ivins.” A Washington Post article -- headlined: "Anthrax report casts doubt on scientific evidence in FBI case against Bruce Ivins" -- announced that "the report reignited a debate that has simmered among some scientists and others who have questioned the strength of the FBI's evidence against Ivins." 

An in-depth joint investigation by ProPublica, PBS and McClatchy — published under the headline “New Evidence Adds Doubt to FBI’s Case Against Anthrax Suspect” — concluded that “newly available documents and the accounts of Ivins’ former colleagues shed fresh light on the evidence and, while they don't exonerate Ivins, are at odds with some of the science and circumstantial evidence that the government said would have convicted him of capital crimes.” It added: “even some of the government’s science consultants wonder whether the real killer is still at large.” The report itself, issued by the National Research Council, concluded that while the components of the anthrax in Ivins’ lab were “consistent” with the weaponized anthrax that had been sent, “the scientific link between the letter material and flask number RMR-1029 [found in Ivins’ lab] is not as conclusive as stated in the DOJ Investigative Summary."

 

In short, these were serious and widespread mainstream doubts about the FBI’s case against Ivins, and those have never been resolved. U.S. institutions seemingly agreed to simply move on without ever addressing lingering scientific and other evidentiary questions regarding whether Ivins was really involved in the anthrax attacks and, if so, how it was possible that he could have carried out this sophisticated attack within a top-secret U.S. Army lab acting alone. So whitewashed is this history that doubts about whether the FBI found the real perpetrator are now mocked by smug Smart People as a fringe conspiracy theory rather than what they had been: the consensus of mainstream institutions.

But what we do know for certain from this anthrax investigation is quite serious. And because it is quite relevant to the current debates over the origins of COVID-19, it is well-worth reviewing. A trove of emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci — who was the government’s top infectious disease specialist during the AIDS pandemic, the anthrax attacks, and the COVID pandemic — was published on Monday by BuzzFeed after they were produced pursuant to a FOIA request. Among other things, they reveal that in February and March of last year — at the time that Fauci and others were dismissing any real possibility that the coronavirus inadvertently escaped from a lab, to the point that the Silicon Valley monopolies Facebook and Google banned any discussion of that theory -- Fauci and his associates and colleagues were privately discussing the possibility that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly as part of a U.S.-funded joint program with the scientists at that lab. 

Last week, BBC reported that “in recent weeks the controversial claim that the pandemic might have leaked from a Chinese laboratory — once dismissed by many as a fringe conspiracy theory — has been gaining traction.” President Biden ordered an investigation into this lab-leak possibility. And with Democrats now open to this possibility, “Facebook reversed course Thursday and said that it would no longer remove posts that claim the virus is man-made,” reported The Washington Post. Nobody can rationally claim to know the origins of COVID, and that is exactly why — as I explained in an interview on the Rising program this morning — it should be so disturbing that Silicon Valley monopolies and the WHO/Fauci-led scientific community spent a full year pretending to have certainty about that “debunked” theory that they plainly did not possess, to the point where discussions of it were prohibited on social media.

What we know — but have largely forgotten — from the anthrax case is now vital to recall. What made the anthrax attacks of 2001 particularly frightening was how sophisticated and deadly the strain was. It was not naturally occurring anthrax. Scientists quickly identified it as the notorious Ames strain, which researchers at the U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick had essentially invented. As PBS’ Frontline program put it in 2011: “in October 2001, Northern Arizona University microbiologist Dr. Paul Keim identified that the anthrax used in the attack letters was the Ames strain, a development he described as ‘chilling’ because that particular strain was developed in U.S. government laboratories.” As Dr. Keim recalled in that Frontlineinterview about his 2001 analysis of the anthrax strain:

We were surprised it was the Ames strain. And it was chilling at the same time, because the Ames strain is a laboratory strain that had been developed by the U.S. Army as a vaccine-challenge strain. We knew that it was highly virulent. In fact, that’s why the Army used it, because it represented a more potent challenge to vaccines that were being developed by the U.S. Army. It wasn’t just some random type of anthrax that you find in nature; it was a laboratory strain, and that was very significant to us, because that was the first hint that this might really be a bioterrorism event.

Why was the U.S. government creating exotic and extraordinarily deadly infectious bacterial strains and viruses that, even in small quantities, could kill large numbers of people? The official position of the U.S. Government is that it does not engage in offensive bioweapons research: meaning research designed to create weaponized viruses as weapons of war. The U.S. has signed treaties barring such research. But in the wake of the anthrax attacks — especially once the FBI’s own theory was that the anthrax was sent by a U.S. Army scientist from his stash at Fort Detrick — U.S. officials were forced to acknowledge that they do engage in defensive bioweapons research: meaning research designed to allow the development of vaccines and other defenses in the event that another country unleashes a biological attack.

But ultimately, that distinction barely matters. For both offensive and defensive bioweapons research, scientists must create, cultivate, manipulate and store non-natural viruses or infectious bacteria in their labs, whether to study them for weaponization or for vaccines. A fascinating-in-retrospect New Yorker article from March, 2002, featured the suspicions of molecular biologist Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who had “strongly implied that the F.B.I. was moving much more slowly in its anthrax investigation than it had any reason to.” Like The New York Times, the magazine (without naming him) detailed her speculation that Dr. Hatfill was the perpetrator (though her theory about his motive — that he wanted to scare people about anthrax in order to increase funding for research — was virtually identical to the FBI’s ultimate accusations about Dr. Ivins’ motives). 

But the key point that is particularly relevant now is what all of this said about the kind of very dangerous research the U.S. Government, along with other large governments, conducts in bioweapons research labs. Namely, they manufacture and store extremely lethal biological agents that, if they escape from the lab either deliberately or inadvertently, can jeopardize the human species. As the article put it:

 

The United States officially forswore biological-weapons development in 1969, and signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, along with many other nations. But Rosenberg believes that the American bioweapons program, which won't allow itself to be monitored, may not be in strict compliance with the convention. If the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks is who she thinks it is, that would put the American program in a bad light, and it would prove that she was right to demand that the program be monitored. 

If the government is saying that the perpetrator was probably an American, it's hard to imagine how it couldn't have been an American who worked in a government-supported bioweapons lab. Think back to the panicky month of October [2001]: would knowing that have made you less nervous, or more?

Having extensively reported on the FBI’s investigation into the anthrax case and ultimate claim to have solved it, I continue to share all the doubts that were so widely expressed at the time about whether any of that was true. But what we know for certain is that the U.S. government and other governments do conduct research which requires the manufacture of deadly viruses and infectious bacterial strains. Dr. Fauci has acknowledged that the U.S. government indirectly funded research by the Wuhan Institute of Virology into coronaviruses, though he denies that this was for so-called “gain of function” research, whereby naturally occurring viruses are manipulated to make them more transmissible and/or more harmful to humans.

We do not know for sure if the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, another lab, or jumped from animals to humans. But what we do know for certain — from the anthrax investigation — is that governments most definitely conduct the sort of research that could produce novel coronaviruses. Dr. Rosenberg, the subject of the 2002 New Yorker article, was suggesting that the F.B.I. was purposely impeding its own investigation because they knew that the anthrax actually came from the U.S. government’s own lab and wanted to prevent exposure of the real bio-research that is done there. We should again ponder why the pervasive mainstream doubts about the F.B.I.’s case against Ivins have been memory-holed. We should also reflect on what we learned about government research into highly lethal viruses and bacterial strains from that still-strange episode.

 

 

Read more:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-fbis-strange-anthrax-investigation

 

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assange2

 

Early talk about an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology – where bat coronaviruses are modified to become more infectious to humans – was largely written off as a conspiracy theory.

As The New Daily reported a month ago, the lab-leak theory is being investigated with vigour – under the direction of United States President Joe Biden – notwithstanding the limited access investigators have had to the Wuhan lab.

 

One of the compelling pieces of evidence being examined by members of the US Congress was done by Australian researchers – who were “shocked” by their own findings.

Their paper, published last week, found that the coronavirus is most ideally adapted to infect human cells – and not bat or pangolin cells, thought to be the likely origin culprits.

The study findings, from Flinders University and La Trobe University, also ruled out monkeys, snakes, cows, tigers, hamsters, cats, civets, horses, ferrets, mice, and dogs.

On the face of it, this stands as an intriguing challenge to the prevailing theory that SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in a bat and was then passed on to people via another, unidentified animals.

The problem is, the Australia data found that bats were a very poor fit for infection by the coronavirus, while humans “were way off the top of the list”.

These scientists were convinced of an animal origin

One of the co-authors of the study is Professor Nikolai Petrovsky. He is director of endocrinology at Flinders Medical Centre and a professor of Medicine at Flinders University. He’s also vice-president and secretary-general of the International Immunomics Society.

Professor Petrovsky said the research, which began last year when the pandemic was taking hold, was based on the assumption that “this was another natural transmission” rather than an engineered one.

“We were trying to find the particular species of animal in which this virus might have originated,” he told The New Daily.

 

The world is now full of armchair virologists who understand that the spike protein (S) of the coronavirus gains entry to a human cell by binding to the cell’s ACE2 receptor – “like a key being inserted into a lock” is the common metaphor.

Essentially, ACE2 acts as a cellular doorway – or receptor – for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Professor Petrovsky – with La Trobe Professor David Winkler and others – used genomic data from the 12 animal species to “painstakingly build computer models of the key ACE2 protein receptors for each species”.

These models were then used “to calculate the strength of binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to each species’ ACE2 receptor”.

Surprisingly, the results showed that SARS-CoV-2 bound to ACE2 on human cells “more tightly than any of the tested animal species, including bats and pangolins”.

If one of the animal species tested was the origin, it would normally be expected to show the highest binding to the virus.

Said Professor Petrovsky, “What shocked us, and not what we were expecting, was that humans came out at the very top.”

What animal came in second?

The team’s modelling shows the SARS-CoV-2 virus “also bound relatively strongly to ACE2 from pangolins, a rare exotic ant-eater found in some parts of South-East Asia with occasional instances of use as food or traditional medicines”.

The pangolins had “the highest spike binding energy of all the animals the study looked at – significantly higher than bats, monkeys and snakes”.

Pangolins were an early suspect, because of a coronavirus it was carrying. But the pangolin coronavirus had less than 90 per cent genetic similarity to SARS-CoV-2.

“And hence could not be its ancestor,” Professor Petrovsky said.

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/coronavirus/2021/07/04/coronavirus-origin-covid-19/

 

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NOTE: Should governments know that the virus is designed to affect humans, NO WONDER THEY ARE PANICKING WORLDWIDE, PUSHING FOR VARIOUS CONTAINMENT TACTICS, INCLUDING USE (still) EXPERIMENTAL VACCINES...

 

Gus is a rabid atheist...

 

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“Juicing up super viruses is not new. Scientists in the U.S. have long known how to mutate animal viruses to infect humans. For years, Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist in the U.S., has been collaborating with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to create super viruses. This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH. … Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?”

 

— Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), remarks at a Senate hearing, May 11

 

 

“Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not never and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

 

— Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in response.

 

------------

 

This fact check has been updated with a statement by the National Institutes of Health

This showdown between Paul and Fauci quickly went viral last week. But the nature of their debate regarding the origins of the coronavirus pandemic may seem obscure to many people. “Gain of function” is one of those insider-y terms that are subject to different definitions. The debate over such experiments predated the pandemic, but it has gained new urgency as scientists investigate the origin of the virus that has killed more than 3 million people around the world.

 

The core of the dispute is this: Did the virus emerge from nature — “zoonotically” from animals — or was it the result of a lab experiment gone awry?

Last May, the Fact Checker video team reported that the “balance of the scientific evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the new coronavirus emerged from nature.” A joint report by the World Health Organization and China, released in February, said a lab escape of the virus was “extremely unlikely.” But last week, a group of 18 preeminent scientists published a letter in the journal Science saying a new investigation is needed, because “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.”

 

The Facts

Let’s start with the basics. What is gain-of-function research?

 

In many ways, it is basic biological research. It’s done all the time with flies, worms, mice and cells in petri dishes. Scientists create novel genotypes (such as arrangements of nucleic acids) and screen or select to find those with a given phenotype (such as trait or ability) to find new sequences with a particular function.

But it’s one thing to experiment with fruit flies and another thing when the research involves genotypes of potential pandemic pathogens and functions related to transmissibility or virulence in humans.

That’s when “gain of function” becomes controversial. The idea is to get ahead of future viruses that might emerge from nature, thereby allowing scientists to study how to combat them. But many believed the research was potentially dangerous.

....

 

The Pinocchio Test

There is some smoke here, but we do not yet perceive the fire claimed by Paul. To some extent, all money is fungible. But the EcoHealth funding was not related to the experiments, but the collection of samples. The NIH grant includes language that some say suggests gain-of-function research; NIH says that is a misinterpretation. Paul’s statements about Baric’s research also appear overblown. We wavered between Two and Three Pinocchios, but decided on Two, because there still are enough questions about the work at the Wuhan lab to warrant further scrutiny, even if the NIH connection to possible gain-of-function research appears so far to be elusive.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/18/fact-checking-senator-paul-dr-fauci-flap-over-wuhan-lab-funding/

 

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It looks as if this Pinnocio article in the Washington Post is trying to whitewash Fauci for whatever reason. Senator Rand Paul is more astute....

 

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To Deny the "Lab Leak" COVID Theory, the NYT and WPost Use Dubious and Conflicted Sources

A bizarre and abrupt reversal by scientists regarding COVID's origins, along with clear conflicts of interest, create serious doubts about their integrity. Yet major news outlets keep relying on them.

 

BY Glenn Greenwald

 

That COVID-19 infected humanity due to a zoonotic leap from a "wet market” in Wuhan — rather than a leak from a lab in the same Chinese city — was declared unquestionable truth at the start of the pandemic. For a full year, anyone dissenting from this narrative was deemed so irresponsible that they were banned from large social media platforms, accused of spreading "disinformation.” No debate about COVID's origins was permitted. It had been settled by The Science™. Every rational person who believed in science, by definition, immediately accepted at the start of the pandemic that COVID made a natural leap from bats or pangolins; that it may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan which just so happens to gather, study and manipulate novel coronaviruses in bats was officially declared a deranged conspiracy theory.

The reason this consensus was so quickly consecrated was that a group of more than two dozen scientists published a letter in the prestigious science journal Lancet in February, 2020 — while very little was known about SARS-CoV-2 — didactically declaring “that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The possibility that COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab was dismissed as a "conspiracy theory,” the by-product of “rumours and misinformation” which, they strongly implied, was an unfair and possibly racist attack on “the science and health professionals of China.”

 

For months, that letter shaped the permissible range of debate regarding the origins of COVID. Or, more accurately, it ensured that there was no debate permitted. The Science™ concluded that COVID was a zoonotic virus that naturally leaped from non-human animal to human, and any questioning of this decree was deemed an attack on The Science™.

That Lancet letter has fallen into disrepute due to the key role in its publication played by one of its signatories, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance. To say that Daszak had a gigantic but undisclosed conflict of interest in disseminating this narrative about the natural origins of COVID is to understate the case. Daszak had received millions of dollars in grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to conduct research into coronaviruses in bats, and EcoHealth awarded part of that grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab which would be the leading suspect, by far, for any COVID lab leak.

Daszak's enormous self-interest in leading the world to believe that a lab leak was impossible is obvious. It would be a likely career-ending blow to his reputation if the Wuhan laboratory to which EcoHealth had provided funding for coronavirus bat research was responsible for the escape of a virus that has killed millions of people around the world and caused enduring suffering among countless others due to lockdowns and economic shutdowns. 

In July of this year, The Lancet published a new letter from the same group which signed that seminal letter in February of last year. The July 2021 letter included two fundamentally new additions. First, the language about COVID's origins was radically softened from the smug certainty of the February letter that closed debate to humble uncertainty given the lack of proof. While continuing to affirm a belief that COVID was naturally occurring (“our working view” is “that SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in nature and not in a laboratory"), they moved far away from the definitive posture of that original letter, acknowledging that “opinions are neither data nor conclusions” and urging further investigation on what they called “the critical question we must address now": namely, “how did SARS-CoV-2 reach the human population?” In other words, after telling the world in February that any questioning of the zoonotic origin was a malicious "conspiracy theory,” they now acknowledge it is “the critical question we must now address.” 

The other major change was that this July Lancet letter included what the February letter shamefully omitted: namely, the key fact that Daszak's “remuneration is paid solely in the form of a salary from EcoHealth Alliance,” and that EcoHealth had received funding from NIH to study coronaviruses in bats, and used some of that funding to support research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This disclosed conflict of interest about Daszak was included in the new July, 2021 letter as well as a separate “addendum” called “competing interests and the origins of SARS-CoV-2.” No explanation was provided about why these "competing interests” on the part of Daszak were not disclosed in that crucial, debate-closing February letter in the The Lancet.

 

The U.S. Government began aggressively distancing itself from EcoHealth this year. In an October 20, 2021 letter to Congress, the NIH argued that while the coronavirus strains studied by the Wuhan lab through EcoHealth's grant “are not and could not have become SARS-CoV-2,” it argued that EcoHealth violated the terms of the grant by failing to notify NIH of “unusual results" from its research that could make the viruses it was studying more dangerous. They also accused EcoHealth of failing to promptly report the ongoing results of their experiments.

All of this led to an unraveling of the Official Consensus. In May of this year — fifteen months after The Lancet pronounced the debate closed — Facebook reversed its policy of banning anyone who suggested that the virus may have come from the Wuhan lab. The reversal came, said the Silicon Valley giant, “in light of ongoing investigations into the origin”. This about-face came after The Wall Street Journal reported days earlier that U.S. intelligence sources claim that “three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care.” 

Weeks later, President Biden “ordered intelligence officials to 'redouble' efforts to investigate the origins of Covid-19, including the theory that it came from a laboratory in China.” The president's statement noted that “the US intelligence community was split on whether it came from a lab accident or emerged from human contact with an infected animal.” Suddenly, mainstream outlets such as The New York Times began publishing claims that, just months earlier, were officially declared "disinformation” and resulted in removal from social media platforms: “some scientists have argued that it’s possible SARS-CoV-2 was the result of genetic engineering experiments or simply escaped from a lab in an accident,” said the Paper of Record in October. The Official Consensus had undergone a 180-degree turn in the course of just over a year. "Lab leak” went from insane conspiracy theory that must be censored to serious possibility that must be investigated.

As a result of all this, Daszak's reputation and credibility are crippled, and rightfully so. The once-revered scientist was profiled two weeks ago in Science under the headline “PROPHET IN PURGATORY.” It noted that while his “journey from oracle to pariah has appalled many colleagues,” many scientists — often loath to openly attack each other's ethics — insist that his wounds are both justified and self-inflicted. Even those who believe the vilification of Daszak has been excessive nonetheless acknowledge that EcoHealth was far from honest about questions central to understanding this worldwide pandemic:

But some scientists, even those dismayed by the attacks, say Daszak is in part a victim of his own making. They argue he failed to reveal important information that later surfaced through embarrassing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and leaks, and some accuse him of making false statements. “Daszak has been far from forthcoming about EcoHealth’s research, much of which is highly relevant to the pandemic origin discussion,” says Filippa Lentzos, a social scientist at King’s College London who specializes in biosecurity. “It is the pattern of continuing obfuscation and deceit that I find alarming.”

Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney who’s solidly in the natural origins camp—he calls the debate a “tempest in an espresso cup”—says Daszak has been “unfairly vilified.” But EcoHealth “is guilty of shockingly poor communication and a naïvete that it would not come under scrutiny,” Holmes says.

That Science profile, similar to the one from The New York Times acknowledging that the "lab leak” is a real possibility, noted that documents unearthed by FOIA litigation from The Intercept call into serious doubt the months of denials by Daszak and EcoHealth, as well as from Dr. Fauci, that funding provided by NIH to the Wuhan lab through EcoHealth was used for "gain of function” research — meaning research designed to manipulate pathogens to make them more contagious and/or dangerous to humans:

In September, a FOIA request to NIH from The Intercept—which required a lawsuit to obtain documents—also yielded details about controversial experiments done at WIV by [WIV virologist Shi Zhengli] during her collaboration with EcoHealth. Her lab has more than 2000 samples of bodily fluids from bats that have tested positive for coronaviruses. To assess the risk of those viruses to humans, Shi’s team took sequences coding for their viral surface protein and stitched them into a bat coronavirus called WIV1, one of only three she has succeeded in growing in lab cultures. Daszak and Shi described these chimeric viruses in a 2017 paper. None of them has a close relationship to SARS-CoV-2. But some lab-leak proponents believe Shi, possibly with Daszak’s knowledge, hid other chimeric virus experiments that led to SARS-CoV-2.

The same batch of documents also showed that in “humanized” mice, some of the chimeric viruses grew better and were more lethal than WIV1. An NIH official, in response to an inquiry from a member of Congress, claimed EcoHealth had “failed to report” the worrisome results immediately, as the grant required. Daszak sent NIH a detailed letter strongly rebutting that accusation.

The documents also included a grant report that described an additional experiment, in which Shi added bat coronavirus surface proteins to the coronavirus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), a highly lethal human pathogen. Ferocious debates erupted about whether this work and the WIV1 studies constituted gain of function (GOF), the type of experiment that can make disease agents more transmissible or pathogenic and that requires extra layers of review. Richard Ebright, a biochemist at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, who has long lobbied against GOF research, tweeted that both “unequivocally”met the definition of [gain-of-function].

Despite the collapse of Daszak's reputation and credibility — due both to his undisclosed conflicts of interest and repeated deceit and even lying — The New York Times continues to cite him as one of its primary sources on the question of COVID's origins. Just two weeks ago, the paper published an article designed to affirm the claim that evidence had once again emerged showing that COVID was naturally occurring. “The first known patient sickened with the coronavirus was a vendor in a large Wuhan animal market,” wrote the Paper of Record about a new paper in Science, arguing that these findings “will revive, though certainly not settle, the debate over whether the pandemic started with a spillover from wildlife sold at the market, a leak from a Wuhan virology lab or some other way.” It had been previously suggested that the first case of COVID infection was found in an accountant who lived miles away from the wet market, suggesting that the wet market was likely not the source. But this new finding — claiming that the first patient was a wet market vendor, not the accountant — would further bolster the view that it has natural origins.

Notably, The Times continues to acknowledge that there is open debate about the origins of COVID, a fact that was deemed off-limits for almost a full year after the pandemic began. “The search for the origins of the greatest public health catastrophe in a century has fueled geopolitical battles, with few new facts emerging in recent months to resolve the question,” it said. But to dismiss the "lab leak” theory as increasingly unlikely, it heavily featured one scientist who insists that this new study provides the strongest evidence yet that COVID was naturally evolving. Who is this source? None other than Peter Daszek. The Times gave Daszak — the completely discredited, conflict-plagued scientist — multiple paragraphs to posture as an objective source to tell readers that the lab leak theory was increasingly unlikely and that the wet market origin was almost certainly true:

But Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist at EcoHealth Alliance who was part of the W.H.O. team, said that he was convinced by Dr. Worobey’s analysis that [researchers showing that COVID originated with the accountant] had been wrong.

“That December the eighth date was a mistake,” Dr. Daszak said. The W.H.O. team never asked the accountant the date his symptoms began, he said. Instead, they were given the Dec. 8 date by doctors from Hubei Xinhua Hospital, who handled other early cases but did not care for Mr. Chen. “So the mistake lies there,” Dr. Daszak said.

For the W.H.O. experts, Dr. Daszak said, the interview was a dead end: The accountant had no apparent links to an animal market, lab or a mass gathering. He told them he liked spending time on the internet and jogging, and he did not travel much. “He was as vanilla as you could get,” Dr. Daszak said.

Had the team identified the seafood vendor as the first known case, Dr. Daszak said, it would have more aggressively pursued questions like what stall she worked in and where her products came from.

While The Times noted in one fleeting subsequent paragraph that their featured source Daszak "has been one of the strongest critics of the lab-leak theory” and that “he and his organization, EcoHealth Alliance, have taken heat for research collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” it does not remotely signal to readers just how invested he is in denying the lab leak possibility. Indeed, there are few people on earth more eager to show — for their own selfish reasons — that COVID did not come from the Wuhan lab than Peter Daszak. 

Despite that, and despite the fact that he has been repeatedly caught misleading, The Timescontinues to cite him as some sort of credible source to convince readers not to believe the lab leak theory. And that one paragraph about his role in this research does not come close to making clear to Times readers just how devastating it would be for Daszak personally if it turned out that the lab leak theory were true. Of all the scientists in the world, why would The Times possibly rely on one of the most conflicted people on the planet to present as an expert on the validity of these various findings about COVID's origins?

A November 18 article from The Washington Post used similarly questionable tactics for the same goal. The headline of that article tells the story of what The Post set out to do: “Prominent scientist who said lab-leak theory of covid-19 origin should be probed now believes evidence points to Wuhan market.” It begins: “The location of early coronavirus infections in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, suggests the virus probably spread to humans from a market where wild and domestically farmed animals were sold and butchered, according to a peer-reviewed articlepublished Thursday in the journal Science,” citing the same study as the one touted by The Times. 

The Post acknowledges that there is widespread criticism among scientists of this new study. “'It is based on fragmentary information and to a large degree, hearsay,' David A. Relman, a professor of microbiology at Stanford University, said in an email after reading an embargoed copy. 'In general, there is no way of verifying much of what he describes, and then concludes'.” Yet the most definitive view of this new study in the Post article comes from Robert F. Garry Jr., a virologist described as “one of the most vocal proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis.” To Garry, the debate is now closed: “Mike’s piece shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that in fact the Huanan market was the epicenter of the outbreak.”

It is remarkable that a scientist like Dr. Garry would be so emphatic that the debate is now closed — the new study “shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that in fact the Huanan market was the epicenter of the outbreak” — given how many scientists continue to insist that the question is far from answered. So who is this Dr. Garry, eager to proclaim the debate closed? The Post does not provide the key facts to enable the reader to assess his credibility. All we know from the Post article is that he is “a virologist at Tulane University and one of the most vocal proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis.” But there is so much more to him than that.

 

Read more:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/to-deny-the-lab-leak-covid-theory

 

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The American authorities previously admitted that Ukraine hosts "biological research facilities", expressing concerns they could come under the control of Russian forces.

The Russian Defence Ministry on Thursday announced that the US-funded biological labs located in Ukraine were conducting experiments with bat coronavirus samples.

 

"According to the documents, the American side planned to conduct work on pathogens of birds, bats, and reptiles in Ukraine in 2022, with a further transition to studying the possibility of carrying African swine fever and anthrax", chief spokesman for the Ministry of Defence Major General Igor Konashenkov said.

 

In addition, the facilities were studying the possible spread of pathogens via wild birds, migrating between Russia, Ukraine, and other countries in the region.

 

"The purpose of this - and other Pentagon-funded biological research in Ukraine, was to create a mechanism for the covert spread of deadly pathogens", he added.

 

The Russian Defence Ministry will soon publish the documents received from staff at the Ukrainian biolaboratories, as well as the results of their examination, Konashenkov said.

On 7 March, the Russian armed forces discovered 30 biological compounds in Ukraine, which were possibly involved in the production of bio weapons, according to the head of the radiation, chemical and biological defence of the Russian armed forces Igor Kirillov.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://sputniknews.com/20220310/us-funded-bio-labs-in-ukraine-conducted-research-into-bat-coronavirus-russian-mod-says-1093736082.html

 

Somewhere on this site, we raise the possibility that Covid-19 originated in one of the Ukrainian labs, accidentally or deliberately... Or Fort Detrick.... Who knows...

 

 

US denies Russian claims of biowarfare labs in Ukraine

 

White House spokeswoman also warns that Russia may seek to use chemical and biological weapons in Ukraine.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/10/us-denies-russian-claims-of-biowarfare-labs-in-ukraine

 

SEE ALSO: US biolabs in ukraine...

 

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Several days ago a mainstream policy analyst dropped me a note mentioning that the Russians were claiming to have discovered the existence of a network of biowarfare labs in Ukraine, funded by the American Pentagon and allegedly working with anthrax and plague. Given that much of my focus over the last two years had been on America’s biowarfare program and its possible deployment, he wondered what I thought about the matter.

I’d seen some of the same Russian accusations swirling around the Internet, and hadn’t paid much attention. On the one hand, over the decades America had spent over $100 billion dollars on “biodefense,” the euphemistic term for biowarfare development, and we had the world’s oldest and largest such program, one of the few ever deployed in real life combat. So allocating a few millions or even tens of millions to labs in Ukraine would hardly be implausible.

But on the other hand, even if we hadn’t, the Russians might certainly say we had, with those charges being almost stereotypical examples of the “black propaganda” used by an invading army to justify its attack to the world. Since I don’t read Ukrainian, the documents the Russians claimed to have found would mean nothing to me, and except for zealous partisans on each side, I doubted whether anyone else would be convinced one way or the other.

However, the situation drastically changed on Tuesday, due to the Congressional testimony of Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, chief architect of our Ukraine policy. She seemed not only to acknowledge the existence of those Ukrainian biolabs but was also apparently concerned that their dangerous contents might fall into enemy hands, thereby seeming to completely confirm those shocking Russian accusations. I’ve never regarded Neocons as particularly bright, but the game-ending own-goal she scored on an issue of the greatest international importance may have set a new record for total incompetence.

I was hardly the only person to notice the massive implications of Nuland’s apparent disclosure. Glenn Greenwald ranks as one of the world’s highest-profile journalists, and he quickly released a lengthy column yesterday morning laying out the facts, and noting that our official media fact-checkers had spent a couple of weeks denouncing and ridiculing accusations that now seem to have turned out to be true.

• Victoria Nuland: Ukraine Has “Biological Research Facilities,” Worried Russia May Seize Them
  The neocon’s confession sheds critical light on the U.S. role in Ukraine, and raises vital questions about these labs that deserve answers
  Glenn Greenwald • Substack • March 9, 2022 • 2,100 Words

Tucker Carlson devoted his top-rated show on cable to the same issue, emphasizing the shame of having to quote official Russian and Chinese government propagandists on the matter because our own American government officials had been lying.

 

All the facts are not yet in, but at this stage I think we should probably assume that the captured documents provided by the Russians are correct, and our Defense budget was funding the development of deadly biological weapons at Ukrainian labs near the Russian border, including anthrax and plague. 

Given that Ukraine ranks as one of Europe’s most corrupt states, word of these projects surely leaked out, and it’s easy to understand why the Russians took a very dim view of it, certainly contributing to their decision to invade. How would America react if a rabidly-hostile Mexican government backed by China were developing deadly bioweapons near the American border?

Naturally, this gigantic story based upon Nuland’s inadvertent disclosure has been totally ignored by America’s mainstream media, but Carlson’s Youtube clip from last night is already approaching a million views, and the facts will continue to spread. 

Kevin Barrett quickly arranged an interview with me, and released a short video outlining the story, and setting it in a broader context. In particular, he noted that back in 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin had raised serious biowarfare concerns about our collection of biological material from ethnic Russians, certainly a very suspicious project for our government to have undertaken.

 

In any event, I think it was an extremely reckless and foolish thing for the American government to have funded the creation of biowarfare facilities in Ukraine, a country enormously hostile to its nuclear-armed Russian neighbor.

And governments that do some extremely reckless and foolish things are much more likely to have done other extremely reckless and foolish things, possibly including those that have already had massive adverse consequences, such as a million American deaths over the last two years.

 

During those same two years, I have published a lengthy series of articles outlining the strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the global Covid epidemic was the result of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), with the articles having been viewed a total of more than 400,000 times and also collected into a freely downloadable eBook.

• Covid/Biowarfare Series
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 2020-December 2021 • 80,000 Words

The evidence I have accumulated seems rather massive and the only argument anyone has ever effectively raised on the other side is that even rogue elements of the Trump Administration could not possibly have done anything so reckless and foolish. I think that argument seems far weaker today than it did a week ago.

Moreover, late last month the New York Times reported on a couple of new scientific papers by our top researchers on the original Covid outbreak in Wuhan. Those findings indicate that the first infection probably occurred in late November or early December, somewhat later than had previously been believed. Meanwhile, back in April 2020 ABC News reported and Israeli TV confirmed that our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a secret report “in the second week of November” describing a “potentially cataclysmic” disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan. This DIA report now appears to have been written before the first Chinese person had even become infected.

I think that previous inadvertent disclosure by our Intelligence officials falls into the same category as Victoria Nuland’s blunder.

All of this was discussed in three of my video interviews last month, which have now passed 170,000 total views. I suggest that people consider revisiting this material given the new disclosure of our anti-Russian biowarfare activities in Ukraine.

 

 

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https://www.unz.com/announcement/ukraine-and-biowarfare-conspiracy-theories/

 

 

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We have been on the case for a while...

 

 

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"A bomb filled with bacteria was placed on the ground and about 20 Manchurians were tied to poles (that is, enough distance to prevent men's death) from the bomb, which were electrically exploded. By the bomb blast ... and its fragments, the plague bacilli and anthrax bacillipenetrated through the wound into human bodies."

This shocking revelation came from Major Tomio Karasawa, 35, who was captured by the Russians in September 1945, in the final days of World War II. Karasawa was an army physician who between 1939 and 1944 worked in Unit 731, a covert biological research and development unit run by the Japanese Imperial Army.

Unit 731, set up in 1932 by General Shiro Ishii, a microbiologist, in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in Northeast China, was responsible for some of the most notorious and little known war crimes in human history. (Manchukuo means the Empire of Manchus, for which the Japanese had installed the dethroned Qing Dynasty emperor Puyi, who was of Manchu ethnicity, as its figurehead ruler.)

The secret unity, based in Pingfang (which Western researchers often call Pinfan) just outside Harbin, the largest city of Manchukuo, and in what is today's Heilongjiang province, not only carried out human vivisections behind its high walls and produced vast quantities of germs to spread all over China, but also acted as an evil core for what the late US historian Sheldon H. Harris called "factories of death" that it had set up across Japan-occupied Asia.

The Russians, who acquired Karasawa's affidavit during their interrogations, soon brought it to the attention of the International Prosecution Section (IPS) of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), convened in April 1946 in Tokyo to try Japanese war criminals.

"We do not consider that the evidence now available is sufficient to justify an assurance that any of the accused can be associated with this activity by any of the criteria adopted by the Court with reference to atrocities and prisoners of war offenses," was the reply on Dec 13, 1946 from Frank S. Tavenner Jr, US associate prosecutor of the IPS.

Tavenner's phrase "Any of the accused" covered, among others, General Yoshijiro Umezu, who, between 1939 and 1944, was commander of the Kwantung Army that controlled Manchukuo, and a direct superior and chief supporter of Ishii. The army, together with the imperial army's military police army Kempeitai, ruled with an iron fist. The latter kept Ishii's laboratories supplied with captives-the Manchurians in Karasawa's affidavit, referred to internally as maruta, a Japanese word meaning logs, by those who performed vivisections.

 

The affidavit was never produced as evidence, nor was the man allowed to testify during court proceedings of the IMTFE, ostensibly modeled on the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg that tried Nazi war criminals.

Yet the affidavit was constantly brought up in written communications not only between the Americans and the Russians, the latter pushing for its inclusion in the trials, but also among the American prosecutors of the IPS, the military intelligence officials under General Douglas MacArthur's occupation authorities and those in Washington.

One of these declassified documents, kept at the US National Archives in College Park, Maryland, was an intelligence report dated Aug 1, 1947 and circulated within the State-War-Navy Coordinating Sub Committee for the Far East. (The State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, a precursor to the US National Security Council, was a US federal government committee created in December 1944 to look at political and military issues related to the occupation of the Axis powers once World War II ended.)

The report, titled Interrogation of certain Japanese by Russian prosecutor, includes four appendixes. The Karasawa affidavit appears in Appendix A-"facts bearing on the problem". Elsewhere, the conclusion of the report is unequivocal:"The value to the US of Japanese BW (biological warfare) data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from 'war crimes' prosecution."

This document can be found in the six-volume Compilation Of Historical Documents On Japanese Biological Warfare During WWII, published in 2019 and coedited by Wang Xuan, a Chinese researcher, and her Japanese counterpart Shoji Kondo.

"Imperial Japan's employment of biological weapons in China was full-scale, and unprecedented in human history," Wang, 69, said. "Its unspeakable cruelty can be glimpsed from the devil's deal, struck between Unit 731 scientists and the Americans who coveted their information."

Ishii said that if the Americans could provide him and his associates with documentary immunity from prosecution for war crimes, much more would come their way. This would include "photomicrographs of selected examples of 8,000 slides of tissues from autopsies of human and animals subjected to BW experiments", as listed in Appendix A.

 

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http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202203/12/WS622c025ba310cdd39bc8c283.html

 

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Ambassador Vasily Nebenzia, Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation, holds documents as speaks during the UN Security Council meeting discussing the Russian and Ukraine conflict at the United Nations Headquarters on March 11, 2022 in New York City. The UN Security Council met at Russia's request to discuss Russia's claim of US-supported chemical and biological weapon labs in Ukraine. [Photo/Agencies]

Beijing urged Washington once again on Monday to fully clarify its biological military activities with a responsible attitude, saying that biological military activities in Ukraine have become a shared concern of the international community.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian made the remark at a daily news briefing after the United States Representative to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield accused China of spreading disinformation in support of Russia when the UN Security Council met on biological weapons at Moscow's request on Friday.

The US has denied Russian claims that Washington is operating bio-warfare laboratories in Ukraine that involve deadly pathogens, including bubonic plague and anthrax. The US embassy in Ukraine has reportedly hastily removed information related to such labs from its website.

Zhao said the US could not convince others by simply dismissing the concerns as disinformation in the face of evidence found by Russia in Ukraine, including documents, photos and other materials.

According to the information released publicly, Zhao said there are dozens of biological labs in Ukraine that are operated by order of the US Department of Defense.

 

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http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202203/15/WS622fce67a310cdd39bc8c850.html

 

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remembering 2016...

 

 

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BY KEVIN BARRETT

 

One hour ago as I write this, The New York Times published a big front-page story that begins:

The United States secretly manufactured biological weapons in Ukraine. It trained birds to carry pathogens into Russia. It created Covid-19.

My first reaction: Yowza! Man bites dog! NYT tells truth! MSM is stealing our stuff! I’d better invite this NYT journalist, Steven Lee Myers, as a guest commentator on False Flag Weekly News!

Then I read the second paragraph:

Of the many falsehoods that the Kremlin has spread since the war in Ukraine began more than six months ago, some of the most outlandish and yet enduring have been those accusing the United States of operating clandestine biological research programs to wreak havoc around the globe.

So the first paragraph had been an innoculation, and the second paragraph the desired immune response.

Regime propagandists have been using this “immunization” technique intensively for at least a decade. After 9/11 and the widespread loss of faith in the official story, a cottage industry sprung up in academia, heavily funded by grant money, looking at ways to “cure conspiracy theories.” (The seminal contribution to the emerging field was Cass Sunstein’s “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures.”) A consenus emerged that since conspiracy theories were a viral disease, the authorities should “innoculate” those who had not yet been exposed, while “locking down” the “carriers” (conspiracy theorists) off in the far corners of the internet where they wouldn’t “infect” the normies.

So how do you “innoculate” someone against conspiracy theories? Simple: You state the conspiracy theory (i.e. you inject the subject with a small dose of the toxic, contagious idea) and then “debunk” it (building an “immune response” in the subject). That’s what the above-cited New York Times story tries to accomplish in its first two paragraphs.

Note that the Times’ debunking atttempt doesn’t actually engage in factual debate. It doesn’t have to. Most people are dominated by emotional, impressionistic thinking. So smearing the theory that COVID came from a US bioweapons lab as an “outrageous falsehood” and “Kremlin propaganda” suffices to innoculate the average NYT reader.

One thing the NYT innoculation attempt, I mean, news story, fails to mention, is the fact that the Chair of The Lancet’s COVID Origins Commission, Jeffrey Sachs, has made it clear that he thinks COVID did originate in a US bioweapons lab. As Ron Unz has noted, that’s a bit like Philip Zelikow, Chair of the 9/11 Commission, saying 9/11 was an inside job. If such a thing happened The New York Times probably wouldn’t mention that, either.

Jeffrey Sachs is a consumate insider. He’s the last person on earth anyone would call a Russian stooge. Sachs was actually a prime villain in the 1990s looting of Russia, as explained in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Maybe he’s telling the truth now because he wants to be remembered for doing something admirable rather than reprehensible.

Why did The New York Times, the leading propaganda organ of the Deep State, find it necessary to run a big front-page innoculation against COVID origin “conspiracy theories”? I would like to think it’s because I just published “What America Needs Right Now Is a COVID Origins Truth Movement”—and then highlighted it during this week’s False Flag Weekly News broadcast. Or because my video with Ron Unz COVID-19 Bio-Attack Smoking Gun! just broke 400,000 views on Rumble (the equivalent of millions of YouTube views).

 

But it probably wasn’t me, or even Ron Unz’s book and articles, that forced the issue. It probably was the Russians. The peg the NYT uses to hang its innoculation attempt on, the actual news, arrives in the fourth paragraph:

In Geneva this week, Russia has commanded an international forum to air its unsupported assertions again. The Biological Weapons Convention, the international treaty that since 1975 has barred the development and use of weapons made of biological toxins or pathogens, gives member nations the authority to request a formal hearing of violations, and Russia has invoked the first one in a quarter-century.

Naturally the NYT piece assures us in advance—more innoculation!—that the Russian accusations will be unsupported by facts:

Virtually no Western officials or experts expect Russia to produce, during the weeklong gathering, facts that corroborate the accusations. If the past is any guide, that will not stop Russia from making them.

If the Russians want to provide facts to support allegations that COVID emerged from a deliberate US (neocon) bio-attack on China and Iran, they won’t have to work very hard digging them up. A strong prima facie case has been freely available on the internet since spring 2020.

China is on Russia’s side:

The state media in China routinely amplifies Russian claims about the war with Ukraine and about secret biological weapons research, as part of its own information battle with the United States that began with the debate over the spread of Covid-19.

China is in an “information battle” involving “the debate over the spread of Covid-19” presumably because the Chinese leadership knows that its Wuhan Lab was set up as a patsy to take the blame for the October, 2019 US bioattack. But don’t expect The New York Times to say that, or anything like it, any time soon.

COVID/Vaccines = Bioweapon/Antidote?

Many people have a hard time accepting that US leaders would be so stupid as to attack China and Iran with a highly contagious (even if only .5% lethal) bioweapon. Wouldn’t they be deterred by the possibility of blowback?

Certainly the blowback was intense. The US took a much bigger hit than China did. If someone with the mentality of Mike Pompeo or Robert Kadlec wanted to slow China’s economic growth using deniable bio-attacks, and decided to go with COVID, they would seem to have screwed the proverbial pooch.

If we consider the long-term strategic perspective, however, the picture becomes more murky. The key to the outcome of the US-China battle for global #1 power status is China’s economic growth rate, especially in key technological sectors. If you’re a China hawk neocon dedicated to perpetuating US unipolar hegemony, you know that the prime US geostrategic imperative is to reduce China’s economic-technological growth by any means necessary, even if it means sacrificing US and global well-being.

Though COVID hit the US worse than China, it may still have served US/neocon objectives. It battered international trade and initiated a process of decoupling the US (and US imperial sphere) from China. (The US cannot credibly threaten pre-emptive war on China without decoupling first.)

And though COVID has harmed more Americans than Chinese, the very success of the Chinese “hard lockdowns” has prevented China from gaining herd immunity, necessitating continuing rounds of lockdowns that inflict economic damage. So COVID may continue to slow the Chinese economy for years—or even decades if new variants and viruses keep emerging.

And then there is the most powerful and underestimated factor in history: demographics. By disproportionately killing old and infirm Westerners, especially Americans, COVID offered at least a partial solution to the West’s single biggest economic problem: the massive bulge of baby boomers hitting retirement age and consuming heavily while producing nothing. As US life expectancy crashes from 79 to 76 years, largely though not entirely due to COVID deaths among older people, the disappearance of people Yuval Harari considers “useless eaters” will actually serve to enhance US economic growth vis-a-vis China.

But what about the antidote? You don’t unleash a bioweapon unless you have an antidote, right? And if the antidote to COVID was MRNA vaccines developed alongside the bioweapon, what kind of lousy, dangerous, only-temporarily-effective antidote was that? As the Unz Review commenter allergic2catz puts it: “How can ineffective/actively harmful (containment) measures (like MRNA vaccines) be ‘necessitated’”?

My response:

Remember the extremely harmful vaccine cocktails inflicted on US troops during Gulf War 1? The long-term vaccines-plus-toxins casualties were orders of magnitude greater than the war casualties: 60k deaths according to Doug Rokke, 250k disabled by Gulf War Syndrome according to Wikipedia. The vaccines were deemed necessary to defend against Saddam’s potential germ warfare attacks. The anthrax vaccine was probably the worst culprit.

The military approach to biowar mitigation involves willingness to sacrifice a lot of pawns on the chessboard, especially in the long term, in order to preserve enough forces in the short term to win the game. The vaccine cocktails (like DU and lots of other toxins) were seen as a military necessity.

The US military presumably developed COVID and the vaccines (or their precursors that were later farmed off to the military-linked corporations) side-by-side, using a military rather than civilian approach to threat mitigation—in other words, they weren’t that concerned about negative side effects. I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that the RAND and DARPA biowar strategists saw the COVID response as a dry run for defense against a future virus that could be much more lethal.

To which another commentator, Iris, added:

Especially that they believe the mRNA “vaccines” are their joker cards out of any such biowarfare trouble.

There is something very unique about the mRNA “vaccine” technology: unlike traditional virus vector vaccines, an mRNA product can be adjusted to a new virus/new variant and be developed in relatively very short time. No long experimentation is required. This is why all booster doses, adjusted to fast-evolving virus variants, are mRNA, even in countries which used AZ or J&J among initial main vaccines.

This is why the US warmongers are now so fond of using viral biowarfare: they think that they are the only ones able to quickly produce the antidote.

What a depressing thought; we can expect more of the same, for sure.

 

 

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Biological warfare: an emerging threat in the 21st century...

 

 

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https://www.unz.com/kbarrett/breaking-ny-times-us-created-covid-19/

 

 

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FROM SCIENCE:

One of the three inventions claimed by Moderna in a legal battle that has erupted over the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines against COVID-19 was actually patented years earlier by two university scientists.

In a complaint filed on 26 August in a U.S. district court in Massachusetts, Moderna accuses Pfizer and its partner BioNTech of “co-opting Moderna’s patented inventions” covering different aspects of the two COVID-19 vaccines, which have already earned the companies billions of dollars. Both vaccines rely on mRNA that codes for the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2.

BioNTech issued a statement insisting its COVID-19 vaccine work was “original” and said it “will vigorously defend against all allegations of patent infringement.” In a statement to Science, Pfizer said it had “not yet fully reviewed the complaint but we are surprised by the litigation,” adding that the company is “confident in our intellectual property supporting the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.”

The two vaccines were the first authorized for COVID-19 in the United States and the first to show the mRNA platform worked, for any pathogen, in people. Moderna said in 2020 it would not enforce patent claims while the pandemic was ongoing. Jacob Sherkow, a patent attorney at the University of Illinois College of Law, suspects the company has changed its tune because it and Pfizer-BioNTech will soon have new markets for formulations of their vaccines that target coronavirus variants. Regulators are expected to authorize these updated vaccines shortly. Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech initially sold most of their doses to the U.S. government but are now selling the shots globally on the open market, with even larger profits at stake. Moderna’s filing “makes sense now that these are goods,” Sherkow says.

At the heart of Moderna’s patent infringement claim are the steps that opened the door for mRNA as a vaccine. Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó, both at the University of Pennsylvania (Karikó now also works for BioNTech), published the fundamental discovery in 2005: They showed that altering one of the fundamental building blocks of mRNA, the nucleotide uridine, made the molecule less toxic and also more capable of dodging immune destruction.

Moderna, which was founded to develop medicines based on mRNA, has a patent for a specific modification known as 1-methylpseudouridine. “Moderna’s scientists made the groundbreaking discovery that replacing uridine in the mRNA molecule with 1-methylpseudouridine resulted in surprisingly superior protein production—a severalfold increase over chemically-modified mRNAs studied before—with a significantly reduced immune response against the mRNA itself,” the complaint argues. “This work became the foundation of Moderna’s mRNA platform.”

 

https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-question-moderna-invention-claim-covid-19-vaccine-dispute

 

THIS ARGUMENT IS AT THE CORE OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND CONTROVERSY....

Millions Killed For Profit - Covid Was State Sponsored Genocide - Dr. David Martin To EU Parliament

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJoi4hGpqa8

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Eqo0yFdlAY

 

Rand Paul puts Antony Blinken in WORST Nightmare for HIDING Important Research Documents

 

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proxy virus.....

Millions Killed For Profit - Covid Was State Sponsored Genocide - Dr. David Martin To EU Parliament

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJoi4hGpqa8

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwRoFapcZPQ

JUST IN: Rand Paul Brings The Receipts To Grill Samantha Power About Gain-Of-Function Research

 

 

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