Over a year and $85bn later, US spies still don’t know ‘where, when or how’ Covid-19 hit the world – but it ‘could've been a lab’

 

By Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.

 

The question of how SARS-CoV-2 came to wreak havoc on the planet is one many have asked but none, so far, have answered. The truth is out there, but the very people on the case could have every reason to ensure it doesn’t emerge.

On April 14, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines revealed that after over a year of determined sleuthing, US spying agencies had no concrete answers on basic questions regarding the origins of the 2019 coronavirus. 

“It is absolutely accurate the intelligence community does not know exactly where, when, or how Covid-19 virus was transmitted initially,” Haines told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Components have coalesced around two alternative theories, these scenarios are it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, or it was a laboratory accident.”

 

This time last year, Donald Trump alleged he’d seen evidence confirming covid was laboratory-made and, throughout 2020, former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove also claimed the virus was “an engineered escapee” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

Haines’ public admission that a “laboratory accident” is a possible explanation is significant because intelligence services have thus far been quick to dismiss the suggestion as a conspiracy theory whenever it’s been aired in public. In response to Trump’s statement for example, the Director of National Intelligence’s office firmly refuted the idea Covid-19 was “manmade or genetically modified.” Of course, the virus could be neither and still have escaped from a lab.

WHO, what, why, where and Wuhan?

While the World Health Organization (WHO) is yet to comment on Haines’ seeming change of heart, the lab theory stands in stark contrast with the agency’s long-held public position. In March, it issued a report, based on the findings of an international team of scientists who spent four weeks in Wuhan probing covid’s origins. They concluded that of all the various explanations, a laboratory leak was by far and away the least likely.

For many though, the report raised far more questions than it answered. Even WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was critical of the team’s investigation – his response to the scientists’ public presentation of their findings was measured yet withering. 

“The team…visited several laboratories in Wuhan and considered the possibility that the virus entered the human population as a result of a laboratory incident. I do not believe this assessment was extensive enough,” he said. “Further data and studies will be needed to reach more robust conclusions…this requires further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist experts, which I am ready to deploy.”

Quite an indictment of the 10-strong squad of researchers, considering they had been presentedby the mainstream media ahead of their excursion as unimpeachable, world-class authorities on virology and public health determined – and destined – to get to the truth. That their investigation of the laboratory leak theory was so undercooked is particularly striking given the only US-based representative on the team, Peter Daszak, is President of EcoHealth Alliance, which has in recent years conducted extensive work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

 

Friends and funding

Then again, Daszak would have a great many reasons for leaving certain stones unturned. For one, he’s a close friend and ardent supporter of Shi Zhengli, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at WIV, who has been repeatedly forced to deny her lab was the source of coronavirus. In June 2020, Scientific American described the pair as “long-time collaborators” – Daszak also staunchly defended his associate, stating she “leads a world-class lab of the highest standards,” and rubbished allegations she or her organization were in any way responsible for covid’s spread.

From 2014 to 2019, Daszak worked with Zhengli on investigating and cataloging bat coronaviruses across China, an initiative funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the tune of $3.7 million. Thereafter, the EcoHealth chief transferred this effort to the University of North Carolina, where he began ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses and chimeras in humanized mice. 

In a December 2019 interview, he somewhat ominously told virologist Vincent Racaniello that some coronaviruses may “get into human cells,” one can “manipulate in the lab pretty easily,” are untreatable with antibodies, and “you can’t vaccinate against them with a vaccine.”

NIH withdrew its backing for the EcoHealth project in April 2020 under pressure from the Trump administration, a move that garnered significant sympathetic media attention for the organisation, and Daszak. The move was reversed to much fanfare in August, and EcoHealth’s funding more than doubled to $7.5 million. However, what no media outlet noted at any stage was the non-profit’s NIH support represents a negligible fraction of its US government income. The overwhelming majority of EcoHealth’s revenue, accounting for almost $40 million between 2013 and 2020, flows from the Department of Defense (DoD).

 

What happened in 2019? 

A State Department factsheet on WIV published in January notes that “several researchers” at the Institute became sick in autumn 2019, “before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses,” raising questions about the credibility of Zhengli’s claims that there was “zero infection” among WIV staff and students prior to the pandemic. 

The factsheet also asserted that “scientists in China have researched animal-derived coronaviruses under conditions that increased the risk for accidental and potentially unwitting exposure,” and “secret Chinese military projects” may have been conducted at the Institute since at least 2017.

Perhaps predictably, there was no mention that the US military may have funded, whether directly or indirectly, projects conducted at WIV. It’s notable that $34.6 million of EcoHealth’s DoD funding came from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a Pentagon division working to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”

 

‘Rumours and misinformation’ 

Daszak’s clear conflict of interest in the WHO probe is rendered all the more shocking when one considers he was lead author of a joint statement published in The Lancet in February 2020, which strongly condemned “rumours and misinformation” relating to covid – namely, that it may have emerged from a laboratory. 

“Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus,” the statement, signed by 27 scientists – four of whom hold positions with EcoHealth – contended. 

The letter’s publication was highly significant, as it publicly cemented the notion of a scientific consensus around covid’s origins. This ‘consensus’ emerged shortly after a draft genome of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 had been released for analysis. As MIT’s Technology Review notes, numerous scientists who’d begun studying the draft were surprised by what they found. 

Among them was Nikolai Petrovsky, a highly-regarded professor at Australia’s Flinders University and chair of Vaxine, a company that develops immunizations for infectious diseases, which since 2005 has received millions in NIH funding. 

“[Computer modeling] generated a startling result: the spike proteins studding SARS-CoV-2 bound more tightly to their human cell receptor, a protein called ACE2, than target receptors on any other species evaluated. In other words, SARS-CoV-2 was surprisingly well adapted to its human prey, which is unusual for a newly emerging pathogen,” Technology Review records. 

Petrovsky and his associates immediately set about writing a speculative paper asking whether the virus was “completely natural” or had originated from “a recombination event that occurred inadvertently or intentionally in a laboratory handling coronaviruses.” 

 

The virological is political 

 

But Petrovsky struggled to find a publisher, with at least one open access repository rejecting his work outright. It wasn’t until May 2020 that the paper was finally released, and by that time suggestions of a lab leak had been comprehensively discredited – not least due to Trump’s pronouncements on the matter having made the issue political. 

As Technology Review notes, it had become “career suicide for scientists to voice suspicions about a possible lab leak,” and the community was “unwilling to challenge the orthodoxy” as a result. In turn, it was virtually impossible for journalists to write credible stories questioning covid’s origins without being branded Trump apologists, conspiracy theorists, or worse. 

The WHO Director General’s pledge to redeploy experts to Wuhan has prompted several scientists, who reluctantly fell victim to this conspiracy of silence, to come forward and voice their concerns. It also raises the prospect that some answers might finally be found. 

One would hope that between the WHO, grossly overpaid US intelligence services ($85 billion last year), and millions of independent researchers the world over, the truth may one day emerge. But one shouldn’t hold one’s breath. When powerful people have a vested interest in suppressing inconvenient facts, secrets can be kept forever, and that’s without factoring in the cottage industry that has emerged dedicated to stigmatizing laboratory accident explanations for the pandemic.

A case in point; The Lancet has established a 12-member COVID Commission panel to investigate the origins of the virus. Its chair is none other than the ubiquitous Peter Daszak – and half his taskforce’s members were signatories to the February 2020 statement that did so much to muzzle so many. 

Peter Daszak and EcoHealth have been approached for comment.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/521314-us-spies-covid-lab/

 

 

Free Julian Assange Now !!!!!!!!!!!!

 As Covid Death Toll Passes 3 Million, a Weary World Takes Stock

 

“It just never crossed your mind that there would be so many dead in so little time,” said one man in Mexico City.

 

Three million lives: That is roughly equivalent to losing the population of Berlin, Chicago or Taipei. The scale is so staggering that it sometimes begins to feel real only in places like graveyards.

The world’s Covid-19 death toll surpassed three million on Saturday, according to a New York Times database. More than 100,000 people have died of Covid-19 in France. The death rate is inching up in Michigan. Morgues in some Indian cities are overflowing with corpses.

And as the United States and other rich nations race to vaccinate their populations, new hot spots have emerged in parts of Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

The global pace of deaths is accelerating, too. After the coronavirus emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the pandemic claimed a million lives in nine months. It took another four months to kill its second million, and just three months to kill a million more.

“We are running out of space,” Mohammed Shamin, a gravedigger in New Delhi’s largest Muslim cemetery, said on Saturday. “If we don’t get more space, you will soon see dead bodies rotting in the streets.”

The deaths are the most tragic aspect of the pandemic, but they aren’t the only cost.

Many millions more have been sickened by the virus, some with effects that may last for years or even a lifetime. Livelihoods have been ruined. Global work and travel have been disrupted in profound and potentially long-lasting ways.

The official toll almost certainly does not account for all the pandemic-related deaths in the world. Some of those deaths may have been mistakenly attributed to other causes, like flu or pneumonia, while others have died as a result of the vast disruptions of life.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/world/covid-deaths-3-million.html

 

see also: ‘gain-of-function’ research

 

Read from top.

 

Please also note that during this pandemic, more than 65 million (21 times the population of Berlin, Chicago or Taipei) new born humans have been added to the population on this planet — and many species of animals and plants have become extinct because of our carelessness and usage of poisons. Billions of animals have died.

 

assange

Imagine that there are more than 5000 laboratories around the world where work on modifying viruses is done. Gain-of-function for increasing potency of the little beasts has been performed since the 1960s, while reducing the potency of viruses (loss-of-function) for vaccines has been performed since the 1900s. Imagine that there are 250 laboratories that are fully-military based, with intent of manufacturing really nasty viruses and their “antidotes”.

 

 

There are 45,508 companies doing bio research, from cancer research to drug testing, listed in stock exchanges around the world. These are listed companies. The number of formal unlisted companies would be a wild guess.

 

The United States operates more than 200 military biological laboratories across the world. More than 30 have been exposed. Many are hidden in unknown places. Do these laboratories develop biological and chemical weapons?

 

 

We already have noted that the list of nasties include Ebola and Anthrax. Work or coronaviruses started about 20 (40?) years ago. Remember the War against Saddam’ weapons of mass destruction… The Anthrax that was supposed to be Saddam’s had come from an American bio-lab, soon exposed by the FBI to the chagrin of the US government…

 

A new tool came on the scene about 15 years ago: CRISPR…

 

CRISPR Service

 

As a revolutionary technology in the field of gene editing, CRISPR has been widely used in basic and medical research. Creative Biolabs has previously employed CRISPR/Cas9 technology to generate innovative and effective cell therapy services for our customers. Aided by our CRISPR/Cas9 platform, you can revolutionize your particular project by enabling any site-specific genome editing without introducing foreign DNA.

 

 

I am not imagining things.

 

CRISPR is an Adaptive Immune System invented in 1987.

 

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat) sequences were initially discovered in the E. coli genome in 1987, but their function as a safeguard against bacteriophages was not elucidated until 2007.

 

 

So it does not take long to imagine bats being used in labs to study viruses and the immune system. Yes bats are used in bio-labs like mice, rats and monkeys — and humans in second and third phase testings of stuffs, from vaccines to medicines...

 

 

But there is the problem that the Coronavirus Covid-19 was quite well-known before the pandemic. Thus its genome was on the record in many places…

 

 

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% of known infectious diseases and 75% 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.

 

Read more:

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

 

 

So, would it be possible to hide “gain of function” under such considerations. Of course. Nothing is impossible, including increasing the potency of such virus by “natural” selection process, (a technique that can be used to create loss-of-function as well) without showing the fingerprint of CRISPR. Until the Wuhan started pandemic, was there variants of the same virus in existence in Europe or in the USA? Yes there was.

 

It took about one month between detection of a “new disease” in Wuhan and a Chinese lockdown of this city. Was this the new pandemic that the “world” (pharmaceutical companies, Bill Gates, governments and policy makers) had been waiting for, and had rehearsed for?

 

Was this an opportunity to relaunch a world economy that was being “de-globalised” (read de-Amercanized) by popular demand in many countries — and with the rise of China? How to make people submit? As religious submission only works in Muslim countries these days, how could a new form of worldwide submission be implemented? Was this an opportune accidental moment or was it designed to follow the "scientific" script? Were the scientists conned by the system to believe in their own (often over-inflated) predictions?

 

Out of the 5500 labs around the world, one only needs one careless enough person — or naughty enough to do the through-crap, either by accident or under instructions…

 

Remember despite having been “prepared”, the shit hit the fan…

 

 

About the Event 201 exercise

 

Event 201 was a 3.5-hour pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic. 15 global business, government, and public health leaders were players in the simulation exercise that highlighted unresolved real-world policy and economic issues that could be solved with sufficient political will, financial investment, and attention now and in the future.

 

The exercise consisted of pre-recorded news broadcasts, live “staff” briefings, and moderated discussions on specific topics. These issues were carefully designed in a compelling narrative that educated the participants and the audience.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation jointly propose these recommendations.

 

Purpose

In recent years, the world has seen a growing number of epidemic events, amounting to approximately 200 events annually. These events are increasing, and they are disruptive to health, economies, and society. Managing these events already strains global capacity, even absent a pandemic threat. Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global—a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences. A severe pandemic, which becomes “Event 201,” would require reliable cooperation among several industries, national governments, and key international institutions.

 

Recent economic studies show that pandemics will be the cause of an average annual economic loss of 0.7% of global GDP—or $570 billion. The players’ responses to the scenario illuminated the need for cooperation among industry, national governments, key international institutions, and civil society, to avoid the catastrophic consequences that could arise from a large-scale pandemic.

 

Similar to the Center’s 3 previous exercises—Clade X, Dark Winter, and Atlantic Storm—Event 201 aimed to educate senior leaders at the highest level of US and international governments and leaders in global industries.

 

It is also a tool to inform members of the policy and preparedness communities and the general public. This is distinct from many other forms of simulation exercises that test protocols or technical policies of a specific organization. Exercises similar to Event 201 are a particularly effective way to help policymakers gain a fuller understanding of the urgent challenges they could face in a dynamic, real-world crisis.

 

Scenario

Details about the scenario are available here.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/about

 

 

By the end of all this and studying many other "opinions", including rebel scientists, Gus thinks that the (bio-modified) virus came from a lab, infected bats which in turn infected humans. Thus "the virus came from bats theory sticks" like a glove to the general narrative. There are so many variants of the said virus (more than 300 genetical differences that can help us determine the spread/origin of the virus, with about 4 main ones) And remember:

 ‘gain-of-function’ is opposite to vaccine...  

 

 Read from top.

 

 

assange2

expert reaction to cases of variant B.1.617 (the ‘Indian variant’) being investigated in the UK

 

Several cases of the SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.617 have now been detected in the UK.

 

Prof Sharon Peacock, Director of COG-UK, and Professor of Public Health and Microbiology, University of Cambridge, said:

What do we currently know about B.1.617?

“This variant has been around for some time. The first B.1.617 genome in the global database (GISAID) dates back to 5 Oct 2020.  India has submitted the most B.1.617 genomes, following in frequency by UK and the US. Based on genome information, B.1.617 was first detected in the UK on 22 Feb 2021, and in the US on 23 Feb 2021. B.1.617 has been identified from genome data submitted by 21 countries as of 19 April 2021. The relative frequency of genomes from different countries is biased because of the different amounts of sequencing being performed in different countries; a country sequencing a high number of genomes may be more likely to detect variants.

What is a ‘double mutant’? Do we know for sure that B.1.617 is one? How worrying is a double mutant?

“B.1.617 has 13 mutations that result in amino acid changes. B.1.617 has been described as a ‘double mutant’. This term is used to refer to two mutations in spike (E484Q and L452R) but is inaccurate, has no specific meaning and should be avoided. The variant has also been referred to as the ‘India variant’ but this should also be avoided – it is unlikely to be able to say definitively where the variant first arose.

“B.1.617 has several mutations that are present in other variants of interest/concern or that have been shown to have antigenic escape in laboratory experiments. Discussed here are changes in positions 484, 452 and 681. E484Q is present in B.1.617. Mutations in position 484 are present in the three global variants of concern, but these variants contains E484K. There is limited evidence for the role of E484Q in immune escape – it was shown to have reduced neutralisation by some but not all convalescent plasma samples from people who have had natural infection with SARS-CoV-2 using an experimental system (Greaney et al., 2021, Cell Host & Microbe 29, 463–476). L452R is present in B.1.617. This is present in several variants of interest, including B.1.429 (associated with California). This mutation has been associated with weaker neutralisation of the virus by convalescent plasma from people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, and/or some monoclonal antibodies in laboratory experiments. P681R is present in B.1.617. P681R or P681H is also present in several variants under investigation in the UK, including A.23.1/E484K, B.1.1.7 and B1.318. This is located adjacent to the furin cleavage site of the spike protein, which could mean a change in spike protein processing or other changes in biology. More evidence is needed to understand the virus changes that result from the specific combination of mutations present in B.1.617.

Is B.1.617 driving the current wave in India or do we not know yet?

“India is currently witnessing a surge in marked surge in COVID-19 cases. The question is whether this is associated with the variant, with human behaviour (for example, the presence of large gatherings, and/or lack of preventive measures including hand washing, wearing masks and social distancing) or whether both are contributing. It is not clear at the present time whether B.1.617 is the main driver for the current wave.

“B.1.617 accounts for almost 70% of genomes submitted by India to GISAID, indicating that the variant is common in the isolates that went on to be sequenced – although this is a very small proportion compared with the total number of cases of infection. Most isolates sequenced by India originated from Maharashtra and West Bengal, but B.1.617 has been identified in several other states. An important caveat is that these data can be influenced by selection of samples for sequencing that are uneven across locations.

Will putting India on the government travel red list help prevent spread of this variant in the UK?

“The Prime Minister announced yesterday that India has now joined the UK government travel red list (as from this Friday). This means that people returning from India will be required to go into government-approved hotel quarantine for 10 days where they will undergo testing and any positive isolates sequenced. This is an important step in controlling further introduction of this variant into the UK.  The number of B.1.617 genomes detected in the UK has risen in the last 3 weeks. Even though this is at or less than 1% of the genomes sequenced in the UK overall, the upward trend in cases warrants action whilst ongoing uncertainties over the level of threat posed by this variant are evaluated. PHE indicated on Sunday that a few cases are not linked to travel – but the vast majority of cases have been in people who have travelled. Contact tracing, testing and genomic surveillance of people with COVID-19 will provide essential information on the extent of transmission in the UK that is no longer related to travel (community transmission), which will in turn inform public health actions.

What do we need to know to decide if B.1.617 should be classified as a ‘variant of concern’?

“B 1.617 is a currently a variant under investigation by PHE, which is defined as ‘a variant with mutations for which there is high confidence predictive data, or laboratory data, supporting significant adverse phenotypic change, but which do not meet the definition of a variant of concern, and there is evidence of community transmission in the UK or abroad’.

“To be classified as a variant of concern by PHE, the following need to be met:

• an increase in transmissibility or other detrimental change in epidemiology, and/or
• an increase in virulence or change in clinical disease presentation, and/or
• escape from immunity derived from natural infection, and/or
• a decrease in effectiveness of public health or clinical countermeasures including vaccination, treatment in current clinical use, or testing if the impact is such that it is not easily mitigated by standard laboratory quality and regulatory measures

“Ongoing study of B.1.617 in the UK and elsewhere is required and underway, to determine whether or not this threshold will be reached for B.1.617.”

 

Dr Jeffrey Barrett, Director of the Covid-19 genomics initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said:

“When we see a new variant of the virus appear, there are generally four kinds of information that we can use to evaluate it. One of those is laboratory experiments which we haven’t had time to do yet on B.1.617 and another is real world vaccine evidence which takes even more time. The third source of information is to look at the specific mutations in a variant and to compare that to other variants that we know more about, and the fourth is see how fast it is spreading.

“It can be difficult to get virus samples to do experiments on internationally as you need fairly recent samples, but I’m sure various international authorities are collaborating as best as they can to get these samples to be able to do the experiments.

“This variant has a couple of potentially concerning mutations but these are probably not as serious as some of the mutations present in the variants first seen in Kent, South Africa and Brazil. This could be because we have had less time to study them, so these mutations should be watched carefully. And in terms of spread, clearly this variant has increased in frequency in India around the time of their very large and tragic recent wave but I don’t think we yet know how much B.1.617 is driving that spread versus its spread coincidentally happening at the same time.

“It is certainly possible that there is a cause and effect relationship but there have only been about 1000 sequences published from India out of about 4 million cases in this wave so far. So we only have a tiny window into which variants are becoming the most common and it’s not clear if they are fully representative. Also, we did see some sequences of this B.1.617 variant late last year so if it is driving the wave in India it has taken several months to get to this point which would suggest it’s probably less transmissible than the Kent B.1.1.7 variant.”

 

Read more:

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-cases-of-variant-b-1-617-the-indian-variant-being-investigated-in-the-uk/

 

 

Read from top.

 

 

assange2

 

Recently, various versions of the origin of Covid-19 have become very actively considered by scientists and experts in various countries. On March 26, even Robert Redfield, the former head of the US Center for Disease Prevention and Control, stated that Covid-19 was after all created artificially, which, he said, was indicated by the peculiarities of the spread of the new type of coronavirus. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus admitted a week later that the source of the coronavirus infection had never been identified, and WHO continues to consider “all possible versions of the origin of the coronavirus.”

At an April 14 hearing before the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haynes also confirmed that the US intelligence community is considering two alternative versions of the origin of Covid-19, including a “laboratory accident”.

Although the United States is strenuously trying to argue that it had nothing to do with this deadly chimera of the 21st century, which has already claimed three million lives worldwide, such accusations against Washington have become more and more frequent in the conclusions of various experts. Even the British Daily Mail, in support of such accusations, emphasizes that back in 2017, when no one in the world even imagined a global coronavirus pandemic breaking out in 2019, US intelligence predicted Covid-19 and related restrictions in all countries of movement to curb its spread. On the basis of this alone, the assumptions that such “esoteric predictions” were clearly based on a perfect knowledge of the subject of the “prediction” from the activities of the numerous secret US bio-laboratories scattered around the world, many of which have appeared in recent years near the borders of China and Russia, become very strong.

And this brings to mind the significant historical experience of US biological genocide around the world. Suffice it in particular to recall the typhoid blankets with lice they used to wipe out as many Indians as possible. Or the brutal population sweeps in Australia, which were carried out not without the aid of the spread of deadly diseases. And also Pentagon’s Ranch Hand operation, which contaminated a large part of South Vietnam with Agent Orange defoliant…

Therefore, Beijing’s demand to the United States to provide information about experiments being conducted in US military biolaboratories, in particular in Ukraine and at Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, sounds very reasonable today. “We hope that the countries concerned and the United States will take a responsible and open stance, begin to cooperate with the WHO and invite its experts to conduct scientific research to find the sources of the origin of the coronavirus in the United States,” Beijing reasonably states.

And this demand is heard today not only from China, but also from many other countries, in which, or in close proximity to which, in recent years “specialists” of the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies have created a whole network of secret bio-laboratories. Two hundred such US biological warfare laboratories are now a direct threat to more than a dozen countries. The US has set up biolaboratories in 25 countries around the world — in the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and the former Soviet Union. In Ukraine alone there are a dozen and a half: in Odessa, Vinnitsa, Uzhgorod, Lviv (three), Kharkov, Kiev (also three), Kherson, and Ternopil. Several laboratories opened near Crimea and near Luhansk.

However, the US ratified the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972, but refused to accept its protocol on mutual control mechanisms in 2001, so it is not possible to verify Washington’s compliance with the Convention through international legal means. Washington is taking advantage of this by expanding its network of military biolaboratories around the world and their covert activities.

From time to time scandals and disputes related to US secret biolaboratories break out in all countries where they are located. And to illustrate the problems it is enough to refer to the activities of such “secret facilities” of the United States in Ukraine.

In 2005, Ukraine and the United States (as, incidentally, many other countries, where today the US secret biolaboratories are located) signed an agreement — between the Ministry of Health of Ukraine and the US Department of Defense “On Prevention of Spread of Technology, Pathogens and Knowledge that Can Be Used in the Development of Biological Weapons.” The very title of this treaty refers to the “development of biological weapons” as well as to the prevention of the dissemination of knowledge about them. The treaty explicitly states that if Ukraine recognizes any information as confidential, the US cannot publish it. And the persons who will have access to this information will act within the framework of the work with state secrets. The very fact of such secrecy in the absence of specific reports and the actual extraterritoriality of the laboratories, which are not even under the control of the Ukrainian government, make their work more than suspicious. After all, if such laboratories work for humanitarian purposes against dangerous viruses and bacteria, why is any information about such work classified?

The fact that, according to the American classifier, such laboratories exist only in Africa, in some Asian countries, and in the “victorious democracies” — Ukraine, Georgia, and a number of Central Asian countries — is also rather remarkable. All the while in Europe, not to mention the United States itself, there are no such laboratories. — Could it be that, where there is a good scientific and medical base, there is no need to fight dangerous infections? Or maybe just because the European Union is not officially an adversary of the United States today, and any experiments by Washington with bioweapons there will quickly become known and suppressed?

Still, of course, these “missteps” with secret biolaboratories can happen anywhere and the “results” of their activities can work against the initiators of such “research” themselves. Since 2009, the Ukrainian newspaper 2000 and a number of other Ukrainian media outlets have written more than a dozen articles about the American biological threat. Among them, in particular, the protests that took place in a small town near Kharkov, in Merefa, where they were going to build a laboratory building at the Veterinary Institute, which was eventually completed in 2015 and was nicknamed “the death lab near Kharkov.” The demand to investigate US biolaboratories in Ukraine was actively joined not only by the Ukrainian media and public organizations, but also by neighboring countries, which are well aware of the dangers of these facilities for them as well.

Another scandal with secret US biolaboratories in Ukraine erupted in April 2020 after Viktor Medvedchuk publicly addressed the president and the heads of the Ministry of Health, the Security Service of Ukraine and the prime minister, claiming that “15 military biolaboratories are operating in Ukraine.”  This topic was then continued by another Ukrainian publication Strana.ua, which published an article with a dozen questions to the president and other responsible officials, as well as a demand to hold accountable those who gave permission for the operation of “illegitimate foreign laboratories” in Ukraine that conduct experiments to create biological weapons, including on Ukrainian citizens.

Many Ukrainian media outlets have joined in the demand for an objective investigation and closure of US biolaboratories in Ukraine, publishing, in particular, their materials with the headlines “Journalists found out what secret US biolaboratories are doing in Ukraine,” as well as an X Files report. In response, the Kiev authorities, on explicit orders from Washington, began blocking the distribution of such articles and even the video material on 1+1 Channel.

A number of publications in various media have linked the laboratories’ activities to outbreaks of mysterious diseases in some areas of Ukraine. In particular, a virus causing hemorrhagic pneumonia, that occurred in Ternopil in 2009, as well as an outbreak of cholera in 2011. In January 2016, 20 servicemen died of a flu-like virus in Kharkov, more than 200 were hospitalized, and two months later there were already 364 deaths in Ukraine. In 2017, there was an outbreak of botulism in Kiev and Kherson, where people died due to a lack of serums (!), while the US biolaboratories operating there claimed to be directly tasked with fighting such pandemics. In 2012, thousands of Ukrainians “suddenly” became ill with measles, and the disease is now returning. In September 2016, an unknown intestinal infection broke out in Ismail (Odessa region), which particularly affected children.

Under these conditions, if the US biolaboratories do not become public, or if they do not close under public pressure, and against the background of US neglect of this issue, the world will undoubtedly face the abandonment of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. And this could be followed by the development by individual countries of their own biological weapons. But does the world, which has already paid the price of three million people for the Covid-19 pandemic that broke out of secret biolaboratories, really need this? Or will the world still force Washington to respect the opinions of other countries?

 

 

Vladimir Platov, expert on the Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2021/04/24/is-the-us-preparing-to-start-a-biological-war/

 

 

Read from top.

 

Read also:

https://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/38483

 

Free Julian Assange Today !!!!!!!!

the hypocrisy of western governments...

 

WASHINGTON -- A US virologist deleted his Twitter account after his email exchange with top US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci was exposed, which included claims that some of the novel coronavirus' features "(potentially) look engineered," according to a recent report by US magazine Newsweek.

The account of Kristian G. Andersen, a professor at the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research, was no longer accessible on June 6, Newsweek quoted the Internet archive The Wayback Machine as saying.

In an email sent to Fauci on Jan 31, 2020, Andersen said some of SARS-CoV-2's features "(potentially) look engineered."

He later added that the "unusual features of the virus" made up a "really small part" of the genome.

The email exchange between him and Fauci had been released by The Washington Post and Buzzfeed.

Andersen noted that following discussions with his team, they "all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change."

On March 17, 2020, Andersen and his colleagues published a paper in Nature Medicine in which they claimed COVID was not created in a lab or "purposefully manipulated," according to the report.

While defending the findings in his research paper, he also told Newsweek that the Wuhan lab leak idea was "based purely on speculation" and that he had not found any "credible evidence" to back it up.

 

Read more:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202106/11/WS60c2c8bfa31024ad0bac51fb.html

 

Read from top

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW Xxxxxxxxxxaaaaaa11111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

US impeded independent research into Covid origins – Lancet

 

Washington barred scientists from its laboratories manipulating SARS-CoV-like viruses, the British medical journal claimed

 

The US has prevented independent research into the origins of the virus that has provoked the global Covid-19 pandemic, a report by the Lancet Commission has said. The American authorities barred the researchers from accessing relevant laboratories and refused to disclose full information on the US studies of the virus and potentially its gene manipulation, the document published in the British medical journal on Wednesday said.

“Independent researchers have not yet investigated the US laboratories engaged in the laboratory manipulation of SARS-CoV-like viruses,” the report said while discussing the potential origins of the Covid-19 infection. Nor had they gained access to the research conducted at the Wuhan laboratory, which has been considered a possible place where the disease might have originated, the document added. 

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) also “resisted disclosing the details” of the research conducted in America on SARS-CoV-related viruses, which the US government agency has been supporting, according to the report. Eventually, only an “extensively redacted” version of the relevant data was provided, the document said, adding that it contains only as much information that was required by the Freedom of Information act lawsuits.

The lack of the needed data on the virus origins still prevents the researchers from determining the origin of the virus, the paper admits, adding that virtually any hypothesis in this field remains plausible. In particular, it said that “two main possible pathways” of its emergence should still be considered: a natural spillover event, in which a person contracted it from an animal, and a “research-related”incident.

The second pathway particularly suggests that a researcher could have become “infected in the field or in the laboratory with a natural virus, or … in the laboratory with a genetically manipulated virus,” the document said. 

“The search for the origins of the virus requires unbiased, independent, transparent, and rigorous work … supported by all governments,” the report noted. Washington has so far not commented on the Lancet Commission findings. 

The exact origins of the Covid-19 virus have yet to be conclusively proven. However, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated in February 2021 that it was most likely transmitted from an animal, possibly a bat, to humans. 

Earlier in September, an Israeli study concluded that bats are likely not to blame for the Covid-19 pandemic since there is no compelling evidence proving a link between bats and the disease outbreak.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/562874-us-impede-covid-research-lancet/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

 

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/38483

 

 

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