“Act Up, Fight Back, Fight AIDS!” The angry chanting grew louder as hundreds of protesters wove through the usually placid campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda on May 21, 1990.
With signs that read “Red Tape Kills Us” and “NIH — Negligence, Incompetence and Horror,” members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, marched toward a row of police officers in riot gear guarding Building One. Suddenly, the pack parted and a small group of protesters ran through the middle of the crowd, right to the police line, bearing torches spewing rainbow-colored smoke. Chaos erupted between the screaming crowd and police, each pushing and shoving back and forth.
ACT UP’s “Storm the NIH” had begun.
“It was spectacular,” Mark Harrington, a leading member of the group, remembered in a phone interview.
As confused NIH scientists and administrators looked out of their windows, the 1,000-strong demonstration then marched to Building 31, which housed the offices of the protests’ target: Anthony S. Fauci, then and now the chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
For months, ACT UP had been formally urging Fauci to include their members in the government’s development process for AIDS drugs. Fauci, now under attack by some Trump supporters for his response to the coronavirus pandemic, was in favor of the group’s participation.
“I was trying to get them into all the planning meetings for the clinical trials,” Fauci said last week, taking time out from the coronavirus fight to look back at another deadly disease he managed 30 years ago. But he met increasing resistance from the scientific community, who were put off by ACT UP’s tactics.
“We were putting Tony in a tough spot,” acknowledged Peter Staley, the ACT UP leader who spearheaded the protest.
ACT UP had formed in New York City in 1987 as an angry response to government inaction on finding drugs and treatments for AIDS patients. The group was motivated by rage, helplessness and grief, Harrington said, as they stood by and watched thousands of friends and lovers die of the human immunodeficiency virus that led to AIDS — what was then called a “gay plague.”
As more and more gay men died in the mid-1980s, and homophobia flourished, ACT UP staged theatrical protests at the Food and Drug Administration, on Wall Street and at New York’s City Hall. The most famous was a 1989 die-in at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to protest then-Cardinal John O’Connor’s opposition to teaching safe sex and distributing condoms.
The “Storm the NIH” protest was the culmination of the group’s public demonstrations about the deadly disease.
“We wanted a seat at the table,” Staley said, and for months before the protest pushed to have ACT UP organizers become voting members on all the scientific committees that set the research agenda at NIAID.
“One of the things that people in ACT UP said is that we are the people who are experiencing this novel disease, and we are the experts, not just the scientists and doctors,” said Garance Ruta, executive director of GEN magazine and an ACT UP member who was at the NIH protest.
The NIH demonstration also advocated for the group’s quest to reduce the dose and price of the only AIDS-fighting drug approved by the FDA at the time, AZT, made by Burroughs Wellcome Co.
“At $8,000 a year for users, AZT is said to be the most expensive prescription drug in history,” read a New York Times column in August 1989. The column also pointed out that about 35 percent of AIDS patients had either no health insurance or policies that did not pay for drugs.
Fauci was one of the younger scientists working on AIDS research at NIAID at the time, and Staley said ACT UP members began to get to know him. “All the older scientists thought we were crazy,” he said. “But Fauci wanted to hear what we had to say.”
“We liked Tony personally. He’s a brilliant scientist, a brilliant fighter of epidemics,” Staley said.
“I was becoming friends with some of them, like Peter Staley and Mark Harrington,” Fauci agreed. “I felt very strongly that we needed to get them into the planning process because they weren’t always right, but they had very, very good input.”
Fauci attended an ACT UP meeting in October 1989. After that, some of the group’s leaders on its Treatment and Data Committee would meet the NIAID chief and his deputy, Jim Hill, for dinner at Hill’s townhouse on Capitol Hill.
Fauci said he urged the scientific community and his own staff to include ACT UP members in the drug trial process. “I was pushing and pulling these people and screaming, ‘Hey, we have to deal with them,’ ” he said. “I was in a difficult position because I was trying to convince the establishment that ACT UP had something to offer.”
Fauci promised NIAID would become more inclusive, but after months with no action, ACT UP decided the only choice they had was a protest, Harrington said.
At a dinner with Fauci in March, Staley said, “Tony, we’ve got some bad news for you. We know you’ve been advocating for us on this. But we’ve decided to do a gigantic demonstration at the NIH, and it will be in front of your building.”
Fauci tried to talk them out of it, but Staley vowed not just to demonstrate, but to get arrested, too, according to Fauci.
Between March and May, ACT UP spread the word about “Storm the NIH” to its chapters across the country. The group took out full-page ads in The Washington Post.
ACT UP was renowned for creating what Staley called a six-ring circus at its demonstrations, and the NIH protest was no different. Gathering at the NIH gates that Monday morning in May, chapters were divided into “affinity groups,” each of which organized its own presentation, skit or protest focus.
“All the affinity groups gave themselves campy names, like CHER!, the Juicers or the Marys,” Staley explained. “I was in charge of a group called the Power Tools.”
A movie he saw featuring military pyrotechnics made him think about using colored smoke. He looked through a military magazine and learned smoke bombs in the shape of grenades were available in different colors. “I ordered all the colors of the rainbow, thinking, ‘That will make a statement,’ ” he said.
The day of the demonstration, he and Power Tools members taped the canisters to poles and hid them behind posters to get on campus.
Staley’s group stayed behind the bulk of the protesters, who marched ahead to confront about 200 police officers, some on horseback, who were clubbing some activists. Others set up a mock graveyard in front of Building 31, with tombstones describing deaths from “drug profiteers” or “AZT poisoning.”
Chanting, “NIH, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” according to United Press International, affinity groups carried banners, posters, mock coffins, and effigies — including one of Fauci. One group staged a die-in. Another formed a human snake that slid its way through the raucous crowd, each section labeled with a different opportunistic AIDS infection.
“One guy even had Fauci’s head on a stick,” Staley said.
It might have seemed otherwise, “but this was not a protest against research,” Ruta said. “It was a protest on behalf of research.”
Staley and his crew lit the smoke bombs and ran through the parting crowd. A roar went up from protesters as billows of red, yellow, blue, purple and green smoke filled the air. An Associated Press photo of screaming activists under a cloud of rainbow smoke eventually made it onto the cover of newspapers across the country.
Meanwhile, Fauci, looking out his office window, grew frustrated. “I didn’t like that degree of disruption on campus,” he said, concerned the rowdy action would further alienate scientists from including ACT UP in the drug development process.
Then Fauci noticed a protester climbing onto the building’s front overhang. It was Peter Staley. Police officers pulled Staley off the roof, lowering him into a band of officers who immediately handcuffed him. Fauci said he raced down to the first floor to make sure Peter was okay.
“I didn’t want him to get hurt because there were mounted police and that could be dangerous,” he said.
“A big, burly African American cop dragged me through the first floor of the building, and who should I run into, but Tony Fauci,” Staley said.
“Peter?” Fauci said.
“Hey, Tony,” Staley responded with a grin.
“Are you guys okay?” Fauci asked.
Staley laughed. “See — I told you I’d get arrested,” he said, adding, “I’m just doing my job,” surprising the officer that his perpetrator knew the head of the institute.
Staley was the first arrest of the day, he said, with about 80 more arrests following, according to The Post.
In The Post story, Fauci was critical of the protest, expressing concern that it could hurt AIDS researchers’ morale.
“It was interesting theater,” Fauci said at the time, “but it was not helpful.”
The next month, however, ACT UP could definitively declare victory. At the International Conference on AIDS in San Francisco, Fauci gave Harrington the good news: Activists, journalists and people with AIDS would be let into the AIDS Clinical Trials Group, Harrington said, and the trials would expand to include women of color, drug users and children.
It was a turning point — for both ACT UP and biomedical research, Harrington said.
All drug testing committees at NIH now have patient advocates, he noted, including NIH’s trial to test hydroxychloroquine and azythromicin.
Staley points out that community activists are now involved in coordinating efforts to combat covid-19, an outgrowth of ACT UP. Activists “are now in lockstep with scientists,” he said.
“Ever since the 1990 demonstration, we’ve been partners in fighting illnesses and diseases, and our enemies now are hesitant politicians and anti-science radio hosts,” he said. “We are now Fauci’s great defenders against the anti-science. And the world is better for it.” – WASHINGTON POST
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The Internets got agitated recently at the news that Moderna’s CEO, Stephane Bancel, dumped $400Million in Moderna stocks and nuked his Twitter account. Here’s why this shouldn’t surprise you and you should expect the worst any moment now.
Have you watched the former Blackrock director that went on Bannon’s War Room and prophesied that the Covid vaccines are a bubble that’s about to pop? Everything I’ve learned lately stands to support his claim.
If the dumping were a sudden and unusual move, this would indicate a recent event that shook the system, possibly rats leaving a sinking ship, a near threat for the business, as in:
That’s the case only partly, due to the stock crash overlapped with the incoming financial report, but a constant behavior over the span of months and years rather indicate a strategy and it’s associated with insider trading more often than not.
Surprisingly, it’s NPR of all the fakestream media who came in support of my suspicions, with a pretty merciless analysis of Moderna’s leadership financial behavior. And you know what’s funny? The piece dates all the way back to September 2020. I recommend reading the whole piece, I added the bolding and highlights :
Whether the coronavirus vaccine developed by Moderna succeeds or not, executives at the small biotech company have already made tens of millions of dollars by cashing in their stock. An NPR examination of official company disclosures has revealed additional irregularities and potential warning signs.
“On a scale of one to 10, one being less concerned and 10 being the most concerned,” said Daniel Taylor, an associate professor of accounting at the Wharton School, “this is an 11.”
Taylor said Moderna’s stock-selling practices appear well outside the norm, and raise questions about the company’s internal controls to prevent insider trading.
Since January, CEO Stéphane Bancel has sold roughly $40 million worth of Moderna stock held by himself or associated investment funds; Chief Medical Officer Tal Zaks has sold around $60 million; and President Stephen Hoge has sold more than $10 million.
Stéphane Bancel, chief executive officer of Moderna, has sold roughly $40 million worth of stock in the company since the beginning of this year.
The stock sales first came to widespread notice after Moderna announced positive early data from a vaccine trial in May [2020 – S.m.]. At that point, the company’s share price jumped and official disclosures showed executives cashing in their shares for millions of dollars.
“As long as stocks are sold after public announcements – and not before – one might conclude that for an executive with significant net worth tied up in the company, it’s a prudent thing to do,” said Marc Fagel, a former longtime enforcement official with the Securities And Exchange Commission (SEC). “But the optics aren’t great.”
The Moderna vaccine was quick to reach a phase 3 trial, and is seen as a promising contender. But, in some ways, the executives’ stock sales have overshadowed the company’s progress.
Advocates have questioned whether it’s appropriate for executives to privately profit before bringing the vaccine to market, especially when American taxpayers have committed roughly $2.5 billion to the company’s vaccine development and manufacture.
Here’s what NPR’s examination found:
Stock Sales Worth Tens Of Millions: Since June 1, NPR has found, company executives have sold roughly $90 million worth of Moderna stock. Rather than put a hold on the trades after facing intense criticism in May, company executives continued to sell.
Questionable Modifications To Stock Sale Plans: Moderna says its executives pre-scheduled their stock sales long in advance. Those schedules – known as 10b5-1 plans – can act as a defense to charges of insider trading. But the plans have to be put in place when executives do not have confidential inside information. NPR has found multiple executives adopted or modified their plans just before key announcements about the company’s vaccine. That has raised questions about whether they were aware of nonpublic information when they planned their stock trades.
Selling To Zero: Generally, corporate best practices suggest that a company’s leadership should hold on to at least some stock in their company to have “skin in the game.” That way, the thinking goes, an executive has an incentive to improve the company’s performance. As Moderna has been developing its coronavirus vaccine, two executives, including the Chief Medical Officer, have sold all their stock holdings in the company. The General Counsel has sold nearly all of her holdings.
In an interview with NPR, Ray Jordan, Moderna’s Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, said the company has strict internal policies in place to prevent illegal insider trading. For example, Jordan said, the company only allows employees to make changes to their stock sale schedules when they don’t have confidential inside information that could affect the company’s share price.
NPR asked Jordan why Moderna executives modified their 10b5-1 plans just before major announcements. Initially, Jordan said by email, “I believe you must have your dates wrong.”
NPR then provided documentation of those dates from the company’s official disclosures to the government, which Jordan did not dispute.
Jordan then said that even though multiple Moderna executives changed their 10b5-1 plans within one business day of announcements, the company had determined that those executives did not have “material nonpublic information” – a key term for insider trading – when they made those changes.
A spokesperson for the SEC declined to comment for this story.
From a relative unknown, to a key player in the vaccine race
Moderna launched in 2010 with a headquarters based in Cambridge, Mass., focused on using a technology called messenger RNA (or mRNA) to develop vaccines and therapeutics. The mRNA technology has been widely considered innovative, but remains largely unproven. The company has never brought a product to market. In early January, Moderna was trading for under $20 per share, and was valued at around six billion dollars.
Then Moderna announced that it had started collaborating on a coronavirus vaccine with scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is led by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
By April, the government had committed half a billion dollars to the Moderna vaccine project as part of Operation Warp Speed.
Since then, the company’s stock price has exploded. Press releases suggesting positive news from the scientific trials, or announcing additional commitments of taxpayer funding sent the share price to a peak of around $95, before dropping to between $60-$70 in recent months. The company is now valued at around $25 billion.
As a result, shares owned by Moderna executives suddenly became much more valuable. And those executives have cashed in tens of millions of dollars worth of stock, according to filings with the SEC.
The bad press and critical comments did not deter continued sales. Since June 1, NPR found, executives sold around $90 million worth of stock.
Public money, private gain
The U.S. government is making massive financial bets on several vaccine candidates. In all likelihood, only some of those vaccine candidates will prove sufficiently safe and effective.
“If the vaccine doesn’t work, you lost a lot of money,” Fauci has said. “But we feel this is serious enough that it’s worth the financial risk.”
But even if taxpayers lose money betting on Moderna, the company’s executives have already made millions.
“The insiders are making plenty of profit and they’re mostly doing it with our money,” said Margarida Jorge, a campaign director with the group Lower Drug Prices Now. “I’m absolutely for deploying public money in the interests of public health and the public good. But we don’t have any commitment from the administration that any of this investment is ultimately going to benefit real people.”
Moderna has argued that the company was only in a position to work with the government on a coronavirus vaccine, because it had spent a decade developing its mRNA technology with the support of private investors.
“The company has been funded over the years by billions of dollars of private investment,” Zaks told the Freakonomics podcast in August. “Those billions created the opportunity for the U.S. government to come in earlier this year and say, ‘I’m going to add some money to the pot to make sure that you get the development for this vaccine right.'”
[But they locked in the Government and its funding for mRNA technology years before SARS-COV2, as shown below, so this was a deliberate lie – S.m]
Trying to resuscitate the company with some archive work?
“Set it and forget it” stock plans
Moderna has offered another defense of those stock sales: the sales, representatives and executives say, were scheduled well in advance, and were unrelated to the market-moving announcements about the coronavirus vaccine. An NPR examination of the company’s financial filings tells a more complicated story.
The schedules are known as 10b5-1 plans. If your stock trades are on autopilot, the idea goes, then you can’t be accused of insider trading. But these “set it and forget it” plans have to be adopted when executives do not have “material nonpublic information,” to use the legal term.
In an interview with CNBC in July, CEO Bancel said he and other executives set up their 10b5-1 plans “a long time ago” – in December 2018 – and “obviously, when we set up those plans, none of us had any idea what was going to happen in 2020.”
In fact, NPR has found, Moderna executives, including Bancel himself, implemented new plans or modified older plans at multiple points in 2020, and right around key announcements related to the company’s vaccine.
On Jan. 21, 2020, for example, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tal Zaks amended his 10b5-1 plan. (It’s unclear what changes he made.)
Then, on Jan. 22, Moderna first widely confirmed that it was working with the government on a coronavirus vaccine. The following day, Jan. 23, the company announced it had received additional funding to support its coronavirus vaccine development.
NPR asked Moderna whether Zaks might have been aware of the collaboration with the government when he changed his stock trading plan.
“What was known on that particular day or not known, I couldn’t specifically talk to,” Moderna’s Jordan told NPR. But he said that the Moderna legal team only allows employees to change their 10b5-1 plans if they do not possess inside information that could affect the company’s share price.
Later, on Friday, March 13, three Moderna executives adopted new 10b5-1 plans, according to records reviewed by NPR: Zaks, Chief Technical Operations and Quality Officer Juan Andres, and then-Chief Financial Officer Lorence H. Kim. (Kim left the company in August 2020.)
On Monday, March 16 – one business day later – the company announced that it had given a participant the first dose of their vaccine as part of its phase 1 trial. The stock ended that day up 24% compared to the previous day’s close. Moderna was “bucking the trend” of the broader market, which was panicking over coronavirus fears, one CNBC host said at the time.
Timing Of Changes To Pre-Scheduled Stock Sales Raises Questions
Jan. 21 – Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tal Zaks amends his schedule of stock sales, known as a 10b5-1 plan.
Jan. 22 – Moderna widely confirms that it is working on a coronavirus vaccine with the National Institutes of Health. The company’s share price rises nearly 5% over the previous day’s close.
Jan. 23 – Moderna announces new funding from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
Mar. 13 – Chief Technical Operations Officer Juan Andres, Chief Financial Officer Lorence Kim, and Zaks adopt new 10b5-1 trading plans.
Mar. 16 – Moderna announces that it provided the first dose of its coronavirus vaccine to a participant in a phase 1 trial. Moderna stock climbs 24% over the previous day’s close.
May 18 – Moderna reports early positive data from its phase 1 trial. The company’s stock ends the day up 20% over the previous day’s close.
May 21 – CEO Stéphane Bancel adopts and amends multiple 10b5-1 trading plans.
May 29 – Moderna announces another milestone in its phase 2 coronavirus vaccine trial.
June 1 – President Stephen Hoge amends his 10b5-1 plan.
Despite the close timing, Jordan told NPR, “by the judgment of the legal team, there would not have been material, nonpublic information known” when executives entered into the new plans.
“Every company and individual is entitled to the presumption of innocence. That said, from the public’s perspective, this trading behavior looks very problematic,” said Taylor of the Wharton School, who first pointed out the timing of these changes to NPR.
“If I put on my SEC enforcement hat, I would certainly be asking, ‘What caused you to change the plan on a Friday?'” said Kurt Wolfe, who works as a defense attorney in securities cases for the firm Troutman Pepper. “I don’t think it’s a good fact pattern.”
On May 21 – in between announcements of major vaccine trial milestones on May 18 and May 29 – CEO Bancel amended and adopted 10b5-1 plans. And on June 1, President Hoge amended his trading plan.
“Amending a trading plan after a positive announcement, like trading after a positive announcement, is only problematic if the executive possesses material, nonpublic information at the time,” said Fagel. “Though repeated or questionably-timed changes to a trading plan will reduce its value as a defense to insider trading.”
Selling to zero
Using these 10b5-1 plans, two Moderna executives – Zaks and Andres – have sold all of their shares in the company. General Counsel Lori Henderson has sold nearly all of her shares.
In fact, roughly every week since June, Zaks has exercised stock options (meaning, he bought stock at a price set by the company as part of his compensation), and then immediately sold all of his shares for a significant profit.
[Isn’t this a great explanation for Bancel’s sales too?! – S.m]
On Aug. 24, for example, Zaks exercised stock options and bought 25,000 shares at bargain prices of between $12 to $21. He then immediately sold all of those shares for around $65 per share. Zaks ended up with a profit of nearly $1.2 million.
SEC filings indicate these trades are made under the 10b5-1 plan he adopted in March.
Selling so much stock can also raise concerns for investors – and the public – about why company leaders would sell now if they expected their vaccine to succeed later. After all, a safe and effective vaccine could send Moderna’s stock to even greater heights.
“It perhaps draws questions about how much they believe in it,” said Wolfe.
If the company does develop a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine, and its stock keeps rising, then “these trades will be water under the bridge,” said Fagel, the former SEC enforcement official.
But, Fagel warns, if the vaccine fails, then SEC regulators and angry investors may come looking for answers. In that case, he said, “both class action litigation and an SEC investigation would seem inevitable.”
NPR revelations end here, we’re actually just starting
So what we’ve learned is that Moderna looks like a stock market operation more than a medical one. The chiefs create momentums and then trade. And they use public money to bet and make billions, but more about that shortly.
This news is actually pretext to get you to know the real history of Moderna, a crux point in modern history in the widest sense. The stock dumping is not really news, it’s been happening for quite a while, indicating a long term strategy and business model, rather than a sudden or impulse move.
The next two older reports from Pharma’s own media – STAT, will cement the certainty that Moderna turned into a stock market bubble long ago, under the helms of Stephan Bancel. They don’t mind having some science to show, but that’s just the bait.
Ego, ambition, and turmoil: Inside one of biotech’s most secretive startups
At first glance, Moderna Therapeutics looks like the most enviable biotech startup in the world. It has smashed fundraising records and teamed up with pharmaceutical giants as it pursues a radical plan to revolutionize medicine by transforming human cells into drug factories.
But the reality is more complicated.
A STAT investigation found that the company’s caustic work environment has for years driven away top talent and that behind its obsession with secrecy, there are signs Moderna has run into roadblocks with its most ambitious projects.
At the center of it all is Stéphane Bancel, a first-time biotech CEO with an unwavering belief that Moderna’s science will work — and that employees who don’t “live the mission” have no place in the company. Confident and intense, Bancel told STAT that Moderna’s science is on track and, when it is finally made public, that it will meet the brash goal he himself has set: The new drugs will change the world.
But interviews with more than 20 current and former employees and associates suggest Bancel has hampered progress at Moderna because of his ego, his need to assert control and his impatience with the setbacks that are an inevitable part of science. Moderna is worth more than any other private biotech in the US, and former employees said they felt that Bancel prized the company’s ever-increasing valuation, now approaching $5 billion, over its science.
As he pursued a complex and risky strategy for drug development, Bancel built a culture of recrimination at Moderna, former employees said. Failed experiments have been met with reprimands and even on-the-spot firings. They recalled abusive emails, dressings down at company meetings, exceedingly long hours, and unexplained terminations.
At least a dozen highly placed executives have quit in the past four years, including heads of finance, technology, manufacturing, and science. In just the past 12 months, respected leaders of Moderna’s cancer and rare disease programs both resigned, even though the company’s remarkable fundraising had put ample resources at their disposal. Each had been at the company less than 18 months, and the positions have yet to be filled.
Lower-ranking employees, meanwhile, said they’ve been disappointed and confused by Moderna’s pivot to less ambitious — and less transformative — treatments. Moderna has pushed off projects meant to upend the drug industry to focus first on the less daunting (and most likely, far less lucrative) field of vaccines — though it is years behind competitors in that arena.
The company has published no data supporting its vaunted technology, and it’s so secretive that some job candidates have to sign nondisclosure agreements before they come in to interview. Outside venture capitalists said Moderna has so many investors clamoring to get in that it can afford to turn away any who ask too many questions. Some small players have been given only a peek at Moderna’s data before committing millions to the company, according to people familiar with the matter.
“It’s a case of the emperor’s new clothes,” said a former Moderna scientist. “They’re running an investment firm, and then hopefully it also develops a drug that’s successful.”
Like many employees and former employees, the scientist requested anonymity because of a nondisclosure agreement. Others would not permit their names to be published out of fear that speaking candidly about big players in the industry would hurt their job prospects down the road.
Moderna just moved its first two potential treatments — both vaccines — into human trials. In keeping with the culture of secrecy, though, executives won’t say which diseases the vaccines target, and they have not listed the studies on the public federal registry, ClinicalTrials.gov. Listing is optional for Phase 1 trials, which are meant to determine if a drug is safe, but most companies voluntarily disclose their work.
Investors say it’ll be worth the wait when the company finally lifts the veil.
“We think that when the world does get to see Moderna, they’re going to see something far larger in its scope than anybody’s seen before,” said Peter Kolchinsky, whose RA Capital Management owns a stake in the company.
The Moderna offices in Cambridge, Mass.ARAM BOGHOSIAN FOR STAT
Bancel, meanwhile, said he is aware of the criticism of him and has taken some steps to address it. After scathing anonymous comments about Moderna’s management began showing up online, Bancel went to Silicon Valley to get tips on employee retention from the human resources departments of Facebook, Google, and Netflix. But he makes no apologies for tumult past or present, pointing to the thousands of patients who might be saved by Moderna’s technology.
“You want to be the guy who’s going to fail them? I don’t,” he said in an interview from his glassy third-floor office. “So was it an intense place? It was. And do I feel sorry about it? No.”
An ambitious CEO dreams big
Bancel, 44, had no experience running a drug development operation when one of biotech’s most successful venture capitalists tapped him to lead Moderna. He’d spent most of his career in sales and operations, not science.
But he had made no secret of his ambition.
A native of France, Bancel earned a master’s in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from Harvard in 2000. As Harvard Business School classmates rushed to cash in on the dot-com boom, Bancel laid out a plan to play “chess, not checkers.”
“I was always thinking, one day, somebody will have to make a decision about me getting a CEO job,” he told an audience at his alma mater in April. “… How do I make sure I’m not the bridesmaid? How do I make sure that I’m not always the person who’s almost selected but doesn’t get the role?”
He went into sales and rose through the operational ranks at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, eventually leading the company’s Belgian operation. And in 2007, at just 34, he achieved his goal, stepping in as CEO of the French diagnostics firm bioMérieux, which employs roughly 6,000 people.
The company improved its margins under Bancel’s tenure, and he developed a reputation as a stern manager who got results, according to an equities analyst who covered bioMérieux at the time.
“He doesn’t suffer fools lightly,” the analyst said, speaking on condition of anonymity to comply with company policy. “I think if you’re underperforming, you’ll probably find yourself looking for another job.”
Bancel’s rise caught the eye of the biotech investment firm Flagship Ventures, based here in Cambridge. Flagship CEO Noubar Afeyan repeatedly tried to entice him to take over one of the firm’s many startups, Bancel said. But he rejected one prospect after another because the startups seemed too narrow in scope.
Moderna was different.
The company’s core idea was seductively simple: cut out the middleman in biotech.
For decades, companies have endeavored to craft better and better protein therapies, leading to new treatments for cancer, autoimmune disorders, and rare diseases. Such therapies are costly to produce and have many limitations, but they’ve given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry. The anti-inflammatory Humira, the world’s top drug at $14 billion in sales a year, is a shining example of protein therapy.
Moderna’s technology promised to subvert the whole field, creating therapeutic proteins inside the body instead of in manufacturing plants. The key: harnessing messenger RNA, or mRNA.
In nature, mRNA molecules function like recipe books, directing cellular machinery to make specific proteins. Moderna believes it can play that system to its advantage by using synthetic mRNA to compel cells to produce whichever proteins it chooses. In effect, the mRNA would turn cells into tiny drug factories.
It’s highly risky. Big pharma companies had tried similar work and abandoned it because it’s exceedingly hard to get RNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects. But if Moderna can get it to work, the process could be used to treat scores of diseases, including cancers and rare diseases that can be death sentences for children.
Bancel was intrigued. He knew it was a gamble, he told STAT, “but if I don’t do it, and it works, I’m just going to kick myself every morning.”
And so he became the company’s CEO — and soon developed an almost messianic reverence for the mRNA technology.
Despite having never worked with RNA before, Bancel said he sat around the table with his core team in the early days of the company, dreaming up experiments. As a result, he is listed as a co-inventor on more than 100 of Moderna’s early patent applications, unusual for a CEO who is not a PhD scientist.
Lavishly funded Moderna hits safety problems in bold bid to revolutionize medicine
SAN FRANCISCO — Moderna Therapeutics, the most highly valued private company in biotech, has run into troubling safety problems with its most ambitious therapy, STAT has learned — and is now banking on a mysterious new technology to keep afloat its brash promise of reinventing modern medicine.
Exactly one year ago, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel talked up his company’s “unbelievable” future before a standing-room-only crowd at the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference here. He promised that Moderna’s treatment for a rare and debilitating disease known as Crigler-Najjar syndrome, developed alongside biotech giant Alexion Pharmaceuticals, would enter human trials in 2016.
It was to be the first therapy using audacious new technology that Bancel promised would yield dozens of drugs in the coming decade.
But the Crigler-Najjar treatment has been indefinitely delayed, an Alexion spokeswoman told STAT. It never proved safe enough to test in humans, according to several former Moderna employees and collaborators who worked closely on the project. Unable to press forward with that technology, Moderna has had to focus instead on developing a handful of vaccines, turning to a less lucrative field that might not justify the company’s nearly $5 billion valuation.
“It’s all vaccines right now, and vaccines are a loss-leader,” said one former Moderna manager. “Moderna right now is a multibillion-dollar vaccines company, and I don’t see how that holds up.”
Bancel made no mention of the Crigler-Najjar drug when he spoke Monday before a similarly packed room at this year’s J.P. Morgan conference.
His presentation instead focused on four vaccines that the company is moving through the first phase of clinical trials: two target strains of influenza, a third is for Zika virus, and the fourth remains a secret. Bancel clicked through graphs of data from animal studies before hurrying on to tout Moderna’s balance sheet and discuss the company’s cancer vaccines, slated for clinical testing later this year.
When STAT asked Bancel after the presentation about Crigler-Najjar, he deferred to Alexion.
In need of a Hail Mary
Founded in 2012, Moderna reached unicorn status — a $1 billion valuation — in just two years, faster than Uber, Dropbox, and Lyft, according to CB Insights. The company’s premise: Using custom-built strands of messenger RNA, known as mRNA, it aims to turn the body’s cells into ad hoc drug factories, compelling them to produce the proteins needed to treat a wide variety of diseases.
But mRNA is a tricky technology. Several major pharmaceutical companies have tried and abandoned the idea, struggling to get mRNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects.
Bancel has repeatedly promised that Moderna’s new therapies will change the world, but the company has refused to publish any data on its mRNA vehicles, sparking skepticism from some scientists and a chiding from the editors of Nature.
The indefinite delay on the Crigler-Najjar project signals persistent and troubling safety concerns for any mRNA treatment that needs to be delivered in multiple doses, covering almost everything that isn’t a vaccine, former employees and collaborators said.
The company did disclose a new technology on Monday that it says will more safely deliver mRNA. It’s called V1GL. Last month, Bancel told Forbes about another new technology, N1GL.
But in neither case has the company provided any details. And that lack of specificity has inevitably raised questions.
Three former employees and collaborators close to the process said Moderna was always toiling away on new delivery technologies in hopes of hitting on something safer than what it had. (Even Bancel has acknowledged, in an interview with Forbes, that the delivery method used in Moderna’s first vaccines “was not very good.”)
Are N1GL and V1GL better? The company has produced no data to answer that question. When STAT asked about new technologies, Bancel referred questions to the company’s patent filings.
The three former employees and collaborators said they believe N1GL and V1GL are either very recent discoveries, just in the earliest stages of testing — or else new names slapped on technologies Moderna has owned for years.
“[The technology] would have to be a miraculous, Hail Mary sort of save for them to get to where they need to be on their timelines,” one former employee said. “Either [Bancel] is extremely confident that it’s going to work, or he’s getting kind of jittery that with a lack of progress he needs to put something out there.”
Former employees and collaborators who spoke with STAT requested anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements — which the highly secretive Moderna requires even some job candidates to sign.
A STAT investigation last year found that Bancel had driven away top talent from Moderna with a culture of recrimination and a caustic work environment, including on-the-spot firings for failed experiments.
The company, based in Cambridge, Mass., seems to have repaired its reputation among many rank-and-file employees, winning workplace accolades from Science Magazine and the Boston Globe, but Moderna has lost more than a dozen top scientists and managers in the past four years, despite its vast financial resources.
A bug in the software
Bancel, a first-time biotech CEO, has dismissed questions about Moderna’s potential. He describes mRNA as a simple way to develop treatments for scores of ailments. As he told STAT over the summer, “mRNA is like software: You can just turn the crank and get a lot of products going into development.”
It seems clear, however, that the software has run into bugs.
Patients with Crigler-Najjar are missing a key liver enzyme needed to break down bilirubin, a yellowish substance that crops up in the body as old red blood cells break down. Without that enzyme, bilirubin proliferates in the blood, leading to jaundice, muscle degeneration, and even brain damage.
In Moderna’s eyes, the one-in-million disease looked like an ideal candidate for mRNA therapy. The company crafted a string of mRNA that would encode for the missing enzyme, believing it had hit upon an excellent starting point to prove technology could be used to treat rare diseases.
But things gradually came apart last year.
Every drug has what’s called a therapeutic window, the scientific sweet spot where a treatment is powerful enough to have an effect on a disease but not so strong as to put patients at too much risk. For mRNA, that has proved elusive.
Before COVID-19, the company’s secretive nature, and its failure to deliver a functional product, was drawing comparisons to the infamous biotech startup Theranos. Similar to Moderna, Theranos rarely published any peer-reviewed material. Like Moderna, Theranos mastered the networking game, and recruited high profile individuals to its board in order to vouch for the company’s “revolutionary technologies.” Once valued at well over $10 Billion, Theranos collapsed after it was revealed that the company was running a massive fraud scheme, in addition to its failure to implement its promised blood testing technology.
“Now an obscure lawsuit filed in British Columbia in October sheds light on one of Moderna’s key partners, and through it FORBES can reveal details on Moderna’s amazing but still untested technology.
It appears that the first two products Moderna has entered into clinical trials rely on technology from a small outfit in Vancouver, British Columbia, called Acuitas Therapeutics. (Acuitas is so small, in fact, that its worldwide headquarters are in its CEO’s single-family home.)
Almost all medicines either block proteins–the building blocks of life–or, in the case of expensive biotech drugs, are proteins themselves. But Moderna has been promising to hack an entirely different part of life’s cookbook. In order to turn genetic information encoded in DNA into the cellular machines that actually are proteins, living things use a messenger chemical called mRNA.
Creating these mRNA drugs is a big challenge on many levels. For them to work, Moderna needs to deliver mRNA to the body’s cells. By itself mRNA breaks down in the bloodstream. Tiny Acuitas specializes in one method: lipid-nanoparticle delivery systems. Its technology essentially wraps the mRNA into balls of fat that disguise the drug so that the target cells will readily ingest it.
“Although we are small,” says Thomas Madden, chief executive of Acuitas, “I believe the technology we have developed is highly effective.”
The problem for Madden and Moderna is that Acuitas doesn’t actually own the technology it has licensed to Moderna. The tech belongs to a third company, publicly traded Arbutus, which recently decided to terminate the license for the tech that it had granted to Acuitas. That’s why Acuitas filed the lawsuit in British Columbia, to protect the deal it had. Arbutus immediately countersued, claiming its deal with Acuitas didn’t cover Moderna’s medicines.
The legal mess has its roots in Moderna’s 2011 start, when Robert Langer, an MIT professor, Moderna board member and founder of dozens of biotech companies, told Bancel that Moderna was too underfunded and small to create its own delivery system. So Moderna vetted over a dozen external delivery methods for mRNA and settled on at least three. One belonged to Arbutus, but Moderna turned to tiny Acuitas to get access to it.
Acuitas was formed in 2009 by Madden after a merger eliminated his position at Arbutus’ predecessor, Tekmira Pharmaceuticals. After a contentious lawsuit Madden was able to license from his former employer the novel tech he had helped develop, and Bancel claims Moderna chose to work with Acuitas because it had “the people and the capabilities.”
But that doesn’t explain why Moderna–flush with capital–didn’t make sure that sublicensing through Acuitas would be okay with Arbutus before advancing its new drugs into human studies.
Bancel met with FORBES at a Brooklyn coffee shop on a recent Saturday to dispel the implications of the lawsuit. He is dismissive of Acuitas’ technology. “We knew it was not very good,” he says. “It was just okay.”
He further explains that Moderna is in the process of producing its own nanoparticle lipids. One such lipid, N1GEL (called “Nigel” internally), appears to cause less inflammation than Acuitas’ version. Another is being licensed from Merck. Bancel says Moderna has stopped using the Acuitas tech for new drugs.
That still leaves a somewhat messy situation for any Moderna vaccines that are being developed using Acuitas’ tech.
Data from one vaccine is expected early next year. If results are good, it could lead to a sizzling-hot initial public offering, even if the Canadian lawsuit ultimately affords Arbutus bigger royalty payments from Moderna.”
Well, the two tiny Canadian companies mentioned above bring royalties to the Canada’s treasury (should I say The British Crown?), so don’t expect Trudeau to backpedal too soon
AND IF ONLY THEY HUSSLED WITH PRIVATE FUNDS, AS THEY CLAIMED…
Moderna chief keep claiming that they started to use public funds only as a patch on infrastructure, science and funding they’ve built for years.
Wrong!
It’s known that NIH + NIAID have long been one of their main sources for the “lavish funding” mentioned earlier and when they locked in the government support, they actually started to leverage it and attract even more private funds, in an self-feeding loop that created today’s monster-bubble.
Very few people know they even got money from BARDA and DARPA. As in “military funds”.
Remember this lie from earlier? “The company has been funded over the years by billions of dollars of private investment,” Zaks told the Freakonomics podcast in August. “Those billions created the opportunity for the U.S. government to come in earlier this year and say, ‘I’m going to add some money to the pot to make sure that you get the development for this vaccine right.'” Watch this claim getting nuked:
This grid above looks familiar to you? It does to me, but it’s not blood from people who underwent Covid genetic therapies, just something similar. Taken from:
KEI asks DOD to investigate failure to disclose DARPA funding in Moderna patents
by Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
Luis Gil Abinader has taken a deep dive into Moderna’s surprising practice of never declaring government funding in its 126 patents and 154 patent applications, despite having had funding from multiple federal agencies.
One outcome of his research is a 25 page report (RN-2020-3) on Moderna’s failure to report funding from DARPA, and a request by KEI to DOD and DARPA to remedy this, including by taking title to patents where disclosures should have been made. (Text of letter below, and PDF version here).
KEI will also send a letter to BARDA. The letter below was addressed to DOD and DARPA, and focuses on their funding.
Context
The obligation to disclose federal funding in patent applications has been subject to presidential executive orders, statutes, regulations and contracts, including those cited and quoted in Abinader’s report. The disclosure clarifies the public’s rights in the inventions and the obligations on the entity getting the money, on everything from the government’s worldwide royalty free license to the public’s march-in rights, obligations to make inventions available to the public on reasonable terms, and additional safeguards that can be exercised by a government inclined to do so.
Secondly, the disclosure changes the narrative about who has financed the inventive activity, often the most risky part of development.
One of the earlier norms on this was Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9424, on the Establishment of a Register of Government interests in patents.
In 2018, the regulations on disclosure were modified by NIST (see 83 FR 15954), where, among other things, the government gave itself unlimited time to remedy a failure to disclose federal funding, to eliminate one loophole that created an incentive ignore the disclosure requirement.
In the past, the US Department of Defense has taken title to patents where federal funding was not disclosed. See: Campbell Plastics v. Brownlee, 389 F.3d 1243 (Fed. Cir. 2004).
The research on the Moderna/DARPA funding is outlined in a 25 page August 27, 2020 report by Luis Gil Abinader, titled: “Moderna failures to disclose DARPA funding in patented inventions.” RN-2020-3
Below is the text of the KEI letter to Dr. Mark T. Esper, Secretary of Defense, and Dr. Amy Jenkins, of the Pandemic Prevention Platform for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), regarding the apparent failure by Moderna to disclose DARPA funding in patent applications. PDF copy here:
2020. September 18. DARPA letter to KEI confirming investigation of Moderna for failure to report government funding in patent applications. https://www.keionline.org/33970
2020. September 4. BARDA is investigating Moderna’s failures to disclose BARDA funding in patent applications. https://www.keionline.org/33907
2020. September 2. KEI request to BARDA concerning Moderna obligations to disclose federal funding in patent applications. https://www.keionline.org/33892
2020. August 30. DARPA announces investigation into Moderna’s apparent failures to disclose mRNA vaccine patents. https://www.keionline.org/33832
2020. August 28. KEI asks DOD to investigate failure to disclose DARPA funding in Moderna patents. https://www.keionline.org/33763
2020. August 27. 2020:3 KEI Research Note: Moderna failures to disclose DARPA funding in patented inventions. https://www.keionline.org/rn-2020-3
2020. August 5. BARDA Responds to KEI, Public Citizen Letter Asking BARDA to Enforce Moderna Contract. https://www.keionline.org/33633
2020. August 4. KEI and Public Citizen request BARDA to address Moderna’s noncompliance with COVID-19 vaccine contract term. https://www.keionline.org/33618
2020. July 1. KEI receives seven new contracts for COVID 19 research from BARDA and DOD, including five using “Other Transactions Authority” that weaken or eliminate Bayh-Dole and FAR Safeguards. https://www.keionline.org/covid19-ota-contracts
Washington Post 2020. August 28. “Moderna failed to disclose federal support in vaccine patents, researchers say: The company with a leading coronavirus vaccine candidate did not adhere to a law designed to protect public investment.” Washington Post. Christopher Rowland. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/28/moderna-vaccine-patents-darpa-funding/
Financial Times 2020. August 29. “US government’s Darpa probes Moderna’s vaccine patents: Researchers accuse biotech company of failing to disclose federal grants in patents which also cover Covid-19 candidate.” Financial Times. Donato Paolo Mancini. https://www.ft.com/content/2be1f87e-9e96-4e23-9cc5-33ba35e50586
Moderna’s vaccine was developed with support from the NIAID, and, as covered in a past fact check, analysis from Axios found that the National Institutes of Health, of which the NIAID is part, may own intellectual property used in producing Moderna’s vaccine. Dr. Francis Collins, director of NIH, has also said that NIH has a stake in intellectual property used in the vaccine, though what exactly this means in practical terms is unclear.
“Valera’s efforts (Moderna subsidiary) have resulted in the demonstration of preclinical efficacy of Moderna’s mRNA-based vaccines in multiple viral disease models, Moderna said.
In the partnership with the Gates Foundation, Valera will apply its mRNA vaccine platform as well as Moderna’s drug platform Messenger RNA Therapeutics™. Designed to produces human proteins, antibodies, and entirely novel protein constructs inside patient cells, the therapeutics are secreted or active intracellularly.” – Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News
To avoid a conflict of interest, Slaoui resigned from the board of the Massachusetts-based biotech firm Moderna, which had been developing a vaccine for the coronavirus. He stepped down but he didn’t give up his stakes in Moderna, as the Daily Beast reports:
“Slaoui’s ownership of 156,000 Moderna stock options, disclosed in required federal financial filings, sparked concerns about a conflict of interest. Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren called Slaoui out over the matter on Twitter: “It is a huge conflict of interest for the White House’s new vaccine czar to own $10 million of stock in a company receiving government funding to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Dr. Slaoui should divest immediately.” The company’s shares skyrocketed last month after news broke of the $483 million in federal funding to work on a coronavirus vaccine. Slaoui could not immediately be reached for comment on the matter.”
Slaoui also sits on the boards of SutroVax, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and the PhRMA Foundation
So this has never been about health, just a global scale racketeering operation that’s coming to light about about to go bust. You can speed up this process simply by spreading this expose far and wide!
UPDATE MARCH 21, 2022: VOILA!
Via our ex-BlackRock friend Edward Dowd. I rest my case, but I bet they will “unrest” it soon.
Both Pfizer+Moderna have issued huge 2022 revenue guidance to Wall Street for C-19 vaccines: combined nearly 3 billion doses & ~$50b in revenue.
But mRNA demand has waned.
If they don't sell 4th doses, they may need to break their promises to Wall St. and lower their guidance. pic.twitter.com/K0HMdfFBPu
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! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
“In 2003, 04, 05, I was investigating this story. Children in an NYC orphanage (and the foster care system) used in clinical trials. The Associated Press took it national and found it going on in seven or more states. “Some states declined to participate in medical experiments. Tennessee said its foster care rules generally prohibit enlisting children in such trials. California requires a judge’s order. And Wisconsin “has absolutely never allowed, nor would we even consider, any clinical experiments with the children in our foster care system,” spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis said. Officials estimated that 5 percent to 10 percent of the 13,878 children enrolled in pediatric AIDS studies funded by NIH since the late 1980s were in foster care. More than two dozen Illinois foster children remain in studies today. ” No medical records were ever made available to official investigators. You make up your own mind.”
– Liam Scheff
A National Scandal: AIDS Drug Experiments on Foster Care Children – Associated Press
On March 10, 2004, The Alliance for Human Research Protection filed a complaint with the FDA and the federal Office of Human Research Protection about a series of AIDS drug experiments conducted on New York City children in foster care. That complaint prompted two separate investigations by the FDA and OHRP which are still on-going.
Articles in The New York Post and a documentary by BBC raised the alarm among the African-American and Latino community in NY-some of who have been protesting weekly in front of Incarnation Children’s Center, the site of some of the drug experiments.
The Associated Press AP has just released its investigative report: the problem is a national scandal–the experiments were conducted in “at least seven states — Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Colorado and Texas — and involved more than four dozen different studies.
AP’s investigation found that 13,878 children had been enrolled in pediatric AIDS studies funded by the government since the late 1980s. Of these, officials estimated that 5 percent to 10 percent were in foster care. Their age ranged from infants to late teens.
“More than two dozen Illinois foster children remain in studies today.”
Those who conducted the experiments in violation of federal regulations, are supported by taxpayers – thus they have a public responsibility which they violated. The children who were targeted to serve as human drug testing subjects – mostly poor children of color – were not afforded the protection of a personal advocate – as is mandated by federal regulations. (45 Code of Federal Regulations 46.409)
The institutional culture of arrogance is demonstrably in evidence at both medical research centers and government agencies: “Our position is that advocates weren’t needed,” said Marilyn Castaldi, spokeswoman for Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York.
And officials of NYC Administration of Child Services “defend the decision to enlist foster children en masse, saying there was a crisis in the early 1990s and research provided the best treatment possibilities.”
The children are reported to have suffered painful side effects “such as rashes, vomiting and sharp drops in infection-fighting blood cells as they tested antiretroviral drugs to suppress AIDS or other medicines to treat secondary infections.”
In one study testing the drug dapsone, “at least 10 children died from a variety of causes, including four from blood poisoning, and researchers said they were unable to determine a safe, useful dosage. They said the deaths didn’t appear to be “directly attributable” to dapsone but nonetheless were “disturbing.”
“overall mortality while receiving the study drug was significantly higher in the daily dapsone group. This finding remains unexplained,” the researchers concluded.
“Another study involving foster children in the 1990s treated children with different combinations of adult antiretroviral drugs. Among 52 children, there were 26 moderate to severe reactions — nearly all in infants. The side effects included rash, fever and a major drop in infection-fighting white blood cells.
At least three states declined to use children in foster care in medical experiments: Tennessee said its foster care rules generally prohibit enlisting children in such trials. California requires a judge’s order. And Wisconsin “has absolutely never allowed, nor would we even consider, any clinical experiments with the children in our foster care system,” spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis said.
Not addressed in the AP report is the amount of money that these trials generated for the institutions involved in the experiments.
***The NYC Council, general welfare committee is holding a hearing about the unethical experiments conducted in NYC. The hearing will take place at City Hall at 11:15.
For information and to register to speak, call: Ms. Jackie Sherman at 212-788-7015
Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav 212-595-8974
Researchers Tested AIDS Drugs on Children – Associated Press
By JOHN SOLOMON 11:08 AM PDT, May 4, 2005
WASHINGTON – Government-funded researchers tested AIDS drugs on hundreds of foster children over the past two decades, often without providing them a basic protection afforded in federal law and required by some states, an Associated Press review has found.
The research funded by the National Institutes of Health spanned the country. It was most widespread in the 1990s as foster care agencies sought treatments for their HIV-infected children that weren’t yet available in the marketplace.
The practice ensured that foster children — mostly poor or minority — received care from world-class researchers at government expense, slowing their rate of death and extending their lives. But it also exposed a vulnerable population to the risks of medical research and drugs that were known to have serious side effects in adults and for which the safety for children was unknown.
The research was conducted in at least seven states — Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Colorado and Texas — and involved more than four dozen different studies. The foster children ranged from infants to late teens, according to interviews and government records.
Several studies that enlisted foster children reported patients suffered side effects such as rashes, vomiting and sharp drops in infection-fighting blood cells as they tested antiretroviral drugs to suppress AIDS or other medicines to treat secondary infections.
In one study, researchers reported a “disturbing” higher death rate among children who took higher doses of a drug. That study was unable to determine a safe and effective dosage.
The government provided special protections for child wards in 1983. They required researchers and their oversight boards to appoint independent advocates for any foster child enrolled in a narrow class of studies that involved greater than minimal risk and lacked the promise of direct benefit. Some foster agencies required the protection regardless of risks and benefits.
Advocates must be independent of the foster care and research agencies, have some understanding of medical issues and “act in the best interests of the child” for the entirety of the research, the law states.
However, researchers and foster agencies told AP that foster children in AIDS drug trials often weren’t given such advocates even though research institutions many times promised to do so to gain access to the children.
Illinois officials believe none of their nearly 200 foster children in AIDS studies got independent monitors even though researchers signed a document guaranteeing “the appointment of an advocate for each individual ward participating in the respective medical research.”
New York City could find records showing 142 — less than a third — of the 465 foster children in AIDS drug trials got such monitors even though city policy required them. The city has asked an outside firm to investigate.
Likewise, research facilities including Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said they concluded they didn’t provide advocates for foster kids.
Some states declined to participate in medical experiments. Tennessee said its foster care rules generally prohibit enlisting children in such trials. California requires a judge’s order. And Wisconsin “has absolutely never allowed, nor would we even consider, any clinical experiments with the children in our foster care system,” spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis said.
Officials estimated that 5 percent to 10 percent of the 13,878 children enrolled in pediatric AIDS studies funded by NIH since the late 1980s were in foster care. More than two dozen Illinois foster children remain in studies today.
Some foster children died during studies, but state or city agencies said they could find no records that any deaths were directly caused by experimental treatments.
Researchers typically secured permission to enroll foster children through city or state agencies. And they frequently exempted themselves from appointing advocates by concluding the research carried minimal risk and the child would directly benefit because the drugs had already been tried in adults.
“Our position is that advocates weren’t needed,” said Marilyn Castaldi, spokeswoman for Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York.
If they decline to appoint advocates under the federal law, researchers and their oversight boards must conclude that the experimental treatment affords the same or better risk-benefit possibilities than alternate treatments already in the marketplace. They also must abide by any additional protections required by state and local authorities.
Many of the studies that enrolled foster children occurred after 1990 when the government approved using the drug AZT — an effective AIDS treatment — for children.
Arthur Caplan, head of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said advocates should have been appointed for all foster children because researchers felt the pressure of a medical crisis and knew there was great uncertainty as to how children would react to AIDS medications that were often toxic for adults.
“It is exactly that set of circumstances that made it absolutely mandatory to get those kids those advocates,” Caplan said. “It is inexcusable that they wouldn’t have an advocate for each one of those children.
“When you have the most vulnerable subjects imaginable — kids without parents — you really do have to come in with someone independent, who doesn’t have a dog in this fight,” he said.
Those who made the decisions say the research gave foster kids access to drugs they otherwise couldn’t get. And they say they protected the children’s interest by carefully explaining risks and benefits to state guardians, foster parents and the children themselves.
“I understand the ethical dilemma surrounding the introduction of foster children into trials,” said Dr. Mark Kline, a pediatric AIDS expert at Baylor College of Medicine. He enrolled some Texas foster kids in his studies, and doesn’t recall appointing advocates for them.
“To say as a group that foster children should be excluded from clinical trials would have meant excluding these children from the best available therapies at the time,” he said. “From an ethical perspective, I never thought that was a stand I could take.”
Illinois officials directly credit the decision to enroll HIV-positive foster kids with bringing about a decline in deaths — from 40 between 1989 and 1995 to only 19 since.
NIH, the government health research agency that funded the studies, did not track researchers to determine if they appointed advocates. Instead, the decision was left to medical review boards made up of volunteers at each study site.
A recent Institute of Medicine study concluded those Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) were often overwhelmed, dominated by scientists and not focused enough on patient protections. An ethicist who served 22 years on such boards said they lack the resources to ensure the safety of foster children.
“Over the last half century, IRBs have basically broken under the strain of some of the structural changes in research,” said Gregory E. Pence, a University of Alabama-Birmingham bioethicist.
The U.S. Office for Human Research Protections, created to protect research participants after the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies on black men, is investigating the use of foster children in AIDS research. The office declined to discuss the probe.
NIH said it considers patient safety its top priority and awaits the outcome of the investigation. “If we find that patient protections need further strengthening, we will take action to do so,” spokesman John Burklow said.
AP’s review found that if children were old enough — usually between 5 and 10 — they also were educated about the risks and asked to consent. Sometimes, foster parents or biological parents were consulted; other times not.
“Our policy was to try and contact the (biological) parents because it was fairly common when we got done the foster kid would go back to the parents,” said Dr. Ross McKinney, a pediatrics AIDS expert at Duke University.
Research and foster agencies declined to make foster parents or children in the drug trials available for interviews, or to provide information about individual drug dosages, side effects or deaths, citing medical privacy laws.
Other families who participated in the same drug trials told AP their children mostly benefited but parents needed to carefully monitor potential side effects. Foster children, they said, need the added protection of an independent advocate.
“I don’t believe a foster care parent can do it,” said Vinnie DiPoalo, a New Jersey woman whose 10-year-old adopted son has participated in three AIDS drug trials. “There are informed consents that have to be signed. There are follow-up blood appointments.
“I think that’s the role the advocate should take, because a foster parent may only have this child for three months and then the child moves on and someone needs to be watching all the time,” she said.
Many studies that enlisted foster children involved early Phase I and Phase II research — the riskiest — to determine side effects and safe dosages so children could begin taking adult “cocktails,” the powerful drug combinations that suppress AIDS but can cause bad reactions like rashes and organ damage.
Some of those drugs were approved ultimately for children, such as stavudine and zidovudine. Other medicines were not.
Illinois officials confirmed two or three foster children were approved to participate in a mid-1990s study of dapsone. Researchers hoped the drug would prevent a pneumonia that afflicts AIDS patients.
Researchers reported some children had to be taken off the drug because of “serious toxicity,” others developed rashes, and the rates of death and blood toxicity were significantly higher in children who took the medicine daily, rather than weekly.
At least 10 children died from a variety of causes, including four from blood poisoning, and researchers said they were unable to determine a safe, useful dosage. They said the deaths didn’t appear to be “directly attributable” to dapsone but nonetheless were “disturbing.”
“An unexpected finding in our study was that overall mortality while receiving the study drug was significantly higher in the daily dapsone group. This finding remains unexplained,” the researchers concluded.
Another study involving foster children in the 1990s treated children with different combinations of adult antiretroviral drugs. Among 52 children, there were 26 moderate to severe reactions — nearly all in infants. The side effects included rash, fever and a major drop in infection-fighting white blood cells.
New York City officials defend the decision to enlist foster children en masse, saying there was a crisis in the early 1990s and research provided the best treatment possibilities. Nonetheless, they are changing their policy so they no longer give blanket permission to enroll children in preapproved studies.
“We learned some things from our experience,” said Elizabeth Roberts, assistant commissioner for child and family health at the Administration for Children’s Services. “It is a more individualized review we will be conducting.”
Researchers likewise defend their work, saying they often sat with foster families to explain the risks and benefits, and provided them literature and 24-hour phone numbers.
“We talk about it. Then they come the next time. There is no rush,” explained Dr. Ram Yogev, the chief pediatric AIDS researcher in Chicago whose patients include a large number of foster children.
Kline, the Texas researcher, added: “I never wanted a parent or guardian to ever say ‘yes’ simply because they thought that it was what I wanted them to do. I wanted it to be the right choice for them. I think there is not any single right answer for any family.”
* __
Researcher Rachel Landau in Washington and reporter Carla K. Johnson in Chicago contributed to this story. On the Net:
Documents associated with this story are available at:
Fauci tested harsh chemotherapy drugs on orphan children in order to determine its use for AIDS treatments in the 1980s
Fauci got control of foster homes in 7 states
Children were tortured to death
Children were denied guardians and any kind of legal protector
Children who refused to take Fauci’s drugs had feeding tubes installed so drug companies could administer the drugs even when the kids fought back
Most of the children did not have HIV/AIDS, they were just used as guinea pigs to see if they could survive the harsh drug regimen
At least 85 kids died as part of these experiments
The graveyard where these children were thrown into a pit, filled with hundreds of coffins sometimes stuffed with multiple children, is buried under an astroturf pit in New York. These are the victims of Fauci’s crimes, says Kennedy.
The Gateway Pundit was able to locate this memorial to the orphan children killed by Dr. Fauci and the NIH in New York State.
The orphans are not forgotten. There are toys and flowers left at the memorial.
The names of the orphans are listed on the memorial wall.
And an angel holds a stuffed Teddy Bear.
These photos were taken from Google maps
RFK Jr.: Reporter Found Monument to Dead Orphans Tortured and Killed by Monster Fauci (VIDEO)
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. joined The High Wire recently to discuss his best-selling book on monster Dr. Tony Fauci.
During the discussion, RFK Jr. revealed that reporter Cecelia Farber went to the cemetery in New York state where the tortured orphan children were buried. These victims were Fauci’s experimental patients.
Fauci has a long history of mass death, barbarism and lies.
In 2004 Dr. Fauci’s NIH was also caught funding experiments on AIDS orphans at a New York City hospital. The Gateway Pundit reported on this dark Fauci chapter in October.
The Fauci NIH approved experiments on hundreds of New York City orphans. Government agencies and pharmaceutical companies used the orphans in deadly AIDS drug trials.
In 2005, the city of New York hired the VERA Institute to form a final report on the drug trials. VERA was given no access to medical records for any of the children used in trials. Their report was published in 2008.
They reported that twenty-five children died during the drug studies, that an additional fifty-five children died following the studies (in foster care), and, according to Tim Ross, Director of the Child Welfare program at VERA (as of 2009), 29% of the remaining 417 children who were used in drug studies had died (out of a total 532 children that are admitted to have been used). [LINK]
The WIKIPEDIA writers cover up all details, as is expected.
No payment or compensation has been paid to any of the children used in the trials, or to their families.
A hospital nurse later spoke out to reporters about the testing. She reported that children would immediately get sick, break out or throw up during the testing. They were orphans at the Incarnation Children’s Center in New York City.https://www.youtube.com/embed/cyJLYPh9pxY?start=1471
On Tuesday The Gateway Pundit reported on Dr. Fauci’s torture and medical murder of at least 85 orphan minority children in New York, children who were vulnerable, could not consent, and who would not be missed.
Ann Rosen at LifeSiteNews wrote a good recap of Fauci’s crimes against children earlier this month.
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These children were buried in mass graves at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, NY in Westchester County and otherwise forgotten.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says that Anthony Fauci is America’s Joseph Mengele for what he did to poor orphan minority kids in the 1980’s.
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
As per usual, Reuters did not fact-check what they claimed. Almost all their smear jobs are based on this type of text-book straw-man. But you will learn more than the headline promises here.
‘I CALLED PHARMAFIA AND THEY SAID NO’ – EVERY MEDICAL FACT-CHECK EVER
The claim in the original article, the claims in the fact-check and the verdict are three separate things. Reuters manages to straw-man its own straw-man.
THIS BLOG IS NOT AN ANTI-VACCINE COMMENTARY. I WISH TO ENCOURAGE READERS TO CAREFULLY READ THE DOCUMENTATION, DO THEIR DUE DILIGENCE, AND NOT BLINDLY ACCEPT WHAT WE ARE BEING TOLD.
WOULD YOU BE SURPRISED OR CONCERNED TO LEARN THAT THE 1918 “SPANISH FLU” HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH SPAIN AND MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN A FLU AT ALL? WELL, HANG ON TIGHT, YOU ARE IN FOR A ROUGH RIDE!
WHAT HISTORY TELLS US ABOUT THE 1918 “SPANISH FLU”
History tells us that the 1918 Spanish Flu killed between 50 – 100 million people. At the time, medical and pharmaceutical sources described it as THE MOST horrific disease process since the Black Plague of 1347, which killed an estimated 25-30 million people.
Reuters does not dispute this
VACCINATION: “THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM”
In the book,Vaccination Condemned, by Eleanor McBean, PhD, N.D., the author describes, in detail, personal and family experiences during the 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic.
McBean’s coverage of the 1918 “Spanish Flu”, as a reporter and an unvaccinated survivor, requires that the historical basis of the event needs to be revisited, not as a “conspiracy theory” but with evidence that will “set your hair on fire”.
A few years ago, I came across another book by Eleanor McBean: “Vaccination…The Silent Killer”. McBean provides evidence that not only were the historical events of the 1918 “Spanish Flu” compromised, but also those of the Polio and Swine Flu epidemics.
LET’S TALK “SPANISH FLU” FACTS:
THE SPANISH SCAPEGOAT
Spain was neutral during WW1 and did NOT censor its press, unlike the combatting countries. As a result, Spain was the first to report the 1918 Flu epidemic and the world “scapegoated” Spain as the source. Thus, the “Spanish Flu” is born.
THE FIRST CASE: MILITARY VACCINATION EXPERIMENTS IN FORT RILEY, KANSAS
In preparation for WW1, a massive military vaccination experiment involving numerous prior developed vaccines took place in Fort Riley, Kansas- where the first “Spanish Flu” case was reported.
WW1 DRAFT = HUMAN TEST SUBJECTS
The fledgling pharmaceutical industry, sponsored by the ‘Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research’, had something they never had before – a large supply of human test subjects. Supplied by the U.S. military’s first draft, the test pool of subjects ballooned to over 6 million men. CLICK HERE for more details.
BACTERIAL MENINGITIS VACCINE: THE KILLING FIELD
Autopsies after the war proved that the 1918 flu was NOT a “FLU” at all. It was caused by random dosages of an experimental ‘bacterial meningitis vaccine’, which to this day, mimics flu-like symptoms.
Reuters simply calls this main claim ‘baseless’ without providing any base for their call, then move on to flog more straw-men of their own:
So, basically, we have a Pharmafia-licensed doctor’s word vs. a Reuter presstitute’s word, and I bet my ass the Reuter NPC has no medical studies. Anyway, to settle the truth here, you have to do your own research, which I did below.
However, to settle that Reuters faked its fact-check is already adequate at this point.
The original article follows up:
The massive, multiple assaults with additional vaccines on the unprepared immune systems of soldiers and civilians created a “killing field”. Those that were not vaccinated were not affected. – Links to the article in the pic below:
Reuters claims there is a disagreement between their findings and the article’s, but they both claim the same thing: it was a flu AND a bacteria that ended the lives of those who got a flu in 1918
Undisputed
SO… HOW DID CIVILIANS DIE?
WW1 ended sooner than expected, leaving HUGE quantities of unused experimental vaccines.
Fearing that soldiers coming home would spread diseases to their families, The U.S. government pushed the largest vaccine ‘fear’ campaign in history. They used the human population as a research and development lab to field test experimental vaccines.
Tens of millions of civilians died in the same manner as did the soldiers.
Instead of stopping the vaccines, doctors intensified them, calling it the great “Spanish Flu of 1918”. As a result, ONLY THE VACCINATED DIED.
“Seven men dropped dead in a doctor’s office after being vaccinated. Letters were sent to their families that they had been killed in action.”
In the examples given in my previous blog “COVID 19: Another Chapter in the History of Deception and Secrecy”, history is replete with intentional lies told to the public to either “save face” or to deceive for nefarious purposes. The 1918 “Spanish Flu” was no exception.
So what did the autopsies really reveal?
This is the only actual dispute Reuters made to the article, and neither sides backed their claims.
Predominant Role of Bacterial Pneumonia as a Cause of Death in Pandemic Influenza: Implications for Pandemic Influenza Preparedness
Abstract
Background
Despite the availability of published data on 4 pandemics that have occurred over the past 120 years, there is little modern information on the causes of death associated with influenza pandemics.
Methods
We examined relevant information from the most recent influenza pandemic that occurred during the era prior to the use of antibiotics, the 1918–1919 “Spanish flu” pandemic. We examined lung tissue sections obtained during 58 autopsies and reviewed pathologic and bacteriologic data from 109 published autopsy series that described 8398 individual autopsy investigations.
Results
The postmortem samples we examined from people who died of influenza during 1918–1919 uniformly exhibited severe changes indicative of bacterial pneumonia. Bacteriologic and histopathologic results from published autopsy series clearly and consistently implicated secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory–tract bacteria in most influenza fatalities.
Conclusions
The majority of deaths in the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic likely resulted directly from secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory–tract bacteria. Less substantial data from the subsequent 1957 and 1968 pandemics are consistent with these findings. If severe pandemic influenza is largely a problem of viral-bacterial copathogenesis, pandemic planning needs to go beyond addressing the viral cause alone (e.g., influenza vaccines and antiviral drugs). Prevention, diagnosis, prophylaxis, and treatment of secondary bacterial pneumonia, as well as stockpiling of antibiotics and bacterial vaccines, should also be high priorities for pandemic planning.
The 1918 to 1919 “Spanish” influenza pandemic virus killed up to 50 million people. We report here clinical, pathological, bacteriological, and virological findings in 68 fatal American influenza/pneumonia military patients dying between May and October of 1918, a period that includes ~4 mo before the 1918 pandemic was recognized, and 2 mo (September-October 1918) during which it appeared and peaked.
The lung tissues of 37 of these cases [a little over half – S.m] were positive for influenza viral antigens or viral RNA, including four from the prepandemic period (May-August). The prepandemic and pandemic peak cases were indistinguishable clinically and pathologically.
All 68 cases had histological evidence of bacterial pneumonia, and 94% showed abundant bacteria on Gram stain.
Sequence analysis of the viral hemagglutinin receptor-binding domain performed on RNA from 13 cases suggested a trend from a more “avian-like” viral receptor specificity with G222 in prepandemic cases to a more “human-like” specificity associated with D222 in pandemic peak cases. Viral antigen distribution in the respiratory tree, however, was not apparently different between prepandemic and pandemic peak cases, or between infections with viruses bearing different receptor-binding polymorphisms. The 1918 pandemic virus was circulating for at least 4 mo in the United States before it was recognized epidemiologically in September 1918.
The causes of the unusually high mortality in the 1918 pandemic were not explained by the pathological and virological parameters examined.
These findings have important implications for understanding the origins and evolution of pandemic influenza viruses.
Frederick Lamont Gates, born in Minneapolis, Hennepin County, MN, December 17, 1886, married, September 11, 1917 in Duluth, St. Louis County, MN, Dorothy Olcott, born June 20, 1891, daughter of William James and Fannie (Bailey) Olcott.
His father said he was “born for study and inquiry and disclosed this at an early age”. Ill health disqualified him from athletic activities and his life was centered wholly on activities of the mind. He was accepted at Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago and, after a year and a half at Chicago, he chose to continue his studies at Yale. He stood at the head of his class, received the Phi Beta Kappa key, and graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1909. The same year, he entered John Hopkins Medical School, and graduated with highest honors four years later. He was recommended for research work at the Rockefeller Institute and took a position on its staff.
On the declaration of war in 1917, Mr. Gates volunteered for the U.S. Army Medical Corps, was accepted and commissioned a first lieutenant. He was assigned to duty on the Rockefeller Institute staff where he gave lectures to military groups selected to attend training there. He was also assigned to visit training camps, in the interest of preventive medicine, and traveled widely. He continued at the institute after the war and his researches, especially those on influenza, received worldwide recognition. His health failed in 1927 and he was required to undertake a less demanding schedule. He continued his research at Harvard and moved his family to Cambridge, MA where he died, June 17, 1933, at age forty-six, after suffering a concussion from a fall. – SOURCE
Frederick Lamont Gates was the son of Frederick Taylor Gates (1853-1923) was the principal business and philanthropic advisor to the major oil industrialist John D. Rockefeller, Sr., from 1891 to 1923.
In 1901, Frederick T. Gates designed the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University), of which he was board president.
Yale Obituary Record Frederick Lamont Gates, B.A. 1909* Born December 17, 1886, in Minneapolis, Minn. Died June 17,1933, in Boston, Main Father, Rev. Frederick Taylor Gates (B. A. University of Rochester 1877, M.A, 1879; Rochester Theological Seminary 1880$ ULD. University of Chicago 1911); a Baptist minister; business and benevolence manager for John D. Rockefeller; president of Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research; chairman of General Education Board; son of Rev. GranviUe Gates and Sarah Jane (Bowers) Gates, of Maine, N. Y. Mother, Emma Lucia (Cahoon) Gates; daughter of Lyman Hall and Cordelia Lucinda (Teague) Cahoon, of Racine, Wis. Montclair (N. J.) High School; attended University of Chicago 1905-06 as member of Class of 1909. Entered Yale as a Sophomore; Andrew D. White prize in history Sophomore year; philosophical oration appointment and honors in physical sciences Senior year; member University Orchestra, Alpha Delta Phi, Sigma Xi, and Phi Beta Kappa. M.D. Johns Hopkins 1913 (member Alpha Omega Alpha); connected with Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York City, 1913-1929^ as fellow 1913-14, assistant in Department of Physiology and Pharmacology 1914-17, associate 1917-1921, and associate member 1921-29; had since been research fellow and lecturer in Department of Physiology at Harvard; member China Medical Board of Rockefeller Foundation 1916-1929 and of its commission to China 1915; commissioned First Lieutenant, Medical Reserve Corps, April 17, 1917; assigned to Base Hospital, Fort Riley, Kans., in December, 1917, and to Camp Taylor, Ky., in November, 1918; received discharge January 18,1919; contributed to Journal of Medical Research, Journal of Experimental Physiology•, and Science; member Harvey Society, Optical Society of America, Society of Experimental Physiology, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Married September 11, 1917, in Duluth, Minn., Dorothy Olcott (B.A. Smith 1913; M.A. Columbia 1917), daughter of William James Olcott (Ph.B. University of Michigan 1883, M.S. 1884, honorary M.A. 1908) and Fanny (Bailey) Olcott. Children: Olcott, Barbara, Frederick Taylor, ad, Dorothy, and Deborah. Death due to a fractured skull and brain hemorrhage. Cremation took place. Survived by wife, five children, three brothers* Franklin H. Gates, ’12, Russell C. Gates, ’14, and Percival T. Gates (B.A. Yale College 119 University of Chicago 192a), and three sisters, Alice Gates Pudney, wife of William K. Pudney (M.D. Columbia 1917), of Montclair, N. J., Lucia Gates Hooper, wife of Leverett F, Hooper (B.A. Harvard 1915), of New York City, and Grace Gates Mitchell, wife of Morns R. Mitchell (B.A. University of Delaware 1919), of Montclair. – SOURCE (PDF) – P.118-119
Your doctor knows nothing about nutrition? Ask him confidentially and he’ll probably confess he had only one course in nutrition. And there’s a reason.
Back in the late 19th century American medicine was in a deplorable state. To the credit of the Rockefeller General Education Board and the Institute for Medical Research, funds were made available to staff teaching hospitals and to eradicate some pretty horrible diseases. On the other hand, a chemical-based medicine was introduced and the medical profession cut its ties with naturopathy. Cancer statistics tell you the rest.
For the moment we want only to note that the impetus for reorganizing medical education in the United States came from John D. Rockefeller, but the funds were channeled through a single member of The Order.”
“One day in 1912 Frederick T. Gates of Rockefeller Foundation had lunch with Abraham Flexner of Carnegie Institution. Said Gates to Flexner:
”What would you do if you had one million dollars with which to make a start in reorganizing medical education in the United States?”
“Flexner’s reply, however, to the effect that any funds — a million dollars or otherwise — could most profitably be spent in developing the Johns Hopkins Medical School, struck a responsive chord in Gates who was already a close friend and devoted admirer of Dr. William H. Welch, the dean of the institution.”
Welch was President of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research from 1901, and a Trustee of the Carnegie Institution from 1906.”
”There is an Establishment history, an official history, which dominates history textbooks, trade publishing, the media and library shelves. The official line always assumes that events such as wars, revolutions, scandals, assassinations, are more or less random unconnected events. By definition events can NEVER be the result of a conspiracy, they can never result from premeditated planned group action. An excellent example is the Kennedy assassination when, within 9 hours of the Dallas tragedy, TV networks announced the shooting was NOT a conspiracy, regardless of the fact that a negative proposition can never be proven, and that the investigation had barely begun.
Woe betide any book or author that falls outside the official guidelines. Foundation support is not there. Publishers get cold feet. Distribution is hit and miss, or non-existent.
Just to ensure the official line dominates, in 1946 the Rockefeller Foundation allotted $139,000 for an official history of World War Two. This to avoid a repeat of debunking history books which embarrassed the Establishment after World War One. The reader will be interested to know that The Order we are about to investigate had great foresight, back in the 1880s, to create both the American Historical Association and the American Economic Association (most economists were then more historians than analysts) under their terms, with their people and their objectives. Andrew Dickson White was a member of The Order and the first President of the American Historical Association.”
It is true that in early 1918, before the first cases of Spanish flu were reported at Camp Funston at Fort Riley in Kansas in March 1918 ( here ), a trial of a vaccine made with inactivated strains of the meningococcus bacteria ( here ) was conducted on military volunteers at the same location. According to a report published in July 1918 by Frederick L. Gates, First Lieutenant of the Medical Corps, U.S. Army ( here ), the experimental vaccine created in the laboratory of The Rockefeller Institute was given to “about 3,700 volunteers” and the doses “rarely caused more than the mildest local and general reactions”, which included “headache, joint pains, and nausea” and in some cases, diarrhea.
While virology would not emerge until the 1930s, physicians could identify many of the bacteria causing the deadly pneumonias that were killing their patients, but without antibiotics they could do little to fight the infections. Thus, as the epidemic struck their camps, hospitals, ships, ports, or divisions, many medical officers documented what they saw, as if trying to define that which they could not control.
IF YOU’RE STILL NOT CONVINCED, YOU HAVEN’T FULLY READ THE REUTERS PIECE, IT DOES A GREAT JOB AT CONFIRMING EVERYTHING THEY WANT TO DEBUNK:
“Stephen Kissler, Postdoctoral Fellow of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health ( here ) told Reuters via phone that the vaccine used at Camp Funston “was derived from existing meningitis strains” that were potentially inactivated with heat. He saw no reason to conclude a vaccine, which was made with existent, inactivated strains of meningitis bacteria from people who had previously been sick with meningitis, had “caused a major epidemic.”
As explained here the Office of Medical History of the U.S. Army Medical Department, meningococcal meningitis, which causes inflammation around the surrounding tissues of the brain ( here ), “has always been one of the most serious and important of the various communicable diseases of man” among soldiers. “It becomes more common when young people are together in closed quarters like dormitories or barracks,” so “the military had a good reason to test a vaccine against meningitis,” Burke said.
It was also not rare to research and test vaccines at this time in history given it was an “early era of microbiology,” Burke added. “The Fort Riley meningococcal vaccine experiment was not an unusual scientific undertaking” and “Many [bacterial] vaccine trials were going on all over the U.S. around 1918.”
The article “The State of Science, Microbiology, and Vaccines Circa 1918” by John M. Eyler provides more context ( here ). For example, during the 1918 flu pandemic itself, experimental bacterial vaccines for influenza were used in army camps as well as on workers, including 275,000 employees of the U.S. Steel Company ( here , here , here ). The cause of the pandemic was unknown at the time, explaining why bacterial vaccines were being tested in the hopes they might work on this new deadly disease.” – REUTERS
And this, my friends, was the kick-off for today’s Military BioTech Complex that I’ve just biographed. This was just an earlier Great Reset, like they regularly do. You have the military, the Rockefellers, the experiments, all the motives and the weapons, they assemble themselves like the Transformers. Only malfeasance or a severe cognitive-dissonance seizure could blame this on coincidence rather than conspiracy. Because if it’s not intentional, it’s coincidental, and you should know by know this is not a place for coincidence theories.
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
For my mother, who has just buried my father, passed away from a very suspicious heart event involving some clots. She had to bury him in my absence, because the Military BioTech Complex holds us prisoners on two different continents. I had to bury myself in work to keep it together.
Work in progress, I will keep adding pieces to the Tetris until it goes away. Please return regularly for updates, this is a very long and fascinating story that should change the worldview for most people.
“This is to request that the current retention allowance [(b)(6) redaction] for Dr. Anthony S. Fauci be converted to a permanent pay adjustment in the amount [(b)(6) redaction] over his base pay of [(b)(6) redaction] in order to appropriately compensate him for the level of responsibility in his current position of Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), especially as it relates to his work on biodefense research activities.”
For past several years, DARPA has been pioneering a powerful new type of countermeasure against infectious disease called gene-encoded antibodies. They work by providing cells with genetic instructions for producing one or more highly protective antibodies against a given threat. pic.twitter.com/h2gz8fuOXJ
Via the ADEPT program, DARPA was an early investor in Moderna's mRNA therapeutics & vaccines. The company announced today their experimental coronavirus vaccine, built in part on this groundbreaking work, is nearly 95% effective at preventing illness: https://t.co/OCi5MEQiVg
First, in the US, Military and an emerging petrochemical industry with strong roots in agriculture but expanding into health, among others. The Rockefellers were the main force driving this expansion in the US and bridging over the ocean to Germany, the most advanced country in terms of chemical industrialization. But it was mostly Crown-controlled and Rothschild-controlled from the City of London, through their many henchmen.
After a few good collaborative experiences, the Military and Pharmafia decided they have a future together, and they bought up the Academia to help with the labs and the brains, as both industries already had a foot in the door there.
Two world wars demonstrated there’s hardly any limit to what they can achieve together.
The Cold War is then used as an excuse to develop more surveillance and population control tools. From these efforts spring1 out Silicon Valley and the Internet.
Before the end of 20th century, Big Pharma and Big Tech are fused by all means: capital, gear, agenda.
The Great Military BioTech Complex is born to be the main Operating System of the system.
9/11 is the launch of the new control grid.
Many of the following events were just test runs.
Covid is a forced upgrade of this operating system.
Weapons trade is disguised as “defense”, bioweapons trade as “biodefense”. And the latter is booming.
Transhumanism Airlines depart from Humanism and are set to land in lifeless soulless material existence.
After 1865, American inventiveness turned away from war and toward commerce and industry. Development of the lands of the West did promote some agencies to investigate natural resources. The Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce and Labor, and the National Park Service appeared during this period. While government research tended toward the applied end of the research spectrum, newly-created private foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute of Washington, supported much of the nation's basic scientific research.- Daniel Else, "Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex", 2017
This is the official history, not whistleblowing. It’s redacted by a system critter to make crimes palatable to the normies. Still a good starting point
Summary
Daniel Else explored the results of his year-long inquiry into the organizational underpinnings of that military technological revolution of the 1940s and 1950s. By mining the Library’s resources, Else traced the evolving relationship between science and the federal government leading to the creation of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in 1941. A temporary wartime agency, OSRD mobilized the nation’s academic and industrial technological resources in support of the war effort, and in so doing profoundly altered the linkages between science and engineering, industry, and government. Else explored those wartime changes and outline their impact, still seen and felt today more than seven decades after V-J Day.
Event Date September 21, 2017
Notes- Daniel Else was a specialist in national defense in the Congressional Research Service in the Library of Congress and the 2016 Kluge Staff Fellow at the Library’s John W. Kluge Center.
Finally in 1950, the Air Force created a larger organization, the Air Research and Development Command. The House finally passed the Senate bill that had been passed the year before, and the president signed the bill, establishing the National Science Foundation. So in that five-year gap, what we saw was the creation of a number of military, Department of Defense organizations for science and scientific research, and the final NSF bill contained no mandate for military research for the National Science Foundation.
So, what are its legacy organizations? A number of federal agencies can trace their origins back to the OSRD. National Science Foundation, of course, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Development and Engineering, or, and Evaluation Command, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, DTRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, DARPA, of course, and in the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is the custodian of atomic stockpile. - Daniel Else, "Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex", 2017
Some of Vannevar Bush’s greatest official honors
One of Vannevar Bush’s PhD students at MIT was Frederick Terman, who was later instrumental in the development of “Silicon Valley”.
DR. HEIKO SCHÖNING: THE STAGE FOR THE DARK WINTER HAS BEEN SET WITH THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS FROM 2001. There was even an Event201 for the Anthrax attacks. It was called “The Dark Winter”
The Dark Winter exercise was the collaborative effort of 4 organizations. John Hamre of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) initiated and conceived of an exercise wherein senior former officials would respond to a bioterrorist induced national security crisis. Tara O’Toole and Tom Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies and Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic Services, Inc., (ANSER) were the principal designers, authors, and controllers of Dark Winter. Sue Reingold of CSIS managed administrative and logistical arrangements. General Dennis Reimer of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) provided funding for Dark Winter.
Preparing homeland security professionals through scenario-based simulations and exercises on key issues.
Steadfast Resolve
The Steadfast Resolve exercise was planned to address the concern that poorly designed government response to the next terrorist attack could disrupt America’s economy and society as much or more than the attack itself. This concern is particularly relevant in the context of an attack that may be harmful, but not catastrophic.
In the event of a next attack, government officials will be under enormous pressure to respond swiftly, more than likely with limited information about the status of the attack or what to expect next. In today’s news cycle, the public – and the situation – will demand a swift and decisive response perhaps before exactly what is happening becomes clear. Confusion, indecision, or false starts at government’s highest levels will be magnified and may have long-lasting ramifications. Getting it wrong will be easier than getting it right. As the Hurricane Katrina experience has demonstrated, a lack of situational awareness, understanding of current plans, and an absence of effective decisionmaking tools can lead to disaster.
Dark Winter: Bioterrorism Simulation Exercise
In the summer of 2001, a group of senior-level officials, including Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma, David Gergen, and James Woolsey, participated in an executive level simulation. Dark Winter simulated a U.S. National Security Council meeting at which senior officials were confronted with a smallpox attack on the United States. The exercise illustrated the issues to be addressed in the event of a bioterrorism crisis, including the challenges facing state and local governments, the role and responsiveness of the federal government, and the likely friction spots between federal- and state-level responders and responses.
Coming as it did before the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent anthrax attacks, Dark Winter generated an enormous amount of interest in both the public policy community and the media. CSIS briefed Vice President Dick Cheney, then National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, then FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh, over 80 members of Congress, senior government officials and leaders, including approximately 20 ambassadors to the United States, and senior government officials from Asia, Latin America, and Europe. Besides raising public awareness of the bioterrorism threat, these briefings contributed to the Bush administration’s decision to manufacture 300 million doses of the smallpox vaccine.
Silent Vector: A Critical Energy Infrastructure Simulation Exercise
The events of September 11 and additional intelligence on al Qaeda demonstrate the potential for an attack against the infrastructure of the United States. To face this challenge, CSIS developed an executive-level simulation focusing on U.S. critical energy infrastructure. The exercise took place in October 2002 and employed a simulated National Security Council of senior policymakers with former senator Sam Nunn, now chairman of CSIS’s Board of Trustees, serving as scenario president.
Silent Vector was designed to simulate possible U.S. reaction to a credible threat of terrorist attack when there is not sufficient information for effective protection. The overall purpose of the exercise was to assist the administration and Congress in their attempts to improve the effectiveness of response during the pre-attack phase of a major terrorist incident. Silent Vector challenged current and former senior government leaders to respond to increasingly credible and specific intelligence indicating the possibility of a large-scale attack against critical energy and energy-related infrastructure on the East Coast of the United States.
Black Dawn: A Scenario-Based Exercise on Catastrophic Terrorism
Organized under the auspices of the Strengthening the Global Partnership project by CSIS and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Black Dawn gathered approximately 55 current and former senior officials and experts from the European Council, the European Commission, NATO, 15 member states, and various international organizations to grapple with the challenges associated with preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by terrorists.
The exercise aimed to develop a set of actionable recommendations for the EU, NATO and individual European governments to prevent terrorists from acquiring and using WMD. The exercise was designed to energize discussion and debate as various European countries and institutions entered into their policy and budget deliberations. The central question animating the exercise was this: In hindsight, what could we have done to prevent terrorists from acquiring WMD and conducting such an attack? And what more can and should we do now?
The exercise concluded with several lessons learned: the threat of WMD terrorism is real; it could happen in Europe; prevention is the best option; we can take concrete steps to significantly reduce the risk of terrorists acquiring nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; Europe has a leadership role to play; and we need to act now.
Simon Chair BlogCommentaries on U.S. relations with countries in the Western Hemisphere – focusing on international political economy, trade, investment, energy, and other current events.
A “Dark Winter” for Public Health: Meet Homeland Security’s New Bioterror Czarina
by Tom Burghardt / August 24th, 2009
In the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks, successive U.S. administrations have pumped some $57 billion across 11 federal agencies and departments into what is euphemistically called “biodefense.” Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2005, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader William Frist, a Bushist acolyte, baldly stated that “The greatest existential threat we have in the world today is biological” and predicted that “an inevitable bioterror attack” would come “at some time in the next 10 years.”
Later that year, Frist and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) covertly inserted language into the 2006 Defense Appropriations bill (H.R. 2863) that granted legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers, even in cases of willful misconduct. It was signed into law by President Bush.
According to Public Citizen and The New York Times, Frist and Hastert benefited financially from their actions; the pair, as well as 41 other congressmen and senators owned as much as $16 million in pharmaceutical stock. revealed that “the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) is purported to be the key author of the language additions. This trade association represents virtually all major vaccine manufacturers.”
The Senate Majority Leader’s alarmist jeremiad at Davos was seconded by Dr. Tara O’Toole who added, “This [bioterrorism] is one of the most pressing problems we have on the planet today.”
Really? Not grinding poverty, global warming or the lack of access by hundreds of millions of impoverished workers and farmers to clean water, an adequate diet, health care or relief from epidemic levels of preventable diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis or diarrhea, but “bioterrorism” as narrowly defined by securocrats and their academic accomplices.
But Dr. Victor W. Sidel, a founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and an outspoken critic of the Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex challenged O’Toole’s hysterical paradigm.
Sidel made the point that there is a fundamental conflict between the state’s national security goals and health care providers’ professional responsibilities to patients. He wrote in 2003 that “military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies and personnel have long histories of secrecy and deception that are contrary to the fundamental health principles of transparency and truthfulness. They may therefore be unsuitable partners for public health agencies that need to justify receiving the public’s trust.”
In this context, the choice of O’Toole as the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Undersecretary of Science and Technology is troubling to say the least. As former CEO and Director of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, critics charge that O’Toole’s appointment will be nothing short of a disaster.
No ordinary policy wonk with an impressive résumé and years as a government insider, O’Toole is a key player advocating for the expansion of dual-use biological weapons programs rebranded as biodefense.
Subverting the Biological Weapons Convention
The resuscitation of American bioweapons programs are facilitated by their secretive and highly-classified nature. Under cover of academic freedom or intellectual property rights, the U.S. Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex has largely been outsourced by the state to private companies and contractors at top American corporations and universities.
Efforts to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) by the inclusion of verification language into the treaty and regular inspection of suspect facilities by international experts have been shot-down since 2001 by the Bush and now, the Obama administrations. Why?
Primarily because the United States view onsite measures as a threat to the commercial proprietary information of multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as well as to America’s reputedly “defensive” biological programs; initiatives that continue to work with nature’s most dangerous and deadly pathogens.
In fact, the problem of the dual-use nature of such research is a conundrum facing critics who challenge the break-neck expansion of concealed weapons programs. Simply put, military activities can be disguised as commercial research to develop medical countermeasures without anyone, least of all the American people, being any the wiser.
Highly-trained microbiologists deployed across a spectrum of low-key companies, trained for academic, public health, or commercial employment are part of the dual-use problem. Who’s to say whether scientists who genetically-manipulate pathogens or create Frankenstein-like chimera disease organisms (say, synthesized Marburg or Ebola virus as has already been done with poliovirus in a U.S. lab) are engaged in treaty-busting weapons research or the development of life-saving measures.
And what about the accidental, or more sinisterly, the deliberate release of some horrific new plague by a scientist who’s “gone rogue”? As researcher Edward Hammond pointed out:
British researchers pled guilty in 2001 to charges that they improperly handled a genetically engineered hybrid of the viruses causing hepatitis C and dengue fever. British authorities characterized the virus as “more lethal than HIV”. ‘Dengatitis’ was deliberately created by researchers who wanted to use fewer laboratory animals in a search for a vaccine for Hepatitis C. Under unsafe laboratory conditions, the researchers created and nearly accidentally released a new hybrid human disease whose effects, fortunately, remain unknown; but which may have displayed different symptoms than its parents and thus been difficult to diagnose, and have required a new, unknown treatment regime. (Emerging Technologies: Genetic Engineering and Biological Weapons, The Sunshine Project, Background Paper No. 12, November 2003)
A new report by the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation has charged that despite restrictions under the BWC prohibiting the development, production, stockpiling and use of weaponized disease agents such as anthrax, smallpox or plague, as well as equipment and delivery systems intended for offensive use, the rapid growth of “biodefense and research programs over the last decade” has placed “new pressure” on efforts to curb the development of banned weapons listed in the treaty.
In an interview with Global Security Newswire Gerald Epstein, a senior fellow with the hawkish Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS) told the publication, “When one is doing bioresearch and biodefense, one has to be careful to not overstep the treaty itself.”
He cited the U.S biodefense effort Project Bacchus–an investigation by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to determine whether it was possible to build a bioweapons production facility using readily available equipment–as an instance where questions were raised if the treaty had been violated.
The type of biodefense activity that is most likely to raise questions regarding treaty compliance is “threat assessment,” the process of determining what type of biological attacks are most likely to occur, he told Global Security Newswire. A dangerous biological agent could inadvertently be developed during such research, Epstein said. (Martin Matishak, “Biodefense Research Could Violate Weapons Convention, Report Warns,” Global Security Newswire, August 20, 2009)
But Pentagon bioweaponeers did more than build “a bioweapons productions facility using readily available equipment.” They built banned weapons. According to Jeanne Guillemin, author of Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism, the Pentagon and CIA made and tested a model of a Soviet anthrax bomb and created an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax.
After consulting with scientists who strongly suggested that the CIA anthrax bomb project would violate the BWC, “CIA lawyers decided the project was within the allowed realm of defensive research,” Guillemin revealed. Project Clear Vision, a joint investigation by the CIA and the Battelle Memorial Institute, under contract to the Agency, reconstructed and tested a Soviet-era anthrax bomblet in order to test its dissemination characteristics. The Agency “decided the same” for the small, fully functional bioweapons facility built under the rubric of Project Bacchus.
The third initiative, Project Jefferson, led to the development of an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax based on a Soviet model. After the outgoing Clinton administration hesitated to give the CIA the go-ahead for the project, the Bush regime’s National Security Council gave the Pentagon permission. “They believed” Guillemin wrote, “the Pentagon had the right to investigate genetically altered pathogens in the name of biodefense, ‘to save American lives’.”
Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon authorized the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), one of the most secretive and heavily-outsourced Defense Department branches, to re-create the deadly anthrax strain.
What the scope of these programs are today is currently unknown. We do know however, that based on available evidence the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department and the oxymoronic Intelligence Community, using the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a cover, continue to investigate the feasibility of transforming nature’s most deadly pathogens into weapons.
In close coordination, the United States government and their outsourced corporate partners are spending billions of dollars on research and simulation exercises, dubbed “disaster drills” by a compliant media, to facilitate this grisly trade.
Secrecy and Deceit
That the official bioterror narrative is a preposterous fiction and swindle as even the FBI was forced to admit during its much-maligned Amerithrax investigation, is hardly worth a second glance by corporate media beholden to the pharmaceutical industry for advertising revenue; call it business as usual here in the heimat.
As we now know, the finely-milled anthrax powder which killed five people and shut down representative government didn’t come from the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al Qaeda, but rather from deep within America’s own Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex, to wit, from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Ft. Detrick in Maryland. But such troublesome and inconvenient truths are barely worth a mention by “respectable” media, e.g. the corporate stenographers who sold two imperialist military adventures to the American people.
Indeed, a credible case can be made that without the anthrax attacks, the fear levels gripping the country in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist events–and the subsequent clamp-down that followed, from the USA Patriot Act to the indefinite detention and torture of “terrorism” suspects, and from warrantless wiretapping to the demonization of dissent–may very well have been impossible.
It is difficult not to conclude that from the beginning of the affair, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax terrorist(s) to draw a straight line between 9/11 and the anthrax mailings. From there, it was but a short step to stitching-up a case for “regime change” in Iraq. The media’s role in this criminal enterprise was indispensable for what Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has called“the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade.” As Greenwald points out,
During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax–tests conducted at Ft. Detrick–revealed that the anthrax sent to [former Senator Tom] Daschle contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since–as ABC variously claimed–bentonite “is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program” and “only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.” (Glenn Greenwald, “Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News,” Salon, August 1, 2008)
Despite ABC News’ claims that their information came from “four well-placed and separate sources,” they were fed information that was patently false; as Greenwald avers, “No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.”
And as we will shortly explore below, the dubious “Dark Winter” and “Atlantic Storm” bioterror exercises designed by Dr. Tara O’Toole freely drew from the neocon’s sinister playbook, right down to the weaponized smallpox supplied to al Qaeda by Saddam.
Whether or not one buys the current permutation of the “lone nut” theory, this one alleges that Dr. Bruce Ivins, a vaccine specialist employed by USAMRIID, was the anthrax mailer; the fact is, when all is said and done the attacks, to use a much over-hyped phrase, were an inside job.
And like other “lone nuts” who have entered the parapolitical frame at their own peril, Ivins isn’t around to refute the charges.
The Alliance for Biosecurity: Insiders with a Mission and (Very) Deep Pockets
Before being pegged by the Obama administration to head DHS’s Science and Technology division where she will oversee the department’s billion dollar budget, with some 45 percent of it going towards chemical and bioweapons defense, O’Toole, as previously mentioned, was the CEO and Director of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, a satrapy which describes itself as “an independent organization dedicated to improving the country’s resilience to major biological threats.”
How “independent”? You make the call!
According to their web site The Alliance for Biosecurity is “a collaboration among the Center for Biosecurity and 13 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies whose mission is to work in the public interest to improve prevention and treatment of severe infectious diseases–particularly those diseases that present global security challenges.”
Alliance partners include the usual suspects: Bavarian Nordic; Center for Biosecurity of UPMC; Cangene Corporation; DOR BioPharma, Inc.; DynPort Vaccine Company LLC, a CSC company; Elusys Therapeutics, Inc.; Emergent BioSolutions; Hematech, Inc., a subsidiary of Kyowa Kirin; Human Genome Sciences, Inc.; NanoViricides, Inc.; Pfizer Inc.; PharmAthene; Siga Technologies, Inc.; Unither Virology LLC, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics Corporation. Rounding out this rogues gallery are associate members, the spooky Battelle Medical Research and Evaluation Facility and the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute.
Among the chief activities of the Alliance is lobbying Congress for increased funding for the development of new drugs deemed “countermeasures” under the Project BioShield Act of 2004, previously described by Antifascist Calling as a particularly grotesque piece of Bushist legislative flotsam.
The Alliance avers that “the United States faces unprecedented risks to national security … by the clear and growing danger of bioterrorism or a destabilizing infectious disease pandemic,” and that “our nation’s vulnerability to biothreats is so severe” due to the fact that “most of the vaccines and medicines that will be needed to protect our citizens do not now exist.” Therefore, countermeasures needed to mitigate nebulous biothreats never spelled out once in the group’s literature “will likely require several years and several hundred million dollars each to successfully develop and produce.” (emphasis added)
An Alliance report, The State of Biosecurity in 2008 and Proposals for a Public/Private Pathway Forward, charts a course for “improving and accelerating” efforts to “develop medical countermeasures (MCMs) for the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile (SNS).”
Under the Project Bioshield Act of 2004, Congress authorized $5.6 billion over ten years “to purchase MCMs for the SNS.” Funds were allocated for the procurement of the anthrax vaccine as well as for “therapeutic antibodies for inhalational anthrax, a botulism heptavalent antitoxin, a smallpox vaccine, and several products for radiological and nuclear threats, obligating a total of about $1.9 billion of the $5.6 billion BioShield fund.”
In 2006 as I noted previously, Congress created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). BARDA was authorized to spend some $1.07 billion over three years for MCMs, “only $201 million has been provided by Congress through FY 2008″ noted the Alliance, “approximately one-fifth of the authorized level.”
According to an “independent economic analysis” carried out by (who else!) the Alliance’s academic partner, the Center for Biosecurity, “it would require $3.4 billion in FY 2009 to support one year of advanced development.”
“Similarly” according to the organization, “the original appropriation of $5.6 billion for Project BioShield is equally insufficient to ensure that once MCMs are developed there will be funds available to procure them and maintain the stockpile.” Indeed, “this level of funding would need to be sustained for many years.” You can bet however, that Alliance lobbyists are busy as proverbial bees in pressuring Congress to fork over the dough!
The report state’s that Alliance goals necessarily entail instilling “a sense of urgency … with Congress” by hyping the “bioterror threat.” But there’s much more here than a simple cynical exercise at preparing the “public diplomacy” ground through academic and industry “message force multipliers” that will enable Congress to shower Big Pharma with a veritable tsunami of cash. A “risk-tolerant culture” should be promoted within BARDA, one that “understands the realities, risks, timelines, and costs of drug development.”
The “risks” to whom and for what purpose are not enumerated, but one can be certain that a “risk-tolerant culture” crafted by industry insiders will come at the expense of the health and safety of the American people, one that pushes potential legal liability should things head south onto the taxpaying public.
The stealth nature of Alliance recommendations are clearly spelled out when they aver that “stakeholders” should “focus more on the potential biothreats and the corresponding countermeasures, rather than the price tag” and that BARDA, ostensibly a public agency, should be packed with insiders “who have drug development and manufacturing experience.” This will lead to the development of “a culture that is focused on partnering with industry and academia.”
But the bottom line as always, is the corporatist bottom line for Alliance shareholders! How else can one interpret their statement that emerging “biothreats” are all the more dire today now that “interest of the public and private capital markets in biodefense has declined over the last 2-3 years.” What better way then, to beef-up those sagging capital markets than to install an industry-friendly individual at DHS with a documented track record of overplaying the “bioterror threat.”
Dark Winter
O’Toole was the principal designer of two “tabletop” bioterror preparedness drills, the 2001 Dark Winter exercise and the 2005 Atlantic Storm run-through; both were criticized by scientific experts as fabrications of an alleged threat of a smallpox attack mounted by al Qaeda.
Reviewing Milton Leitenberg’s 2005 report, Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat, published the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, protein chemist Dr. Eric Smith wrote the following:
Of note is Leitenberg’s dissection of the process of assessment as practiced through bioterrorism threat scenarios conducted by the US government and private think tanks. Exercises like Dark Winter, which modeled an “aerosolized” smallpox attack, Top Off 2 and 3, both on pneumonic plague strikes, and Atlantic Storm, an exercise that purported to show an al Qaida group manufacturing a dry powder smallpox weapon, were rigged. In the cases of Dark Winter and the Top Offs, transmission rates of disease were sexed up beyond historical averages so that “a disastrous outcome was assured” no matter any steps taken to contain outbreaks. Eight pages are reserved to pointedly condemn the Atlantic Storm exercise on a host of sins which can generally be described as a bundle of frank lies and misinformation coupled with a claimed terrorist facility for making smallpox into a weapon that even state run biological warfare operations did not possess. And once again, juiced transmission rates of disease were employed to grease theoretical calamity. The reader comes to recognize the deus ex machina–a concoction or intervention added to dictate an outcome, in these cases very bad ones–as a regular feature of the exercises. However, the results of the same assessments–the alleged lessons learned–have never been reported with much, if any, skepticism in the media. (Eric Smith, “A Vaccine for the Hype: Milton Leitenberg’s new ‘Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat,” Global Security, National Security Notes, March 31, 2006)
In criticizing “the fancy that such attacks are easy and one of the most catastrophic threats faced by the American people,” Smith denounces the alarmist scenarios of Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm’s designers–people like Dr. Tara O’Toole and the coterie of industry insiders and other well-paid “experts”–as guilty of perpetrating a massive “fraud … and a substantial one” on the American people.
While one of Atlantic Storm’s architects proclaimed “this is not science fiction” and that “the age of Bioterror is now…” Leitenberg and Smith denounce O’Toole’s spurious claims as “not the least bit plausible.”
Leitenberg wrote that “well before October-November 2001, the spectre of ‘bioterrorism’ benefitted from an extremely successful sales campaign.” Indeed, hyped-up scenarios such as Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm that place “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of shadowy, intelligence-linked terror outfits like al Qaeda provided “inflated predictions that … were certainly not realistic. Much worse, in addition to being wrong, inflated predictions were counterproductive. They induced interest in BW in the wrong audiences.”
But the implausible nature of the scenarios deployed in national exercises hardly prohibited the Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex from concocting scarecrow-like straw men designed to sow terror amongst the American people while extracting regular infusions of cash from Congress.
Among the eight exercises analyzed by Leitenberg between 1998-2005, he found that each and every one were fraudulently designed and the threat of bioterrorism had been framed as a rationalization for “political action, the expenditure of public funds for bioterrorism prevention and response programs,” that could “not occur without it.” This is “not benign,” Leitenberg concludes.
A second consequence of sexed-up “bioterror” drills have even more ominous implications for the immediate future. Because of national security state perceptions that mitigation of catastrophic bioterrorism is of supreme importance for national survival–perceptions reinforced by academic, corporate and militarist peddlers of crisis–”the US biodefense research program appears to be drifting into violation” of the Biological Weapons Convention. This is a menacing development and has happened, I would argue precisely because the evaluation process which justifies research into biological weapons threat capabilities and scenarios, are repackaged to conceal the offensive thrust of this research as wholly defensive in nature, which it certainly is not.
How else would one explain ongoing research funded by the National Institutes of Health to study botulism toxin, “with the added qualification” Smith points out, that because the protein toxin is “unstable, therefore there will be collaboration with other researchers to stabilize it.” The NIH grant “means preparing a much more effective botulinum toxin than had been available before.”
Smith goes on to cite “another problematical breakout” offered by two scientists to study the “aerobiological” characteristics of the lethal Marburg and Ebola viruses. How this is “defensive” in nature, in keeping with research restrictions under the Biological Weapons Convention, is another instance of a backdoor move to kick-start illicit bioweapons development.
According to Smith, the study “looks to define how the organisms can be aerosolized, an instance of research into examining vulnerability in the complete absence of a verified threat.” But I would argue that showering taxpayers dollars into such dark and troubling research tributaries deploy hyped-up threats as cover for the development of illegal weapons.
When her nomination was announced in May, Rutgers University and homeland security critic Richard Ebright told Wired,
“This is a disastrous nomination. O’Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush Administration. O’Toole is as out of touch with reality, and as paranoiac, as former Vice President Cheney. It would be hard to think of a person less well suited for the position.”
“She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of government, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security,” he adds. “She makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.” (Noah Shachtman, “DHS’ New Geek Chief is a Bioterror ‘Disaster,’ Critics Charge,” Wired, May 6, 2009)
And Dr. Smith told Wired that exercises designed by O’Toole and her colleagues show her to be “the top academic/salesperson for the coming of apocalyptic bioterrorism which has never quite arrived.”
As noted above, “[She’s] most prominent for always lobbying for more money for biodefense, conducting tabletop exercises on bioterrorism for easily overawed public officials, exercises tweaked to be horrifying,” Smith told Wired.
But Smith goes even further and denounces O’Toole as an industry shill who “has never obviously appeared to examine what current terrorist capabilities have been… in favor of extrapolating how easy it would be to launch bioterror attacks if one had potentially unlimited resources and scientific know-how.” It’s a “superb appointment if you’re in the biodefense industry and interested in further opportunity and growth.”
“Alternatively” Smith avers, O’Toole’s appointment is “a disaster if threat assessment and prevention” has “some basis in reality.”
Not that any of this matters in Washington. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee led by “independent Democrat” and arch neocon Sen. Joseph Lieberman, voted to send her nomination to the full Senate July 29.
Never mind that the deadly weaponized pathogen employed in the attacks didn’t originate in some desolate Afghan cave or secret underground bunker controlled by Saddam.
And never mind that the principal cheerleaders for expanding state-funded programs are Pentagon bioweaponeers, private corporations and a shadowy nexus of biosecurity apparatchiks who stand to make a bundle under current and future federal initiatives.
Leading the charge for increased funding is the Alliance for Biosecurity, a collaborative venture between the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Big Pharma.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His articles are published in many venues. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning
Bioweapon manufacturing and trading is ‘biodefense’. Guess who does the bioterrorism that sells the ‘biodefense’. Deleted article ARCHIVED HERE
Soviet scientists reportedly used newly developed genetic engineering techniques to create vaccine-subverting and antibiotic-resistant strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, and smallpox for attacks against military forces and civilian populations (Bozheyeva et al. 1999, Alibek and Handelman 2000)
TRUMP: WE’RE MOBILIZING THE MILITARY TO DELIVER THE CORONAVIRUS VACCINE END OF 2020Dr Sharad S. Chauhan is a decorated Indian Police Service (IPS) officer awarded the Prime Minister’s baton and the Home Minister’s Revolver. He is also a Gold Medallist MBBS Doctor from Delhi University with a PhD in Bioterrorism. He also authored the book Biological Weapons. SOURCE
The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. Alexeter Technologies LLC, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc., Altimmune Inc., ANP Technologies Inc., Bavarian Nordic AS, Cleveland BioLabs Inc., Elusys Therapeutics Inc., Emergent BioSolutions Inc., General Dynamics Corp., and GlaxoSmithKline Plc are some of the major market participants. Although the rising prevalence of infectious disease and rapid increase in government funding in R&D will offer immense growth opportunities, to leverage the current opportunities, market vendors must strengthen their foothold in the fast-growing segments, while maintaining their positions in the slow-growing segments.
In an exclusive interview, Dr. Boyle touches upon GreatGameIndia‘s exclusive report Coronavirus Bioweapon – where we reported in detail how Chinese Biowarfare agents working at the Canadian lab in Winnipeg were involved in the smuggling of Coronavirus to Wuhan’s lab from where it is believed to have been leaked.
In this bombshell interview (full transcript below), Boyle talks about:
How the Deep State deployed anthrax on US soil to whip up publicity about biological weapons and increase funding for bioweapons labs
Why the WHO and CDC are both criminal organizations which are complicit in the covert development of biological weapons
The “death science” industry and why the US government has spent over $100 billion developing self-replicating weapons
Details about the Pirbright Institute and its ties to bioweapons, depopulation, vaccines and coronavirus patents. (It’s partially funded by Bill & Melinda Gates)
Why all BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs in the world should be banned and shut down.
Full transcript
Geopolitics and Empire: Geopolitics & Empire is joined by Dr. Francis Boyle, who is international law professor at the University of Illinois. We’ll be discussing the Wuhan coronavirus and biological warfare. He’s served as counsel to numerous governments such as Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Palestinian authority. He’s represented numerous national international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes and genocide, nuclear policy, and biowarfare. He’s written numerous books, one of my favorites being “Destroying Libya and World Order”, which I assigned as mandatory reading material for my own students when I taught at the Monterrey Institute of Technology.
But most important for this interview, he’s written a book called “Biowarfare and Terrorism”, and drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the biological weapons convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was approved unanimously by both houses of the US Congress and signed into law by President Bush. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Boyle.
Dr. Francis Boyle: Wow. Thank you so much for having me on and thanks for that kind introduction.
Geopolitics and Empire: Now let’s get to what’s been on the news recently. This coronavirus in Wuhan. There have been some reports recently, there’s a really interesting website called GreatGameIndia that has been reporting on this. They’ve been talking about China, which they say has been complying with biological weapons convention in recent years.
But then there are some people in the US and experts that have been saying that in reality, China isn’t complying with the weapons convention. And I think neither, perhaps the US as well. I’m wondering if China is developing its own biosafety level four lab in Wuhan and elsewhere, as you know, as a type of deterrence. Is it a type of a biological arms race that we have going on?
You told me in an email that you suspect China was developing the coronavirus as a dual use of biowarfare weapons agent. Also, what do you make of reports that Chinese scientists have been stealing research and viruses, including the coronavirus from a Canadian bio lab this past December?
And as well, Chinese nationals have been charged with smuggling vials of biological research to China from the US with the aid of Charles Lieber who was the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department. And he also happens to be in 2011 a strategic scientist at Wuhan University. So, can you tell us what’s going on with this recent outbreak in Wuhan?
Dr. Francis Boyle: Well, that’s a lot of questions. I guess we can take them one at a time, but if you just do a very simple Google search on “Does China have a BSL-4 laboratory?”, Wuhan comes up right away. It’s at the top of the list. That’s all with the moment this type of thing happened I began to do that. So a BSL-4 is the most serious type. And basically BSL-4 labs, we have many of them here in the United States, are used to develop offensive biological warfare weapons with DNA genetic engineering.
So it does seem to me that the Wuhan BSL-4 is the source of the coronavirus. My guess is that they were researching SARS, and they weaponize it further by giving it a gain of function properties, which means it could be more lethal.
Indeed, the latest report now is it’s a 15% fatality rate, which is more than SARS at 83% infection rate. A typical gain of function travels in the air so it could reach out maybe six feet or more from someone emitting a sneeze or a cough. Likewise, this is a specially designated WHO research lab. The WHO was in on it and they knew full well what was going on there.
Yes. It’s also been reported that Chinese scientists stole coronavirus materials from the Canadian lab at Winnipeg. Winnipeg is Canada’s formal center for research, developing, testing, biological warfare weapons. It’s along the lines of Fort Detrick here in the United States of America. I have three degrees from Harvard. It would not surprise me if something was being stolen out of Harvard to turn over to China. I read that report. I don’t know what was in those vials one way or the other.
But the bottom line is I drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention that was approved unanimously by both Houses in the United States Congress signed into law by President Bush Sr. that it appears the coronavirus that we’re dealing with here is an offensive biological warfare weapon that leaped out of Wuhan BSL-4. I’m not saying it was done deliberately. But there had been previous reports of problems with that lab and things leaking out of it. I’m afraid that is what we are dealing with today.
Geopolitics and Empire: We’ll be talking about the Wuhan and the coronavirus and China, but can you give us kind of like a bigger context. I know you’ve, previously, in interviews said that since 9/11, you think that the US has spent $100 billion on biological warfare research. We know the Soviet Union, if I’m not mistaken, developed anthrax as a bioweapon. And you’ve also mentioned that UK, France, Israel and China are all involved in biological warfare weapons research.
And something interesting, I believe one or two years ago a Bulgarian journalist and the Russian government shared their concern of the discovery of a US bioweapons lab in the country of Georgia. You’ve commented how in Africa, US has set up bioweapons labs to work on Ebola, which I think is illegal under international law. But they were allowed somehow to put those in Africa. Can you give us like a bigger picture? What’s going on with these different countries and what’s the purpose of this research?
Dr. Francis Boyle:All these BSL-4 labs are by United States, Europe, Russia, China, Israel are all there to research, develop, test biological warfare agents. There’s really no legitimate scientific reason to have BSL-4 labs. That figure I gave $100 billion, that was about 2015 I believe. I had crunched the numbers and came up with that figure the United States since 9/11.
To give you an idea that’s as much in constant dollars as the US spent to develop the Manhattan Project and the atom bomb. So it’s clearly all weapons related. We have well over 13,000 alleged life science scientists involved in research developed testing biological weapons here in the United States. Actually this goes back it even precedes 9/11 2001.
I have another book, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, tracing that all the way back to the Reagan administration under the influence of the neocons and they got very heavily involved in research development testing of biological weapons with DNA genetic engineers. It was because of that I issued my plea in 1985 in a Congressional briefing sponsored by the Council for Responsible Genetics, I’m a lawyer for them. They’re headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. All the MIT, Harvard people are involved in that, the principal ones. And then they asked me to draft the implementing legislation.
The implementing legislation that I drafted was originally designed to stop this type of work. “Death science work”, I call it, “by the United States government”. After 9/11, 2001, it just completely accelerated. My current figure, that last figure a 100 billion. I haven’t had a chance to re-crunch the numbers because I just started classes. But you have to add in about another 5 billion per year.
Basically, this is offensive biological weapons raised by the United States government and with its assistance in Canada and Britain. And so other States, the world have responded accordingly including Russia and China. They were going to set up a whole series of BSL-4 facilities as well. And you know Wuhan was the first. It backfired on them.
Geopolitics and Empire: Would you basically consider what happened and Wuhan and just boil it down to ineptitude or incompetence on the Chinese part?
Dr. Francis Boyle: Well, it’s criminality. It does appear they stole something there from Winnipeg. This activity that they engaged in clearly violates the Biological Weapons Convention. Research development of biological weapons these days is an international crime, the use of it would be. That was criminal.
I’m not saying they deliberately inflicted this on their own people, but it leaked out of there and all these BSL-4 facilities leak. Everyone knows that who studies this. So this was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Unfortunately, it happened. The Chinese government under Xi and his comrades there have been covering this up from the get-go. The first reported case was December 1, so they’d been sitting on this until they couldn’t anymore. And everything they’re telling you is a lie. It’s propaganda.
The WHO still refuses to declare a global health emergency. It said Tedros was over there shaking hands with Xi and smiling and yanking it up. The WHO was in on it. They’ve approved many of these BSL-4 labs., they know exactly what’s going on and that is a WHO research-approved laboratory. They know what’s going on too. You can’t really believe anything the WHO is telling you about this, either they’re up to their eyeballs in it, in my opinion.
Geopolitics and Empire: I’d probably agree with you that this outbreak in Wuhan was an accidental leak from the laboratory. But just your thoughts, it’s happening at quite an opportune time because namely we’re smack in the middle of a US-China new Cold War, which is currently characterized by economic warfare such as the trade war among other forms of hybrid and technological warfare. And it seems the Wuhan outbreak will likely hit the Chinese economy hard. The Chinese are flat out dismissing any idea that the US is involved in. Like I said, it’s probably they made the mistakes in the Wuhan lab. What are your thoughts of any seemingly, this would benefit the US…
Dr. Francis Boyle: When the outbreak occurred, of course I considered that alternative too. When you have an outbreak, you’re never quite sure who or what is behind it. It certainly isn’t bats, that’s ridiculous. They made the same argument on Ebola in West Africa. I demolished that online. You can check it out. So I kept competing theories about this.
But right now, when you originally contacted me, I said I wasn’t prepared to comment because I was weighing the evidence. I’m a law professor and a lawyer, I try to do the best I can to weigh the evidence. But right now, the Wuhan BSL-4 in my opinion is the most likely source, apply Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation. I’m not ruling out some type of sabotage. But right now, I believe that is the source here.
Geopolitics and Empire: And you mentioned WHO. I’d like to just get your thoughts on the WHO and the Big Pharma. There’s also some analysts who are downplaying this news media hype of the coronavirus. You’ve just said that it seems to be lethal, but if we go back a decade to the 2009 swine flu, which I believe didn’t have too many casualties, but I think profited greatly the pharmaceutical companies. If I recall that back in 2009, many countries purchased great stocks of the vaccines and they ended up not using anywhere from 50 to 80% of the vaccines that they purchased.
You’ve previously stated in an interview that the World Health Organization is a front for Big Pharma if I’m not mistaken. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also agrees and he says, you know, 50% of WHO funding comes from pharmaceutical companies. And that the CDC itself is also severely compromised. What are your thoughts on the WHO? The CDC?
Dr. Francis Boyle:Can’t trust anything the WHO says because they’re all bought and paid for by Big Pharma and when they work in cahoots with the CDC, which is the United States government, they work in cahoots with Fort Detrick, so you can’t trust any of it.
However, the swine flu and yes, I agree pharma made a lot of money, but that swine flu which I looked at it, it did seem to me to be a genetically modified biological warfare weapon. It was a chimera of three different types of genetic strains that someone put it together in a cocktail. Fortunately, it was not as lethal as all of us fear. So fine. But as I said, this figure I just gave to you was Saturday from Lancet, which is a medical publication, saying it’s a 15% fatality rate and an 83% infection rate. So it’s quite serious, I think, far more serious than the swine flu.
As for big pharma, sure they’re all trying to profit off this today as we speak. There was a big article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, all big pharma trying to peddle whatever they can over there in China even if it’s worthless and won’t help. We do know, if you read the mainstream news media they say there isn’t a vaccine.
Well, there is, it’s by the Pirbright Institute in Britain that’s tied into their biological warfare program over there. They were behind the hoof and mouth disease outbreak over there that wiped out their cattle herd and it leaked out of there. So it’s clear they’re working on a hoof and mouth biological warfare weapon, but the vaccine is there. I have the patent for it here, I haven’t had a chance to read the patent it’s about 25 pages long and my classes just resume. So eventually, I get some free time and I’ll read the patent.
You can’t patent a vaccine with the United States patent office unless the science is there. So there is a vaccine. Everyone’s lying about that, no one’s pointing this out – there’s a vaccine but instead big pharma wants to make money and the researchers say, well, it’ll take three months and we’re racing forward, you know. Everyone’s gonna make a buck off of this, that’s for sure. But there is a vaccine, I have the patent here. It’s been patented by the United States government.
So obviously, I don’t know exactly how workable it is, but it’s a vaccine. I don’t know why it isn’t out there now? Why isn’t someone saying there is a vaccine? Perhaps political leaders have already been vaccinated for all I know, I really don’t know. But there is a vaccine, Pirbright is well known there in Britain and it’s tied into Fort Detrick and CDC is tied into Fort Detrick too. So they all know there’s a patented vaccine.
Geopolitics and Empire: And just to get your comment on, I mean, something to related to this, which was my next question. So I think, I’m not sure if it’s that same Institute that you just mentioned that has the patent. I read somewhere that the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation maybe funds or has some connection to that Institute that has the patent.
Dr. Francis Boyle: I think they do. The Bill & Melinda Gates information, they fund this type of DNA genetically engineered biological warfare work. That’s correct. So you can’t trust anything they’re telling you that somehow they’re out there trying to make the world a better place. I mean, we have Bill Gates publicly admitting that the world be a better place if there were a lot less people. So the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, they are wolves in sheep’s clothing and they are funding this type of stuff. Sure.
Geopolitics and Empire: And just your comment, there was also the report that I guess it was a consortium of companies which included the Gates foundation that back in just two or three months ago in October of 2019 they held a pandemic exercise simulating an outbreak. I mean, what are the chances specifically of a coronavirus and it was called events 201. People can find this online online and they gave a list of seven recommendations for governments and international organizations to take. I also find that kind of interesting how they had this simulation.
Dr. Francis Boyle: That’s correct. It raises that question, the origins of what happened here. But right now, I’m just looking at the evidence I have and applying Occam’s razor and we know that Wuhan BSL-4 was research developing, testing, SARS as a biological warfare agent. So it could have been, they gave it this DNA genetic engineering enhanced properties gain of function which we do here in the West, in the United States all the time. We have all sorts of research that is clearly a bio warfare research that has been approved by the National Institutes of Health, it’s a joke. They know full well they are proving all kinds of biological warfare research and it gets funded by the United States government.
Geopolitics and Empire: And you’ve also mentioned in the email to me that what happened in the biosafety lab level 4 in Wuhan calls into question the safety of all of these level 3and 4four labs around the world.
Dr. Francis Boyle:They’re complete unsafe. BSL-3 and BSL-4 lab are only designed for research development testing of offense of biological warfare agents. In my opinion, they serve no legitimate purpose at all. They should all be shut down, every one of them. Even assuming, they’re simply too dangerous. If you want, there’s an excellent documentary called Anthrax Wars by Nadler and Coen and I’m in there. Repeatedly at the end, I say with respect to these labs, three and four, this is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Well, I’m afraid the catastrophe is now happened. So there it is.
Geopolitics and Empire: Yeah, I was just watching that documentary before we connected and I recommend the listeners go check that out. Do you see, in the future, any countries, if we come to a conflict between US, EU, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Russia, I mean you name it. Do you see any of these countries actually utilizing these biological weapons? I mean, it’s illegal under international law but we know like in the past that international law isn’t followed. Do you think that there’s a real danger of this escalating?
Dr. Francis Boyle: For sure. That’s the only reason they develop these biological weapons to eventually be used, sure. I mean, it’s like the Manhattan project, we put all that money into developing an atom bomb and even though it was not needed to end world war II they still knew Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, yes, I think that’s correct. And also these can be used covertly. Anytime you see an unexplained sudden outbreak of a disease like this anywhere in the world, both for human beings and or animals, I always suspect the bio warfare agent is at work. I monitor the situation like I did at Wuhan until I can reach a conclusion. Yes, they can be used as the eyes for the United States government, today they are fully prepared, armed, equipped, supplied to wage a biological warfare with anthrax.
These other more exotic things I don’t know, but they have the weapons, there are stockpiles. We have to understand if you read Seymour Martin Hersh’s book published about 1968, he won the Pulitzer prize, he had the whole offensive US biological warfare industry in there back before it was illegal and criminal. Basically after 9/11, 2001, that entire industry – offensive biological warfare industry has been reconstituted here in the United States with all these BSL-4 BSL-3 labs, well over 13,000, alleged scientists sort of like Dr. Mengele working on these things. Other countries have responded in kind like Russia, like China, France is involved, Britain’s involved. Sure.
Geopolitics and Empire: I just wanted to get your thoughts on, in the last few years there was the Russian double agent spy Sergei Skripal who had been allegedly poisoned with Novichok out in Britain and I thought it was funny. It just so happened where he was allegedly poisoned, he was right in Porton down the British bio weapons lab, I guess the world’s first bio weapons lab that was created in 1916. I mean, I don’t know if you have thoughts on that whole incident.
Dr. Francis Boyle: Yeah, I was right down the street from Porton Down, so applying Occam’s razor who you think might’ve been behind this and it was not a nerve agent. A nerve agent would have killed him immediately. This is Novichok. It was something else like DX or something like that. So fine. But, I would just say that I don’t think that was a coincidence, but, you know, there you go. There’s the, obviously there’s a lot of speculation on that.
Geopolitics and Empire: Something else that’s kind of interesting. You’ve written in bio warfare and terrorism in your book and there’s also Graeme Macqueen, I think your colleague who wrote the anthrax deception the case for domestic conspiracy…
Dr. Francis Boyle: Everything you said in there. That’s correct.
Geopolitics and Empire: I’m wondering also if this new war for biotechnological dominance, whatever you want to call it, if it can also be used kind of as a pretext for the centralization of political power and the initiation of wars like I guess it did in the 2003 Iraq war. I mean, is this another danger that we get these events like now this coronavirus and then governments will call for a centralization of greater power and taking away some of our civil liberties?
Dr. Francis Boyle: Sure. If you look at the October, 2001 anthrax attacks here in the United States, that was clearly by elements of the United States government that was behind that. That was a super weapons grade anthrax with a trillion spores per gram and it floated in the air solely a very sophisticated biological weapons lab like Fort Detrick could produce that. And they use that anthrax attack including on Congress to brand through the USA Patriot act which basically turned the United States to a police state which is what we have now. You have to understand the Pentagon, Fort Dietrich made the dugway proving ground still has a stockpile of that super weapons grade anthrax that we saw in October of 2001 that they can use the next time they want to do something like that to further develop the American police thing. Right.
Geopolitics and Empire: Is there anything else you feel important to mention regarding this Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak or biological warfare or any other thoughts you’d like to leave us with?
Dr. Francis Boyle:Well, you just can’t believe anything the Chinese government, the WHO, the CDC are telling. They’re all lies because they know what’s going on here and so you’re going to have to figure it out as fast as you can. But in my opinion, as of this time and I’m fully prepared to consider further evidence on this, it does seem to me that this was a DNA genetically engineered biological warfare agent leaking out of Wuhan that has gain-of-function properties which can make it more lethal. I think they are probably doing something with SARS to make it a lot more lethal and more infectious. And so for that reason, you have to take extreme precautions and they’re now finally admitted anyone within six feet can be infected, whereas with SARS that was about two feet. Well, that’s gaining a function right there and that should be a tip off.
So, I guess you’re gonna have to protect yourself. Laurie Garrett had a pretty good essay in a foreign policy yesterday and she was over there covering the SARS and she has very good advice in there except that she took the SARS figure out two to three feet and said well, you gotta stay to two to three. I think you’ve got to stay at least six feet away because this is gained function. It can flow through the air and infect and it can get you in the eyes. Any orifice, the mouth, maybe the ears, we’re not sure at this point.
Geopolitics and Empire: I’m here on the border of China in Kazakhstan and I was just reading yesterday – today that they’re no longer allowing Chinese citizens into Kazakhstan without a medical paper, a medical check to get their visas to enter Kazakhstan
Dr. Francis Boyle: Those medical checks are worthless because this is just public relations by all the governments involved because there is a 14 day incubation period where people can still be infected. So someone could walk right through a medical inspection and passing a gate into your country and then they come down with the coronavirus. So that’s all public relations in my opinion by governments and they know it and they’re just sending people out there with temperatures and things like that. It’s not like SARS, this is more dangerous than SARS. As I said, I think that Wuhan lab, we know they had SARS in there that they were dealing with and I think they enhanced it at and I’m afraid that’s what we’re dealing with. But you know, I’m keeping an open mind as to what other sources that might have and I wasn’t prepared to say anything until that Wuhan lab is right there and it’s dealing with coronavirus. So again, apply Occam’s razor. It seems to me that’s the simplest explanation here.
Geopolitics and Empire: I guess my, one of my final question would be in the months ahead, apart of what you say staying six feet away from people. I’ve read taking high doses of vitamin C and other things like this can help you. But, if they come out as the situation develops and if it gets worse and they come out with a coronavirus vaccine, should people take it or not? What are your thoughts?
Dr. Francis Boyle: Well, what I would say is this. Right now, if you look at the article at the Wall Street Journal, big pharma is trying to sell all sorts of – they’re taking all their drugs off the shelf and say well let’s see if it works. Which is preposterous. Okay. The scientists are saying, well, we can get you a vaccine maybe two to three months but they’re not tested. So what we do know, however, is that Pirbright vaccine has been patented. So all I can assume is that that might work. But I don’t think I’d be taking any of these other vaccines. No, you have no idea what’s in there. You’ll be the Guinea pig for big pharma and everyone figures they’re gonna make a lot of money here. So I’ll keep my eye open on this and how it develop but I wouldn’t trust anything they’re trying to sell right now. They’re just pulling these things off the shelf.
If they do come up with something in two to three months, even that’s not going to be tested in accordance with normal scientific protocol. So it’s going to be a crap shoot. If it’s going to help you, indeed it might not help you because they’ll be using for this vaccines (these DNA genetic engineered vaccines) they’ll be using live coronavirus probably and sticking it in there and giving you some live coronavirus on the theory you’ll develop an immunity. That’s the way a lot of these vaccines worked out, that’s what happened with the Ebola vaccine that created the Ebola pandemic there in West Africa. They were testing out a vaccine on poor black Africans, as usual, and this vaccine had live Ebola in it so it gave them Ebola. So again, I’d be very careful even if they do come up with these vaccines two to three months from now, very careful. Why would you want to inject the live coronavirus in you?
Geopolitics and Empire: All right. I don’t believe you have a strong online presence. How can people best follow your work? I suppose to search for interviews as well as get your books.
Dr. Francis Boyle:Well, basically I’m blackballed and blacklisted off all the mainstream news media here on purpose. As far as I can figure out, the US government gave an order that I should not be interviewed by anyone, so I’m not. I guess you could just put my name in there under Google, Google alert, and some interviews might come up. What happened was, right after the anthrax attacks of 9/11 2001, I was giving a lecture out at Harvard m Alma Mater. I was running a panel on biological warfare for the council for responsible genetics and it was at Harvard Divinity School and as I was going in, there was a Fox camera crew there from Boston and I said it looks to me like this has come out of the US government lab. We know they do research and testing on anthrax. Then I said the same thing there at Harvard then I gave an interview to a radio station in Washington, D C then I gave an interview on that to the BBC. So the whole world saw it and at that point I was completely cut off and I’ve been cut off ever since. So you probably not going to hear too many interviews from me here. As for my book. Biowarfare & Terrorism, you can just get it at amazon.com. That picks up the story pretty much from 9/11 2001 and until it went to press and then there are interviews I’d given to an investigative reporter, Sherwood Ross and a big one I just sent you and you might want to put that on your web page. That was pretty comprehensive.
Geopolitics and Empire: Yeah, I read that as well and I’ll include the link in the description of this interview so people can go check that out. You’re not the only academic I know and have heard of others that similar things have happened and that’s just I guess the price we pay for telling the truth. Again, for listeners, if people wanted to have a broader context and deeper understanding of what’s happening today especially with biological warfare as well as us foreign policy and international affairs, I urge you to get Dr. Francis Boyle’s books and listen to his interviews as well as his colleagues book. Graeme Macqueen, The Anthrax Deception, The Case For Domestic Conspiracy. Thank you for being with us, Dr. Boyle.
Dr. Francis Boyle: Well, thank you and again, please understand these are my current opinions. I could change my opinion here based on more evidence. So I’m just looking at the evidence out there as I see it and you have to understand there is so much disinformation, lies and propaganda that it’s kind of very difficult to distinguish truth from fact. I’m doing the best job I can here.
VINCE JAMES DOES A GREAT JOB EXPLORING THE COMPLEX FROM THE CIA ANGLE AND ARRIVING TO THE SAME BIG PICTRE AND ALL THE GOOD CONCLUSIONS, MUST WATCH ENTIRELY!
The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms’ rules.
Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, last weekinstructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online to provide a full accounting of their activities by next month after the White House and somefederal agencies expressed mounting concerns over the Defense Department’s attempted manipulation of audiences overseas, according to several defense and administration officials familiar with the matter.
The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations.
The researchers did not specify when the takedowns occurred, but those familiar with the matter said they were within the pasttwo or three years. Some were recent, they said, and involved posts from the summer that advanced anti-Russia narratives citing the Kremlin’s “imperialist” war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict’s direct impact on Central Asian countries. Significantly, they found that the pretend personas — employing tactics used by countries such as Russia and China — did not gain much traction, and that overt accounts actually attracted more followers.
Centcom, headquartered in Tampa, has purview over military operations across 21 countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Central and South Asia. A spokesman declined to comment.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement that the military’s information operations “support our national security priorities” and must be conducted in compliance with relevant laws and policies. “We are committed to enforcing those safeguards,” he said.
Spokespersons for Facebook and Twitter declined to comment.
According to the researchers’ report, the accounts taken down included a made-up Persian-language media site that shared content reposted from the U.S.-funded Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe. Another, it said, was linked to a Twitter handle that in the past had claimed to operate on behalf of Centcom.
One fake account posted an inflammatory tweet claiming that relatives of deceased Afghan refugees had reported bodies being returned from Iran with missing organs, according to the report. The tweet linked to a video that was part of an article posted on a U.S.-military affiliated website.
Centcom has not commented on whether these accounts were created by its personnel or contractors. If the organ-harvesting tweet is shown to be Centcom’s, one defense official said, it would “absolutely be a violation of doctrine and training practices.”
Independent of the report, The Washington Post has learned that in 2020 Facebook disabled fictitious personas created by Centcom to counter disinformation spread by China suggesting the coronavirus responsible for covid-19 was created at a U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick, Md., according to officials familiar with the matter. The pseudo profiles — active in Facebook groups that conversed in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, the officials said — were used to amplify truthful information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the virus’s origination in China.
The U.S. government’suse of ersatz social mediaaccounts, though authorized by law and policy, has stirred controversy inside the Biden administration, with the White House pressing the Pentagon to clarify and justify its policies. The White House, agencies such as the State Department and even some officials within the Defense Department have been concerned that the policies are too broad, allowing leeway for tactics that even if used to spread truthful information, risk eroding U.S. credibility, several U.S. officials said.
“Our adversaries are absolutely operating in the information domain,” said a second senior defense official. “There are some who think we shouldn’t do anything clandestine in that space. Ceding an entire domain to an adversary would be unwise. But we need stronger policy guardrails.”
A spokeswoman for the National Security Council, which is part of the White House, declined to comment.
Kahl disclosed his review at a virtual meeting convened by the National Security Council on Tuesday, saying he wants to know what types of operations have been carried out, who they’re targeting, what tools are being used and why military commanders have chosen those tactics, and how effective they have been, several officials said.
The message was essentially, “You have to justify to me why you’re doing these types of things,” the first defense official said.
Pentagon policy and doctrine discourage the military from peddling falsehoods, but there are no specific rules mandating the use of truthful information for psychological operations. For instance, the military sometimes employs fiction and satire for persuasion purposes, but generally the messages are supposed to stick to facts, officials said.
In 2020, officers at Facebook and Twitter contacted the Pentagon to raise concerns about the phony accounts they were having to remove, suspicious they were associated with the military. That summer, David Agranovich, Facebook’s director for global threat disruption, spoke to Christopher C. Miller, then assistant director for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict, which oversees influence operations policy, warning him that if Facebook could sniff them out, so could U.S. adversaries, several people familiar with the conversation said.
“His point‚” one person said, “was ‘Guys, you got caught. That’s a problem.’ ”
Before Miller could take action, he was tapped to head a different agency — the National Counterterrorism Center. Then the November election happened and time ran out for the Trump administration to address the matter, although Miller did spend the last few weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency serving as acting defense secretary.
With the rise of Russia and China as strategic competitors, military commanders have wanted to fight back, including online. And Congress supported that. Frustrated with perceived legal obstacles to the Defense Department’s ability to conduct clandestine activities in cyberspace, Congress in late 2019 passed a law affirming that the military could conduct operations in the “information environment” to defend the United States and to push back against foreign disinformation aimed at undermining its interests. The measure, known as Section 1631, allows the military to carry out clandestine psychologic operations without crossing what the CIA has claimed as its covert authority, alleviating some of the friction that had hindered such operations previously.
“Combatant commanders got really excited,” recalled the first defense official. “They were very eager to utilize these new authorities. The defense contractors were equally eager to land lucrative classified contracts to enable clandestine influence operations.”
At the same time, the official said, military leaders were not trained to oversee “technically complex operations conducted by contractors” or coordinate such activities with other stakeholders elsewhere in the U.S. government.
President Biden, right, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, left, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley attend a Pentagon ceremony to remember the victims of 9/11. (Leigh Vogel/Bloomberg)
Last year, with a new administration in place, Facebook’s Agranovich tried again. This time he took his complaint to President Biden’s deputy national security adviser for cyber, Anne Neuberger. Agranovich, who had worked at the NSC under Trump, told Neuberger that Facebook was taking down fake accounts because they violated the company’s terms of service, according to people familiar with the exchange.
The accounts were easily detected by Facebook, which since Russia’s campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election has enhanced its ability to identify mock personas and sites. In some cases, the company had removed profiles, which appeared to be associated with the military, that promoted information deemed by fact-checkers to be false, said a person familiar with the matter.
Agranovich alsospoke to officials at the Pentagon. His messagewas: “We know what DOD is doing. It violates our policies. We will enforce our policies” and so “DOD should knock it off,” said aU.S. official briefed on the matter.
In response to White House concerns, Kahl ordered a review of Military Information Support Operations, or MISO, the Pentagon’s moniker for psychological operations. A draft concluded that policies, training and oversight all needed tightening, and that coordination with other agencies, such as the State Department and the CIA, needed strengthening, according to officials.
The review also found that while there were cases in which fictitious information was pushed by the military, they were the result of inadequate oversight of contractors and personnel training — not systemic problems, officials said.
Pentagon leadership did little with the review, two officials said, before Graphika and Stanford published their report on Aug. 24, which elicited a flurry of news coverage and questions for the military.
Army psyop graduates receive pins at the end of a field exercise reading “Persuade, Change, Influence.” (Cynthia McIntyre/Fort Hunter Liggett Public Affairs)
The State Department and CIA have been perturbed by the military’s use of clandestine tactics. Officers at State have admonished the Defense Department, “Hey don’t amplify our policies using fake personas, because we don’t want to be seen as creating false grass roots efforts,” the first defense official said.
One diplomat put it this way: “Generally speaking, we shouldn’t be employing the same kind of tactics that our adversaries are using because the bottom line is we have the moral high ground. We are a society that is built on a certain set of values. We promote those values around the world and when we use tactics like those, it just undermines our argument about who we are.”
Psychological operations to promote U.S. narratives overseas is nothing new in the military, but the popularity of western social media across the globehas led to an expansion of tactics, including the use of artificial personas and images — sometimes called “deep fakes.” The logic is that views expressed by what appears to be, say, an Afghan woman or an Iranian student might be more persuasive than if they were openly pushed by the U.S. government.
The majority of the military’s influence operations are overt, promoting U.S. policies in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere under its own name, officials said. And there are valid reasons to use clandestine tactics, such as trying to infiltrate a closed terrorist chat group, they said.
A key issue for senior policymakers now is determining whether the military’s execution of clandestine influence operations is delivering results. “Is the juice worth the squeeze? Does our approach really have the potential for the return on investment we hoped or is it just causing more challenges?” one person familiar with the debate said.
The report by Graphika and Stanford suggests that the clandestine activity did not have much impact. It noted that the “vast majority of posts and tweets” reviewed received “no more than a handful of likes or retweets,” and only 19 percent of the concocted accounts had more than 1,000 followers. “Tellingly,” the report stated, “the two most-followed assets in the data provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly declared a connection to the U.S. military.”
Clandestine influence operations have a role in support of military operations, but it should be a narrow one with “intrusive oversight” by military and civilian leadership, said Michael Lumpkin, a former senior Pentagon official handling information operations policy and a former head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. “Otherwise, we risk making more enemies than friends.”
45 years ago, legendary journalist Carl Bernstein released an investigation documenting how the CIA had managed to infiltrate U.S. and global media. The CIA had placed hundreds of agents into newsrooms and had convinced hundreds more reporters to collaborate with them. These included individuals at some of the most influential outlets, including The New York Times. The CIA needed to do this clandestinely because any attempt to do so openly would harm the effectiveness of the operation and provoke stiff public resistance. But by 2015, there was barely a murmur of disapproval when Reuters announced that it was hiring 33-year veteran CIA manager and director Dawn Scalici as a global director, even when the company announced that her primary responsibility was to “advanc[e] Thomson Reuters’ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. government.”
Facebook, however, is vastly more influential than the New York Times or Reuters, reaching billions of people daily. In that sense, it stands to reason that it would be a prime target of any intelligence organization. It has become so big and ubiquitous that many consider it a de facto public commons and believe it should no longer be treated as a private company. Considering who is making many of the decisions on the platform, that distinction between public and private entities is even more blurry than many presume.
I’ve just brought to light insider information that confirms a very similar model has been pursued in USSR / Russia. I wonder if the two are eventually merging at the top, like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, seeing that Putin is a former Klaus Schwab disciple and a Davos regular.
I asked the AI Chat Bot “What was the role of the DoD in covid-countermeasures?” Here is what it wrote:
“The Department of Defense (DoD) played a significant role in the development of countermeasures against COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. The DoD worked closely with other federal agencies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to respond to the pandemic.
One of the main roles of the DoD in the COVID-19 response was to provide logistical support and medical resources to help healthcare workers and first responders on the front lines of the pandemic. The DoD also worked to develop and distribute personal protective equipment (PPE) and other supplies to support the response efforts.
In addition, the DoD provided funding and resources to support the development of vaccines and treatments for COVID-19. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research arm of the DoD, played a key role in this effort by funding and supporting the development of treatments and vaccines through its “Rapid Response Research” program.
Overall, the DoD played a vital role in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic by providing logistical support, medical resources, and funding for research and development efforts to combat the disease.”
AI Chat Bot gets a “F” – for a highly controlled narrative answer, which was fed to all MSM sources, while the “alternative” media did not examine it very much, with some exceptions. It wasn’t just logistics or even just lots of funding, and certainly nobody was “combatting disease”.
The frantic analysis pieces pointing harder and harder at Pfizer are being circulated to draw public anger away from the DOD-HHS complex, and steer it to expendables, Pfizer are just one of the patsy's.https://t.co/kCz7ipO8uM
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
When coincidences outnumber differences, it’s either a method or a conspiracy. In the AIDS – Covid comparison, it’s both.
Our effort has already earned the YouTube Badge of Honor and Credibility, so you know this is hard-hitting
Let’s play a new game: Identify all the ‘coincidences’ between AIDS and Covid. Here’s my incomplete list for starters:
No gold standard virus isolation from patients
Virus – illness causation not fully evidenced
Fauci runs the show
Poison sold for therapy results in genocide
Cases explode after therapy approval
Fauci promotes Gilead drugs and suppresses all other alternatives
Deliberate misuse of PCRs
Fake test and cases
Fauci brutally suppresses dissent
Fake stats and other mish-mashes in third world
They couldn’t do it without their friends in media and Pentagon
Strong political and economical incentives for Government participation
Genetic sequence changing all the time
No cure found, normalized, need permanent medication
I will probably add more with time, feel free to send me suggestions on my socials
Mengele was a baby compared to what Fauci achieved in any of these crises alone
I only mirror AIDS and COVID / AZT and Covid injections here, but rest assured they’ve made many more trials and versions, these are just the most documented and obvious. So much documented I might follow up with one or two more episodes. However, these first 40+ minutes suffice to support the claim in my headline and the case that trialing Fauci’s genocide has to start with AIDS, if not earlier. But this video presentation is not all I have, I’ll keep adding below more of the bombshells I’ve dug out during my investigations.
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
THERE’S NO BETTER PREVENTION THAN SHARING THE KNOWLEDGE FASTER THAN THEY SHARE THEIR PROPAGANDA!
The original title of this article was URGENT! DEBUNKING THE NEXT ENGINEERED PANDEMIC: NIPAH VIRUS. I expanded the scope because in the meantime I learned they are ramping up propaganda for all three. These viruses have more things in common, as you will find out below.
You should actually begin with this earlier report:
To further develop the ChAd3 Ebola and Marburg vaccines, Sabin has entered into a Research Collaboration Agreement with the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The Sabin Vaccine Institute, a non-profit organization founded in 1993, is a leading advocate for expanding vaccine access and uptake globally, advancing vaccine research and development, and amplifying vaccine knowledge and innovation. Sabin received more than $110 million for vaccine R&D programs from public and philanthropic funding sources, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, European Commission, Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Global Health Innovative Technology Fund and the Michelson Medical Research Foundation.
Washington DC, Oct. 21, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Sabin Vaccine Institute (Sabin) announced that the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has exercised the third contract option, valued at $34.5 million, under the 2019 contract to advance the development of vaccines against Ebola Sudan and Marburg viruses through Phase 2 clinical trials.
In September 2019, BARDA awarded Sabin a development contract, valued up to $128 million, and has already provided funding of $40.5 million. This third contract option will enable continued nonclinical efficacy and safety studies, Phase 2 clinical trials in Africa, and vaccine manufacturing processes to ensure quality and safety.
In August, a case of Marburg disease was confirmed in the West African country of Guinea where the Ministry of Health officially declared an outbreak of Marburg.1 This recent case, as well as Marburg’s history of outbreaks and their potential for future devastating outbreaks, demonstrates that preventative measures are overdue to protect civilian populations, military personnel, first responders, health care workers and laboratory workers, both in the United States and abroad, against these emerging infectious diseases.
Ebola Sudan and Marburg viruses are closely related to Ebola Zaire virus, which has caused more than 2,200 deaths since 2018, leading the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Like Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan and Marburg are among the world’s deadliest viruses, causing hemorrhagic fever with subsequent death in an average of 50 percent of cases.2,3
“Even as the world struggles with the COVID-19 pandemic, disease caused by Ebola Sudan and Marburg viruses continue to be a serious threat, as we have seen with the recent outbreak of Marburg in Guinea. We are grateful for BARDA’s continued support of Sabin’s efforts to advance vaccines against these deadly viruses,” said Sabin Chief Executive Officer Amy Finan. “We also thank our partners at the Vaccine Research Center of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for their continued collaboration, and GSK for their earlier work on the candidates.”
The two candidate vaccines, based on GSK’s proprietary ChAd3 platform, were exclusively licensed to the Sabin Vaccine Institute from GSK in 2019.
This project has been funded in whole or in part with federal funds from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response; Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, under contract number 75A50119C00055.
This above is the official Sabin Inst. press release, this below isn’t:
November 4, 2021 – The U.S. CDC published a Level Three Travel Advisory for the recent Ebola outbreak in the Beni Health Zone of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
November 3, 2021 – The U.S. CDC vaccine advisory committee reviewed previous recommendation preexposure vaccination with Ervebo for adults aged ≥18 years in the U.S. population who are at highest risk for potential occupational exposure to Ebola virus species Zaire ebolavirus because they are: responding to an outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), or work as health care personnel at federally designated Ebola treatment centers in the U.S., or work as laboratorians or other staff at biosafety level 4 facilities in the U.S.
November 2, 2021 – The WHO reported additional cases and deaths confirmed in the Ebola virus disease outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with two new health areas affected. A total of 394 people (67 primary care providers including nine high-risk contacts, nine contacts of contacts, and 49 probable contacts) have been vaccinated including 182 contacts of contacts, 125 probable contacts, and 87 high-risk contacts.
October 29, 2021 – A Research Article – Safety and immunogenicity of 2-dose heterologous Ad26.ZEBOV, MVA-BN-Filo Ebola vaccination in healthy and HIV-infected adults: A randomized, placebo-controlled Phase II clinical trial in Africa – was published by the journal PLOS Medicine. Conclusion – The Ad26.ZEBOV and MVA-BN-Filo combo vaccination were well tolerated and immunogenic in healthy and HIV-infected African adults. Increasing the interval between vaccinations from 28 to 56 days improved the magnitude of humoral immune responses. Antibody levels persisted to at least 1 year, and an Ad26.ZEBOV booster vaccination demonstrated the presence of vaccination-induced immune memory. These data supported the approval by the European Union for prophylaxis against EBOV disease in adults and children ≥1 year of age.
October 27, 2021 – IAVI announced an award of up to US$126 million from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to develop two recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus (rVSV)-vectored filovirus vaccine candidates. This award supports preclinical activities and includes options for clinical development up to and inclusive of a Phase II clinical trial of IAVI’s rVSV Sudan ebolavirus vaccine candidate (rVSVΔG-SUDV-GP). Optional work that would continue the development of IAVI’s Marburg virus vaccine candidate (rVSVΔG-MARV-GP) that is currently supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense could be funded at a later date.
“Vectored” means, most likely, mRNA or some other genetic / nanotech targeting technology.
October 20, 2021 – The WHO African Region reported 5 Ebola cases, and over 27,000 travelers have been screened in the DRC. Furthermore, over 116 people have been vaccinated.
October 17, 2021 – Africa News reported Ebola vaccinations started in Beni, DRC, after at least two people died due to the virus in October 2021. The WHO African Region Tweeted DRC Situation Report (17/10/21) 5 confirmed cases, three deaths, 369 contacts identified, and 308 contacts monitored.
October 13, 2021 – Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) health officials confirmed an Ebola vaccination campaign had launched in the North Kivu province where one confirmed Ebola case, plus three related suspected deaths, were recently reported. About 1,000 doses of the rVSV-ZEBOV Ebola vaccine and other medical supplies were delivered from the capital Kinshasa to Goma city in North Kivu. The DRC has more than 12,000 vaccine doses in Kinshasa that can be deployed if necessary.
October 10, 2021 – The WHO reported additional Ebola cases related to the recent DRC case of a 3-year-old boy. A cluster of three deaths (two children and their father) who were neighbors of the case. These three patients died on 14, 19, and 29 September 2021 after developing symptoms consistent with Ebola. However, none were tested for the virus. As of October 9th, a total of 148 contacts have been identified and are under follow-up by the local response team.
October 8, 2021 – A case of Ebola has been confirmed in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, five months after the end of the most recent Ebola outbreak there. The child died on October 6th. It was not immediately known if the Ebola case was related to the 2018-20 outbreak that killed more than 2,200 people in eastern Congo or the flare-up that killed six people in 2021.
September 13, 2021 – A new study based in Sierra Leone concluded the Ebola vaccine regimen from Janssen – J&J. It was found well tolerated with no safety concerns in children aged 1–17 years and induced robust humoral immune responses, suggesting the suitability of this regimen for Ebola virus disease prevention in children.
August 31, 2021 – The government of Cote d’Ivoire has informed the WHO that a second laboratory has tested samples from a patient suspected of having Ebola and has found no evidence of the virus. Around a dozen WHO experts were mobilized to support the country’s efforts, and 5,000 Ebola vaccine doses which WHO had helped Guinea procure were sent from Guinea to Cote d’Ivoire.
August 23, 2021 – The WHO African region reported Ebola booster dose vaccinations in Sierra Leone following administration of the prime dose of the Johnson & Johnson Ebola vaccine in May 2021. Frontline health workers, practitioners of traditional medicines or traditional healers, and commercial motorbike riders who received the first dose are now given their second jab to maximize their protection against the disease.
August 17, 2021 – The WHO confirmed Cote d’Ivoire deployed 2,000 vaccine doses from Merck and around 3,000 vaccine doses manufactured by Johnson & Johnson – Janssen.
August 14, 2021 – The WHO Africa reported the Ministry of Health of Cote d’Ivoire today confirmed the country’s first case of Ebola since 1994. This came after the Institut Pasteur in Cote d’Ivoire confirmed the Ebola Virus Disease in samples collected from a patient hospitalized in Abidjan’s commercial capital after arriving from Guinea.
August 9, 2021 – The WHO confirmed ‘Marburg virus disease (MVD) is a highly virulent, epidemic-prone disease associated with high case fatality rates (CFR 24-90%). In the early course of the disease, the clinical diagnosis of MVD is difficult to distinguish from other tropical febrile illnesses because of the similarities in the clinical symptoms. Differential diagnoses to be excluded include Ebola virus disease, as well as malaria, typhoid fever, leptospirosis, rickettsial infection, and plague.’
June 15, 2021 – The Southwest National Primate Research Center at Texas Biomedical Research Institute (Texas Biomed) has been awarded more than $37 million from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to continue operations into 2026. The P51 grant, given by the NIH Office of Research Infrastructure Programs, provides essential funding to house and care for nearly 2,500 non-human primates that are part of life-science research programs at Texas Biomed and partners around the globe.
June 4, 2021 – Johnson & Johnson welcomed a new recommendation by the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization for the WHO that supports the use of the Johnson & Johnson Ebola vaccine regimen both during outbreaks for individuals at some risk of Ebola exposure and preventively, in the absence of an outbreak, for national and international first responders in neighboring areas or countries where an outbreak might spread.
April 10, 2021 – The government of Sierra Leone and the WHO announced Johnson & Johnson had donated about 4,500 Zabdeno and Mvabea Ebola vaccines to Sierra Leone to help prevent any Ebola outbreak. The last Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone was in 2016.
March 25, 2021 – Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine revealed health officials are monitoring 44 people who have returned from areas of Africa with active outbreaks of Ebola.
March 25, 2021 – Oregon public health officials announced they are monitoring four people who recently visited the West African countries of Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Regions in each of these countries are currently experiencing outbreaks of Ebola virus disease. The Oregon Health Authority and local public health departments have been in contact with these individuals, considered “persons under monitoring” since they arrived in the state earlier in March 2021.
March 23, 2021 – The WHO African Region Tweeted Guinea Ebola outbreak Situation Report (22/03/21) 18 cases, nine deaths, 78 contacts, 82% monitored. And 3,905 people have been vaccinated.
March 13, 2021 – After a request from the Guinean authorities, Russia is considering supplying a domestic vaccine against the Ebola virus to the African country, reported TASS.
May 13, 2020 – BARDA Provides the Sabin Vaccine Institute with an Additional $20 Million for Further Development of Ebola Sudan and Marburg Vaccines
The Sabin Vaccine Institute (Sabin) and its partner ReiThera Srl today announced that the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has exercised the first two options, valued at $20 million, under the 2019 contract to advance the development of vaccines against Ebola Sudan and Marburg viruses through Phase 2 clinical trials. In September 2019, BARDA awarded Sabin a development contract, valued at $128 million, and provided the initial funding award of $20.5 million. This second $20 million award will enable the manufacture and release of clinical vaccine material developed by ReiThera, a specialist in the development and cGMP manufacture of adenoviral vector vaccines. The funding will also support non-clinical studies to evaluate efficacy and immune response.
UPDATE 5: NOVEMBER 7, 2021: MARBURG GOES VIRAL ON INTERNET ONLY, YET. I’m happy awareness increases, it’s crucial. I’ve addressed this virus below, but not many had the patience to go through all text, and I kind of understand them, but there’s no easier way than reading. Here’s another angle to keep in sight when computing all this info:
UPDATE 4: OCTOBER 19 2021: THE FEARPORN CAMPAIGN TAKES SPEED AS IF THEY ARE TO RELEASE THIS SOON. IF YOU FALL FOR THEIR BRAINWASH, THEY HAVE NO REASON TO STOP.
And they’re still not running out of stupid ideas we can see through:
Oh, look who pushes the fear! Exactly who I would’ve expected:
Later update: In the meantime I’ve learned that Marburg (an Ebola relative) and Xinjiang fever, a Chinese relative of the Yellow Fever virus, are also top candidates, and that goes in line with the Fauci e-mails I highlighted below. I will be back with more details shortly. Almost certainly it will be some form of hemorrhagic fever, most likely to cover for injections side-effects on the blood stream.
UPDATE 2:
One month later, they’re starting to catch up and it’s still not too late to un-play it if this goes BOOM NOW!
By the end of last century, The Military has abandoned you and has joined Pharmafia and the super-rich elites in a plan to govern you with bioweapons and psy-ops. As I’ve said many times, Big Pharma and Big Tech are long gone, The Military BioTech Complex has been running the show for quite a while. This is just a chapter from that book, more to come if we get some love.
Canadian lab’s shipment of Ebola, Henipah viruses to China raises questions
Henipah and Nipah are interchangeable
Scientists at the National Microbiology Lab sent live Ebola and Henipah viruses to Beijing on an Air Canada flight March 31, and while the Public Health Agency of Canada says all federal policies were followed, there are questions about whether that shipment is part of an ongoing RCMP investigation.
Ebola and Henipah are Level 4 pathogens, meaning they’re some of the deadliest viruses in the world. They must be contained in a lab with the highest level of biosafety control, such as the one in Winnipeg.
Two months after that shipment, on May 24, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) referred an “administrative matter” to RCMP that resulted in the removal of two Chinese research scientists — Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng — and several international students on July 5.
Both agencies have said repeatedly that public safety has not been at risk.
PHAC will not confirm if the March 31 shipment is part of the RCMP investigation.
Strict protocols
Several sources, who have asked to remain anonymous because they fear for their jobs, say the pathogens may have been shipped to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in a way that circumvented the lab’s operating procedures, and without a document protecting Canada’s intellectual property rights.
Researchers working at the National Microbiology Lab on cutting-edge, high-containment research are not allowed to send anything to other countries or labs without the intellectual property office negotiating and having a material transfer agreement in place, in case the material sent leads to a notable discovery.
A PHAC spokesperson did not confirm if this shipment included such an agreement.
However, Eric Morrissette said it’s “routine” for the lab to share samples of pathogens and toxins with partners in other countries to advance scientific work worldwide.
“All transfers of Risk Group 4 samples follow strict transportation requirements and are authorized by senior officials at the lab and the NML tracks and keeps electronic records of all shipments of samples in accordance with the HPTA. Agreements for the transfer of materials are determined on a case-by-case basis,” Morrisette wrote in an email statement.
“On the specific shipments to China earlier this year, we can confirm that we have all records pertaining to the shipment, and that all protocols were followed as directed by the above Acts and Standards.”
Sources say Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, were escorted from the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg on July 5. (Governor General’s Innovation Awards)
Xiangguo Qiu is head of the National Microbiology Lab’s Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies section in the Special Pathogens Program. She is responsible for the lab that works with Ebola. Her husband, Keding Cheng, is also a PHAC biologist.
After their security clearance was revoked and they were escorted from the lab, the University of Manitoba also cut ties with them and re-assigned Qiu’s graduate students, pending the RCMP investigation. No charges have been laid.
Neither scientist has responded to requests for comment, although some of their former colleagues say Qiu is not just a world-renowned scientist who helped develop a treatment for Ebola, but also a researcher with ethics and integrity.
Case raises questions
One question raised by this case is that of intellectual property protection, says Leah West, who practises, studies and publishes in the field of national security law and lectures at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs.
“If China was leveraging these scientists in Canada to gain access to a potentially valuable pathogen or to elements of a virus without having to license the patent … it makes sense with the idea of China trying to gain access to valuable IP without paying for it,” she said.
Leah West says she hopes the lab and Health Canada are doing an investigation in addition to the one the RCMP is conducting. (Submitted by Leah West)
West accepts PHAC’s assertion that public safety is not an issue, even though the viruses were transported on a commercial Air Canada flight.
However, she says the fact the RCMP is involved means there’s a legitimate concern.
“You don’t send a policy breach, a bureaucratic policy breach, to the RCMP to investigate unless you believe that that policy breach has resulted in a criminal offence or could have resulted in a criminal offence. So what is the criminal offence potentially here?” West said.
She said she hopes the lab and Health Canada are also doing an internal investigation.
“I think there will need to be an inquiry into the scientists to potentially see whether or not they were compromised or any elements of their work were compromised and that China gained illegal or improper access to Canadian intellectual property … to see what China may have gained access to without knowledge, prior to this incident,” West says.
Don’t ‘jump into any conclusions too quickly’
However, the deputy director of the University of Alberta’s China Institute is urging caution when it comes to making assumptions.
Jia Wang doesn’t dispute China has been involved in the past in espionage and intellectual property theft, but she says that country is making big investments in developing STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) scholars and then putting that into innovation.
China has its own reasons to protect intellectual property because many new ideas are coming from there, Wang says.
She’s waiting to see what comes of the RCMP investigation of the lab in Winnipeg.
“As China observers, we’d like to perhaps gently remind people not to jump into any conclusions too quickly,” she said.
“It will be good to get to the bottom of this and see what might have gone wrong and what was the oversight and how can the procedures be improved or people involved can be reminded of how to adhere to the policies better.”
Jia Wang, deputy director of the University of Alberta’s China Institute, is advising caution about making assumptions concerning the case. (Submitted by Jia Wang)
The shipment of the viruses took place at a time when relations between Canada and China have been strained over the arrest of a Huawei executive, at the request of the United States.
In retaliation, China has detained two Canadians and is boycotting Canadian canola and pork.
Because of the strained relationship between the two countries, and this case at the lab, Chinese-Canadian researchers and academics are starting to worry they may be singled out and targeted, Wang said.
“Certain assumptions are made or their loyalty to Canada is questioned in any way. And as multicultural as we are in Canada, we don’t want to see that.” – CBC, 2019
On December 19, 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced the approval of Ervebo to prevent EVD caused by Zaire ebolavirus in individuals 18 years of age and older. This report, published by the U.S. CDC on January 8, 2021, summarizes the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommendations for using the rVSVΔG-ZEBOV-GP Ebola vaccine (Ervebo) in the USA.
On July 1, 2020, the European Medicines Agency granted Johnson & Johnson Janssen’s Zabdeno and Mvabea Ebola vaccine therapy, a prime-boost vaccination approach for preventing infectious diseases. Janssen’s Ebola vaccine regimen is specifically designed to induce long-term immunity against the Ebola virus in adults and children aged one year and above.
CanSino Biologics’s Ad5-EBOV Ebola vaccine received approval in China in October 2017. Ad5-EBOV is an adenovirus type 5 vector-based Ebola virus disease vaccine that protects against Ebola by relying on the recombinant replication-defective human adenovirus type-5 vector immune response. In addition, Ad5-EBOV is manufactured as a lyophilized powder, highly stable, and does not require storage at ultra-low temperatures. This feature renders it viable for use in resource-limited tropical areas.
The WHO published the revised Ebola Vaccine FAQ on January 11, 2020.
Henipaviruses belong to the family of paramyxoviruses. Two species have been identified to be zoonotic, causing disease in animals. These are the Hendra virus (HeV) and the Nipah virus (NiV). They produce severe and often fatal illness in humans and horses.
Samples from early Wuhan COVID-19 patients show the presence of genetically modified Henipah virus, an American scientist has found.
Henipah was one of the two types of viruses sent to China by Chinese-born scientists from a Canadian laboratory at the centre of a controversy over the firing of the scientists and collaboration with Chinese military researchers. It is not clear whether the virus found in the Chinese samples is related to the samples sent by the Canadian lab, which were shipped in late March 2019.
The finding was confirmed for The Epoch Times by another qualified scientist.
The evidence was first found by Dr. Steven Quay, a Seattle-based physician-scientist and former faculty member at the Stanford University School of Medicine, who looked at early COVID-19 samples uploaded by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) shortly after China informed the World Health Organization about the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.
Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli is seen inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 23, 2017. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)
The samples from the patients, who reportedly were found to have the “unknown pneumonia” in December 2019, were uploaded to the genetic sequence database, GenBank, on the website of the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH).
Quay says that while other scientists around the world were mostly interested in examining the genome of SARS-CoV-2 in the samples uploaded by the WIV scientists, he wanted to see what else was in the samples collected from the patients.
So he collaborated with a few other scientists to analyze sequences from the samples.
“We started fishing inside for weird things,” Quay told The Epoch Times.
What they found, he says, are the results of what could likely be contamination from different experiments in the lab making their way into the samples, as well as evidence of Henipah virus.
“We found genetic manipulation of the Nipah virus, which is more lethal than Ebola.” Nipah is a type of Henipah virus.
The Epoch Times asked Joe Wang, PhD, who formerly spearheaded a vaccine development program for SARS in Canada with one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, to verify the finding. Wang is currently the president of NTD Television Canada, the sister company of The Epoch Times in Canada.
After examining the evidence, Wang said he was able to replicate Quay’s findings on the Henipah virus. He explains that the genetic manipulation of the virus was likely for the purposes of vaccine development.
Winnipeg Lab
The firing of Chinese-born scientist Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, from the National Microbiology laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg has been the subject of much controversy in Canada, with opposition parties pressing the government for more details on the case, and the government refusing to release information citing national security and privacy concerns.
Qiu and Cheng along with several Chinese students were escorted out of NML, Canada’s only Level 4 lab, in July 2019, amid a police investigation. The two scientists were formally fired in January 2021.
The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which is in charge of NML, said the termination was the result of an “administrative matter” and “possible breaches of security protocols,” but has declined to provide further details, citing security and privacy concerns.
House Speaker Anthony Rota admonishes Public Health Agency of Canada President Iain Stewart in the House of Commons on June 21, 2021, for failing to provide documents related to the firing of two scientists from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)
During her time at NML, Qiu travelled several times in an official capacity to WIV, helping train personnel on Level 4 safety. The Globe and Mail later reported that scientists at NML have been collaborating with Chinese military researchers on deadly pathogens, and that one of the Chinese military researchers worked at the high-security Winnipeg lab for a period of time.
Documents and emails released by PHAC show that the shipment of Henipah and Ebola samples was done with the permission of NML authorities.
In one of the emails sent in September 2018, David Safronetz, chief of special pathogens at PHAC, informs then-head of NML Matthew Gilmour and other lab administrators about the request from WIV for the shipment of the samples, saying “I trust the lab.”
In response, Gilmour asks about the nature of the work that will be done at the Wuhan lab, and why the lab doesn’t get the material from “other, more local labs.” He also tells Safronetz that it’s “good to know that you trust this group,” asking how NML was connected with them.
In his reply, Safronetz doesn’t specifically say what the samples will be used for in China, but notes they will only be sent once all paperwork and certification is completed. He also says the WIV is requesting the material from NML “due to collaboration” with Qiu.
He adds, “Historically, it’s also been easier to obtain material from us as opposed to US labs. I don’t think other, closer labs have the ability to ship these materials.”
Gilmour resigned from his position at NML in May 2020 and joined a UK-based bioresearch company.
MPs have asked NML management why shipment of the samples was allowed and whether they knew if China performs any Gain of Function (GoF) research at WIV. GoF research involves increasing the lethal level (virulence) or transmissibility of pathogens.
NML’s acting scientific director general Guillaume Poliquin told MPs during a parliamentary committee meeting on March 22 that the lab only sent the samples to WIV after receiving assurance that no GoF research would take place.
Conservative MP John Williamson pressed for more answers, saying the word of the state-run Chinese lab can’t be trusted as the Chinese regime “has a history of theft and lies.”
The issue of GoF research at WIV has been a point of contention in the United States between lawmakers and Dr. Anthony Fauci, NIH’s head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose organization has funded research (through EcoHealth Alliance) on coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab. U.S. Sen. Rand Paul says published work from WIV on coronaviruses shows the lab is conducting GoF research, a charge Fauci denies.
The P4 laboratory on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, on May 13, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
The Epoch Times sought comment from PHAC, including as to how the agency addressed issues of intellectual property and the development of any products such as vaccines with WIV, but didn’t hear back by time of publication.
Despite repeated requests by opposition parties for more details related to the firing of the two NML scientists, the Liberal government has refused to provide records, saying there are national security and privacy concerns.
After the House of Commons issued an order for the government to disclose the information, the government took the Speaker of the House to court to obtain confirmation from a judge that it can withhold the documents. The government later dropped its court case once Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called an election and Parliament was dissolved. – Epoch Times
UPDATE 3: I FOUND CREDIBLE SOURCES FOR MOST OF DR. ARYANA LOVE’S EXPLOSIVE CLAIMS BELOW:
I didn’t have an in depth look at all her sources, I can’t have a final 100% verdict, but I did more than a glance and no lies detected. You can review her blog post yourself HERE. This might be the closure to this report and the start for another.
OBAMA: EBOLA RESPONSE A TRIAL RUN FOR A POTENTIAL AIRBORNE VIRUS THAT MIGHT HIT SOON (2014)
BONUS
This is from 2014, but the story goes a way long back. And forward. Let’s not forget Putin is a Davos regular since before he became such a literal czar.
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How is this NOT on every screen like the first batch of Fauci e-mails?!?!
(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch announced on 4th of June 2021 that it obtained 280 pages of documents from the Department of Health and Human Services revealing that from 2014 to 2019, $826,277 was given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The documents, some of which were redacted or withheld in their entirely, were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking records of communications, contracts and agreements with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 1:21-cv-00696)). The agency is only processing 300 pages records per month, which means it will take until the end of November for the records to be fully reviewed and released under FOIA.
The records include a chart of NIAID funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology sent on April 21, 2020, by NIAID’s Chase Crawford to Principal Deputy Director Hugh Auchincloss and other NIAID officials. The agency funds directed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology between the years 2014-2019 total $826,277. All of the projects listed in the chart are titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
In an April 15, 2020 email marked “high” importance, Principal Deputy Director of NIH Lawrence Tabak emailed Fauci, NIH Director Francis Collins, and other NIH officials with the subject line: “HEADS UP: Wuhan lab research:”
Tabak: WH has strongly embraced concerns raised by Congressman Gaetz who is publicly criticizing HHS/NIH for funding the Wuhan laboratory’s bat research. Here’s this quote from another article: “I’m disgusted to learn that for years the US government has been funding dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute, which may have contributed to the global spread of coronavirus, and research at other labs in China that have virtually no oversight from US authorities.” [Emphasis in original]
This is a large multi-country study with Wuhan being one site. The principal investigator, Peter Daszak, is based in NY at EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. [Emphasis in original]
Tabak provides details of the grant to Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” Tabak continues, saying, “The 3.7M dollar figure is over 6 years to all sites which include (several in) China, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Myanmar. We estimate that approximately $826,300 has been spent at this site since the inception of the grant. Yearly costs appear to be about 80K/year. The grant is in year 6 of a total of 10 year.”
A January 9, 2020, email exchange labeled “high” importance between NIAID Senior Scientific Advisor Dr. David Morens and Daszak details the relationship between the Fauci agency and the Wuhan Institute of Virology:
Morens: Hi guys, do any of you have any inside info on this new coronavirus that isn’t yet in the public domain? Or any thoughts?
Daszak: Yes – lots of information and I spoke with Erik Stemmy and Alan Embry yesterday before the news was released. Erik is my program officer on our coronavirus grant specifically focused on China….
Morens: Thanks, the excitement never ends, right?
Daszak: NIAID has been funding coronavirus work in China for the past 5 years … (1R01Al110964: “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” ). That’s now been renewed … Collaborators include Wuhan Institute of Virology (currently working on the nCoV), and Ralph Baric [of University of North Carolina].
***
Also-FYI, prior to the R01, we worked under an R01 with Eun-Chung Park as program officer on viral discovery in bats, where originally identified SARS-CoV as having a likely origin in bats (published in Science)….
Morens: Great info, thanks. Tony doesn’t maintain awareness of these things and doesn’t know unless program officers tell him, which they rarely do, since they are across town and may not see him more than once a year, or less…. Interested in your feeling about where this is going. The experts are buzzing around us are all over the map, between doomsday and not that big a deal, with everything in between.
On January 23, 2020, a senior NIH official Melinda Hoskins forwarded a Daily Mail article to colleagues discussing NIH/NIAID funding of the bat virus research, and noting that Fauci would be briefing senators the following morning. Hoskins says, “Would you please confirm the exact nature of our support to the Wuhan Institute of Virology/Biosafety Lab.”
Another official, Barbara Mulach, responds that, “We’ve identified one grant with a sub-grant to Wuhan Institute of Virology (thanks for the lead) and one primary grant to Wuhan University. We are trying to get clarification whether or not the two organizations are related so we know if the second application is relevant to the request or not.”
She provides data showing a “Sub-award to Wuhan Institute of Virology,” with Daszak as principal investigator for a project titled, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” and she provides information on another award, grant number R01AI119064-06, with principal investigator Ke Lan, going to Wuhan University and titled, “Versatile functions of LANA in KSHV pathogenesis.”
In an April 13, 2020, email from NIH official Emily Erbelding to NIH colleagues, Erbelding notes that the “entire amount of the new Daszak grant (year 6 funded in FY19) is about 3.64 M. The total amount that will go to Wuhan Institute of Virology under this grant will be about $750K ($76,301 had already been sent to Wuhan in year 1 according to the NOA).” Additionally, the email notes that bat sampling work done during years 2011-2015, in addition to receiving funding from Daszak’s grant, “could also have been supported by USAID Predict program (which was also funding the Wuhan lab).”
Auchinloss forwards Erberlding’s note to Fauci, saying, “This is higher but not extraordinarily higher than I originally indicated which was for some earlier work.” Fauci replies, “Thanks.”
In an April 15, 2020, email exchange, Tabak asks his colleagues if Daszak’s team had “published anything seminal related to the current pandemic.” Erbelding responds, “Peter’s only publication on SARS CoV2 since the epidemic began is thought piece in NEJM [New England Journal of Medicine]” to which she provides a hyperlink. She adds, “Note that all of the prior work on zoonotic reservoirs of CoV’s was also supported by USAID funding through a program called PREDICT, which has since ended.”
On October 1, 2017, after receiving Daszak’s email related to his then-unpublished paper describing detailed research into a novel bat-born virus tied to Swine Acute Diarrheal Syndrome, Fauci forwards Daszak’s email and paper on to NIH official Greg Folkers, saying, “Confidential, but fyi for you.” Daszak says, “You should know that this work was supported by a NIAID ROl that [NIH’s] Erik Stemmy is the Program Officer for, and that I’m PI [principal investigator] on, with Zhengli Shi [the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Wuhan Institute of Virology] as co-PI.”
A person whose name is redacted on April 19, 2018, CCs an email to “International Cables (HHS/OS)” with the subject line “China Virus Institute Welcomes More U.S. Cooperation on Global Health Security,” includes a U.S. cable:
China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, a global leader in virus research, is a key partner for the United States in protecting global health security. Its role as operator of the just-launched Biosafety Level 4 (or ‘P4’) lab- the first such lab in China – opens up even more opportunities for expert exchange, especially in light of the lab’s shortage of trained staff.
***
In the last year, the lab also hosted visits from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and experts from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. The institute reports to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
P4 Lab is Open and Transparent, Officials Emphasize
***
Officials described the lab as a “regional node” in the global biosafety system and said it would play an emergency response role in an epidemic or pandemic. The lab’s English brochure highlighted a national security role, saying that it is “an effective measure to improve China’s availability in safeguarding national bio-safety if [a] possible biological warfare or terrorist attack happens.”
Institute officials said there would be “limited availability” for international and domestic scientists who had gone through the necessary approval process to do research at the lab. They stressed that the lab aimed to be a “worldwide, open platform” for virology. They said they welcomed U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) experts, noting that the Chinese Academy of Sciences was not strong on human disease expertise, having only focused on it in the last 15 years, after the SARS outbreak. A Wuhan-based French consulate official who works on science and technology cooperation with China also emphasized that the lab, which was initiated in 2004 as a France-China joint project, was meant to be “open and transparent” to the global scientific community. “The intent was to set up a lab to international standards, and open to international research,” he said. French experts have provided guidance and biosafety training to the lab, which will continue, the French official said. Institute officials said that France provided the lab’s design and much of its technology, but that it is entirely China-funded and has been completely China-run since a “handover” ceremony in 2016.
In addition to French assistance, experts from the NIH-supported P4 lab at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston have trained Wuhan lab technicians in lab management and maintenance, institute officials said.… One Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher trained for two years at the Galveston lab, and the institute also sent one scientist to U.S. CDC headquarters in Atlanta for six months’ work on influenza.
NIH-Supported Research Revises SARS Origin Story
NIH was a major funder, along with the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC), of SARS research by the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s [redacted.]
***
Ready to Help with the Global Virome Project
Institute officials expressed strong interest in the Global Virorne Project (GVP), and said Chinese funding for the project would likely come from Chinese Academy of Sciences funding already earmarked for One Belt, One Road-related initiatives…. GVP aims to launch this year as an international collaborative effort to identify within ten years virtually all of the planet’s viruses that have pandemic or epidemic potential and the ability to jump to humans. “We hope China will be one of the leading countries to initiate the Global Virome Project,” one Wuhan Institute of Virology official said. China attended a GVP unveiling meeting in January in Thailand and is waiting for more details of the initiative. The officials said that the Chinese government funds projects similar to GVP to investigate the background of viruses and bacteria. This essentially constituted China’s own Virome Project …
U.S.-China Workshop Explores Research Partnerships
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Some workshop participants also expressed skepticism about the Global Virome Project’s (GVP) approach, saying that gaining a predictive understanding of viruses with pandemic potential would require going beyond the GVPs strategy of sample collection, to take an “ecological” approach that considers the virome beyond vertebrate systems to identify mechanisms driving pathogen evolution. A follow-on workshop will be held in June at the University of Berkeley. NSF and NSFC hope to jointly announce a funding call for collaborative projects later this year.
On April 14, 2020, NIH official Marshall Bloom forwarded a Washington Post article by Josh Rogin titled “State Department Cables Warned of Safety Issues at Wuhan Lab Studying Bat Coronaviruses,” and asked a colleague to “Please send to the HCTF [High Containment Task Force]. Thanks!”
After receiving an article via an email on November 1, 2013, from NIH official Greg Folkers with a cartoon depicting a bat depositing coronavirus particles attacking human ACE2 receptor cells, his colleague, Fauci’s Special Assistant Patricia Conrad writes, “I think we need more slides like this…its too cute!”
A January 19, 2018, State Department cable from the US Embassy in Beijing about the Wuhan Institute of Virology with the subject “China Opens First Bio Safety Level 4 Laboratory” includes a section titled “Unclear Guidelines on Virus Access and a Lack of Trained Talent Impede Research,” which notes in its introduction that “its current productivity is limited by a shortage of highly trained technicians and investigators required to safely operate a BSL-4 laboratory and a lack of clarity in related Chinese government policies and guidelines.”
The memo continues: “To date, WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] has obtained permission for research on three viruses: Ebola virus, Nipah virus, and Xinjiang hemorrhagic fever virus (a strain of Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever found in China’s Xinjiang Province.)”
“These new documents show that funding for the Wuhan Institute was greater than the public has been told,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “That it has taken a year and a federal lawsuit to get this first disclosure on COVID and Wuhan is evidence of cover-up by Fauci’s agency.”
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