This might be the biggest news since Covid and, four days later, no one is talking about it. So big it’s worth sounding war drums to cover it. Some scientists say it’s a 1/3trillion coincidence, others say it’s nothing amazing. I propose a my own solution to this debate.
The facts:
In a new study, published only four days ago in Frontiers in Virology, researchers compared the SARS-COV-2 makeup to millions of sequenced proteins in a database, finding a coincidence that they deem as a 1/3trillion mathematical probability. The other element of the coincidence is the notorious Moderna 2016 invention patent for a technology included in a precursor to the Covid mRNA vaccine, the cancer mRNA jab they were working on at the time.
The virus is made up of 30,000 letters of genetic code that carry the information it needs to spread, known as nucleotides.
Analysis of the original Covid genome found the virus shares a sequence of 19 specific letters with a genetic section owned by Moderna, which has a total of 3,300 nucleotides.
The few scientists that have reacted to this discovery so far haven’t denied it. But some denied its importance and relevance, stating simplistically that 19 nucleotides out of 3300 is not much and can be a natural coincidence, possibly driven by common evolutionary needs. Except the patent is not the fruit of natural evolution, it wouldn’t be patentable if it were natural.
“Twelve of the shared letters make up the structure of Covid’s furin cleavage site, with the rest being a match with nucleotides on a nearby part of the genome. Writing in the paper, led by Dr Balamurali Ambati, from the University of Oregon, the researchers said the matching code may have originally been introduced to the Covid genome through infected human cells expressing the MSH3 gene. Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick University, admitted the latest finding was interesting but claimed it was not significant enough to suggest lab manipulation. He told MailOnline: ‘We’re talking about a very, very, very small piece made up of 19 nucleotides. ‘So it doesn’t mean very much to be frank, if you do these types of searches you can always find matches. ‘Sometimes these things happen fortuitously, sometimes it’s the result of convergent evolution (when organisms evolve independently to have similar traits to adapt to their environment). ‘It’s a quirky observation but I wouldn’t call it a smoking gun because it’s too small. He added: ‘It doesn’t get us any further with the debate about whether Covid was engineered.’ Dr Simon Clarke, a microbiologist at Reading University, questioned whether the find was as rare as the study claims. He told MailOnline: ‘There can only be a certain number of [genetic combinations within] furin cleavage sites. ‘They function like a lock and key in the cell, and the two only fit together in a limited number of combinations. ‘So it’s an interesting coincidence but this is surely entirely coincidental.’
Say what?!?!
“MailOnline has approached Moderna for comment.”
UDATE: Daily Mail couldn’t get a comment from Moderna, but Fox could. And it’s spectacular in its own very special way:
And I have reasons to think those guys suck balls and very likely this is the biggest news since Covid, hear me out:
This news is a perfect case study for a point I’ve been making for a long while: things in Universe exist in either of these three states:
Natural occurrence beyond human influence aka COINCIDENCES
2. The aimed result of human deliberation and activity aka CONSPIRACIES.
3. A combination of 1. and 2. aka CONSPIRACIES GONE HAYWIRE, which I think describes 99% of human life experience.
And, based on history, lived or learned, pure coincidences are way more rare than pure conspiracies, or mixtures, so favoring coincidences over conspiracies is simply dumb and ignorant.
Thus, Coincidence theorists are the ones who deserve the most scrutiny, mockery and ridicule. In the human society, as opposed to nature, coincidence theories should be more seriously scrutinized than conspiracy theories.
It is crucial to find alternative ways to solve such a debate with means that are accessible to anyone that’s just a functional literate.
THE DISCUSSION
Is that nucleotide sequence a stunningly unlikely coincidence or just nothing special?
“One in three trillion” or “once in a while”?
How do we arbiter this high-expertise debate without having that expertise and without relying on pre-chewed opinions from dubious or biased experts?
I have a bachelor degree in journalism and public communication, and I’ve always been deeply interested in science even since before school. I have studied health (not just medicines) and physiology for my own understanding, use and benefit for over 20 years now. As a result, I haven’t used any medication in close to 15 years now. That’s where expertise ends for me. People with other occupations and passions need to be able to make their own minds on this because ‘expert’ nowadays is the politically correct term for whores.
I can’t calculate complicated probabilities, nor do I have the education and the practical experience of a virologist, as the majority of any media readership. But they don’t have my education either, and I bet you it’s just as useful.
So does this mean we can’t find a way to skin this cat and we have to take these conmen’s word?
Don’t be silly. This is SILVIEW.media
When it comes to chance and ‘probabilistics’, the most common reference is the lottery. Not so popular among the young ones, but I hope they have a grasp of it too. At least through some online games.
There are many models, I don’t play, I’ll just pick one that I remember from home. It’s called “6 out of 49”. As the name suggest, from the numbers 1-49 they randomly pick 6 and you have to guess all of them. But they give you a decent prize even if you have five matches, because that’s extraordinary enough.
VERY IMPORTANTLY: 1. The order doesn’t matter. 2. The numbers don’t mean anything, they don’t have any function, nor do they make up a system.
There’s been years without any claim for the grand prize there. That’s how rare this coincidences are.
Now, in our dilemma we have a huge stream of only four characters, as the genome is made up of only four nucleobases: guanine, adenine, cytosine and thymine; in RNA, uracil is used in place of thymine. They are symbolised with the letters A, C, G, T. Not by coincidence, they also form the name Gattaca.
So, in our genetic coincidence theory we have a stream of 3300 of these four elements and another one of 3000, and a fragment of 19 elements coincides between the two streams. Is that so amazing?
Maybe a superficial face value estimate, by the lottery model, “19 out of 3000” sounds insignificant, but that’s the wrong equation here.
Remember: 1. The order 2. The function
It’s not in the numbers, but in the succession and the function
As opposed to lottery, what surprises here is not that we have matching elements, but a massive matching sequence of elements. That’s a whole new level of complexity. We’re dealing with a mathematical combination of four elements taken 19 times. Now that mathematical function will yield a gigantic number of possibilities.
And then something takes things to a whole new level: the sequence is not just some random fragment from the character streams, it’s a full subsystem with its own functionality.
Twelve of the shared letters make up the structure of Covid’s furin cleavage site, with the rest being a match with nucleotides on a nearby part of the genome.
And it’s not just any function, they are debating if this is what makes it more contagious, as in ‘the capabilities they add to viruses through gain-of-function research’!
Scientists do not yet fully understand how individual mutations in SARS-CoV-2 variants influence contagiousness or disease severity.
To enter a human cell, the SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein must be activated. This happens following cleavage by an enzyme called furin.
Scientists have theorized that mutations at the furin cleavage site might play an important role in a variant’sability toinfect or replicate in human cells.
Contrary to expectations, the authors of a new study found that this mutation did not influence the ability of the virus to enter or spread between cells.
Some variants of concern, such as Delta and Omicron, also have mutations at the same furin cleavage site, and this study may help understand the changes in their contagiousness and ability to produce disease.
If it were a random coincidence, it wouldn’t have a meaning / function of its own, it would be… random.
How do you get from:
“Dr Simon Clarke, a microbiologist at Reading University, questioned whether the find was as rare as the study claims. He told MailOnline: ‘There can only be a certain number of [genetic combinations within] furin cleavage sites. ‘They function like a lock and key in the cell, and the two only fit together in a limited number of combinations. “
to:
“So it’s an interesting coincidence but this is surely entirely coincidental.”
Absolute non-sequitur. They literally demonstrated the opposite of their conclusion. They simply count on you not critically analyzing things, just skimming headlines.
Because coincidence theorists are fucking dumb.
I mean, is it even theoretically possible if we factor in all the discussion above? What would be the likeliness? Sounds somewhere in the range of one in trillions to me. I’d personally round it up to an infinite.
While we can’t extract precise numbers with this method of reasoning, we can establish that this is the biggest lottery ticket ever won.
Disclaimer: this article does not imply that SARS-COV-2 exists in any other form and shape than a stream o characters on some computer hard drives. That’s all we’ve seen and analyzed here.
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
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
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
WHERE IT’S AT EXACTLY TWO YEARS LATER (SEPT. 2023)
meanwhile, we found out that…
In March 2015, a CureVac investor, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, agreed to provide separate funding for several projects to develop prophylactic vaccines based on CureVac’s proprietary mRNA platform… n July 2020, Tesla, Inc CEO Elon Musk announced via Tweet that Tesla and CureVac had reached an agreement to produce portable “RNA microfactories” based on this technology to manufacture CureVac’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate. CureVac had stated that the bioprinters would be able to produce “more than a hundred thousand doses” within approximately two weeks. At approximately the same time, Tesla and CureVac filed a joint patent on the technology. In August, Musk reviewed the project with Curevac while in Germany.
How much of the tsunami is fabricated in Musk’s factories?
So we’re back at:
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
I had to pull out the colored crayons as the world is a kindergarten.
LATER UPDATE: VIDEO VERSION READY, IT GOES EVEN DEEPER…
This is your virus, one of the versions, but it has only proven to exist in form of a salad of four characters shaped as a genetic code. SOURCESOURCE
When you ask about virus Gold-Standard evidence, aka purification and isolation as per Koch’s Postulates, they give you “cultures”. That’s like saying you discovered a new species of primate but you can only show a jungle.
That letter salad was fed into a computer program which generated the formulations for injections in mere hours, as the industry bragged:
Proving the virus is bullshit had never been easier:
Now, the more you investigate other viruses, the more you have similar surprises. And that goes for 99% of what you hold true.
Especially the slavery
Don’t trust what I say, research it.
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
Article 8 of The Rome Statute of The International Criminal Court (ICC) defines biological experiments as war crimes. The US, however, is not a state party to the international treaty, and cannot be held accountable for its war crimes.
“The Russian Defence Ministry continues to study materials on the implementation of military biological programs of the United States and its NATO allies on the territory of Ukraine.
We have already mentioned Robert Pope, director of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Programme and author of the idea of the Central Depository of Highly Dangerous Microorganisms in Kiev.
In his statement of April 10, 2022, Pope said that “…there is no reason to claim that research related to the development of biological weapons is taking place in Ukraine…”. He previously claimed that “…the Americans did not find biological weapons when they first started working with Ukraine, and they still haven’t. In addition, Ukraine lacks the infrastructure to develop and produce biological weapons…”.
I would like to recall that the term “biological weapons” includes biological formulations that contain pathogenic micro-organisms and toxins, as well as the means of delivery and use of said formulations.
While the priority for Ukrainian healthcare is socially significant diseases such as HIV, poliomyelitis, measles and hepatitis, US customers are interested in a completely different nomenclature: cholera, tularemia, plague and hantaviruses.
As a result of the special military operation on the territory of Ukraine, facts of work with the specified pathogens, which are potential agents of biological weapons, have been revealed. At the same time, it was noted that Ukraine had sent a request to the manufacturing company regarding the possibility of equipping the Bayraktar drones with aerosol equipment.
In addition on March 9, three unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with 30-litre containers and equipment for spraying formulations were detected by Russian reconnaissance units in Kherson region. At the end of April, 10 more were found near Kakhovka.
All this information calls into question the statements of American experts.
We have previously provided a scheme for US coordination of biological laboratories and research institutes in Ukraine. Its preliminary analysis suggests that Ukraine is essentially a testing ground for the development of biological weapons components and the testing of new samples of pharmaceuticals.
The Russian Ministry of Defence was able to clarify the said scheme.
It should be noted that the ideologues of US military-biological activities in Ukraine are the leaders of the Democratic Party.
Thus, through the US executive branch, a legislative framework for funding military biomedical research directly from the federal budget was formed. Funds were raised under state guarantees from NGOs controlled by the Democratic Party leadership, including the investment funds of the Clintons, Rockefellers, Soros and Biden.
The scheme involves major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Moderna, Merck and the US military-affiliated company Gilead. U.S. experts are working to test new medicines that circumvent international safety standards. As a result, Western companies are seriously reducing the cost of research programmes and gaining a significant competitive advantage.
The involvement of controlled nongovernmental and biotechnological organisations, and the increase in their revenues, allows the leaders of the Democratic Party to generate additional campaign finance and hide its distribution.
In addition to US pharmaceutical companies and Pentagon contractors, Ukrainian state agencies are involved in military bioweapons activities, whose main tasks are to conceal illegal activities, conduct field and clinical trials and provide the necessary biomaterial.
Thus, the US Department of Defence, using a virtually internationally uncontrolled test site and the high-tech facilities of multinational companies, has greatly expanded its research capabilities, not only in the field of biological weapons, but also in gaining knowledge about antibiotic resistance and the antibodies to specific diseases in populations in specific regions.
It should be noted that not only the US, but also a number of its NATO allies are implementing their military-biological projects in Ukraine.
The German government has decided to launch a national biosafety programme independent of Washington, D.C., starting in 2013. Twelve countries, including Ukraine, are involved in the Programme.
On the German side, the programme involves the Institute for Armed Forces Microbiology (Munich), the Robert Koch Institute (Berlin), the Loeffler Institute (Greifswald) and the Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (Hamburg).
New documents reveal that between 2016 and 2019 alone, three and a half thousand blood serum samples of citizens living in 25 regions of Ukraine were taken by military epidemiologists from the Bundeswehr Microbiology Institute.
The involvement of institutions subordinate to the Bundeswehr confirms the military orientation of biological research carried out in Ukrainian laboratories and raises questions about the goals pursued by the German armed forces in collecting biomaterials of Ukrainian citizens.
The documents obtained also show the involvement of Poland in Ukrainian biolaboratories. The participation of the Polish Institute of Veterinary Medicine in research aimed at assessing the epidemiological threats and spread of the rabies virus in Ukraine has been confirmed. Characteristically, the research in question was carried out jointly with the US-based Battelle Institute, a key contractor for the Pentagon.
In addition, Polish funding for the Lvov Medical University, which includes a member of US military biology projects, the Institute of Epidemiology and Hygiene, has been documented. The organisation has been running a retraining programme for specialists with experience of working with dual-use materials and technologies since 2002.
The special military operation by Russian troops succeeded in obtaining additional information about bio-incidents in Ukraine.
For example, materials indicating the intentional use of a multidrug-resistant tuberculosis pathogen in 2020 to infect the population of the Slavyanoserbsky district of the LPR were examined.
The flyers, made in the form of counterfeit currency notes, were infected with the tuberculosis agent and distributed to minors in Stepovoe village. The organisers of this crime took into account the behaviour of children, who have a habit of “putting everything in their mouths” and taking food with unwashed hands.
The results of bacteriological studies have confirmed the resistance of the isolated bacteria to first- and second-line anti-TB drugs, meaning that the disease caused by them is much more difficult to treat and the cost of treatment is much higher.
According to the conclusion of the Lugansk Republican Sanitary and Epidemiological Station, “…the contamination of the notes was most likely carried out artificially, as the material contains extremely dangerous strains of the pathogen in concentrations capable of ensuring infection and development of the tuberculosis process…”.
In his conclusion, the chief doctor of the Lugansk Republican TB Dispensary also notes that “…there are all signs of deliberate, man-made contamination of the flyers with highly pathogenic biomaterial…”.
We previously reported on trials of potentially dangerous biological drugs on one of the least protected categories of people – patients of the Kharkov Regional Clinical Psychiatric Hospital No 3.
We have received new information revealing details of the Pentagon’s inhuman experiments on Ukrainian citizens in Psychiatric Hospital No 1 (Streleche village, Kharkov region). The main category of subjects was a group of male patients aged 40-60 years with a high stage of physical exhaustion.
In order to conceal their US affiliation, the biological research experts travelled via third countries. Here is a photograph of Florida native Linda Oporto, who was directly involved in these works.
In January 2022, the foreign nationals conducting the experiments were evacuated in an emergency and the equipment and drugs they were using were taken to western Ukraine.
Russian Defence Ministry specialists have carried out work directly in two biolaboratories in Mariupol.
Evidence of emergency destruction of documents confirming work with the US military establishment was obtained. A preliminary analysis of extant documentation indicates the use of Mariupol as a regional centre for cholera pathogen collection and certification. The selected strains were sent to the Public Health Centre in Kiev, which is responsible for the onward shipment of biomaterials to the United States. These activities have been carried out since 2014, as evidenced by the transfer of strains.
An act of destruction of the pathogen collection dated February 25, 2022, according to which cholera, tularemia and anthrax pathogens were handled there, was found in the sanitary and epidemiological laboratory.
Part of the collection of the veterinary laboratory was not destroyed in a hurry. In order to ensure safety and secure storage, 124 strains were exported by Russian specialists and their study was organised.
The presence in the collection of pathogens that are uncharacteristic of veterinary medicine, such as typhoid, paratyphoid fever and gas gangrene, is a cause for concern. This could indicate the laboratory’s misuse and involvement in a military biological programme.
We will continue to examine the full volume of material received from the Mariupol biolaboratories and will inform you about the results.
The Russian Ministry of Defence has information that provocations are being prepared to accuse the Russian Armed Forces of using weapons of mass destruction, followed by a “Syrian scenario” investigation to fabricate the necessary evidence and assign blame.
The high likelihood of such provocations is confirmed by requests from the Kiev administration for personal skin and respiratory protection equipment that provides protection against toxic chemicals and biological contaminating agents. The supply to Ukraine of organophosphorus poisoning antidotes raises concerns. In 2022 alone, more than 220,000 ampoules of atropine, as well as preparations for special treatment and disinfection, were delivered from the USA at the request of the Ukrainian Ministry of Health.
Thus, the information obtained confirms that the United States is implementing an offensive military-biological programme in Ukraine to study the possibility of forming controlled epidemics in specific territories.
The special military operation of the Russian Armed Forces has crossed the US military-biological expansion in Ukraine and stopped criminal experiments on civilians.” – RUSSIA MOD
Yeah, everything from any government has to be taken with a pinch of salt and all that, but when things easily corroborate with what we previously discovered, we need to pay attention. I can’t argue anything against the new data yet, but we can cross-reference a lot of it, so, rather than a bombshell, this is more like cementing the foundation and filling in some gaps.
She originated all our revelations and public debate and this is her first lengthy interview lately! Thank her and be a part of the solution by spreading this!
US fired back at Russia with very symmetrical accusations. Many are correct. That doesn’t let either of the parts off the hook, both are dirty and guilty, both are a reflection of each other, like commies and nazis, libtards and trumptards, Pepsi and Coke, all eventually owned by some Blackrock.
Dilyana Gaytandzhieva is a Bulgarian investigative journalist, Middle East correspondent and founder of Arms Watch. Over the last two years she has published a series of revealing reports on weapons supplies to terrorists in Syria and Iraq. Her current work is focused on documenting war crimes and illicit arms exports to war zones around the world.
Attention: for expired/deleted links, learn to use the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive, their apps and plugins are great.
The US Army regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria and toxins in direct violation of the UN Convention on the prohibition of Biological Weapons. Hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are systematically exposed to dangerous pathogens and other incurable diseases. Bio warfare scientists using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at Pentagon bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world. These US bio-laboratories are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program– Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), and are located in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.
Georgia as a testing ground
The Lugar Center is the Pentagon bio laboratory in Georgia. It is located just 17 km from the US Vaziani military airbase in the capital Tbilisi. Tasked with the military program are biologists from the US Army Medical Research Unit-Georgia (USAMRU-G) along with private contractors. The Bio-safety Level 3 Laboratory is accessible only to US citizens with security clearance. They are accorded diplomatic immunity under the 2002 US-Georgia Agreement on defense cooperation.
The Lugar Center, Republic of GeorgiaThe US Army has been deployed to Vaziani Military Air Base, 17 km from the Pentagon bio-laboratory at The Lugar Center.The USA-Georgia agreement accords diplomatic status to the US military and civilian personnel (including diplomatic vehicles), working on the Pentagon program in Georgia.
Information obtained from the US federal contracts registry clarifies some of the military activities at The Lugar Center – among them research on bio-agents (anthrax, tularemia) and viral diseases (e.g. Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever), and the collection of biological samples for future experiments.
Pentagon contractors produce bio agents under diplomatic cover
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has outsourced much of the work under the military program to private companies, which are not held accountable to Congress, and which can operate more freely and move around the rule of law. US civilian personnel performing work at The Lugar Center have also been given diplomatic immunity, although they are not diplomats. Hence, private companies can perform work, under diplomatic cover, for the US government without being under the direct control of the host state – in this case the Republic of Georgia. This practice is often used by the CIA to provide cover for its agents. Three private American companies work at the US bio-laboratory in Tbilisi – CH2M Hill, Battelle and Metabiota. In addition to the Pentagon, these private contractors perform research for the CIA and various other government agencies.
CH2M Hill has been awarded $341.5 million DTRA contracts under the Pentagon’s program for bio-laboratories in Georgia, Uganda, Tanzania, Iraq, Afghanistan, South East Asia. Half of this sum ($161.1 million), being allocated to The Lugar Center, under the Georgian contract. According to CH2M Hill, the US Company has secured biological agents and employed former bio warfare scientists at The Lugar Center. These are scientists who are working for another American company involved in the military program in Georgia – Battelle Memorial Institute.
Battelle as a $59 million subcontractor at Lugar Center has extensive experience in research on bio-agents, as the company has already worked on the US Bio-weapons Program under 11 previous contracts with the US Army (1952-1966).Source: US Army Activities in the US, Biological Warfare Programs, vol. II, 1977, p. 82
As opposed to this Al Jazeera dude, we’re not working for corporations or governments and there’s no government that can put up with our research. Dilyana is anti-Russian, I am against any large group of people that’s not a music festival audience or a tree-planting brigade, they’re all dumb and only harmonic vibrations can redeem them.
The CIA-Battelle Project Clear Vision
Project Clear Vision (1997 and 2000), a joint investigation by the CIA and the Battelle Memorial Institute, under a contract awarded by the Agency, reconstructed and tested a Soviet-era anthrax bomblet in order to test its dissemination characteristics. The project’s stated goal was to assess bio-agents dissemination characteristics of bomblets. The clandestine CIA-Battelle operation was omitted from the US Biological Weapons Convention declarations submitted to the UN.
Top Secret Experiments
Battelle has operated a Top Secret Bio laboratory (National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center – NBACC) at Fort Detrick, Maryland under a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contract for the last decade. The company has been awarded a $344.4 million federal contract (2006 – 2016) and another $17.3 million contract (2015 -2026) by DHS.
Besides the military experiments at the Lugar Center in Georgia, Battelle has already produced bioterrorism agents at the Biosafety Level 4 NBACC Top Secret Laboratory at Fort Detrick in the US. A NBACC presentation lists 16 research priorities for the lab. Amongst them to characterize classical, emerging and genetically engineered pathogens for their BTA (biological threat agent) potential; assess the nature of nontraditional, novel and non-endemic induction of disease from potential BTA and to expand aerosol-challenge testing capacity for non-human primates.
Scientists engineer pathogens at the NBACC lab. Photo credit: NBACC
The US Company Metabiota Inc. has been awarded $18.4 million federal contracts under the Pentagon’s DTRA program in Georgia and Ukraine for scientific and technical consulting services. Metabiota services include global field-based biological threat research, pathogen discovery, outbreak response and clinical trials. Metabiota Inc. had been contracted by the Pentagon to perform work for DTRA before and during the Ebola crisis in West Africa and was awarded $3.1 million (2012-2015) for work in Sierra Leone – one of the countries at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak.
Metabiota worked on a Pentagon’s project at the epicenter of the Ebola crisis, where three US biolabs are situated.
A July 17, 2014 report drafted by the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium, accused Metabiota Inc. of failing to abide by an existing agreement on how to report test results and for bypassing the Sierra Leonean scientists working there. The report also raised the possibility that Metabiota was culturing blood cells at the lab, something the report said was dangerous, as well as misdiagnosing healthy patients. All of those allegations were denied by Metabiota.
2011,The Lugar Center, Andrew C. Weber (on the right) – US Assistant Secretary of Defense (2009-2014), US DoD Deputy Coordinator for Ebola Response (2014-2015), is currently a Metabiota ( the US contractor) employee.
[Keep these guys in mind for later! – S.m.]
Military Experiments on biting insects
Entomological warfare is a type of biological warfare that uses insects to transmit diseases. The Pentagon has allegedly performed such entomological tests in Georgia and Russia. In 2014 The Lugar Center was equipped with an insect facility and launched a project “Raising Awareness about Barcoding of Sand Flies in Georgia and Caucasus”. The project covered a larger geographic area outside of Georgia – Caucasus. In 2014-2015 Phlebotomine sand fly species were collected under another project “Surveillance Work on Acute Febrile Illness” and all (female) sand flies were tested to determine their infectivity rate. A third project, also including sand flies collection, studied the characteristics their salivary glands.
A biting fly in a bathroom in Tbilisi (photo 1), flies in Georgia (photo 2, 3)
As a result Tbilisi has been infested with biting flies since 2015. These biting insects live indoors, in bathrooms, all year long, which was not the typical behaviour of these species in Georgia previously (normally the Phlebotomine fly season in Georgia is exceptionally short – from June to September). Local people complain of being bitten by these newly appeared flies while naked in their bathrooms. They also have a strong resistance to cold and can survive even in the sub-zero temperatures in the mountains.
Biting Flies in Dagestan, Russia
Since the start of the Pentagon project in 2014 flies similar to those in Georgia have appeared in neighboring Dagestan (Russia). According to local people, they bite and cause rashes. Their breeding habitats are house drains.
Flies in Georgia (on the left). The same species in Dagestan (on the right)
Flies from the Phlebotomine family carry dangerous parasites in their saliva which they transmit through a bite to humans. The disease, which these flies carry, is of high interest to the Pentagon. In 2003 during the US invasion of Iraq American soldiers were severely bitten by sand flies and contracted Leishmoniasis. The disease is native to Iraq and Afghanistan and if left untreated the acute form of Leishmoniasis can be fatal.
A 1967 US Army report “Arthropods of medical importance in Asia and the European USSR” lists all local insects, their distribution and the diseases that they carry. Biting flies, which live in drains, are also listed in the document. Their natural habitats, though, are the Philippines, not Georgia or Russia.
Source: “Arthropods of medical importance in Asia and the European USSR”, US Army report, 1967
Operation Whitecoat: Infected flies tested to bite humans
Sand fly
In 1970 and 1972, Sand Fly Fever tests were performed on humans according to a declassified US Army report – US Army Activities in the US, Biological Warfare Programs, 1977, vol. II, p. 203. During operation Whitecoat volunteers were exposed to bites by infected sand flies. Operation Whitecoat was a bio-defense medical research program carried out by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland between 1954 and 1973.
Despite the official termination of the US bio-weapons program, in 1982 USAMRIID performed an experiment if sand flies and mosquitoes could be vectors of Rift Valley Virus, Dengue, Chikungunya and Eastern Equine Encephalitis – viruses, which the US Army researched for their potential as bio-weapons.
Killer Insects
A. Aegupti
The Pentagon has a long history in using insects as vectors for diseases. According to a partially declassified 1981 US Army report, American bio warfare scientists carried out a number of experiments on insects. These operations were part of the US Entomological Warfare under the Program for Biological Weapons of the US.
The Pentagon: How to kill 625,000 people for just $0.29 cost per death
A US Army report in 1981 compared two scenarios – 16 simultaneous attacks on a city by A. Aegupti mosquitoes, infected with Yellow Fever, and Tularemia aerosol attack, and assesses their effectiveness in cost and casualties.
Operation Big Itch: Field tests were performed to determine coverage patterns and survivability of the tropical rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis for use as a disease vector in biological warfare.
Operation Big Buzz: 1 million A. Aeugupti mosquitoes were produced, 1/3 were placed in munitions and dropped from aircraft, or dispersed on the ground. The mosquitoes survived the airdrop and actively sought out human blood.
Source: Evaluation of Entomological Warfare as a potential Danger to the US and European NATO nations, US Army, March 1981 Report
Operation May Day: Aedes Aegupti mosquitoes were dispersed through ground based methods in Georgia, USA, during a US Army operation codenamed May Day.
Parts of the 1981 US Army report such as the “Mass production of Aedes Aegypti” have not been declassified, potentially meaning that the project is still ongoing.
Aedes Aegypti, also known as yellow fever mosquito, have been widely used in US military operations. The same species of mosquitoes are alleged to be the vectors of dengue, chikungunya and the Zika virus, which causes genetic malformations in newborns.
The US Army Chemical Research and Development Command, Biological Weapons Branch, studied outdoor mosquito biting activity in a number of field tests at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, in 1960. Virgin female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which had been starved, were tested upon troops out in the open air.
Military Experiments with Tropical Mosquitoes and Ticks in Georgia
Such species of mosquitoes and fleas (studied in the past under the US Entomological Warfare Program) have also been collected in Georgia and tested at The Lugar Center.
Under the DTRA project “Virus and Other Arboviruses in Georgia” in 2014 the never-before-seen tropical mosquito Aedes albopictus was detected for the first time and after decades (60 years) the existence of Aedes Aegypti mosquito was confirmed in West Georgia.
Aedes Albopictus is a vector of many viral pathogens, Yellow fever virus, Dengue, Chikungunya and Zika.
These tropical mosquitoes Aedes Albopictus having never been seen before in Georgia, have also been detected in neighboring Russia (Krasnodar) and Turkey, according to data provided by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Their spread is unusual for this part of the world.
Aedes Aegupti Mosquitoes have been distributed only in Georgia, Southern Russia and Northern Turkey. They were detected for the first time in 2014 after the start of the Pentagon program at The Lugar Center.
Under another DTRA project “Epidemiology and Ecology of Tularemia in Georgia” (2013-2016) 6,148 ground ticks were collected ; 5,871 were collected off the cattle and 1,310 fleas and 731 ticks were caught. In 2016 a further 21 590 ticks were collected and studied at The Lugar Center.
In 2007 despite the anthrax outbreak the Georgian government terminated the compulsory vaccination for 7 years, 2013 saw NATO start human trials on a new anthrax vaccine in Georgia.
Pentagon Research on Russian Anthrax
Anthrax is one of the bio agents weaponized by the US Army in the past. Despite the Pentagon’s claims that its program is only defensive, there are facts to the contrary. In 2016 at The Lugar Center American scientists carried out research on the “Genome Sequence of the Soviet/Russian Bacillus anthracis Vaccine Strain 55-VNIIVViM”, which was funded by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s (DTRA) Cooperative Biological Engagement Program in Tbilisi, and administered by Metabiota (the US contractor under the Pentagon program in Georgia).
34 people infected with Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) in Georgia
Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is caused by infection through a tick-borne virus (Nairovirus). The disease was first characterized in Crimea in 1944 and given the name Crimean hemorrhagic fever. It was then later recognized in 1969 as the cause of illness in Congo, thus resulting in the current name of the disease. In 2014 34 people became infected (among which a 4-year old child) with CCHF. 3 of which died. The same year Pentagon biologists studied the virus in Georgia under the DTRA project “Epidemiology of febrile illnesses caused by Dengue viruses and other Arboviruses in Georgia”. The project included tests on patients with fever symptoms and the collection of ticks, as possible vectors of CCHV for laboratory analysis.
34 people became infected with CCHF, 3 of them died in Georgia. Source: NCDC-Georgia
The cause of the CCHF outbreak in Georgia is still unknown. According to the local Veterinary Department report, only one tick from all of the collected species from the infected villages tested positive for the disease. Despite the claims of the local authorities that the virus was transmitted to humans from animals, all animal blood samples were negative too. The lack of infected ticks and animals is inexplicable given the sharp increase of CCHF human cases in 2014, meaning that the outbreak was not natural and the virus was spread intentionally.
In 2016 another 21 590 ticks were collected for DNA database for future studies at The Lugar Center under the Pentagon project “Assessing the Seroprevalence and Genetic Diversity of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Virus (CCHFV) and Hantaviruses in Georgia”.
Symptoms of CCHF
Military bio-lab blamed for deadly CCHF outbreak in Afghanistan
237 cases of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) have also been reported across Afghanistan, 41 of which were fatal as of December 2017. According to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Health most of the cases have been registered in the capital Kabul where 71 cases have been reported with 13 fatalities, and in the province of Herat near the border with Iran (67 cases).
Afghanistan is one of 25 countries across the world with Pentagon bio-laboratories on their territory. The project in Afghanistan is part of the US bio-defense program – Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), which is funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The DTRA contractors, working at The Lugar Center in Georgia, CH2M Hill and Battelle have also been contracted for the program in Afghanistan. CH2M Hill has been awarded a $10.4 million contract (2013-2017). The Pentagon contractors in Afghanistan and Georgia are the same and so are the diseases which are spreading among the local population in both countries.
Why the Pentagon collects and studies bats
Bats are allegedly the reservoir hosts to the Ebola Virus , Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and other deadly diseases. However, the precise ways these viruses are transmitted to humans are currently unknown. Numerous studies have been performed under the DTRA Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) in a search for deadly pathogens of military importance in bats.
Bats have been blamed for the deadly Ebola outbreak in Africa (2014-2016). However, no conclusive evidence of exactly how the virus “jumped” to humans has ever been provided, which raises suspicions of intentional and not natural infection.
This comes from the set of evidences Russia made public prior to convoking a UN meeting on March 11 2022
Engineering deadly viruses is legal in the US
MERS-CoV is thought to originate from bats and spread directly to humans and/or camels. However, like Ebola, the precise ways the virus spreads are unknown. 1,980 cases with 699 deaths were reported in 15 countries across the world (as of June 2017) caused by MERS-CoV.
3 to 4 out of every 10 patients reported with MERS have died (Source: WHO)
MERS-CoV is one of the viruses that have been engineered by the US and studied by the Pentagon, as well as Influenza and SARS. Confirmation of this practice is Obama’s 2014 temporary ban on government funding for such “dual-use” research. The moratorium was lifted in 2017 and experiments have continued. Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens (PPPs) experiments are legal in the US. Such experiments aim to increase the transmissibility and/or virulence of pathogens.
Tularemia as Bioweapon
F. Tularensis is a highly infectious bacterium and has the potential to be weaponized for use through aerosol attacks.
Tularemia, also known as Rabbit Fever, is classified as a bioterrorism agent and was developed in the past as such by the US. However, the Pentagon’s research on tularemia continues, as well as on possible vectors of the bacteria such as ticks and rodents which cause the disease. The DTRA has launched a number of projects on Tularemia along with other especially dangerous pathogens in Georgia. Especially Dangerous Pathogens (EDPs), or select agents, represent a major concern for the public health globally. These highly pathogenic agents have the potential to be weaponized with proof of their military importance seen through the following Pentagon projects: Epidemiology and Ecology of Tularemia inGeorgia (2013-2016) (60 000 vectors were collected for strain isolates and genome research); Epidemiology of Human Tularemia in Georgia and Human Disease Epidemiology and Surveillance of Especially Dangerous Pathogens in Georgia (study of select agents among patients with undifferentiated fever and hemorrhagic fever/septic shock).
Tularemia is one of the bio-weapons that the US Army developed in the past. Source: 1981 US Army Report
Pentagon bio-laboratories spread diseases in Ukraine
The DoD Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has funded 11 bio-laboratories in the former Soviet Union Country Ukraine, bordering on Russia.
The US military program is sensitive information
Ukraine has no control over the military bio-laboratories on its own territory. According to the 2005 Agreement between the US DoD and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine the Ukrainian government is prohibited from public disclosure of sensitive information about the US program and Ukraine is obliged to transfer to the US Department of Defense (DoD) dangerous pathogens for biological research. The Pentagon has been granted access to certain state secrets of Ukraine in connection with the projects under their agreement.
Biowarfare scientists under diplomatic cover
Among the set of bilateral agreements between the US and Ukraine is the establishment of the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU) – an International organization funded mainly by the US government which has been accorded diplomatic status. The STCU officially supports projects of scientists previously involved in the Soviet biological weapons program. Over the past 20 years the STCU has invested over $285 million in funding and managing some 1,850 projects of scientists who previously worked on the development of weapons of mass destruction.
The US personnel in Ukraine work under diplomatic cover.
364 Ukrainians died from Swine Flu
One of the Pentagon laboratories is located in Kharkiv, where in January 2016 at least 20 Ukrainian soldiers died from Flu-like virus in just two days with 200 more being hospitalized. The Ukrainian government did not report on the dead Ukrainian soldiers in Kharkiv. As of March 2016 364 deaths have been reported across Ukraine (81.3 % caused by Swine Flu A (H1N1) pdm09 – the same strain which caused the world pandemic in 2009).
According to DPR intelligence information the US bio lab in Kharkiv leaked the deadly virus.
Police investigate infection with incurable disease
A highly suspicious Hepatitis A infection spread rapidly in just few months across South East Ukraine where most of the Pentagon biolabs are located.
29 cases of Hepatitis A were reported in Kharkiv in November 2017. The virus was isolated in contaminated drinking water. One of the Pentagon bio-labs is located in Kharkiv which was blamed for the deadly Flu outbreak a year ago which claimed the lives of 364 Ukrainians.
Ukraine and Russia hit by new highly virulent cholera infection
A new highly virulent variant of the cholera agent Vibrio cholera, with a high genetic similarity to the strains reported in Ukraine, hit Moscow in 2014. According to a 2014 Russian Research Anti-Plaque Institute genetic study the cholera strain isolated in Moscow was similar to the bacteria which caused the epidemic in neighboring Ukraine.
Southern Research Institute, one of the US contractors working at the bio-laboratories in Ukraine, has projects on Cholera, as well as on Influenza and Zika – all pathogens of military importance to the Pentagon.
Along with Southern Research Institute, two other private American companies operate military bio-labs in Ukraine – Black&Veatch and Metabiota.
Black & Veatch Special Project Corp. was awarded $198.7 million DTRA contracts to build and operate bio-laboratories in Ukraine (under two 5-year contracts in 2008 and 2012 totaling $128.5 million), as well as in Germany, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Thailand, Ethiopia, Vietnam and Armenia.
Metabiota has been awarded a $18.4 million federal contract under the program in Georgia and Ukraine. This US company was also contracted to perform work for the DTRA before and during the Ebola crisis in West Africa, the company was awarded $3.1 million (2012-2015) for work in Sierra Leone .
Southern Research Institute has been a prime subcontractor under the DTRA program in Ukraine since 2008. The company was also a prime Pentagon contractor in the past under the US Biological Weapons Program for research and development of bio-agents with 16 contracts between 1951 and 1962.
Southern Research Institute was also a subcontractor on a Pentagon program for anthrax research in 2001. The prime contractor being Advanced Biosystems, whose president at that time was Ken Alibek (a former Soviet microbiologist and biological warfare expert from Kazakhstan who defected to the US in 1992).
Ken Alibek was the First Deputy Director of Biopreparat, where he oversaw a program for biological weapon facilities and was the Soviet Union’s main expert on anthrax. After his defection to the US, he was engaged on Pentagon research projects.
$250 000 for lobbying Jeff Sessions for “research for US intelligence”
Southern Research Institute lobbied the US Congress and US Department of State hard for “issues related to research and development for US intelligence” and “defense related research and development”. The lobbying activities coincided with the start of the Pentagon projects on bio-labs in Ukraine and other former Soviet states.
The company paid $ 250 000 for lobbying the then Senator Jeff Sessions in 2008-2009 (currently the US Attorney General appointed by Donald Trump), when the institute was awarded a number of federal contracts.
US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, US Senator from Alabama (1997-2017)
Police investigate Botulism toxin poisoning in Ukraine
115 Botulism cases, with 12 deaths, were reported in Ukraine in 2016. In 2017 the Ukrainian Ministry of Health confirmed a further 90 new cases, with 8 deaths, of botulinum toxin poisoning (one of the most poisonous biological substances known). According to the local health authorities, the cause of the outbreak was food poisoning into which police launched an investigation. The Pentagon biolaboratories in Ukraine were among the prime suspects, as botulinum toxin is one of the bioterrorism agents which have already been produced at a Pentagon bioweapons facility in the US. (see below)
The Ukrainian government stopped supplying antitoxin in 2014 and no botulism vaccines in stock were available during the 2016-2017 outbreak.
Botulism is a rare and extremely dangerous illness caused by a toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum.
1 gm of the toxin can kill as many as 1 million people
Botulinum neurotoxin poses a major bio-weapon threat because of its extreme potency, ease of production and transport. It causes muscles paralyses, respiratory failure and ultimately death if not treated immediately. A single gram of crystalline toxin, evenly dispersed and inhaled can kill more than one million people. It could be disseminated via aerosol, or by contamination of water and/ or food supplies.
The Pentagon produces live Viruses, Bacteria & Toxins
Botulinum Toxin was tested as a bio-weapon by the US Army in the past, as well as Anthrax, Brucella and Tularemia. Although the US bio-weapons program was officially terminated in 1969 documents show that the military experiments have never ended. Presently the Pentagon produces and tests live bio- agents at the same military facility as it did in the past – Dugway Proving Ground.
The US Army produces and tests bio-agents at a special military facility located at Dugway Proving Ground (West Desert Test Center, Utah), as proven in a 2012 US Army Report. The facility is overseen by the Army Test and Evaluation Command.
The Life Sciences Division (LSD) at Dugway Proving Ground is tasked with the production of bio-agents. According to the Army report, scientists from this division produce and test aerosolized bio-agents at Lothar Saloman Life Sciences Test Facility (LSTF).
Lothar Saloman Life Sciences Test Facility (LSTF) where bio-terrorism agents are produced and aerosolized. Photo Credit: Dugway Proving GroundBiological Agents produced by the US Army at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, USA Source: Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test Center
The Life Sciences Division consists of an Aerosol Technology branch and a Microbiology Branch. The Aerosol Technology Branch aerosolizes biological agents and simulants. The Microbiology branch produces toxins, bacteria, viruses and agent-like organisms which are used in chamber and field testing.
The fermentation laboratories at the Life Sciences Test Facility grow bacteria in fermentors ranging from a small 2 L to a large 1500 L system. The fermentors are tailored specifically to the requirements of the microorganism that is being engineered – pH, temperature, light, pressure, and nutrient concentrations that give the microorganism optimal growth rates.
A large 1500 L fermentatorA post-production laboratory dries and mills test materials. Photos credit: Dugway Proving Ground
After the bio-agents are produced, the scientists challenge them at containment aerosol chambers.
Technicians disseminate live biological agents for identification sensitivity tests (photos: Dugway Proving Ground)
Aerosol experiments with Botulinum Neurotoxin and Anthrax
Documents prove that the US Army produces, possesses and tests aerosols of the most lethal toxin in the world – Botulinum Neurotoxin. In 2014 the Department of the Army purchased 100 mg of Botulinum Toxin from Metabiologics for tests at Dugway Proving Ground.
The experiments date back to 2007 when an unspecified quantity of the toxin was procured to the Department of the Army by the same company – Metabiologics. According to the 2012 West Desert Test Center Report, the military facility performs tests with Botulinum Neurotoxin Aerosol, as well as with aerosolized Anthrax, Yersinia pestis, and Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus (VEE).
Source: Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test Center
Outdoor field test programs at Dugway Proving Ground
US Army documents and photos show that the Pentagon has developed various dissemination methods for bioterrorism attacks including by explosives.
Source: Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test CenterDissemination of contaminants for biological/chemical tests. Photo credit: Dugway Proving GroundDissemination of simulants by explosives. Photo Credit: Dugway Proving GroundLiquid DisseminationPowder DisseminationDissemination on the test grid. Photos Credit: Dugway Proving GroundAerosol Sprayer
The US Army report lists numerous dissemination techniques including by bio-aerosol sprayers. Such sprayers called Micronair disseminators have already been developed by the US Army and tested at Dugway Proving Ground. According to the documents, they can be vehicle-mounted, or worn as a backpack, with a pump system which can be fitted to the unit to increase the accuracy of the release. Micronair sprayers can release 50 to 500 mL of bio-liquid simulant per minute from 12 L tanks.
The US stole bacteria from Saddam Hussein’s bio weapons factory
Bacillus thuringiensis
Bacillus thuringiensis is an insect pathogen that is widely used as a bio-pesticide. B. thuringiensis (BT) Al Hakam was collected in Iraq by the UN Special Commission led by the US in 2003. It is named after Al Hakam – Iraq’s bio-weapons production facility. Apart from Pentagon field tests, this bacterium is also used in the US for the production of GM corn, resistant to pests. Photos posted by the CIA prove that the bacteria was collected by the US in Iraq. According to the CIA, the vials containing bio-pesticide, were recovered from an Al Hakam scientist’s home.
CIA: A total of 97 vials-including those with labels consistent with the al Hakam cover stories of single-cell protein and bio-pesticides, as well as strains that could be used to produce BW agents were recovered from a scientist’s residence in Iraq in 2003. Photo credit: CIA
Information from the US federal contracts registry shows that the Pentagon performs tests using the bacteria stolen from Saddam Hussein’s bio-weapons factory in Iraq.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) federal project for laboratory analysis and field tests with bacteria. Source: govtribe.com
The tests are performed at Kirtland Air Force Base (Kirtland is the home of the Air Force Materiel Command’s Nuclear Weapons Center). Here weapons are being tested, meaning that the field tests with biological simulants (bacteria) also fall into this group.
The DTRA contractor on this project – Lovelace Biomedical and Environmental Research Institute (LBERI), operates an Animal Bio-safety 3 Level (ABSL-3) laboratory which has Select Agent status. The facility is designed to conduct bioaerosol studies. The company has been awarded a 5-year contract for field tests with biological simulants at Kirtland Air Force Base.
Photo Credit: Kirtland Air Force Base
Field tests with Biological Simulants (bacteria)
What the Pentagon is now doing is exactly what it did in the past, meaning that its bio-weapons program was never terminated. The US Army performed 27 field tests with such biological simulants, involving the public domain from 1949 to 1968, when President Nixon officially announced the end of the program.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which runs the US military program at the Lugar Center in Georgia, is alleged to have already performed field tests with an unknown substance in Chechnya, Russia. In the spring of 2017 local citizens reported on a drone disseminating white powder close to the Russian border with Georgia. Neither the Georgian border police, nor the US personnel operating on the Georgia-Russia border, commented on this information.
$9.2 million US military project on Russia-Georgia border
DTRA has full access to the Russia-Georgia border, granted under a military program called “Georgia Land Border Security Project”. The activities, related to the project have been outsourced to a private American company – Parsons Government Services International. DTRA has previously contracted Parsons for similar border security projects in Lebanon, Jordan, Libya and Syria. Parsons have been awarded a $9.2 million contract under the Pentagon border security project on the Russia-Georgia border.
Local citizens in Chechnya noticed a UAV sprayer near the Russian border with Georgia in 2017.
US Defense Agency tests GM Insects to transmit GM Viruses
The Pentagon has invested at least $65 million in gene editing. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded 7 research teams to develop tools for genome engineering in insects, rodents and bacteria under DARPA’s Safe Gene program, using a novel CRISPR-Cas9 technology.
Under another military program –Insect Allies, GM insects are engineered to transfer modified genes to plants. The $10.3 million DARPA project includes both gene editing in insects and in the viruses that they transmit. Ecological Niche-preference Engineering is a third ongoing military program for genome engineering in insects. The Pentagon’s stated objective is to engineer GM organisms so that they can resist certain temperatures, change their habitat and food sources.
Besides gene editing in insects and in the viruses they transmit, the Pentagon wants to engineer humans as well. DARPA Advanced Tools for Mammalian Genome Engineering Project seeks to create a biological platform inside the human body, using it to deliver new genetic information, and thus altering humans at the DNA level.
DARPA wants to insert an additional 47th artificial chromosome into human cells. This chromosome will deliver new genes that will be used for engineering the human body. SynPloid Biotek LLC has been awarded two contracts under the program totaling $1.1 million (2015-2016 – $ 100,600 for the first phase of the research; 2015-2017 – $ 999,300 for work which is not specified in the federal contracts registry. The company has only two employees and no previous record on bio-research.
Top Secret Research on Synthetic Viruses
Between 2008 and 2014, the United States invested approximately $820 million in synthetic biology research, Defense being a major contributor. Most of the military projects on synthetic biology are classified, among them are a number of classified studies by the secretive JASON group of US military advisors – e.g. Emerging Viruses and Genome Editing for the Pentagon, and Synthetic Viruses for the National Counterterrorism Center.
JASON is an independent scientific advisory group that provides consulting services to the U.S. government on matters of defense science and technology. It was established in 1960 and most of their resulting JASON reports are classified. For administrative purposes, the JASON’s projects are run by the MITRE Corporation, which has contracts with the Defense Department, CIA and the FBI. Since 2014 MITRE has been awarded some $27.4 million in contracts with the DoD.
Although the JASON Reports are classified, another US Air Force study titled Biotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens, sheds some light on what the secretive JASON group has researched – 5 groups of genetically engineered pathogens that can be used as bio-weapons. These are binary biological weapons (a lethal combination of two viruses), host swapping diseases (animal viruses that “jump” to humans, like the Ebola virus), stealth viruses, and designer diseases. Designer diseases can be engineered to target a certain ethnic group, meaning that they can be used as ethnic bio-weapons.
Ethnic Bioweapons
Ethnic biological weapon (biogenetic weapon) is a theoretical weapon that aims to primarily harm people of specific ethnicities, or genotypes. Although officially the research and development of ethnic bio-weapons have never been publicly confirmed, documents show that the US collects biological material from certain ethnic groups – Russians and Chinese.
The US Air Force has been specifically collecting Russian RNA and synovial tissue samples, raising fears in Moscow of a covert US ethnic bio-weapons program.
Source: fbo.gov
Apart from Russians, the US has been collecting biological material from both healthy and cancer patients in China. The National Cancer Institute has collected biological samples from 300 subjects from Linxian, Zhengzhou, and Chengdu in China. While another federal project, titled Serum Metabolic biomarkers discovery study of Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma in China, includes analysis of 349 serum samples which have been collected from Chinese patients.
The US National Cancer Institute has been collecting biological material from patients of the Chinese Cancer Hospital in Beijing.
Chinese biological material has been collected under a series of federal projects including saliva and cancer tissue. Among them, Genotyping DNA Samples from Lymphoma cases and from controls (healthy patients), Breast cancer tissue blocks from breast cancer patients, Saliva samples of 50 families who have 3 or more cases of UGI cancer, Genotype 50 SNP’S for DNA samples from the Cancer Hospital, Beijing, Genotypes from 3000 cases of gastric cancer and 3000 controls (healthy patients) in Beijing.
Tobacco Vaccines: How the Pentagon helped tobacco companies to profit from Ebola
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has invested $100 million in vaccines production from tobacco plants. The companies, involved in the project, are owned by the biggest American tobacco companies – Mediacago Inc. is co-owned by Philip Morris, and Kentucky BioProcessing is a subsidiary of Reynolds American which is owned by British American Tobacco. Currently they are producing Flu and Ebola vaccines from tobacco plants.
The $100 million program Blue Angel was launched as a response to the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. Medicago being awarded $21 million to produce 10, 000 million doses of an influenza vaccine within one month.
Blue Angel program manager Dr. John Julias explains: “Although there are multiple plant species and other organisms being explored as alternative protein production platforms, the US Government has continued to make an investment in tobacco-based manufacturing.”
The plant-based vaccine production method works by isolating a specific antigen protein that triggers a human immune response from the targeted virus. A gene from the protein is transferred to bacteria, which is used to infect plants. The plants then start producing the protein that will be used for vaccinations (photos: DARPA)
It is not clear why the Pentagon chose to invest in vaccines produced from tobacco plants amongst all other plant species, which they explored. Medicago, co-owned by Philip Morris, paid $495,000 for lobbying the Department of Defense, the Congress and The Department of Health and Human Services for “funding to advance technology to support public health preparedness applications”. The Pentagon funded tobacco companies to develop new technology and to profit from vaccines. – http://dilyana.bg/
Bulgarian journalist confronts US official over secret biolabs
On 16 January 2018, a Bulgarian investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva wrote a detailed article about the US bio-weapons research that spans across the world in 25 different countries. Gaytandzhieva wrote in her article that the US Army regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria and toxins in direct violation of the UN Convention on the prohibition of biological weapons, and that hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are systematically exposed to dangerous pathogens and other incurable diseases. She added that bio-warfare scientists are using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at Pentagon bio-laboratories in 25 countries across the world. These bio-laboratories are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $2.1 billion military program called Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), and are located in countries such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, etc. Luckily, the Balkans seems to be clear.
Gaytandzhieva recently traveled to Brussels and attended the European Parliament in order to confront Robert Kadlec, Assistant Secretary at the US Department of Health, regarding the number of classified bio-weapons research labs scattered through Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Kadlec categorically denied the existence of an American bio-weapon program as well as that information surrounding the labs in question were classified. Gaytandzhieva attempted to continue her follow up but was silenced by Hilde Vautmans, the EU official sitting next to Kadlec, who stated “This is not an investigation” to applause from the audience and an embrace between herself and Kadlec. Gaytandzhieva didn’t stop there, however, following Kadlec to the elevator and continuing to ask him questions regarding the bio-weapons program which Kadlec refused to answer. Security staff then refused to let Gaytandzhieva on the elevator.
Here’s the full transcript of the exchange between Gaytandzhieva and Kadlec:
Gaytandzhieva: Why has the Pentagon been operating military bio-laboratories in 25 countries, bordering on the US rivals Russia, China and Iran, and why has the number of deadly outbreaks, in all those countries, increased dramatically since the start of the military program of the United States in these countries? Kadlec: I will say unequivocally and undeniably, the US does not have a military biological weapons program. Period. End of statement. Number two [interrupts Gaytandzhieva], we have been working, and I do know from the Department of Defense, they have been working with partners in parts the World, to ensure that those laboratories, and we trained them to do the diagnostic tests on these diseases, to ensure that they can manage them and also safely secure those facilities, so they’re not accessible by terrorists, or by criminals, who would do ill with them. Gaytandzhieva: Why are all these projects classified information? All these bio-laboratories of the Pentagon in 25 countries across the world? Why are they classified information? Kadlec: They’re not classified, they’re openly avaliable to anyone who wants to look at them. Gaytandzhieva: No, I tried it. No, this is not true. They are classified information. Vautmans: Ok, ok, I think I will not give you more time. We will try to answer your questions, but that’s not the place here. Case closed, thank you very much [kisses with Kadlec].
Gaytandzhieva then followed Kadlec to the elevator and continued to ask him questions regarding the bio-weapons program.
Gaytandzhieva: Just one more question? Kadlec: No more questions. Gaytandzhieva: What is the need of military biolaboratories of the United States in 25 countries across the world?
She attempted to enter the elevator, but was forcibly stopped.
Gaytandzhieva: This is public area, sorry, I can use the elevator. Security man: Sorry not this one, it’s full. Gaytandzhieva: I can use the elevator. Security man: No more questions then [trying to prevent cameraman]. Gaytandzhieva: Why not? Why is the Pentagon investing 65 million dolars in gene editing? The gene editing is the part of this program.
Elevator gates closed.
Later, Gaytandzhieva posted the video on her social media pages, simply commenting: “How a journalist gets expelled from the European Parliament when asking the Assistant Secretary at the US Department of Health questions about the Pentagon bio-laboratories around Russia, China and Iran.
Although unable to retrieve any answers from Kadlec, her article is already an impressive collection of information revealing a network of bio-weapons research facilities as well as mysterious outbreaks in their vicinities.
This is not the first time that Gaytandzhieva is exposing the US secret military programs. Last summer, she published a bombshell report which found that an Azerbaijan state airline company was regularly transporting tons of cheap Bulgarian and East European weaponry to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Turkey, under diplomatic cover as part of the CIA covert program. These weapons were found inside underground terrorist warehouses belonging to Al Nusra Front, Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria designated as a terrorist organization by the UN. The US modus operandi was the same: using bases in the satellite countries, abuse of diplomatic channels, and dirty politics directed against Russia, Iran and Syria.
Leaked e-mails between the Lugar Center, the Pentagon biolaboratory in Tbilisi, the US Embassy to Georgia and the Georgian Ministry of Health reveal new information about the $161 million secretive US Government biological research program in this former Soviet country.
The data allegedly originating from the Ministry of Health of Georgia has been published anonymously on Twitter and on a forum for database leaks – Raidforums. Among the documents there are internal memos, official letters and detailed information about US government projects at the Lugar Center, funding and foreign business trips.
Arms Watch volunteers have analyzed these documents and discovered very interesting facts about the Center’s recent activities.
The Pentagon has planned to turn Georgia into its largest biological research center overseas, combining its military resources with the resources of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Georgia.
Furthermore, the number of US projects and grants have increased as well as the number of US scientists deployed to the Lugar Center. The Pentagon-funded facility is planned to temporarily accommodate 16 CDC specialists from Atlanta, for whom Georgia will build a separate BSL-2 laboratory, administrative building and a campus near the Lugar Center. In addition, Georgia will become a regional CDC hub for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, internal documents reveal.
The Lugar Center is a $161 million Pentagon-funded biolaboratory in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi (photo: Dilyana Gaytandzhieva)
The Lugar Center already sparked controversy about possible dual-use research in 2018 when leaked documents revealed that US diplomats in Georgia were involved in the trafficking of frozen human blood and pathogens for a secret military program.
Pentagon research on bioterrorism agents at the Lugar Center
US military scientists have been deployed to Georgia for research on bioterrorism agents at the Lugar Center, according to the new data-leak. These bio-agents have the potential to be aerosolized and used as bioweapons. Among them anthrax, tularemia, Brucella, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, Hantavirus, Y. pestis (causing the disease plague).
The US military biological research projects in Georgia have been funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). According to internal data, American and Georgian scientists are currently working on the following DTRA projects in the Lugar Center:
Project 1059:Zoonotic Infections with Fever and Skin Injuries in Georgia
The project includes isolation of new orthopoxviruses in humans, rodents, domestic and wild animals in Georgia, and collection of rodents (as a natural reservoir for this virus) for their further study.
Duration: 01/11/2015-31/10/2018 (extended to 2020)
Funding: $702,343
Project 1060:Characterization of the Georgian National Center for Disease Control (NCDC) Strain Repository by New Generation Sequencing
Description: characterization and genome research on 100 strains from four endemic species: Y. pestis (causing the disease plague), B. anthracis (anthrax), Brucella, and F. tularensis (causing the disease tularemia).
Duration: 01/11/2015-31/10/2018
Funding: $ 518,409
Project 1439:Molecular Virological Research in Georgia
Description and objectives:
Identify and characterize Hantavirus and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) strains by molecular methods;
Characterize and study genetic diversity of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus and hantavirus strains isolated from rodents and ectoparasites;
Serological examination of febrile patients with Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever and hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome;
Collection of rodents and ectoparasites (ticks, fleas);
Duration: 16/08/2017-15/08/2021
Funding: $612,614
Project 1497:Molecular Epidemiology and Ecology of Yersinia Species in Georgia and Azerbaijan
Description: 1) Ecological research on rodents in Kerb on the Georgian-Azerbaijani border 2) Isolation of different strains of Yersinia; 3) Molecular screening of collected rodent and flea samples. 4) A comparative analysis of the genomes of Yersinia strains obtained during the fieldwork; 5) Spatial analysis of the distribution of Yersinia strains.
Duration: 01/09/2017-31/08/2018 (extended to 2022)
Funding: $134,090.00DTRA Projects in Georgia1 of 8
Project 1742:Risks of bat-borne zoonotic diseases in Western Asia
Duration: 24/10/2018-23 /10/2019
Funding: $71,500
In 2017 the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) launched a $6.5 million project on bats and coronaviruses in Western Asia (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Jordan) with the Lugar Center being the local laboratory for this genetic research. The duration of the program is 5 years and has been implemented by the non-profit US organisation Eco Health Alliance.
The project’s objectives are: 1. Capture and non-lethally sample 5,000 bats in 5-year period (2017-2022) 2. Collect 20,000 samples (i.e. oral, rectal swabs and/or feces, and blood) and screen for coronaviruses using consensus PCR at regional labs in Georgia and Jordan. According to the project presentation, Eco Health Alliance already sampled 270 bats of 9 species in three Western Asian countries: 90 individual bats in Turkey (Aug 2018), Georgia (Sept 2018), and Jordan (Oct 2018).Video Player00:0003:02
EcoHealth Alliance and Georgian scientists sampling a bat for coronavirus research in 2018 (Facebook, Keti Sidamonidze)
Coincidentally, the same Pentagon contractor tasked with the US DoD bat-research program – Eco Health Alliance, USA, also collected bats and isolated coronaviruses along with Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. EcoHealth Alliance received a $3.7 million grant from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to collect and study coronaviruses in bats in China from 2014 to 2019.
Project 1911:Ricketsia and Coxelia infection surveillance in Georgia and Azerbaijan (US federal grant HDTRA1-19-1-0042 awarded to NCDC-Georgia)
Duration: 23/09/2019 – 22/09/2022
Funding: $945,000
Despite the official claims of Georgia and USA that the Lugar Center is under the full control of the government of this Caucasus country internal documents show otherwise. Not only has the Pentagon funded biological research projects but it has also paid all the expenses for security and maintenance including utility bills – water, gas, electricity, and cleaning. Tasked with the operational and scientific support to the Lugar Center is USAMRU-Georgia, a special unit deployed to Georgia by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR). WRAIR has paid: $524,625 (2016-2018), $650,000 (2017-2019) and $1,062,400 (2017-2021) for utility bills, and a further $158,050 (2016-2017) and $322,000 (2018-2021) for security guards.
The Pentagon has also awarded a private US contractor, Technology Management Company (TMC) an $8 million contract for science services to support USAMRU-Georgia in the Lugar Center (2016-2021).WRAIR Projects at the Lugar Center1 of 5
Tularemia research on soldiers
The Pentagon unit USAMRU-Georgia has conducted extensive research on tularemia involving Georgian soldiers, scientific papers reveal.
Tularemia is a rare infectious disease that typically attacks the skin, eyes, lymph nodes and lungs. Tularemia, also called rabbit fever or deer fly fever, is caused by the bacterium Francisella tularensis. It is categorized as a category A bioterrorism agent. Tularemia was weaponized for mass aerosol dissemination by the US Army in the past, according to a recently declassified military report.
Tularemia is one of the bio-weapons that the US Army developed in the past. Source: 1981 US Army Report
900 volunteers (soldiers and civilians) were recruited for the DTRA project GG-19 “Epidemiology and Ecology of Tularemia in Georgia” from 2014 to 2017. Blood samples were collected from those volunteers and tested for tularemia.
According to the study, 10 soldiers (2%) of the 500 solders tested had antibodies for F. tularensis. The seropositive soldiers were men, the majority of whom were between 30 and 39 years of age. Seven cases had current residences in known endemic areas (i.e. Kakheti, Samtskhe-Javakheti, Kvemo Kartli, Shida Kartli, and Tbilisi). Three were from areas without previously known F. tularensis transmission (i.e. Imereti).
Of the 783 residents approached to participate in this study, 35 (5.0%) volunteers had antibodies to F. tularensis.
While the civilian volunteers were all residents of two areas with naturally occurring foci of tularemia in Georgia, the military personnel were soldiers visiting Georgia’s military hospital. The study does not provide any explanation as to why soldiers were enrolled in this project nor how exactly they contracted the disease in the army.Project GG-19: Tularemia in Georgia1 of 8
Furthermore, Georgia has asked the US Embassy for assistance for the construction of a second military hospital in the country, according to leaked correspondence between local health officials and the US Embassy to Tbilisi.
Below is Google translation in English of this correspondence:
CDC regional hub
The US Government has launched a parallel civil program in Georgia implemented by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Leaked e-mails between the US Embassy to Tbilisi and Georgian health officials reveal that CDC has planned to set up a regional office for Eastern Europe and Central Asia in Georgia. The US Embassy and CDC have requested additional office space for 16 employees. Currently the CDC staff are working inside the Lugar Center.CDC regional hub for Eastern Europe and Central Asia in Georgia1 of 4
Interestingly, the Georgian health officials do not ask about any further information or clarification as to what this new foreign hub is going to do in their own country. Instead, Georgia’s Ministry of Health has planned the construction of a new BSL-2 laboratory, conference hall and campus near the Lugar Center with a loan from the European Investment Bank, according to a letter to the finance minister of Georgia leaked on Raidforums.
Arms Watch could not independently verify the authenticity of this letter as we did not find it in the leaked files. We have further analyzed the ministry’s internal data and discovered the following CDC projects in Georgia:
Project 1320: Antimicrobial Resistance Project
Duration: 01/09/2016 -29/09/2020
Funding: $153,492.40
Project 1440:Introducing or Expanding the Use of Influenza Vaccine Outside the United States
Duration: 30/09/2016 – 29/09/2019
Funding: $750,000
Project 1441:Influenza Surveillance Outside the United States
Duration: 30/09 / 16-29 / 09/21
Funding: $250,000
Project 1446: Strengthening New Generation Sequencing Capacities for Hepatitis C Surveillance in Georgia
Duration: 01/07/2017-30 /06/2018
Funding: $22,000
Project 1447:Samples collection under the Hepatitis C Elimination Program in Georgia – Bio-Bank
Objective: The aim of the project is to store samples collected under the Hepatitis C program for future scientific work
20,000 plasma/serum samples
6,000 serum samples from the 2015 National Seroprevalence Survey of Hepatitis C and B
1,000 blood samples from blood banks
500 blood samples from patients with terminal liver disease
Duration: 01/07/2017-30/06/2018
Project 1456:Strengthening the micronutrient deficit monitoring system in Georgia
Duration: 01/09/2017 – 31/08/2018
Funding: $92,875
Project 1457:Genetic peculiarities of hepatitis C virus in Georgia and its role in the Georgian Hepatitis C elimination program
Objective: Evaluate morbidity and mortality associated with Hepatitis C virus
Duration: 01/09/2017-31/08/2018
Funding: $127,125
Project 1532:Strengthening, detection, response and prevention of diarrhea outbreaks in Georgia
Duration: 30/09/2017 -29/09/2020
Funding: $40,000
Project 1533:Strengthening Immunization and Vaccination Control System
Duration: 30/09/2017 – 29/09/2020
Funding: $67,220.00
Project 1534: Respiratory Disease Surveillance
Duration: 30/09/2017 – 29/09/2020
Funding: $80,000.00
Project 1535:Enterovirus surveillance Georgia
Duration: 30/09/2017 -29/ 09/2020
Funding: $45,000
Project 1536:National Laboratory Quality Control Program in Georgia
Duration: 30/09/2017 -29 /09/2020
Funding: $56,140
Project 1537:South Caucasus Field Epidemiology and Laboratory Training Program
Duration: 30/09/2017 -29 /09/2020
Funding: $150,000
Project 1538: Fever of unknown etiology caused by arboviruses in the Black Sea region – clinical specimens will be shipped to the CDC Laboratory for analyses
Duration: 30/09/2017 – 29/09/2020
Funding: $100,360CDC Projects in Georgia1 of 15
In conclusion, the United States has been consistently developing its laboratory facilities in the Caucasus. Why has the US Government spent billions of dollars on such biolaboratories and projects abroad instead on the health of its own citizens?Scientists with diplomatic immunity1 of 6
Furthermore, why have US scientists working at the Lugar Center been given diplomatic status and immunity to research deadly pathogens and insects in Georgia? Diplomatic immunity is a principle of international law by which foreign government officials are not subject to the jurisdiction of local courts and other authorities for their activities. Hence, US scientists could even perform illegal experiments in Georgia without being prosecuted as they have diplomatic immunity.
The Internet has generated this and sent it my way, I don’t know who to credit, but it’s a good job, no lies detected as of now.
UPDATE MARCH 10, 2022: Klaus Schwab & Hunter Biden Connected To Ukraine Bio-Labs
I was working on exposing these connections myself, but Infowars moved faster and they did great job. So I can vouch for almost every sentence there based on my own research and I will take it even further. Until then, enjoy their video:
The Gateway Pundit identified through the Wayback Machine that Rosemont Seneca provided capital (invested in) Metabiota as noted on the firm’s website back in 2014.
It is listed as “Our Team’s Investments” on the Rosemont Senaca webpage.
We also located a number of documents from the Wayback Machine (meaning they have been since deleted off the Internet) that show the Department of Defense investing in the creation of Biolabs in Ukraine with the help of firm Black & Veatch.
Here is a sample of one of the documents located. (We’ve located nearly a dozen of these documents.)
Today, Metabiota, the pioneer in epidemic risk modeling, announced it has been awarded a subcontract from Black & Veatch (B&V) to support the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s (DTRA) Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) in Iraq under the Biological Threat Reduction Integrating Contract (BTRIC). Metabiota has also partnered with B&V on DTRA’s recently awarded Cooperative Threat Reduction Integrating Contract (CTRIC) III with an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (ID/IQ) contract ceiling of $970M.
Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm that has collaborated with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was a primary financial backer of Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, an investment group led by Hunter Biden.
Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP) was a spinoff of Rosemont Capital, a venture capital firm created by Biden and John Kerry’s stepson in 2009. Biden served as a Managing Director.
<<Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings are becoming harder for the major media to suppress amid revelations coming out of an ongoing grand jury investigation and his business partner’s prison sentence in a scheme to defraud a Native American tribe of some $60 million in bonds.
Which brings us back to a topic many have forgotten if they even knew: The proximity between Hunter Biden and the origins of COVID-19.
Hunter Biden
Independent media outlet The National Pulse reported in June of last year that an investment firm led by Hunter Biden was a key financial collaborator with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP), the firm led by Joe Biden’s son, was a lead financial backer of Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm that partnered with EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan lab, the report said.
EcoHealth Alliance, headed by Daszak, and financed by several U.S. government agencies, partnered with Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina and Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research on bat-borne coronaviruses in communist China prior to the initial outbreak of Covid.
The National Pulse cited financial reports which show that RSTP led Metabiota’s first round of funding, which amounted to $30 million.
“Former Managing Director and co-founder of RSTP Neil Callahan – a name that appears many times on Hunter Biden’s hard drive – also sits on Metabiota’s Board of Advisors,” the report noted.
In April 2021, Joe Biden’s USAID announced a new initiative spearheaded by EcoHealth Alliance to track emerging infectious diseases with pandemic potential. Also collaborating on the taxpayer-funded venture was Metabiota.
Since 2014, Metabiota has been a partner of EcoHealth Alliance as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) “PREDICT” project, which seeks to “predict and prevent global emerging disease threats.” As part of this effort, researchers from Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on a study relating to bat infectious diseases in China.
Daszak is also central figure in the potential origins of Covid. His EcoHealth Alliance funneled taxpayer dollars from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to collaborate on bat coronavirus research in Wuhan.
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer on Monday was sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison by Manhattan Judge Ronnie Abrams.
“There’s no dispute about the harm caused to real people,” Abrams said, noting that the defrauded tribe, the Oglala Sioux, is one of the poorest in the nation. Archer will also have to pay more than $15 million in forfeiture by himself and more than $43 million in restitution with his co-defendants in the case.
Rosemont Seneca was one of a handful of companies listed in a May 2019 grand jury subpoena that ordered JP Morgan Chase to provide records of transactions between Hunter Biden’s various ventures and the Bank of China for the previous five years.
The subpoena also asked for similar “records, documents and accounts” related to James Biden, Joe Biden’s brother, and Hunter’s former business partners Eric Schwerin and Archer, both founding partners at Rosemont Seneca.
Archer’s attorney, Matthew Schwartz, confirmed that his client had “cooperated completely” with the Department of Justice after the subpoena was leaked online last month by Marco Polo which is preparing a comprehensive report on the Biden family.
“The document offered the first real clues as to the specifics of Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s probe, which was launched in late 2018 but controversially kept under wraps until weeks after the 2020 Presidential election, supposedly to avoid becoming a campaign issue,” the Daily Mail noted.>>
Update March 30, 2020: Once we pull it out you better pick up on it quickly, I told you we’re in the business of dictating future MSM headlines. But without the sugar glazing. 🙂
Knight Spirit makes a nice summary of the Metabiota – Covid connection:
Metabiota & COVID-19 origin
<<Since 2014, Metabiota has been a partner of EcoHealth Alliance as part of the “PREDICT” initiative of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID), which aims to “predict and prevent global emerging disease threats.”
As part of this endeavor, researchers from Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on a study into bat infectious diseases in China. According to the research, “sensitive and broadly reactive RT-PCR assays were performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.”
Shi Zhengli, the Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Communist Party’s Wuhan Lab, is one of the researchers included in the aforementioned 2014 publication. Peter Daszak, who was recently removed from the Lancet COVID-19 panel due to many conflicts of interest as a “longtime collaborator” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is named as a contributor.
Daszak is also a key figure in COVID-19’s possible origins. His EcoHealth Alliance used public funds to collaborate on bat coronavirus research in Wuhan with Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota researchers have also worked together on presentations on how to “live safely with bats” and studies tying new infectious disease epidemics to wildlife trade facilities, such as “wet markets.”
“Wildlife trade can facilitate zoonotic disease transmission and represents a threat to human health and economies in Asia, highlighted by the 2003 SARS coronavirus outbreak, where a Chinese wildlife market facilitated pathogen transmission,” the 2016 paper notes.
On a 2014 study on henipavirus spillover, a 2014 study on Ebola monitoring, a 2015 study on herpes, and a 2015 study on viral diversity, Metabiota researchers were named with EcoHealth Alliance staff.
Aside from its ties to EcoHealth Alliance, Metabiota has also been criticized for “bungling” America’s Ebola response.>>
BUT METABIOTA IS INVOLVED IN MANY PLACES AND MANY BITHREATS, SUCH AS:
ABOUT PREDICT
PREDICT is enabling global surveillance for viruses that may spillover from animal hosts to people by building capacities to detect and discover viruses of pandemic potential. The project is part of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats program and is led by the UC Davis One Health Institute. The core partners are USAID, EcoHealth Alliance, Metabiota, Wildlife Conservation Society, and Smithsonian Institution. Scientists work in 30 countries in Africa and Asia testing for five viral families—coronaviruses (e.g. SARS/MERS), filoviruses (e.g. Ebola), paramyxoviruses (e.g. Nipah / Hendra), influenza viruses (e.g. H1N1, H5N1, H7N9) and flaviviruses (e.g. Zika)—in wildlife, livestock, and humans, to understand the risk of spillover. As part of this effort, lab scientists around the world are trained to perform viral testing—a vital skill in case an outbreak should emerge. Field researchers are trained to safely handle and sample animals by capture and release. – SOURCE
Researchers from Metabiota have also been listed alongside EcoHealth Alliance personnel on a 2014 study on henipavirus [aka Nipah – keep this in mind – S.m.] spillover, 2014 study on Ebola monitoring, 2015 study focusing on herpes, and 2015 study on viral diversity.
“An American company that bills itself as a pioneer in tracking emerging epidemics made a series of costly mistakes during the 2014 Ebola outbreak that swept across West Africa — with employees feuding with fellow responders, contributing to misdiagnosed Ebola cases and repeatedly misreading the trajectory of the virus,” an Associated Press (AP) investigation into the company found.
The company reportedly made the “already chaotic situation worse,” prompting World Health Organization officials to criticize the company.
Emails obtained by AP and interviews with aid workers on the ground show that some of the company’s actions made an already chaotic situation worse.
WHO outbreak expert Dr. Eric Bertherat wrote to colleagues in a July 17, 2014, email about misdiagnoses and “total confusion” at the Sierra Leone government lab Metabiota shared with Tulane University in the city of Kenema. He said there was “no tracking of the samples” and “absolutely no control on what is being done.”
“This is a situation that WHO can no longer endorse,” he wrote.
<<A separate document detailing Ukraine’s biolab network from the BioWeapons Prevention Project outlines in greater detail the scope of pathogens the facility has conducted research with.
Among the viruses the lab studied were Ebola and “viruses of pathogencity group II by using of virology, molecular, serologica and express methods.”
Additionally, the lab provided “special training for specialists on biosafety and biosecurity issues during handling of dangerous biological pathogenic agents.”>> – National Pulse
BIOLAB’S PATHOGENS.
Look again and tell me if that virus list reminds you of anything. Hint:
This above quotes a National Defense Magazine article, which reveals the Covid narrative was already being set up in 2011, as we’ve shown in other reports too:
<<Teams are learning that local health clinics in South Asia, Africa and Southeast Asia possess deadly pathogens, not as potential weapons, but because they need samples of naturally-occurring diseases on hand to diagnose outbreaks in their human and animal populations. These samples are often kept in public repositories where the microbes could easily be stolen and released.
“We’re looking for partners in new areas around the world who have legitimate need for maintaining samples of these horrible diseases and pathogens,” Myers said, according to National Defense Magazine. “We are looking for ways to partner with them to increase their ability to keep them secure and safe, to be able to account for them so they know exactly how many strains of pathogen X or pathogen Y or pathogen Z they might have.”
The cooperative biological engagement teams are also seeking to assist the partner nations with epidemiological training to ensure scientists are effective and efficient at identifying outbreaks and alerting the proper authorities.
“Many of the countries we’re dealing with now never had any intention of being a threat to the United States,” Myers said, according to National Defense Magazine. “One of their interests in engaging with us is to become real partners with us, and we look forward to developing those relationships.”>> –
All research at a Fort Detrick laboratory that handles high-level disease-causing material, such as Ebola, is on hold indefinitely after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the organization failed to meet biosafety standards.
No infectious pathogens, or disease-causing material, have been found outside authorized areas at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.
The CDC inspected the military research institute in June and inspectors found several areas of concern in standard operating procedures, which are in place to protect workers in biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories, spokeswoman Caree Vander Linden confirmed in an email Friday.
The CDC sent a cease and desist order in July.
After USAMRIID received the order from the CDC, its registration with the Federal Select Agent Program, which oversees disease-causing material use and possession, was suspended. That suspension effectively halted all biological select agents and toxin research at USAMRIID, Vander Linden said in her email.
The Federal Select Agent Program does not comment on whether a program such as USAMRIID is registered and cannot comment on action taken to enforce regulations, Kathryn Harben, a spokeswoman for the CDC, wrote in an email.
“As situations warrant, [Federal Select Agent Program] will take whatever appropriate action is necessary to resolve any departures from regulatory compliance in order to help ensure the safety and security of work with select agents and toxins,” Harben said in the email.
The suspension was due to multiple causes, including failure to follow local procedures and a lack of periodic recertification training for workers in the biocontainment laboratories, according to Vander Linden. The wastewater decontamination system also failed to meet standards set by the Federal Select Agent Program, Vander Linden said in a follow-up email.
“To maximize the safety of our employees, there are multiple layers of protective equipment and validated processes,” she said.
Vander Linden could not say when the laboratory would be able to continue research.
“USAMRIID will return to fully operational status upon meeting benchmark requirements for biosafety,” she said in an email. “We will resume operations when the Army and the CDC are satisfied that USAMRIID can safely and consistently meet all standards.”
USAMRIID has been working on modified biosafety level 3 procedures and a new decontamination system since flooding in May 2018. This “increased the operational complexity of bio-containment laboratory research activities within the Institute,” she said.
At the time of the cease and desist order, USAMRIID scientists were working with agents known to cause tularemia, also called deer fly or rabbit fever, the plague and Venezuelan equine encephalitis, all of which were worked on in a biosafety level 3 laboratory. Researchers were also working with the Ebola virus in a biosafety level 4 lab, Vander Linden said.
Of the pathogens, Ebola, bacteria Yersinia pestis (plague), and bacterium Francisella tularensis (tularemia) are on the list of the Health and Human Services select agents and toxins. The three are considered Tier 1 agents, which pose a severe public health and safety threat.
Venezuelan equine encephalitis also falls under the Federal Select Agent Program, according to the Code of Federal Regulations.
The military research institute is looking at each of its contracts to see what will be affected by the shutdown. USARMIID work outside the lab is not expected to be affected, including on Ebola, Vander Linden said.
“We are coordinating closely with the CDC to ensure that critical, ongoing studies within bio-containment laboratories are completed under appropriate oversight and that research animals will continue to be cared for in accordance with all regulations,” she said in an email. “Although much of USAMRIID’s research is currently on hold, the Institute will continue its critical clinical diagnostic mission and will still be able to provide medical and subject matter expertise as needed to support the response to an infectious disease threat or other contingency.”
According to the Code of Federal Regulations, which also lists required training, records and biosafety plans, Federal Select Agents Program registration can be suspended to protect public health and safety. It is not clear if this is why the USAMRIID registration was suspended.
The code also gives the Department of Health and Human Services, under which the CDC falls, the right to inspect any site and records, without prior notifications. Vander Linden said in the email that the CDC inspected USAMRIID several times over the past year, both unannounced and on a regularly scheduled basis.
USAMRIID will work to meet requirements set by the Army and the CDC and have its suspension lifted, Vander Linden said.
“While the Institute’s research mission is critical, the safety of the workforce and community is paramount,” she said. “USAMRIID is taking the opportunity to correct deficiencies, build upon strengths, and create a stronger and safer foundation for the future.”
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
Sometimes my memes are 3D. And you can own them. Or send them to someone. You can even eat some of them. CLICK HERE
Detection and comparative analysis of persistent measles virus infection in Crohn’s disease by immunogold electron microscopy Daszak, Peter, Purcell, Matthew, Lewin, Jackie, Dhillon, Amar P, Pounder, Roy E and Wakefield, Andrew J (1997) Detection and comparative analysis of persistent measles virus infection in Crohn’s disease by immunogold electron microscopy. Journal of Clinical Pathology, 50(4), pp. 299-304. ISSN (print) 0021-9746 Official URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9215145
AFTER THAT, HE GOT 77 NOBEL PRIZES AND 31 MEDICAL ASSOCIATIONS TO BACK HIS AND FAUCI’S GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH
Peter Daszak – who donated to Hillary Clinton 13 times in 2016 – serves as the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a research organization that has partnered with the Wuhan Institue of Virology (WIV) – the very same lab many count as the source of COVID-19.
The type of research conducted by the group in tandem with the WIV prompted concern among National Institutes of Health officials for its role in COVID-related research, as outlined in a letter by NIH’s Deputy Director for Extramural Research Dr. Michael Lauer.
“It is our understanding that one of the sub-recipients of the grant funds is the Wuhan Institute of Virology (‘WIV’). It is our understanding that WIV studies the interaction between corona viruses and bats. The scientific community believes that the coronavirus causing COVID-19 jumped from bats to humans likely in Wuhan where the COVID-19 pandemic began. There are now allegations that the current crisis was precipitated by the release from WIV of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19. Given these concerns, we are pursuing suspension of WIV from participation in Federal programs.”
Chinese State Media.
While speaking at a conference sponsored by state-run media outlet China Global Television Network (CGTN), Daszak also revealed that he was a recipient of Chinese Communist Party cash.
He revealed he “has been working in China in collaboration with Chinese scientists and the government of China for over 15 years supported by federal funding from the U.S. and federal funding from China.”
Daszak has praised and attended the Beijing-based World Conference on Science Literacy, which is sponsored by the scientific group China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) that “serves as a bridge that links the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government to the country’s science and technology community.”
He has also appeared on panels at a CGTN-sponsored conference in cooperation with the Chinese Society for Science and Technology Journalism, a subsidiary of CAST. .
The zoologist obtained his Ph.D. in parasitic infectious diseases from the University of East London – a college ranked 116th of 130 in the country.
He has repeatedly appeared on CGTN, including praising the network as “fantastic” and “great” and defending scientific collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party as “important”
EcoHealth Alliance, Daszak’s nonprofit group, routed $600,000 in taxpayer funds to the WIV in form of subgrants as part of a project to study bat-based coronaviruses in China, funding that was terminated by the National Institutes of Health in May 2020.
From the onset of the pandemic, Daszak has denied he has a conflict of interest with the WIV, a claim that Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard H. Ebright said in April was a “brazen lie.
"'I have no conflicts of interest,' said Peter Daszak"
The WHO has defended its decision to appoint Daszak to the investigation of its COVID-9 origins despite accusations that his involvement mires the probe with major conflict of interests.
The WHO investigative panel shelved plans last week to release an interim report detailing how it concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that COVID-19 could have accidentally leaked from the WIV. ”
Despite working at the onset of the pandemic to suppress debate on the lab leak theory, Daszak said former White House strategist Steve Bannon and the Chinese Falun Gong religious sect, which financially backs the Epoch Times newspaper and faces persecution from the Chinese Communist Party, are the ones responsible for China’s decision to block an outside investigation of the pandemic’s origins for over a year after the initial outbreak.
“I’ve seen incredible efforts from everything from Falun Gong to … Steve Bannon’s group pushing the conspiracy theories around China,” Daszak said during Wednesday’s panel discussion. “It’s useful to them. They’re funding it and pushing it and science has been to some extent caught up in that to other instances absolutely crushed by it.”
“We’ve not had access to work in China on the origins for the last 12 months, which is ironic because we could have been on the ground there working with our Chinese colleagues and by now we could have found some really important answers,” he said. “The rhetoric has held that up.”
Life is good when you share the bill with both Wakefield and Fauci
Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Seventy-seven U.S. scientists who have won a Nobel Prize today asked Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services, to “act urgently” to review a controversial NIH decision to terminate a grant that supported research into bat coronaviruses in China. NIH’s explanation for killing the grant was “preposterous,” the laureates write.
On 24 April, NIH informed the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, led by wildlife disease specialist Peter Daszak, that it was ending a grant, first awarded in 2014 and renewed in 2019 because it no longer aligned with the agency’s priorities. The move came after Conservative U.S. politicians and media suggested—without evidence—that the coronavirus causing the pandemic escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, that employs a Chinese virologist who had received funding from the grant. The termination also came 1 week after President Donald Trump, when asked about the project at a press conference, said: “We will end that grant very quickly.”
In their letter, the Nobel laureates say they “are gravely concerned” about that decision. “We believe that this action sets a dangerous precedent by interfering in the conduct of science and jeopardizes public trust in the process of awarding federal funds for research. … Now is precisely the time when we need to support this kind of research if we aim to control the pandemic and prevent subsequent ones.”
They write that “despite the high relevance of the studies to the current pandemic, and despite the very high priority score that his application for renewal had received during peer review, the NIH informed Dr. Daszak and his colleagues that the grant was being terminated because ‘NIH does not believe that the current project outcomes align with the program goals and agency priorities.’ Such explanations are preposterous under the circumstances.”
Azar and Collins should, they write, “act urgently to conduct and release a thorough review of the actions that led to the decision to terminate the grant, and that, following this review … take appropriate steps to rectify the injustices that may have been committed in revoking it.”
The signers of the letter include researchers who won a Nobel Prize as recently as 2019, and as long ago as 1975.
The letter from the scientific societies was organized by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB). “Our aim with this effort is to stand up for a scientific enterprise that should be free of political influence on sound scientific research,” said Benjamin Corb, public affairs director for ASBMB, in a statement. “The continued politicization of science during this pandemic crisis is an alarming trend that is risking not only the integrity of science, but also the lives of citizens.
The Honorable Francis S. Collins Director National Institutes of Health 9000 Rockville Pike Bethesda, MD 20892 May 20, 2020 Director Francis Collins: We, the undersigned scientific organizations representing tens of thousands of members of the American biomedical research enterprise, are alarmed by the National Institutes of Health’s revocation of a peer-reviewed research grant for studies of coronaviruses by EcoHealth Alliance. Not only is this decision counterintuitive, given the urgent need to better understand the virus that causes COVID-19 and identify drugs that will save lives, but it politicizes science at a time when, if we are to stamp out this scourge, we need the public to trust experts and to take collective action. The foundation of the American biomedical research enterprise rests on two principles: international collaboration and a robust peer-review process. Both must be vigilantly upheld. The abrupt revocation of the NIH grant for the EcoHealth Alliance concerns us for two primary reasons: First, the decision seems to be a reaction to a theory about the origins of the COVID-19 virus that the intelligence community itself has publicly repudiated. EcoHealth Alliance at one point collaborated with a lab in Wuhan, China, which has recently been at the center of rumors about the origin of the pandemic. The overall goal of EcoHealth Alliance’s research project is to study coronavirus transmission from species to species. But the purpose of the research project has been conflated with these rumors. This is worrisome. International collaboration has propelled the American research enterprise to achieve vital innovations and discoveries; it is the gold standard for the scientific community. The United States is a beacon for the best and brightest minds, consistently attracting top scientists from around the world. However, with this incident, international collaboration is being portrayed as a threat. The scientific enterprise requires diversity, and American scientists depend on their international colleagues to pool resources, expertise, and ultimately make scientific breakthroughs. Second, the decision sets a dangerous precedent by revoking a grant that was awarded based upon scientific merit without a justifiable rationale such as issues related to scientific or financial fraud or misconduct. This grant is highly and uniquely relevant to all NIAID priorities to address the current COVID-19 pandemic. Most extramural research funds are awarded through a robust peer-review process. Scientists, not politicians, determine the merit of grant applications, and grant recipients are expected to be careful stewards of taxpayer dollars. Throughout the lifetime of a grant, each recipient communicates regularly with scientific review officers at the funding agency and produces progress reports providing evidence that the work remains valuable and on track. This has been the norm and until April 24, 2020 was applied to the now terminated grant. That has now been breached and this action must not become the norm going forward. The scientific community urges federal funding agencies and policymakers to ensure the transparency, openness, and collaborative nature of the American biomedical research enterprise. We call on the NIH to be transparent about their decision-making process on this matter. We urge federal funding agencies to safeguard the American biomedical research enterprise. The action taken by the NIH must be immediately reconsidered. Respectfully, The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology The Academy for Radiology and Biomedical Imaging Research The American Association for Anatomy The American Institute of Biological Sciences The American Physiological Society The American Psychological Association The American Society for Investigative Pathology The American Society for Virology The American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists The Association of Anatomy, Cell Biology and Neurobiology Chairs The Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities The Association of Medical and Graduate Departments of Biochemistry The Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health The Biophysical Society The Botanical Society of America The Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences The Endocrine Society The Entomological Society of America The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology The Genetics Society of America The HIV Medicine Association The Infectious Diseases Society of America The Natural Science Collections Alliance The North American Vascular Biology Organization The Shock Society The Society for Freshwater Science The Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles The Society for the Study of Reproduction The Society of Toxicology
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
Sometimes my memes are 3D. And you can own them. Or send them to someone. You can even eat some of them. CLICK HERE
The USA TODAY Network’s “Biolabs in Your Backyard” investigation, published since 2015, has revealed hundreds of accidents at corporate, university, government and military labs nationwide. It also has exposed a system of fragmented federal oversight and pervasive secrecy that obscures failings by facilities and regulators.
In January 2015, in an effort to determine the extent of lab accidents at the agency’s facilities, USA TODAY filed a FOIA request seeking copies of all incident reports at CDC labs in Atlanta and Fort Collins during 2013 and 2014. The CDC granted the request “expedited” processing status because USA TODAY demonstrated a compelling public need for the information. But the agency has said it will likely be 2018 before the records are released.
The newly disclosed 2009 incident in the BSL-4 decontamination shower is among about 4,000 pages of records the agency released in late January in response to two FOIA requests USA TODAY filed in June 2012. Those requests sought records about airflow and security door incidents at CDC’s $214 million, 368,000-square-foot Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory in Atlanta, commonly referred to by the agency as Building 18.
Most of these released records — which focus on airflow engineering issues in labs — involve a 2012 incident that USA TODAY reported four years ago based on documents obtained from sources. The issue involved air from inside a potentially contaminated lab briefly blowing outward into a “clean” corridor where a group of visitors weren’t wearing any protective gear. Among other incidents revealed in the records:
In 2011, a worker feeding animals in an enhanced biosafety level 3 lab used for studies on dangerous strains of avian flu, was unable to shower out of the lab after a construction contractor mistakenly closed the wrong water valve in a service tunnel. Not knowing when the water would come back on, the worker removed her protective equipment, put on a clean protective suit and left the lab without taking a shower. “I escorted her through the service tunnel to building (redacted) where she signed into our (redacted) select agent laboratory. She disposed of the tyvek suit in a biohazard bag, placed her scrubs in the laundry bin, and took a personal shower.” The CDC told USA TODAY that because the potential for any exposure was considered low risk, a medical evaluation was not required.
In 2008 an unvaccinated repair worker was potentially exposed to an undisclosed pathogen when a door containing contaminated items unexpectedly opened in a malfunctioning device, called an autoclave, that is used to sterilize equipment and other items. The infectious materials inside the device included bedding from infected mice and used laundry. While a report of the incident said that any material that may have escaped through the clean-side door that opened “was likely to be drawn upward toward the exhaust,” the worker was told to shower and his clothes, shoes, wallet, watch and other personal items were disinfected. He was escorted to the clinic for evaluation. The report notes that the autoclave “was installed backwards during building construction” and that as a result, the manual override controls for doors are reversed “which ultimately resulted in the incident.”
Building 18, which opened in 2005 has had a series of significant issues over the years. While the building’s many other high-containment and lower security labs were in operation from the start, its suite of BSL-4 labs did not go “hot” and start working with pathogens until around early 2009. The lab complex made news in 2007 when backup generators didn’t work to keep airflow systems working during a power outage and in 2008 for high-containment lab door that was being sealed with duct tape. The duct tape was applied after a 2007 incident where the building’s ventilation system malfunctioned and pulled potentially contaminated air out of the lab and into a “clean” hallway. Nine CDC workers were tested for potential exposure to Q fever bacteria. None were infected.
Read all the records released by CDC in response to USA TODAY’s 2012 Freedom of Information Act requests here and here.
The full coverage of USA TODAY’s investigation used to be hosted on its own separate website, biolabs.usatoday.com , but they deleted it, unsurprisingly.
As we’ve shown in our video too, a wide range of mainstream media outlets have reflected the situation over the years, not just USA Today, being quite critical of it, but with almost no impact on the general population. Ah, well…
Why some labs work on making viruses deadlier — and why they should stop
The pandemic should make us question the value of gain-of-function research.
Editor’s note, June 7, 2021: Since this article was originally published in May 2020, scientific consensus has shifted. Now some experts say the “lab leak” theory warrants an investigation, along with the natural origin theory. The article has been updated to reflect this, but other information may be out of date. For our most up-to-date coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, visit Vox’s coronavirus hub.
Earlier this week, Newsweek and the Washington Post reported that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab near the site of the first coronavirus cases in the world, had been studying bat coronaviruses.
The Newsweek report revealed an alarming tidbit: The Wuhan lab at the center of the controversy had for years been engaged in gain-of-function research. What exactly is it? It’s a line of research where scientists take viruses and study how they might be modified to become deadlier or more transmissible. Why would they do this? Scientists who engage in such research say it helps them figure out which viruses threaten people so they can design countermeasures.
To be clear, there is no evidence that the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was released on purpose, and many experts believe it is likely to have been the result of accidental transmission through human contact with wild animals, like almost all disease outbreaks in history have been.
But the emerging reports about the lab in Wuhan are making many people aware for the first time that gain-of-function research happens at all. I wouldn’t blame you if your response to this news is this: The government gives grants to researchers to make potentially pandemic viruses deadlier and to make them transmissible more easily between people? Why are we doing that?
The increased attention to gain-of-function research is a good thing. This kind of highly controversial research — banned under the Obama administration after safety incidents demonstrated that lab containment is rarely airtight — began again under the Trump administration, and many scientists and public health researchers think it’s a really bad idea. Our brush with the horrors of a pandemic might force us to reconsider the warnings those experts have been sounding for years.
The US stopped funding gain-of-function research. Then it started again.
In 2019, Science magazine broke the news that the US government resumed funding two controversial experiments to make the bird flu more transmissible.
The two experiments had been on hold since 2012 amid a fierce debate in the virology community about gain-of-function research. In 2014, the US government, under the Obama administration, declared a moratorium on such research.
It was in that context that scientists and biosecurity experts found themselves embroiled in a debate about gain-of-function research. The scientists who do this kind of research argue that we can better anticipate deadly diseases by making diseases deadlier in the lab. But many people at the time and since have become increasingly convinced that the potential research benefits — which look limited — just don’t outweigh the risks of kicking off the next deadly pandemic ourselves.
While internally divided, the US government came down on the side of caution at the time. It announced a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research — putting potentially dangerous experiments on hold so the world could discuss the risks this research entailed.
But in 2017, the government under the Trump administrationreleased new guidelines for gain-of-function research, signaling an end to the blanket moratorium. And the news from 2019 suggests that dangerous projects are proceeding.
Experts in biosecurity are concerned the field is heading toward a mistake that could kill innocent people. They argue that, to move ahead with research like this, there should be a transparent process with global stakeholders at the table. After all, if anything goes wrong, the mess we’ll face will certainly be a global one.
Should we really be doing this kind of research?
Advocates of this kind of gain-of-function research (not all gain-of-function research uses pathogens that can cause pandemics) point to a few things they hope it will enable us to do.
In general, they argue it will enhance surveillance and monitoring for new potential pandemics. As part of our efforts to thwart pandemics before they start — or before they get severe — we take samples of the viruses currently circulating. If we know what the deadliest and most dangerous strains out there are, the argument goes, then we’ll be able to monitor for them and prepare a response if it looks like such mutations are arising in the wild.
“As coordination of international surveillance activities and global sharing of viruses improve,” some advocates wrote in mBio, we’ll get better at learning which strains are out there. Then, gain-of-function research will tell us which ones are close to becoming deadly.
“GOF data have been used to launch outbreak investigations and allocate resources (e.g., H5N1 in Cambodia), to develop criteria for the Influenza Risk Assessment Tool, and to make difficult and sometimes costly pandemic planning policy decisions,” they argue.
“The United States government weighed the risks and benefits … and developed new oversight mechanisms. We know that it does carry risks. We also believe it is important work to protect human health,” Yoshihiro Kawaoka, an investigator whose gain-of-function research was approved, told Science magazine.
According to this logic, if we’d known for years that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus — the virus now keeping us all indoors — was a particularly dangerous one, maybe we could have had disease surveillance systems out to alert us if it made the jump to humans.
Others are skeptical. Thomas Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins, told me last year that he doesn’t think the benefits for vaccine development hold up in most cases. “I haven’t seen any of the vaccine companies say that they need to do this work in order to make vaccines,” he pointed out. “I have not seen evidence that the information people are pursuing could be put into widespread use in the field.”
Furthermore, there are unimaginably many possible variants on a virus, of which researchers can identify only a few. Even if we stumble across one way a virus could mutate to become deadly, we might miss thousands of others. “It’s an open question whether laboratory studies are going to come up with the same solution that nature would,” MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt told me last year. “How predictive are these studies really?” As of right now, that’s still an open question.
And even in the best case, the utility of this work would be sharply limited. “It’s important to keep in mind that many countries do not have mechanisms in place at all — much less a real-time way to identify and reduce or eliminate risks as experiments and new technologies are conceived,” Beth Cameron, the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s vice president for global biological policy and programs, told me.
With the stakes so high, many researchers are frustrated that the US government was not more transparent about which considerations prompted them to fund the research. Is it really necessary to study how to make H5N1, which causes a type of bird flu with an eye-popping mortality rate, more transmissible? Will precautions be in place to make it harder for the virus to escape the lab? What are the expected benefits from the research, and which hazards did the experts who approved the work consider?
“The people proposing the work are highly respected virologists,” Inglesby said. “But laboratory systems are not infallible, and even in the greatest laboratories of the world, there are mistakes.” What measures are in place to prevent that? Will potentially dangerous results be published to the whole world, where unscrupulous actors could follow the instructions?
These are exactly the questions the review process was supposed to answer, but didn’t.
Sometimes pathogens escape from the lab. Here’s how it happens.
The reason the subject of gain-of-function research can inspire such heated opposition is because the stakes can be so high. Pathogens have escaped labs before.
Take smallpox, once one of the deadliest diseases.
In 1977, the last case of smallpox was diagnosed in the wild. The victim was Ali Maow Maalin of Somalia. The World Health Organization tracked down every person he’d been in face-to-face contact with to vaccinate everyone at risk and find anyone who might have caught the virus already. Thankfully, they found no one had. Maalin recovered, and smallpox appeared to be over forever.
That moment came at the end of a decades-long campaign to eradicate smallpox — a deadly infectious disease that killed about 30 percent of those who contracted it — from the face of the Earth. Around 500 million people died of smallpox in the century before it was annihilated.
But in 1978, the disease cropped back up — in Birmingham, England. Janet Parker was a photographer at Birmingham Medical School. When she developed a horrifying rash, doctors initially brushed it off as chicken pox. After all, everyone knew smallpox had been chased out of the world — right?
Parker got worse and was admitted to the hospital, where testing determined she had smallpox after all. She died of it a few weeks later.
How did she get a disease that was supposed to have been eradicated?
It turned out that the building Parker worked in also contained a research laboratory, one of a handful where smallpox was studied by scientists who were trying to contribute to the eradication effort. Some papersreported the lab was badly mismanaged, with important precautions ignored because of haste. (The doctor who ran the lab died by suicide shortly after Parker was diagnosed.) Somehow, smallpox escaped the lab to infect an employee elsewhere in the building. Through sheer luck and a rapid response from health authorities, including a quarantine of more than 300 people, the deadly error didn’t turn into an outright pandemic.
In 2014, as the Food and Drug Administration did cleanup for a planned move to a new office, hundreds of unclaimed vials of virus samples were found in a cardboard box in the corner of a cold storage room. Six of them, it turned out, were vials of smallpox. No one had been keeping track of them; no one knew they were there. They may have been there since the 1960s.
Panicked scientists put the materials in a box, sealed it with clear packaging tape, and carried it to a supervisor’s office. (This is not approved handling of dangerous biological materials.) It was later found that the integrity of one vial was compromised — luckily, not one containing a deadly virus.
The 1979 and 2014 incidents grabbed attention because they involved smallpox, but incidents of unintended exposure to controlled biological agents are actually quite common. Hundreds of incidents occur every year, though not all involve potentially pandemic-causing pathogens.
In 2014, a researcher accidentally contaminated a vial of a fairly harmless bird flu with a far-deadlier strain. The deadlier bird flu was then shipped across the country to a lab that didn’t have authorization to handle such a dangerous virus, where it was used for research on chickens.
The mistake was discovered only when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted an extensive investigation in the aftermath of a different mistake — the potential exposure of 75 federal employees to live anthrax, after a lab that was supposed to inactivate the anthrax samples accidentally prepared activated ones.
The CDC’s Select Agents and Toxins program requires “theft, loss, release causing an occupational exposure, or release outside of primary biocontainment barriers” of agents on its watchlist be immediately reported. Between 2005 and 2012, the agency got 1,059 release reports — an average of one incident every few days. Here are a few examples:
In 2009, a new high-security bioresearch facility — rated to handle Ebola, smallpox, and other dangerous pathogens — had its decontamination showers fail. The pressurized chamber kept losing pressure and the door back into the lab kept bursting open while the scientists leaned against it to try to keep it closed. Building engineers were eventually called to handle the chemical showers manually.
In 2011, a worker at a lab that studied dangerous strains of bird flu found herself unable to shower after a construction contractor accidentally shut off the water. She removed her protective equipment and left without taking a decontaminating shower. (She was escorted to another building and showered there, but pathogens could have been released in the meantime.)
Now, the vast majority of these mistakes never infect anyone. And while 1,059 is an eye-popping number of accidents, it actually reflects a fairly low rate of accidents — working in a controlled biological agents lab is safe compared to many occupations, like trucking or fishing.
But a trucking or fishing accident will, at worst, kill a few dozen people, while a pandemic pathogen accident could potentially kill a few million. Considering the stakes and worst-case scenarios involved, it’s hard to look at those numbers and conclude that our precautions against disaster are sufficient.
Reviewing the incidents, it looks like there are many different points of failure — machinery that’s part of the containment process malfunctions;regulations aren’t sufficient or aren’t followed. Human error means live viruses are handled instead of dead ones.
Now imagine such an error involving viruses enhanced through gain-of-function research. “If an enhanced novel strain of flu escaped from a laboratory and then went on to cause a pandemic, then causing millions of deaths is a serious risk,” Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard University, told me last year.
The cost-benefit analysis for pathogens that might kill the people exposed or a handful of others is vastly different from the cost-benefit analysis for pathogens that could cause a pandemic — but our current procedures don’t really account for that. As a result, allowing gain-of-function research meansrunning unacceptable risks with millions of lives. It’s high time to rethink that.
nyt: Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns
Problems with disposal of dangerous materials led the government to suspend research at the military’s leading biodefense center.
Denise Braun prepared to demonstrate lab work during a media tour at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Md., in 2011.CreditCreditPatrick Semansky/Associated Press
Safety concerns at a prominent military germ lab have led the government to shut down research involving dangerous microbes like the Ebola virus.
“Research is currently on hold,” the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Fort Detrick, Md., said in a statement on Friday. The shutdown is likely to last months, Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman, said in an interview.
The statement said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided to issue a “cease and desist order” last month to halt the research at Fort Detrick because the center did not have “sufficient systems in place to decontaminate wastewater” from its highest-security labs.
But there has been no threat to public health, no injuries to employees and no leaks of dangerous material outside the laboratory, Ms. Vander Linden said.
In the statement, the C.D.C. cited “national security reasons” as the rationale for not releasing information about its decision.
The institute is a biodefense center that studies germs and toxins that could be used to threaten the military or public health, and also investigates disease outbreaks. It carries out research projects for government agencies, universities and drug companies, which pay for the work. It has about 900 employees.
The shutdown affects a significant portion of the research normally conducted there, Ms. Vander Linden said.
The suspended research involves certain toxins, along with germs called select agents, which the government has determined have “the potential to pose a severe threat to public, animal or plant health or to animal or plant products.” There are 67 select agents and toxins; examples include the organisms that cause Ebola, smallpox, anthrax and plague, and the poison ricin.
In theory, terrorists could use select agents as weapons, so the government requires any organization that wants to handle them to pass a background check, register, follow safety and security procedures, and undergo inspections through a program run by the C.D.C. and the United States Department of Agriculture. As of 2017, 263 laboratories — government, academic, commercial or private — had registered with the program.
The institute at Fort Detrick was part of the select agent program until its registration was suspended last month, after the C.D.C. ordered it to stop conducting the research.
The problems date back to May 2018, when storms flooded and ruined a decades-old steam sterilization plant that the institute had been using to treat wastewater from its labs, Ms. Vander Linden said. The damage halted research for months, until the institute developed a new decontamination system using chemicals.
The new system required changes in certain procedures in the laboratories. During an inspection in June, the C.D.C. found that the new procedures were not being followed consistently. Inspectors also found mechanical problems with the chemical-based decontamination system, as well as leaks, Ms. Vander Linden said, though she added that the leaks were within the lab and not to the outside world.
“A combination of things” led to the cease and desist order, and the loss of registration, she said.
Dr. Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist and bioweapons expert at Rutgers University, said in an email that problems with the institute’s new chemical-based decontamination process might mean it would have to go back to a heat-based system “which, if it requires constructing a new steam sterilization plant, could entail very long delays and very high costs.”
Although many projects are on hold, Ms. Vander Linden said scientists and other employees are continuing to work, just not on select agents. She said many were worried about not being able meet deadlines for their projects.
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
Sometimes my memes are 3D. And you can own them. Or send them to someone. You can even eat some of them. CLICK HERE
UPDATE: LATER JOSH ROGIN APPEARANCE ON JOE ROGAN’S PODCAST
Washington Post’s Josh Rogin Calls Out Media for Ignoring Fauci’s Potential Connection to Wuhan Lab
Rudy Takala April 25, 2021
Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin lamented the media’s refusal to discuss aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s potential connection to a Wuhan lab, in an interview with Megyn Kelly.
“This body of research, this gain-of-function research, the whole world of virologists … it’s very insular,” Rogin said in an interview on Kelly’s podcast. “I often talk to scientists who say the same thing, who say, ‘Listen, we really want to speak out about this, but we can’t do it.’ Why can’t we do it? Well, We get all of our funding from NIH, or NIAID, which is run by Dr. Fauci. … And so we can’t say anything like ‘Oh, gain-of-function research might be dangerous, or it might have come from a lab, because we’re going to lose our careers, we’re going to lose our funding, we’re not going to be able to do our work.’
“Gain-of-function” research focuses on artificially enhancing the transmissibility of pathogens. In the five years prior to the coronavirus pandemic, that research was spearheaded in China by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci has led since 1984, oversees funding for most of the related research in America. The agency falls under the National Institutes of Health, which Rogin referenced.
“The head of the funding, the head of the entire field, really, is Anthony Fauci,” Rogin said. “He’s the godfather of gain-of-function research as we know it. That, what I said right there, is too hot for TV, because people don’t want to think about the fact that our hero of the pandemic … might also have been connected to this research, which might also have been connected to the outbreak.
“The problem is not that they were doing something wrong or illegal,” he noted. “The problem is that nobody knows what this legal stuff was that was going on. And now, all of a sudden, we have to take a look at it.”
Fauci has inspired critics in some quarters for his role in approving a $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan lab in 2015 to engage in related research, which came just a year after the Obama administration issued a moratorium on conducting such research in the U.S.
Rogin claimed in a book published last month that sources informed him China engaged in that research more aggressively than was previously understood, arguing that it contributed to evidence the Covid-19 pandemic stemmed from the lab in Wuhan.
“The Wuhan Institute of Virology had openly participated in gain-of-function research in partnership with U.S. universities and institutions,” Rogin noted in the book. “But [an] official told me the U.S. government had evidence that Chinese labs were performing gain-of-function research on a much larger scale than was publicly disclosed, meaning they were taking more risks in more labs than anyone outside China was aware of. This insight, in turn, fed into the lab-accident hypothesis in a new and troubling way.”
Rogin expanded on that statement in his interview with Kelly, saying, “Dr. Fauci, the hero of the pandemic, might also have had a role in the research that may have caused the pandemic.”
“People can’t get it through their heads, but that’s the reality,” he added, before lamenting that the topic was largely absent from public dialogue. “We don’t have a media environment where we can have that kind of discussion.”
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
This is a corroboration of a few recent reports from various news outlets in India and external sources. We face another grave under-reported fact in a “top-shelf authoritative source” CV. Or CR. The ramifications are vast. We have much more of these to disclose in the near future.
<< India has asked the American frontline public health agency, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to stop funding virus research studies in the country. CDC was caught funding Karnataka’s Manipal Center for Virus Research (MCVR) for secretly carrying out research on the lethal Nipah virus – a pathogen considered potential bioweapon. The fact that an under-qualified private laboratory was secretly handling a dangerous virus under government’s nose at the behest of a foreign agency has raised major concerns within the health ministry apparatus.
The matter is more complicated with the fact that the CDC has a checkered history in India. The Indian defense establishment believes that the CDC was involved in the plague outbreak in the western Indian city of Surat in 1994, which they consider to be a case of bioterrorism. Earlier in February this year the Indian government launched an investigation into another secret research being conducted on bat hunters in the eastern Indian state of Nagaland, funded by the US Department of Defense in collaboration with Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
India Blacklists US CDC For Secretly Funding Bioweapons Research At Manipal Institute Of Virology | GreatGameIndia https://t.co/VpwWNp7Y19
A $3.6 million donation from Atlanta-based US health agency CDC to Indian research agencies for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic has been put on hold by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The CDC has been placed on the watchlist since December 2019 for its involvement in funding virus research without government’s approval.
The Nipah research fiasco that came into light in October last year was the primary reason behind the MHA decision. As of now, any funding or donation from the U.S government body CDC would be first cleared by the MHA itself. They can no longer send funds directly to any government or private institution in India without MHA’s clearance.
No translation availables, sorry!
CDC secretly funds risky virus research in India
In October 2019, Hindustan Times reported that the Union health ministry wrote to both CDC and Manipal Center for Virus Research, ordering them to shut down the study related to Nipah virus that belongs to Risk Group 4 (RG4) classification. The RG4 viruses are considered highly dangerous and have no treatment or vaccine. They can only be tested in BSL4 lab which is the highest level of biological safety. The health ministry was upset that a study related to high risk pathogens like Nipah was being carried out at MCVR which is BSL2+ level facility.
A memorandum sent out by the health ministry said:
“It has been brought to our notice that CDC had trained MCVR for diagnosis of Nipah virus disease (NIV) in spite of the known fact that NIV is BSL 4 level pathogen whereas MCVR is a level BSL2+lab. Prior to this training to MCVR, CDC has not consulted national/govt agencies as per norm. Since Nipah is a high risk pathogen with potential for being used as agent of bio-terrorism the samples were to be handled more carefully and tested only in a BSL4.”
While CDC admitted that the training program didn’t have the necessary approval due to some confusion, it maintained that they did not commission the research directly. “The training was done through the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) and was aimed at strengthening laboratory systems in India which allowed for detection of Nipah virus.”
International collaborations of Manipal Center of Virus Research
CDC has partnered with MCVR to carry out illness surveillance across India under the project known as AFI surveillance which tracks mysterious diseases in the government hospitals. The Indian government has now asked both agencies to stop the surveillance project. It also warned CDC to ensure all funding is approved by the government.
In its defence, MCVR denied carrying out any risky virus isolation work at their lab. Dr. Arunkumar, Director of MCVR, said:
“We did not take approval from HMSC. Prior to testing, MCVR inactivated the virus. Inactivation of the virus was carried out in BSL3 facility at MCVR. Once inactivated, the virus cannot spread. Molecular testing was carried at MCVR in its BSL2 facility. No Nipah virus sample was transferred from MCVR to any other lab (except NIV Pune) within and outside the country.”
Investigation on secret research on Bat Hunters
This is not the first time a dangerous research took place in India without keeping the government in loop. Back in February this year, the officials confirmed to that foreign funded researchers were conducting study on bats and bat hunters (humans) in the northeastern state of Nagaland. Bats are known to often carry viruses such as ebola, SARS coronavirus, rabies,etc.
After Indian scientists were forced to withdraw their study concluding #Coronavirus was injected with HIV AIDS virus amidst massive online criticism, now Indian authorities have launched an investigation against China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.https://t.co/T0mZ1uG9Y5
What’s more alarming was that two of the 12 researchers belonged to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Department of Emerging Infectious Diseases – the same institute from where COVID-19 outbreak is believed to have originated. The Nagaland study was funded by the United States Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction agency (DTRA).
The results of the study were published in October last year in the PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases journal, originally established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
To conduct a high-risk study in India, they would have needed special permissions from the Indian authorities which was not sought by the parties involved in the study. The fact that scientists from foreign countries were allowed to handle live samples of bats and bat hunters without permission prompted Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) to send a five-member committee to investigate the matter.
Funding of controversial Gain-of-Function research
Even before the coronavirus outbreak, a number of controversial studies were being carried out at China’s Wuhan lab under the patronage of United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH). One of the studies is the gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses which involves mutating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans.
The gain-of-function research has been widely criticized by the scientists around the world due to the risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.
However, last year the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research. A total of $7.5 million of American tax dollars have been spent since 2014 for conducting GoF studies.
Role of CDC in Surat plague
The plague outbreak in the western Indian city of Surat in 1994 has been mired in controversy just as COVID-19. Around 55 people died and close to a half of the city of 1.2 million people fled Surat for fear of the plague and of being quarantined.
EXCLUSIVE
The origin of 1994 Surat plague has been mired in controversy just as COVID-19. Indian defense establishment believe it is a case of bioterrorism involving American CDC with the germ with an extra protein ring developed at CDC lab in Kazakhstanhttps://t.co/TN8CD91F6g
The origin of the outbreak is still a mystery. Indian defense establishment believes the 1994 Surat Plague is a case of bioterrorism. Numerous media outlets at the time reported the involvement of American CDC. It was suspected that the germ with an extra protein ring was developed by a CDC lab in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Thus it comes as no surprise that Indian authorities are taking no chances this time around with CDC, especially since the world is already under the grip of a virus pandemic and the role of CDC is increasingly being seen as suspicious. >> GGI
Dear @GreatGameIndia It appears that one of your study concerning HIV insertions inside coronavirus made it to a Nobel prize winner, Luc Montagnier https://t.co/82BMeFiAhq
He discovered HIV was nominated for a Nobel prize in 2008/2009. He was inspired by an Indian group.
Additionally, The Week Magazine from India reported recently:
<< Did the novel coronavirus leak similarly through a worker in a biowar lab in Wuhan? The Washington Times, which is known for its CIA links, has raised the suspicion in an article quoting Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biowarfare.
Indian scientists would not rule out the possibility. The Wuhan lab, said Dr William Selvamurthy, a former chief controller of the Defence Research and Development Organisation who was in charge of the life science labs, could have been keeping the virus under BSL-4 (biosafety level-4)—the most secure condition for reseach. So, the possibility of someone having been infected from the lab and inadvertently spreading it could not be ruled out, said Selvamurthy.
The Wuhan Institute is officially acknowledged to be China’s most advanced virus research lab complex. China, a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) since 1985, had, in 1993, declared the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products as one of eight biowarfare research facilities covered by the BWC. Yet, last year’s US state department report on arms control compliance had accused China of working on military pathogens for offensive purposes. It said the US had concerns with respect to “Chinese military medical institutions’ toxin research and development because of the potential dual-use applications and their potential as a biological threat”.
China has maintained that the virus has originated from wild animals sold at a market in Wuhan. The lab under suspicion is just about 30km from the market. The virus has been identified as a virulent strain, much like any classical germ warfare strain—they were designed to be virulent initially, but quickly controllable. The idea, as a military scientist explained, was for the germ to be released in hostile territory to disable the enemy, but the territory would have to be quickly sanitised for your own forces to capture it.
During the 1994 plague outbreak in Surat and Beed, it was found that the germs had an extra protein ring which could only have been inserted artificially. Indian scientists had raised concerns about a US biowar experiment having gone awry. THE WEEK had carried reports giving details of germ war research being carried on in labs under the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta and about a newly developed germ detector being tested. The US embassy had denied the allegations. There were also reports that the Surat germ could have been developed in a lab in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
There have been rumours and reports in Chinese cybermedia in the last few days suggesting that the Wuhan outbreak could have been a US biowar attack. This, US officials consider, was an attempt to preempt charges that the new virus had escaped from the Wuhan lab, which had been in the crosshairs of the west especially after a team of Chinese virologists working in a lab in Winnipeg, Canada, unauthorisedly sent samples of some of the deadliest viruses on earth to China.” >> – The Week Mag
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
© Provided by Mediaite Anthony Fauci Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
SILVIEW.media 
