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FTR #1170 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Revisiting Peter Daszak, centrally involved in the gain-of-function research that appears to have spawned the SARS CoV2 virus and Covid-19, we note that Daszak has deflected inquiries into his work by calling critics “conspiracy theorists.” ” . . . The ‘media-industrial complex’ includes people in power who vehemently, if irrationally, deny a conspiratorial version of history, automatically mocking anyone who subscribes to it as a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ code words for ‘dangerously deranged fool.’ Uttering the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist’ is used as a convenient way of shutting down conversation on a subject. . . .”
We begin by returning to the subject of synthesizing viruses in a laboratory. A study released by US National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Department of Defense about the threats of synthetic biology concluded that the techniques to tweak and weaponize viruses from known catalogs of viral sequences is very feasible and relatively easy to do.
In FTR #‘s 1157, 1158 and 1159, we highlighted very disturbing connections between Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance and the Pentagon and USAID, a State Department subsidiary that serves as a frequent cover for CIA.
The EcoHealth Alliance–financed by USAID–partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to research bat-borne coronaviruses. A “chimeric” virus was created by Baric under this program in 2015, and Baric was subsequently selected to create the SARS Cov‑2 virus from scratch.
It is our considered view that the WIV was set up for the blame for Covid-19, in a manner not unlike the “Painting of Oswald Red” discussed in–among other programs–FTR #‘s 925 and 926, as well as our series of interviews with Jim DiEugenio.
We have also noted the profound links between elements of the military and treatment regimens (vaccines and medicines) for Covid-19.
A new article adds further depth to the alarming connections of Daszak, the EcoHealth Alliance and Jeffrey Sachs. (As discussed in a number of programs, including the above-mentioned FTR #‘s 1157, 1158 and 1159, Sachs presided over the Harvard Institute of International Development, a US-funded organization that advised Boris Yeltsin’s disastrous economic policy in Russia.)
Many in Russia view Sachs as “an emissary either of Satan or the CIA.” Recent political incarnations have him as a member of the [Bernie] Sanders Institute and an advisor to AOC.
A brilliant, insightful article by Sam Husseini on Independent Science News provides critical depth to our previous coverage of Citizen Daszak.
Husseini notes that:
- The Pentagon and USAID (a State Department subsidiary that has frequently fronted for CIA) are the largest funders of EcoHealth Alliance, which obscures this fact: “ . . . . Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance obscures its Pentagon funding. . . . Only buried under their ‘Privacy Policy,’ under a section titled ‘EcoHealth Alliance Policy Regarding Conflict of Interest in Research,’ does the EcoHealth Alliance concede it is the ‘recipient of various grant awards from federal agencies including . . . . the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense.’ . . . Even this listing is deceptive. It obscures that its two largest funders are the Pentagon and the State Department (USAID) . . . . These two sources thus total over $103 million. . . .”
- One of the principal advisers to EcoHealth Alliance is David Franz: ” . . . . The military links of the EcoHealth Alliance are not limited to money and mindset. One noteworthy ‘policy advisor’ to the EcoHealth Alliance is David Franz. Franz is former commander of Fort Detrick, which is the principal U.S. government biowarfare/biodefense facility. . . .”
- Peter Daszak has high regards for Donald Rumsfeld, whom he enthusiastically quotes. (Rumsfeld was Chairman of the Board of Gilead Sciences for many years, leaving that position to become Secretary of Defense for George W. Bush. Rumsfeld made millions on his sale of Gilead stock, which soared in value following the Pentagon’s purchase of Gilead’s Tamiflu to combat a feared breakout of H5N1 influenza. Gildead Sciences makes remdesivir, which was being tested on rhesus macaques at the U.S. Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in the spring of 2019. The USAAMRIID was shut down by the CDC in early August of 2019, in part for the improper disposal of waste from “non-human primates” infected with a “select agent” which has not been disclosed for national security reasons.) ” . . . . ‘It’s an awesome quote! And yes, it’s Donald Rumsfeld, Jeff, and I know he’s a Republican, but — what a genius!’ . . .”
- The close association of Jeffrey Sachs and Daszak: ” . . . . In September, Sachs’ commission [on the Lancet–D.E.] named Daszak to head up its committee on the pandemic’s origins. Daszak is also on the WHO’s committee to investigate the pandemic’s origin. He is the only individual on both committees. . . .”
Program Highlights Include: Further development of the media’s reflexive use of “conspiracy theory” and/or “conspiracy theorists” to preempt intelligent analysis of lethal covert operations–both foreign and domestic; The New York Times’ lead role in rhetorical firewall protecting both domestic and foreign covert operations.
1. A study released by US National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Department of Defense about the threats of synthetic biology concluded that the techniques to tweak and weaponize viruses from known catalogs of viral sequences is very feasible and relatively easy to do:
The rapid rise of synthetic biology, a futuristic field of science that seeks to master the machinery of life, has raised the risk of a new generation of bioweapons, according a major US report into the state of the art.
Advances in the area mean that scientists now have the capability to recreate dangerous viruses from scratch; make harmful bacteria more deadly; and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body.
The three scenarios are picked out as threats of highest concern in a review of the field published on Tuesday by the US National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Department of Defense. The report was commissioned to flag up ways in which the powerful technology might be abused, and to focus minds on how best to prepare.
Michael Imperiale, chair of the report committee, and professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Michigan, said the review used only unclassified information and so has no assessment of which groups, if any, might be pursuing novel biological weapons. “We can’t say how likely any of these scenarios are,” he said. “But we can talk about how feasible they are.”
In the report, the scientists describe how synthetic biology, which gives researchers precision tools to manipulate living organisms, “enhances and expands” opportunities to create bioweapons. “As the power of the technology increases, that brings a general need to scrutinise where harms could come from,” said Peter Carr, a senior scientist at MIT’s Synthetic Biology Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
More than 20 years ago, Eckard Wimmer, a geneticist at Stony Brook University in New York, highlighted the potential dangers of synthetic biology in dramatic style when he recreated poliovirus in a test tube. Earlier this year, a team at the University of Alberta built an infectious horsepox virus. The virus is a close relative of smallpox, which may have claimed half a billion lives in the 20th century. Today, the genetic code of almost any mammalian virus can be found online and synthesised. “The technology to do this is available now,” said Imperiale. “It requires some expertise, but it’s something that’s relatively easy to do, and that is why it tops the list.”
Other fairly simple procedures can be used to tweak the genes of dangerous bacteria and make them resistant to antibiotics, so that people infected with them would be untreatable. A more exotic bioweapon might come in the form of a genetically-altered microbe that colonises the gut and churns out poisons. “While that is technically more difficult, it is a concern because it may not look like anything you normally watch out for in public health,” Imperiale said.
…
One bioweapon that is not considered an immediate threat is a so-called gene drive that spreads through a population, rewriting human DNA as it goes. “It’s important to recognise that it’s easy to come up with a scary-sounding idea, but it’s far more difficult to do something practical with it,” said Carr.
2. In FTR #‘s 1157, 1158 and 1159, we highlighted very disturbing connections between Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance and the Pentagon and USAID, a State Department subsidiary that serves as a frequent cover for CIA.
The EcoHealth Alliance–financed by USAID–partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to research bat-borne coronaviruses. A “chimeric” virus was created by Baric under this program in 2015, and Baric was subsequently selected to create the SARS Cov‑2 virus from scratch.
It is our considered view that the WIV was set up for the blame for Covid-19.
We have also noted the profound links between elements of the military and treatment regimens (vaccines and medicines) for Covid-19.
A new article adds further depth to the alarming connections of Daszak, the EcoHealth Alliance and Jeffrey Sachs. (As discussed in a number of programs, including the above-mentioned FTR #‘s 1157, 1158 and 1159, Sachs presided over the Harvard Institute of International Development, a US-funded organization that advised Boris Yeltsin’s disastrous economic policy in Russia.)
Many in Russia view Sachs as “an emissary either of Satan or the CIA.” Recent political incarnations have him as a member of the [Bernie] Sanders Institute and an advisor to AOC.
A brilliant, insightful article by Sam Husseini on Independent Science News provides critical depth to our previous coverage of Citizen Daszak.
Husseini notes that:
- The Pentagon and USAID (a State Department subsidiary that has frequently fronted for CIA) are the largest funders of EcoHealth Alliance, which obscures this fact: “ . . . . Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance obscures its Pentagon funding. . . . Only buried under their ‘Privacy Policy,’ under a section titled ‘EcoHealth Alliance Policy Regarding Conflict of Interest in Research,’ does the EcoHealth Alliance concede it is the ‘recipient of various grant awards from federal agencies including . . . . the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense.’ . . . Even this listing is deceptive. It obscures that its two largest funders are the Pentagon and the State Department (USAID) . . . . These two sources thus total over $103 million. . . .”
- One of the principal advisers to EcoHealth Alliance is David Franz: ” . . . . The military links of the EcoHealth Alliance are not limited to money and mindset. One noteworthy ‘policy advisor’ to the EcoHealth Alliance is David Franz. Franz is former commander of Fort Detrick, which is the principal U.S. government biowarfare/biodefense facility. . . .”
- Peter Daszak has high regards for Donald Rumsfeld, whom he enthusiastically quotes. (Rumsfeld was Chairman of the Board of Gilead Sciences for many years, leaving that position to become Secretary of Defense for George W. Bush. Rumsfeld made millions on his sale of Gilead stock, which soared in value following the Pentagon’s purchase of Gilead’s Tamiflu to combat a feared breakout of H5N1 influenza. Gildead Sciences makes remdesivir, which was being tested on rhesus macaques at the U.S. Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in the spring of 2019. The USAAMRIID was shut down by the CDC in early August of 2019, in part for the improper disposal of waste from “non-human primates” infected with a “select agent” which has not been disclosed for national security reasons.) ” . . . . ‘It’s an awesome quote! And yes, it’s Donald Rumsfeld, Jeff, and I know he’s a Republican, but — what a genius!’ . . .”
- The close association of Jeffrey Sachs and Daszak: ” . . . . In September, Sachs’ commission [on the Lancet–D.E.] named Daszak to head up its committee on the pandemic’s origins. Daszak is also on the WHO’s committee to investigate the pandemic’s origin. He is the only individual on both committees. . . .”
“Pandemics are like terrorist attacks: We know roughly where they originate and what’s responsible for them, but we don’t know exactly when the next one will happen. They need to be handled the same way — by identifying all possible sources and dismantling those before the next pandemic strikes.”
This statement was written in the New York Times earlier this year by Peter Daszak. Daszak is the longtime president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based non-profit whose claimed focus is pandemic prevention. But the EcoHealth Alliance, it turns out, is at the very centre of the COVID-19 pandemic in many ways.
To depict the pandemic in such militarized terms is, for Daszak, a commonplace. In an Oct. 7 online talk organized by Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, Daszak presented a slide titled “Donald Rumsfeld’s Prescient Speech.”:
“There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns — there are things we don’t know we don’t know.” (This Rumsfeld quote is in fact from a news conference)
In the subsequent online discussion, Daszak emphasized the parallels between his own crusade and Rumsfeld’s, since, according to Daszak, the “potential for unknown attacks” is “the same for viruses”.
Daszak then proceeded with a not terribly subtle pitch for over a billion dollars. This money would support a fledgling virus hunting and surveillance project of his, the Global Virome Project — a “doable project” he assured watchers — given the cost of the pandemic to governments and various industries.
Also on the video was Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs is a former special advisor to the UN, the former head of the Millennium Villages Project, and was recently appointed Chair of the newly-formed EAT Lancet Commission on the pandemic. In September, Sachs’ commission named Daszak to head up its committee on the pandemic’s origins. Daszak is also on the WHO’s committee to investigate the pandemic’s origin. He is the only individual on both committees.
These leadership positions are not the only reason why Peter Daszak is such a central figure in the COVID-19 pandemic, however. His appointment dismayed many of those who are aware that Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance funded bat coronavirus research, including virus collection, at the Wuhan Institute for Virology (WIV) and thus could themselves be directly implicated in the outbreak.
For his part, Daszak has repeatedly dismissed the notion that the pandemic could have a lab origin. In fact, a recent FOIA by the transparency group U.S. Right To Know revealed that Peter Daszak drafted an influential multi-author letter published on February 18 in the Lancet. That letter dismissed lab origin hypotheses as “conspiracy theory.” Daszak was revealed to have orchestrated the letter such as to “avoid the appearance of a political statement.”
Sachs for his part seemed surprised by Daszak’s depiction of Rumsfeld but Daszak reassured him. “It’s an awesome quote! And yes, it’s Donald Rumsfeld, Jeff, and I know he’s a Republican, but — what a genius!”
Following the EcoHealth Alliance’s money trail to the Pentagon
Collecting dangerous viruses is typically justified as a preventive and defensive activity, getting ahead of what “Nature” or “The Terrorists” might throw at us. But by its nature, this work is “dual use”. “Biodefense” is often just as easily biowarfare since biodefense and the products of biowarfare are identical. It’s simply a matter of what the stated goals are.
This is openly acknowledged [See below] by scientists associated with EcoHealth Alliance when talking about alleged programs in other counties — like Iraq.
For much of this year, Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance garnered a great deal of sympathetic media coverage after its $3.7 million five-year NIH grant was prematurely cut when the Trump administration learned that EcoHealth Alliance funded bat coronavirus research at the WIV.
The temporary cut was widely depicted in major media as Trump undermining the EcoHealth Alliance’s noble fight against pandemics. The termination was reversed by NIH in late August, and even upped to $7.5 million. But entirely overlooked amid the claims and counter-claims was that far more funding for the EcoHealth Alliance comes from the Pentagon than the NIH.
To be strictly fair to the media, Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance obscures its Pentagon funding. On its website EcoHealth Alliance states that “A copy of the EHA Grant Management Manual is available upon request to the EHA Chief Financial Officer at finance ( at ) ecohealthalliance.org”. But an email to that address and numerous others, including Peter Daszak’s, requesting that Manual, as well as other financial information, was not returned. Neither were repeated voicemails.
Only buried under their “Privacy Policy,” under a section titled “EcoHealth Alliance Policy Regarding Conflict of Interest in Research,” does the EcoHealth Alliance concede it is the “recipient of various grant awards from federal agencies including the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense.”
Even this listing is deceptive. It obscures that its two largest funders are the Pentagon and the State Department (USAID); whereas the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which accounts for a minuscule $74,487, comes before either.
Meticulous investigation of U.S. government databases reveals that Pentagon funding for the EcoHealth Alliance from 2013 to 2020, including contracts, grants and subcontracts, was just under $39 million. Most, $34.6 million, was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the DOD which states it is tasked to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”
Most of the remaining money to EHA was from USAID (State Dept.), comprising at least $64,700,000 (1). These two sources thus total over $103 million.
Another $20 million came from Health and Human Services ($13 million, which includes National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control), National Science Foundation ($2.6 million), Department of Homeland Security ($2.3 million), Department of Commerce ($1.2 million), Department of Agriculture ($0.6 million), and Department of Interior ($0.3 million). So, total U.S. government funding for EHA to-date stands at $123 million, approximately one third of which comes from the Pentagon directly. The full funding breakdown is available here and is summarized by year, source, and type, in a spreadsheet format.
Pdf versions of this the spreadsheet are available to download. The summary is here and all Federal grants and contracts are here.
More military connections
The military links of the EcoHealth Alliance are not limited to money and mindset. One noteworthy ‘policy advisor’ to the EcoHealth Alliance is David Franz. Franz is former commander of Fort Detrick, which is the principal U.S. government biowarfare/biodefense facility.
David Franz was part of UNSCOM which inspected Iraq for alleged bioweapons — what were constantly referred to as WMDs or Weapons of Mass Destruction by the U.S. government and the media. Franz has been one of those eager to state, at least when discussing alleged Iraqi programs, that “in biology … everything is dual use — the people, the facilities and the equipment.” (NPR, May 14, 2003; link no longer available).
Just this year Franz wrote a piece with former New York Times journalist Judith Miller, whose stories of Iraqi WMDs did much to misinform the US public regarding the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Their joint article, “A Biosecurity Failure: America’s key lab for fighting infectious disease has become a Pentagon backwater,” urges more funding for Fort Detrick.
Miller and Franz are long-time associates. Miller co-wrote the book Germs, released amid the 2001 false flag anthrax attacks, which repeatedly quotes Franz. Miller at the time received a hoax letter with a harmless white powder, increasing her prominence.
Franz continued hyping the existence of Iraqi WMDs even after the invasion of Iraq. While she was still with the Times, Miller quoted him in a story “U.S. Analysts Link Iraq Labs To Germ Arms” on May 21, 2003 pushing the theory that Iraq had mobile biological WMD units. (This theory was debunked by the British scientist Dr David Kelly, who would die, apparently by suicide, soon thereafter.
Four significant insights emerge from all this. First, although it is called the EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak and his non-profit work closely with the military. Second, the EcoHealth Alliance attempts to conceal these military connections. Third, through militaristic language and analogies Daszak and his colleagues promote what is often referred to as, and even then somewhat euphemistically, an ongoing agenda known as “securitization“. In this case it is the securitization of infectious diseases and of global public health. That is, they argue that pandemics constitute a vast and existential threat. They minimize the very real risks associated with their work, and sell it as a billion dollar solution. The fourth insight is that Daszak himself, as the Godfather of the Global Virome Project, stands to benefit from the likely outlay of public funds.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to James Baratta and Mariamne Everett for researching the funding sources.
Footnote
- The figure for EHA’s USAID funding was obtained from the University of California at Davis, a major grantee of PREDICT funds, which EHA has been a major sub-grantee of Davis confirmed that EHA’s funding from PREDICT totaled $64,722,669 (PREDICT‑1: 2009 to 2014: $19,943,214; PREDICT‑2: 2014 to present (2020) $44,779,455)
3. Daszak has dismissed discussion of a laboratory origin of the virus as the work of “conspiracy theorists,” utilizing a time-worn device for dismissing information without any intelligent discussion. ” . . . The ‘media-industrial complex’ includes people in power who vehemently, if irrationally, deny a conspiratorial version of history, automatically mocking anyone who subscribes to it as a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ code words for ‘dangerously deranged fool.’ Uttering the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist’ is used as a convenient way of shutting down conversation on a subject. . . .”
. . . . There is such a stark difference in viewpoint between the average American who tends to believe in conspiracy and what film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum calls “the media-industrial complex” that we seem to be living in two different realities. The “media-industrial complex” includes people in power who vehemently, if irrationally, deny a conspiratorial version of history, automatically mocking anyone who subscribes to it as a “conspiracy theorist,” code words for “dangerously deranged fool.” Uttering the phrase “conspiracy theorist” is used as a convenient way of shutting down conversation on a subject. . . .
4. The rhetorical reflex of dismissing serious investigative effort as “conspiracy theory” dates largely to the coup of 11/22/1963.
People who pretend that conspiracies don’t exist, when in fact they are among the most common modus operandi of significant historical change throughout the world, including in this country, become furious when their naïve illusion is challenged. They attack the messengers, “conspiracy theorists,” for proposing alternate accounts of reality. Not only do they attack, they demonize. The convention of portraying conspiracy theorists as crazy is crude but effective way of stigmatizing them, ensuring that they aren’t taken seriously by “reasonable” people, and sending the message to the mainstream media that such people are beyond the pale. Dr. [E. Martin] Schotz writes that for years he thought the unpunished assassination of Kennedy was “a grievous wound to our democracy in urgent need of being exposed so the society would heal,” but he came to realize it was instead “a wound against certain political forces in our democracy, but not to the democracy itself. In fact, I submit that the assassination was totally within the framework of how American democracy works.” Much of Dr. Schotz’s analysis is acutely insightful, but I would submit that the type of government he describes is not a genuine “democracy” but a mere simulacrum of one to fool the public into acquiescence with the war policies of dubious legality. In the regime of George W. Bush, following the stolen election of 2000, we saw the inevitable consequences of the lack of genuine democracy, the ultimate fallout from the 1963 coup, on full terrible display in domestic terrorism, illegal wars of aggression, and the stripping away of many of our basic civil liberties. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., persuasively demonstrated in a 2006 investigative report for Rolling Stone that Bush and Dick Cheney also stole the 2004 election by committing fraud in Ohio. This antidemocratic trend in our country unfortunately did not end with the 2008 election of Barack Obama, which was thought by many to be a form of healing, but actually only showed that the changes in the system had become systemic and almost impossible to reverse.
Our President’s murder in broad daylight on a public street fifty years ago, and the new government’s refusal to bring his killers to justice, meant nothing less than the end of our long experiment in democracy. We now live not in a democracy but in what more accurately can be termed a limited police state, and that is the ultimate legacy of the Coup of 1963 . . . .
5. Publisher of the Warren Report, The New York Times has “walked point” on the issue of discrediting critics of the official lie about the JFK assassination.
In the immediate aftermath of the coup of 11/22/1963, ” . . . . The paper’s managing editor, Turner Catledge, took the unusual approach of writing a letter to the editor on November 26 objecting to the labeling of the murdered Oswald in the previous day’s paper as the ‘assassin.’ . . . .”
. . . . Most American media outlets were as quick to convict Oswald extralegally as the Dallas police were to allow him to be executed in their headquarters. The New York Times would flatly identify Oswald as the assassin once he was dead, in its banner headline on November 25 “PRESIDENT’S ASSASSIN SHOT TO DEATH IN JAIL CCORRIDOR BY A DALLAS CITIZEN . . . ” This posthumous verdict without the benefit of a trial was a serious breach of journalistic ethics, showing the Times to be more of an organ of government propaganda than a disinterested seeker of the truth. The enormous and egregious headline on the day of Kennedy’s funeral evidently caused some disagreement within the Times. The paper’s managing editor, Turner Catledge, took the unusual approach of writing a letter to the editor on November 26 objecting to the labeling of the murdered Oswald in the previous day’s paper as the “assassin.” Catledge noted that while the Dallas police “thought they had an air-tight case against him, he was never tried and convicted. Under the American system of justice, he is innocent until proven guilty. Future stories and headlines will reflect that fact.” Yet the “paper of record” has kept calling Oswald the “assassin” ever since. The word “alleged” rarely appears in conjunction with Oswald’s name in the mainstream media. The Times consistently attacks those who question the lone-gunman theory. Why that leading newspaper has such a vested interest in following and propagating the official line after all these many years is a troubling question reflecting the extent to which our “free press” knuckles under to the government’s propaganda needs. . . .”
The WHO team of experts tasked with studying the origins of SARS-CoV‑2 virus have issued their initial public report. This is, of course, just one of the international teams that includes Peter Daszak, someone who quite possibly has more conflicts of interest in this investigation than anyone else on the planet.
So what was the verdict? It was almost certainly not a lab-based origin and likely came from the virus naturally jumping from bats to another animal and then on to humans. In other words, exactly as predicted. Surprise!
While the investigators are continuing to focus on the animal-to-human jump hypothesis, they aren’t falling back on the initial ‘wet market’ scenario that the virus jumped from animal to human at the wet market near the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Instead, they note that the virus was found inside and outside the market, suggesting the market was not necessarily the source of the outbreak. But while the team is recommending that further investigation into the origins of the virus be carried out, the question of a lab based origin should NOT BE ASKED AGAIN GOING FORWARD. Yep.
And what was the basis for their conclusion that a lab origin is so unlikely that it shouldn’t even be considered? Well, they held a lot of meetings with the WIV’s safety protocols and concluded that it was extremely unlikely a virus could have escaped from there. In other words, their investigation into a lab origin was exclusively restricted to an investigation of the WIV, a convenient framing of the question. As we’ll see in the second article below, Peter Daszak was quite effusive in his praise of the WIV’s and Chinese government’s openness with the investigators.
They did sort of address the general question of whether or not Chinese researchers were involved with experimenting on coronaviruses, something that is undeniable given the published research. The lead Chinese scientist on the investigative team, Liang Wannian, told reporters none of the labs in Wuhan had worked with the SARS-Cov‑2 strain but did work on the virus’s “distant relatives.” The characterization of these viruses as “distant relatives” is interesting in the context of the findings by Harvard/MIT researcher Alina Chan that Shi Zhengli’s lab had access and sequenced the closet known relative to SAR-CoV‑2, the RaTG13 virus, multiple times starting in 2017 and 2018. Keep in mind that, while RaTG13 is the closest known relative to SARS-CoV‑2, one could arguably still characterize it as a “distant relative”. There was of course no mention of the history of Shi Zhengli’s lab working on gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses with international collaborators. International collaborators that includes Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance.
The allegations about sick athletes at the Military World Games held in Wuhan in October of 2019 was not addressed at all by the team. Similarly, the studies like the Italian study that found evidence of the virus in Italian blood samples drawn in September of 2019 were not mentioned.
Liang Wannian did, however, call for the investigation into the origins of the virus to now expand beyond China to include the rest of the world. There’s no indication of that expanded search actually taking place.
So, overall, in the WHO team’s initial report we find exactly what we should have expected to find, which is basically nothing other than a rehashing of the same talking points we’ve been hearing all along. It’s the kind of report that should raise a whole lot of questions about the questions being asked by this investigation and, more importantly, not being asked by this investigation:
“Notably, the WHO team dismissed as “extremely unlikely” another theory that the virus leaked from laboratories at the local Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Peter Ben Embarek, the Danish food safety expert leading the WHO team, said his group was satisfied with answers about safety at the WIV and will not recommend further investigation into the possible links to the lab.”
No further investigation is recommended into the possibility of a lab origin. The investigators pointed to evidence that undercuts the initial suspicions about the local wet market, and left open the possibility that it could have been transmitted through frozen food, but somehow were able to determine conclusively that it couldn’t possibly have come from a lab:
And that conclusive determination that the virus couldn’t have originated in a lab was made despite Liang Wannian’s admission that, yes, labs in Wuhan were studying the distant relative of SARS-CoV‑2, but not the virus itself. It’s the kind of admission that should lead to an array of new questions about the nature of this research, in Wuhan and elsewhere. But those questions obviously aren’t really being asked:
Finally, we have Liang’s calls for expanding the investigation globally. Calls that didn’t appear to be echoed by anyone else, giving us a clue as the likelihood of that happening:
Next, here’s a report from last week about the progress the investigative team was making during their time in China. Peter Daszak had high praise for the Chinese experts they met with, in particular Shi Zhengli, and noted no obstacles in their investigation. The article notes that Daszak and Shi worked together in the past on tracking down the origins of SARS.
Daszak warned that it would likely take years to confirm the origins of the virus and described what would be required to do it: Exhaustive research is needed to pin down an outbreak’s animal reservoir, including taking animal samples, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies. And that just happens to describe the work of Daszak’s EcoHealth alliance. In other words, Daszak is telling us that it will probably be his own EcoHealth Alliance that will deliver the eventual final conclusion on this question of the origin of the virus. Which will presumably require more funding for the project:
“Daszak said the investigation by the team, composed of experts from 10 nations, was simply an initial step and that it would likely take years to confirm the origins of the virus. Exhaustive research is needed to pin down an outbreak’s animal reservoir, including taking animal samples, genetic analysis and epidemiological studies.”
Are we in store for an explosion of investments in virus hunting research projects? That’s what Daszak is recommending, and it’s not hard to imagine. An explosion of ‘defensive’ biological research that just happens to have obvious biological warfare dual use applications. And that’s part of why understanding the biological warfare dual use implications of the EcoHealth Alliance and related ‘defensive’ biological research is going to be more important than ever going forward. Because when you explode the funding for dual use ‘defensive’ biological research, you’re definitely changing the risks of a viral disaster but not necessarily lowering them.
@Pterrafractyl–
Looks like the Warren Report has “gone viral!”
No mention of Daszak’s funding coming mostly from Pentagon, USAID, nor of his association with David Franz, former commander of Ft. Detrick.
Daszak might be viewed as the Allen Dulles of this commission.
Keep up the great work!
Dave Emory
Well look at that: Politico just published an article about how US diplomats were informed as far back as late 2017 that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) were Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was carrying out gain-of-function experiments on bat-borne coronaviruses. And informed the Trump administration, which seemingly did nothing with this information. The content of the report, authored by Josh Rogin, was actually first reported by Rogin back in April of 2020 in the Washington Post, but Rogin’s new piece has some interesting new details:
In late 2017, top health and science officials at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing attended a conference for a presentation by a group of Chinese scientists, including several from the WIV, of a new study put out by the group along with the US National Institutes of Health entitled “Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses Provides New Insights into the Origin of SARS Coronavirus.”. So it was a conference specifically on research into bat borne coronaviruses.
It was at this conference that US officials grew alarmed after learning that one of the three viruses they were working on contained a spike protein that was particularly good at grabbing on to a specific receptor in human lung cells known as an ACE2 receptor. Recall how, back in March of 2020, we were already getting hints that this virus was developed in a lab when we learned that the SARS-CoV‑2 spike protein’s contained the cannonical furin cleavage site. Around this same time we also learned that the virus’s Receptor Binding Domain (RBD) is particularly good as sticking to the human ACE2 receptor. So at least some of SARS-CoV-2’s features that make it particularly good at infecting humans were apparently shared with the viruses the WIV was studying in 2017.
It’s also worth recalling the evidence found by Alina Chan that the WIV was accessing and sequencing the genome of the closest known relative to SARS-CoV‑2: the RaTG13 virus, which appears to have been was first accessed by Shi’s lab in June of 2017. Did the analysis Shi’s lab presented to US diplomats at that conference in late 2017 include the RaTG13 virus? That would be a fascinating detail.
In response the concerns of the diplomats over what they saw at the conference, the US embassy sent three teams of experts in late 2017 and early 2018 to meet with the WIV scientists, including Shi Zhengli. Is was during these meetings that the Chinese researchers reportedly informed them that the WIV didn’t have enough properly trained technicians to safely operate their BSL‑4 lab and asked for more support to get it up to standards. Recall how China’s very first BSL‑4 lab was opened in early 2017 with international support and approval. So we have Chinese researchers sharing with US diplomats their joint research on bat coronaviruses as well as their safety concerns over the BSL‑4 lab that the US helped China open months earlier. It’s a sign of how close the relationship has been between the US government and the operations of the WIV.
Following these meetings, the US diplomats sent warnings back to Washington that the Chinese researchers were working with viruses that could easily infect humans and more support was needed for the WIV. The diplomatic cables were intentionally kept unclassified to ensure broader readership. So these warnings in 2018 were presumably relatively widely known within US government circles, almost a year and a half before the first signs of the outbreak. There was no response from State Department headquarters to the cables and they were never made public. It sounds like these diplomatic cables were not leaked to Josh Rogin by anyone in the Trump administration when he received them back in April and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was angry about Rogin’s report, so these diplomatic cables and foreknowledge of the kind of research taking place in the WIV was not something the Trump administration necessarily wanted the public to know.
Now, Rogin published most of these details last year. In his new report, he gives us an idea of how that April 2020 report was received and what people inside government and the research community were telling him. Rogin apparently found that many government officials who he trusts and reached out to had suspicions of a lab-based origin they didn’t want to publicly share. They were specifically concerned about ‘gain-of-function’ experiments.
There’s a pretty explosive admission, at least explosive in the context of the non-stop assertions that ‘the entire scientific community’ has somehow determined the virus didn’t originate in a lab: When Rogin asked the US scientists who worked with Shi Zhengli’s lab whether or not they thought her Shi’s lab was connected to the outbreak, they told Rogin they couldn’t be sure because there was no way they could know what exactly the WIV lab was doing outside of their cooperative projects. In other words, they were admitting that, yes, it’s possible the virus came from a lab. It’s quite an admission given the prevailing narrative on this.
There was one pretty big new allegation in Rogin’s piece that, if it panned out, would actually lend credibility to the idea that this virus leaked from the WIV: a US official told Rogin that the U.S. government had evidence that Chinese labs were performing gain-of-function research on a much larger scale than was publicly disclosed. We are told nothing more than that. So it would be extremely interesting to know who this US official is and the nature of that evidence. Was this a Trump administration official?
Overall, Rogin’s piece gives us an idea of the direction the questions about the origins of SARS-CoV‑2 are going and, slowly but surely, these questions are heading in the appropriate direction. Questions about gain-of-function research and the extensive working relationship between the US government, US researchers, and the Chinese lab that is being fingered as the top culprit. And questions about why the US government seemingly didn’t act in response to the diplomatic warnings. But we still haven’t heard many questions about the dark, yet, obvious range of options that would have been available to the Trump administration upon learning about these diplomatic warnings. Options like a covert intentional release outside of the WIV. After all, it’s not like this research was being hidden from the US. What the Chinese researchers knew they were sharing with the US collaborators. So when we talk about the labs were the virus could have emerged from, we can now conclude that the WIV and its international collaborators had the technical knowledge to artificially make SARS-CoV‑2 by roughly mid-2018.
So what’s the Occam’s razor scenario at this point? The whole premise of exclusively suspecting the WIV is based on an Occam’s razor approach: if the virus first appeared nearby the WIV, Occam’s razor clearly points towards the WIV. But when we expand out the full scope of what we now know, where does Occam’s razor actually point? After all, other than the claim by the anonymous US official that evidence exists of secret Chinese ‘gain-of-function’ experiments, all other data points we have suggest the Chinese researchers were being incredibly open with the US officials. And why not? The US was basically their sponsor. The Chinese researchers literally told them about safety issues and asked for help. So on the one hand, if we have Chinese researchers who appear to have been quite open with their collaborators. And on the other hand, we had a Trump administration that was fully aware of these experiments and keenly intent on finding ways of stoking conflict with China as a core political objective. And that’s why we have to ask: what’s the actual Occam’s razor scenario here?:
“In late 2017, top health and science officials at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing attended a conference in the Chinese capital. There, they saw a presentation on a new study put out by a group of Chinese scientists, including several from the Wuhan lab, in conjunction with the U.S. National Institutes of Health.”
It was no secret: The WIV literally invited the US officials to a conference to share their coronavirus results. Results on multiple coronaviruses seemingly ready to start a pandemic thanks to their spike proteins’ stickiness to human ACE2 receptors. And when the US government sent teams to interview these Chinese researchers they were told even more about the possible safety issues at the WIV. Alarms really were raised. What happened after they were raised remains an open question, but they were raised:
But those diplomatic alarms were somehow ignored despite the diplomats making their cables unclassified. Which raises the question: just how many people were aware of the contents of these cables? Hundreds of people? Thousands? We don’t know. But despite all of the Trump administration’s keen interest in blaming the pandemic on the WIV, for some reason it wasn’t interested in publicly sharing this knowledge about these diplomatic viral concerns from recent years. It’s the kind of strategic choice that suggests an awareness that if the public knew the full story, the story the Trump administration was trying to peddle wouldn’t sell as well:
In another sign of how widespread the suspicions of a lab origin were inside the US government, when Rogin reached out to US officials he trusted to get their take on the pandemic back in April, a large swath of these people were already suspicious it had escaped from the WIV:
But perhaps the biggest hint that the virus could have originated in a lab is the fact that Shi Zhengli’s US collaborators told Rogin that they couldn’t actually rule the possibility out because they don’t know the full extent of her lab’s work. That was the opinion of the group of people arguably more technically qualified to answer that question than anyone else: a solid ‘maybe?’:
We have Chinese researchers that appear to be working openly with their US sponsors, contrasted with a Trump administration intent on conflict with China that seemingly ignored diplomatic warnings about safety-concerns and then tried to suppress the existence of those prior safety concern. Both the US and Chinese governments effectively had the knowledge of the existence of these SARS-CoV-2-like viruses in the years leading up to the pandemic. Both had more than enough resources to make this virus if they wanted to. But only one of those two governments, China, was actually vulnerable to charges of irresponsible research if one of those viruses managed to escape and start a pandemic. And when the diplomatic warnings were issued in late 2017, the Trump administration had already made it clear that conflict with China was going to be a theme of Trump’s term. So, again, given everything we’ve seen, where is Occam’s razor pointing here?
@Pterafractyl–
Good find! Rogin, however, reflecting his traditional right-wing bias, fails to note DARPA’s interest in these viruses (reference the Whitney Webb article), doesn’t mention Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance’s central role in all this, doesn’t mention the fact that Daszak’s EHA is financed by Pentagon, USAID, doesn’t mention that one of Daszak is advised by the former commander of Fort Detrick, or that ANY virus can be synthesized from scratch, once the genome is sequenced.
Alina Chan doesn’t mention this either.
Keep up the great work!
Best,
Dave