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FTR #1157 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
FTR #1158 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment. NB: Mr. Emory misspoke himself in this program, identifying the Pinochet/Chicago Boys erroneously–once–as the “Allendede” regime.
FTR #1159 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: A noteworthy development in the Covid-19 “op” concerns the selection of experts to oversee The Lancet’s investigation of the origins of the SARS CoV‑2.
In FTR #1156, we looked at the involvement of known U.S. intelligence cut-outs–notably USAID–and their funding of programs ostensibly aimed at preventing epidemics. Those programs involved the “Gain-of-Function” mutation of bat-borne coronaviruses, creating novel “chimeric” viruses that never existed before.
The ostensible purpose was to “prevent” future epidemics. We wondered in FTR #1156 if those ostensible epidemic “prevention” programs may have masked epidemic propagation programs, rather like Unit 731.
Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was selected to lead the project.
His perspective would, on the surface, appear to be less than objective, in as much as he championed the very type of GOF experiments that are at the center of this inquiry.
Of interest, as well, is the selection of Jeffrey Sachs, an economist, member of the [Bernie] Sanders Institute, economic adviser to Bernie Sanders, economic adviser to AOC and, most importantly, head of the [partly] government financed Harvard Institute of International Development which (as advisers to Boris Yeltsin) drove the Russian economy back to the Stone Age.
Sachs has no medical or scientific credentials.
A consummately important article about Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance provides troubling insights into the uneven professional track record of Daszak and the profound involvement of the organization he heads with the Pentagon and other U.S. national security establishment institutions.
EcoHealth Alliance looks disturbingly like an organization that fronts for elements and individuals involved with biological warfare research.
“Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, is a top scientific collaborator, grantwriter and spokesperson for virus hunters and gain-of-function/dual-use researchers, in labs both military and civilian.
Daszak works with dozens of high-containment laboratories around the world that collect pathogens and use genetic engineering and synthetic biology to make them more infectious, contagious, lethal or drug-resistant. These include labs controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense, in countries in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.
Many of these labs are staffed by former biological weapons scientists. (See Arms Watch’s reports.) Before the Biological Weapons Convention was ratified, this research was called what it is: biological weapons research. Now, it’s euphemistically called gain-of-function or dual-use research.
Gain-of-function research to alter coronaviruses for the infection of humans goes back to 1999 or earlier, years before the first novel coronavirus outbreak. On behalf of the U.S. government, often the military, Daszak scours the globe for animal pathogens and brings them back to the lab to be catalogued, investigated and manipulated. . . .”
Key points of analysis and discussion include:
- EcoHealth Alliance contracts with the Pentagon in Tanzania, South Africa, Georgia and Malaysia, as well as the U.S.
- ” . . . . A recent Wired magazine article quoting Daszak described how a virus collected in 2012 was found to be a 96-percent match to SARS-CoV‑2 in 2020 . . . ‘a lack of funding meant they couldn’t further investigate the virus strain now known to be 96 percent genetically similar to the virus that causes Covid-19’ . . . .”
- Daszak’s claim that they couldn’t further investigate that virus because of a lack of funding is dubious, in that recent grants to the organization are on top of ” . . . . $100.9 million that EcoHealth Alliance has received in government grants and contracts since 2003. . . .”
- Daszak does not explain how that virus (discovered in 2012) turned into SARS-CoV‑2. ” . . . . Some scientists say it would take 50 years for RaTG13 [the virus in question–D.E.] to turn into SARS-CoV‑2. . . .”
- Daszak is heavily networked with the Department of Homeland Security: ” . . . . the Department of Homeland Security’s National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) . . . . gave Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance a $2.2‑million contract (2016–2019) to create a ‘Ground Truth Network’ of ‘subject matter experts’ who could provide ‘contextual information pertaining to biological events.’ . . . .”
- The intellectual and professional track record of Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance is porous. EcoHealth Alliance floated a canard about Ebola potentially traveling to the U.S. ” . . . . an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson, spread a false (not to mention racist and xenophobic) narrative, one that subsequently would be thoroughly debunked, that bushmeat smuggled to the U.S. from Africa could transmit Ebola to Americans. . . .”
- Daszak missed the boat badly with regard to SARS: ” . . . . It is commonly accepted that the SARS pandemic began in 2002, when humans caught a bat virus from civet cats at a wet market in Guangdong, China. But Daszak and his collaborators admit they have no evidence to explain how the virus leapt from bats to civets to humans. . . .”
- ” . . . . SARS-CoV was found in civets at the Guangdong wet market, but civets aren’t the natural reservoir of this virus. Bats are. Only the civets at the market—and no farm-raised or wild civets—carried the virus. None of the animal traders handling the civets at the market had SARS. . . .”
- ” . . . . When Daszak and his collaborators at the WIV searched the cave in Yunnan for strains of coronavirus similar to human versions, no single bat actually had SARS. Genetic pieces of the various strains would have to be recombined to make up the human version. Adding to the confusion, Yunnan is about 1,000 kilometers from Guangdong. . . .”
- ” . . . . So, how did viruses from bats in Yunnan combine to become deadly to humans, and then travel to civets and people in Guangdong, without causing any illnesses along the way during this 1,000 kilometer trip? . . .”
- Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance were deeply involved with a USAID and NIH funded joint WIV/University of North Carolina project we have covered extensively in past programs. ” . . . . The two institutions also worked as collaborators under another $2.6‑million grant, ‘Risk of Viral Emergence from Bats,’ and under EcoHealth Alliance’s largest single source of funding, a $44.2 million sub-grant from the University of California at Davis for the PREDICT project (2015–2020). . . .”
- ” . . . . It’s the $44.2‑million PREDICT grant that EcoHealth Alliance used to fund the gain-of-function experiment by WIV scientist Zhengli Shi and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Ralph Baric. Shi and Baric used genetic engineering and synthetic biology to create a ‘new bat SARS-like virus . . . that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans.’ . . .”
- ” . . . . The work . . . published in Nature in 2015 during the NIH’s moratorium on gain-of-function research, was grandfathered in because it was initiated before the moratorium (officially called the U.S. Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses), and because the request by Shi and Baric to continue their research during the moratorium was approved by the NIH. . . .”
- ” . . . . As a condition of publication, Nature, like most scientific journals, requires authors to submit new DNA and RNA sequences to GenBank, the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information Database. Yet the new SARS-like virus Shi and Baric created wasn’t deposited in GenBank until May 2020. . . .”
- ” . . . . why is the government focusing on just one of EcoHealth Alliance’s projects, when the organization has received $100.9 million in grants, primarily from the Department of Defense, to sample, store and study bat coronaviruses at labs around the world? Coronaviruses, both those that have been collected from animals and those that have been created through genetic engineering and synthetic biology, at all of these labs should be compared with SARS-CoV‑2. . . . .”
- ” . . . . Daszak’s collaborators working under contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) aren’t allowed to conduct gain-of-function research unless specifically approved to do so by the Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) committee. This committee was set up as a condition for lifting the 2014–2017 moratorium on gain-of-function research. The P3CO committee operates in secret. Not even a membership list has been released. . . .”
- Exemplifying EcoHealth Alliance’s work is a Pentagon contract with Tanzania, researching CCHF–Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever. ” . . . . EcoHealth Alliance has a $5‑million Pentagon contract, ‘Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever: Reducing an Emerging Health Threat in Tanzania.’ Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) is a tick-borne disease, originally only infecting animals. . . . There was only ever one case of CCHF in Tanzania, and that was in 1986. . . . Gain-of-function research on CCHF is being conducted at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) . . . . (The National Bio and Agro Defense Facility will take over the mission of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and become the lead facility for Foreign Animal Disease research.) . . .”
- ” . . . .Tanzania is the origin of chikungunya, a mosquito-borne virus that the U.S. has long cultivated as a potential biological weapon. according to a patent held by the University of Texas for a ‘chimeric’ chikungunya virus created through genetic engineering and synthetic biology: ‘The 39 documented laboratory infections reported by HHS in 1981 strongly suggest that Chikungunya virus is infectious via aerosol route. Chikungunya virus was being weaponized by the U.S. Army army when the offensive program was terminated.’ Tanzania is one of the countries where bat coronaviruses were collected for the PREDICT project. . . .”
Program Highlights Include: The prominent role in the Sanders Institute and AOC’s advisory team of Jeffrey Sachs, whose HIID team of advisers (with government funding) sent Russia back to the Stone Age, economically; the “handoff” to Jeffrey Sachs and his HIID of Russia and other former Soviet Republics by the Gehlen/GOP Nazis manifesting through the Free Congress Foundation; review of the operational political continuum stretching from the Third Reich, through the OSS, the CIA and the GOP; review of the roles of Allen Dulles, William Casey, Resorts International and Donald Trump in that continuum.
1a. A noteworthy development in the Covid-10 “op” concerns the selection of experts to oversee The Lancet’s investigation of the origins of the SARS CoV‑2.
In FTR #1156, we looked at the involvement of known U.S. intelligence cut-outs–notably USAID–and their funding of programs ostensibly aimed at preventing epidemics. Those programs involved the “Gain-of-Function” mutation of bat-borne coronaviruses, creating novel “chimeric” viruses that never existed before.
The ostensible purpose was to “prevent” future epidemics. We wondered in FTR #1156 if those ostensible epidemic “prevention” programs may have masked epidemic propagation programs, rather like Unit 731.
Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was selected to lead the project.
His perspective would, on the surface, appear to be less than objective, in as much as he championed the very type of GOF experiments that are at the center of this inquiry.
Of interest, as well, is the selection of Jeffrey Sachs, an economist, member of the [Bernie] Sanders Institute, economic adviser to Bernie Sanders, economic adviser to AOC and, most importantly, head of the [partly] government financed Harvard Institute of International Development which (as advisers to Boris Yeltsin) drove the Russian economy back to the Stone Age.
Sachs has no medical or scientific credentials.
Sachs and Company will be discussed at greater length below, as well.
An international team of scientists will examine the possibility Sars-Cov‑2 leaked from a laboratory as part of a comprehensive investigation into the origins of the virus.
The team is being set up as part of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission, a body established in July to “offer practical solutions” to the pandemic and make recommendations on how the next one can be avoided or better defended against.
The team looking at the origins of the virus will be led by Dr Peter Daszak, a British zoologist and leading authority on zoonotic spillover events.
Dr Daszak said yesterday he and his team would “systematically examine every theory” about the origin of the virus, carefully marshalling the scientific evidence for each.
He accepted conspiracy theorists would not welcome his appointment but said, as a scientist, he would “not be bound by preconceived ideas” and would investigate all avenues forensically and “with an open mind”.
He warned, however, it was not possible to “prove a negative” and said it was unlikely it would ever be possible to say with “absolute certainty” how the virus emerged.
“But what we can do is look at every possible theory on the origins of COVID-19 and say, ‘what is the evidence for that?’ And then we put all of those theories together and say, ‘where is the preponderance of evidence?’
“Is it for the virus coming from nature and spilling over into people and emerging that way? Or is it for some form of human involvement that involves a lab or biotechnology? Let’s see where the evidence lies”.
…
The Lancet Commission notes in its mission statement that “the evidence to date supports the view that Sars-Cov‑2 is a naturally occurring virus rather than the result of laboratory creation and release”.
But it adds that investigators should examine the ‘possibility of laboratory involvement” in “a scientific and objective way that is unhindered by geopolitical agendas and misinformation”.
It is hoped a full investigation will, if nothing else, will rule out “baseless and uninformed allegations and conspiracy theories that are unbacked by evidence”.
The wider Lancet Covid-19 Commission is being chaired by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, an eminent American economist and adviser to the UN.
He will oversee the investigation, not just into the origins of virus, but the world’s reaction to it in order to make recommendations for strengthening pandemic preparedness globally.
“What we have learned, I think, about the public health response [to date] is that even though this is a devilish virus it is controllable”, he told the Telegraph.
“Around two billion people live in countries that have substantially suppressed the virus. They’ve been able to do that, primarily because of public health means, and especially these non-pharmaceutical interventions [social distancing]”.
“But if we look at the UK, the US, and western Europe, we failed to put such policies in place basically until now. In the US we still don’t have an effective control system.
“We have a lot of emphasis on hospitals, but far far less on public health”.
Prof Sachs said he hoped and expected the Lancet Commission would be conducted on an objective basis and would be free of political bias.
“There has been a lot of rumour-mongering and statements that are way out of line, that are part of a political agenda by some people, senators in the US and others that have really gone far beyond what we know,” he said.
“The origins of the virus must be understood, both to help end the current pandemic and to prevent the next one.”
Dr Daszak, like most zoologists, virologists and geneticists, says the strongest evidence available to date points to Sars-Cov‑2 emerging naturally.
It is likely the virus has a natural reservoir in bats in which closely related coronaviruses viruses have been found.
From there it may have jumped directly to humans via a so-called spillover event, or perhaps indirectly via farmed mustelids such as ferrets, mink, martens, civets and weasels.
A recent study of mink farms in Holland demonstrated that closely packed mustelids catch and spread the Sars-Cov‑2 efficiently. The researchers were also able to track the virus jumping back and forth between farmer workers and their animals, mutating as it moved.
The intensive farming of mustelids and other small animals is common in China where the animals are used for their fur and meat, and in traditional medicine.
Dr Daszak says the key to understanding zoonotic spillover is to think of it, not as a rare occurrence but as something happening all the time – a numbers game.
Most animal viruses quickly die out if they pass from human to human at all, but given the right virus and the right set of environmental circumstances, they can explode.
“It is not that every 10 years or so a person gets infected by a bat virus and it sparks a pandemic. What’s really happening is, every day people are getting infected,” he said.
“The chances of it spreading depends on things like is the virus replicating quickly? Does it cause illness? Does the infected person have a high level of contact with other people? Do they travel to busy cities or markets?”
As the world has become more developed, mobile and connected the risk of spillover events escalating has risen, causing scientists to speculate that we may be facing a “pandemic century” in which major outbreaks become much more common. “We may be much more vulnerable to these pandemics than we think,” said Dr Daszak. “We may be creating a perfect storm. And if that’s true, we need to know it. We need to get some data around it.
“It isn’t a blame game or about politics. It’s much more important. This is about how do we as a species deal with what is potentially an existential threat to our existence”.
1b. A consummately important article about Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance provides troubling insights into the uneven professional track record of Daszak and the profound involvement of the organization he heads with the Pentagon and other U.S. national security establishment institutions.
EcoHealth Alliance looks disturbingly like an organization that fronts for elements and individuals involved with biological warfare research.
“Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, is a top scientific collaborator, grantwriter and spokesperson for virus hunters and gain-of-function/dual-use researchers, in labs both military and civilian.
Daszak works with dozens of high-containment laboratories around the world that collect pathogens and use genetic engineering and synthetic biology to make them more infectious, contagious, lethal or drug-resistant. These include labs controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense, in countries in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.
Many of these labs are staffed by former biological weapons scientists. (See Arms Watch’s reports.) Before the Biological Weapons Convention was ratified, this research was called what it is: biological weapons research. Now, it’s euphemistically called gain-of-function or dual-use research.
Gain-of-function research to alter coronaviruses for the infection of humans goes back to 1999 or earlier, years before the first novel coronavirus outbreak. On behalf of the U.S. government, often the military, Daszak scours the globe for animal pathogens and brings them back to the lab to be catalogued, investigated and manipulated. . . .”
Key points of analysis and discussion include:
- EcoHealth Alliance contracts with the Pentagon in Tanzania, South Africa, Georgia and Malaysia, as well as the U.S.
- ” . . . . A recent Wired magazine article quoting Daszak described how a virus collected in 2012 was found to be a 96-percent match to SARS-CoV‑2 in 2020 . . . ‘a lack of funding meant they couldn’t further investigate the virus strain now known to be 96 percent genetically similar to the virus that causes Covid-19’ . . . .”
- Daszak’s claim that they couldn’t further investigate that virus because of a lack of funding is dubious, in that recent grants to the organization are on top of ” . . . . $100.9 million that EcoHealth Alliance has received in government grants and contracts since 2003. . . .”
- Daszak does not explain how that virus (discovered in 2012) turned into SARS-CoV‑2. ” . . . . Some scientists say it would take 50 years for RaTG13 [the virus in question–D.E.] to turn into SARS-CoV‑2. . . .”
- Daszak is heavily networked with the Department of Homeland Security: ” . . . . the Department of Homeland Security’s National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) . . . . gave Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance a $2.2‑million contract (2016–2019) to create a ‘Ground Truth Network’ of ‘subject matter experts’ who could provide ‘contextual information pertaining to biological events.’ . . . .”
- The intellectual and professional track record of Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance is porous. EcoHealth Alliance floated a canard about Ebola potentially traveling to the U.S. ” . . . . an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson, spread a false (not to mention racist and xenophobic) narrative, one that subsequently would be thoroughly debunked, that bushmeat smuggled to the U.S. from Africa could transmit Ebola to Americans. . . .”
- Daszak missed the boat badly with regard to SARS: ” . . . . It is commonly accepted that the SARS pandemic began in 2002, when humans caught a bat virus from civet cats at a wet market in Guangdong, China. But Daszak and his collaborators admit they have no evidence to explain how the virus leapt from bats to civets to humans. . . .”
- ” . . . . SARS-CoV was found in civets at the Guangdong wet market, but civets aren’t the natural reservoir of this virus. Bats are. Only the civets at the market—and no farm-raised or wild civets—carried the virus. None of the animal traders handling the civets at the market had SARS. . . .”
- ” . . . . When Daszak and his collaborators at the WIV searched the cave in Yunnan for strains of coronavirus similar to human versions, no single bat actually had SARS. Genetic pieces of the various strains would have to be recombined to make up the human version. Adding to the confusion, Yunnan is about 1,000 kilometers from Guangdong. . . .”
- ” . . . . So, how did viruses from bats in Yunnan combine to become deadly to humans, and then travel to civets and people in Guangdong, without causing any illnesses along the way during this 1,000 kilometer trip? . . .”
- Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance were deeply involved with a USAID and NIH funded joint WIV/University of North Carolina project we have covered extensively in past programs. ” . . . . The two institutions also worked as collaborators under another $2.6‑million grant, ‘Risk of Viral Emergence from Bats,’ and under EcoHealth Alliance’s largest single source of funding, a $44.2 million sub-grant from the University of California at Davis for the PREDICT project (2015–2020). . . .”
- ” . . . . It’s the $44.2‑million PREDICT grant that EcoHealth Alliance used to fund the gain-of-function experiment by WIV scientist Zhengli Shi and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Ralph Baric. Shi and Baric used genetic engineering and synthetic biology to create a ‘new bat SARS-like virus . . . that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans.’ . . .”
- ” . . . . The work . . . published in Nature in 2015 during the NIH’s moratorium on gain-of-function research, was grandfathered in because it was initiated before the moratorium (officially called the U.S. Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses), and because the request by Shi and Baric to continue their research during the moratorium was approved by the NIH. . . .”
- ” . . . . As a condition of publication, Nature, like most scientific journals, requires authors to submit new DNA and RNA sequences to GenBank, the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information Database. Yet the new SARS-like virus Shi and Baric created wasn’t deposited in GenBank until May 2020. . . .”
- ” . . . . why is the government focusing on just one of EcoHealth Alliance’s projects, when the organization has received $100.9 million in grants, primarily from the Department of Defense, to sample, store and study bat coronaviruses at labs around the world? Coronaviruses, both those that have been collected from animals and those that have been created through genetic engineering and synthetic biology, at all of these labs should be compared with SARS-CoV‑2. . . . .”
- ” . . . . Daszak’s collaborators working under contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) aren’t allowed to conduct gain-of-function research unless specifically approved to do so by the Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) committee. This committee was set up as a condition for lifting the 2014–2017 moratorium on gain-of-function research. The P3CO committee operates in secret. Not even a membership list has been released. . . .”
- Exemplifying EcoHealth Alliance’s work is a Pentagon contract with Tanzania, researching CCHF–Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever. ” . . . . EcoHealth Alliance has a $5‑million Pentagon contract, ‘Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever: Reducing an Emerging Health Threat in Tanzania.’ Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) is a tick-borne disease, originally only infecting animals. . . . There was only ever one case of CCHF in Tanzania, and that was in 1986. . . . Gain-of-function research on CCHF is being conducted at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) . . . . (The National Bio and Agro Defense Facility will take over the mission of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and become the lead facility for Foreign Animal Disease research.) . . .”
- ” . . . .Tanzania is the origin of chikungunya, a mosquito-borne virus that the U.S. has long cultivated as a potential biological weapon. according to a patent held by the University of Texas for a ‘chimeric’ chikungunya virus created through genetic engineering and synthetic biology: ‘The 39 documented laboratory infections reported by HHS in 1981 strongly suggest that Chikungunya virus is infectious via aerosol route. Chikungunya virus was being weaponized by the U.S. Army army when the offensive program was terminated.’ Tanzania is one of the countries where bat coronaviruses were collected for the PREDICT project. . . .”
Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, is a top scientific collaborator, grantwriter and spokesperson for virus hunters and gain-of-function/dual-use researchers, in labs both military and civilian.
Daszak works with dozens of high-containment laboratories around the world that collect pathogens and use genetic engineering and synthetic biology to make them more infectious, contagious, lethal or drug-resistant. These include labs controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense, in countries in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.
Many of these labs are staffed by former biological weapons scientists. (See Arms Watch’s reports.)
Before the Biological Weapons Convention was ratified, this research was called what it is: biological weapons research. Now, it’s euphemistically called gain-of-function or dual-use research.
Gain-of-function research to alter coronaviruses for the infection of humans goes back to 1999 or earlier, years before the first novel coronavirus outbreak.
On behalf of the U.S. government, often the military, Daszak scours the globe for animal pathogens and brings them back to the lab to be catalogued, investigated and manipulated.
Daszak and others justify their research this way: If/When an outbreak of a new virus occurs, they can compare it to the ones in their labs, and maybe glean how the novel virus emerged. A recent Wired magazine article quoting Daszak described how a virus collected in 2012 was found to be a 96-percent match to SARS-CoV‑2 in 2020:
“The search for the source of SARS – which killed more than 770 people two decades ago – has given us a headstart for the current hunt. Wearing hazmat suits and equipped with mist nets, a team from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, together with the ecologist and president of EcoHealth Alliance Peter Daszak, ventured into limestone caves to collect faeces and blood samples from thousands of roosting bats before testing them for novel coronaviruses in the lab. ‘At the time, we were looking for SARS-related viruses, and this one was 20 percent different,’ says Daszak. ‘We thought it’s interesting, but not high-risk. So we didn’t do anything about it and put it in the freezer.’ The group has found around 500 bat-borne viruses in China over the last 16 years, but only flagged those that most resembled SARS to the authorities – a lack of funding meant they couldn’t further investigate the virus strain now known to be 96 percent genetically similar to the virus that causes Covid-19.”
Interesting though that story is, it fails to explain how SARS-CoV‑2 evolved. Some scientists say it would take 50 years for RaTG13 [the virus in question–D.E.] to turn into SARS-CoV‑2. Others propose theories on how the virus might have evolved so quickly, yet still suspect that it escaped from the Wuhan lab.
Certainly, to learn that the closest known relative to SARS-CoV‑2 has been in the care of the gain-of-function researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) for seven years does nothing to allay suspicions that the virus infected humans only after being tinkered with in a lab.
Still, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is going all-in on virus hunting. The institute just announced a five-year, $82-million investment in a new global network of Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases, including gain-of-function experiments to “determine what genetic or other changes make [animal] pathogens capable of infecting humans.”
Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance will receive $7.5 million from this grant. This is on top of $100.9 million that EcoHealth Alliance has received in government grants and contracts since 2003. (What was that Daszak said about how “a lack of funding meant they couldn’t further investigate the virus strain now known to be 96-percent genetically similar to the virus that causes Covid-19”)?
Critics of virus hunting say scientists like Daszak could make a greater contribution to human health by going after the viruses that commonly infect humans, not the ones that never have. According to a 2018 Smithsonian Magazine report:
“Not everyone thinks that discovering viruses and their hotspots is the best way to prevent pandemics. Dr. Robert B. Tesh, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch, says we don’t understand enough about zoonotic viruses to create predictive models. ‘A lot of the stuff they produce is hype. … It’s more PR than science.’”
Daszak’s research might be more hype and public relations than science, but the Department of Homeland Security’s National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) has chosen to rely on it. NBIC gave Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance a $2.2‑million contract (2016–2019) to create a “Ground Truth Network” of “subject matter experts” who could provide “contextual information pertaining to biological events.”
The context Daszak invariably provides is a compelling one. Destruction of forests and other encroachments on wildlife habitats, especially the hunting of wild animals and the sale of live animals in wet markets, is forcing humans and animals into uncomfortable proximity. This is bad for vulnerable and endangered species, as well as for humans who are at increasing risk for contracting novel zoonotic diseases.
Who isn’t shocked and appalled to learn that people eat bats, or that marvelously strange and adorable animals you’ve never heard of―pangolins, civet cats―have had their habitats destroyed and are now being sold for meat at live animal markets?
Daszak’s framing of the issue―what has come to be known as the One Health approach―has been heartily embraced by the U.S. military.
But what if the stories being spun by Daszak and his fellow government-supported subject matter experts aren’t supported by the evidence?
Let’s look at EcoHealth Alliance’s story about Ebola and bushmeat.
False narrative, tragic outcomes
From 2011 to 2014, Ecohealth Alliance had a $164,480 purchase order contract from the Centers for Disease Control in Pittsburgh for “Bushmeat.” No more information than that is available on that contract (HHSD2002011M41641P), but the money likely funded a paper Daszak and his colleagues published in 2012.
The 2012 paper, “Zoonotic Viruses Associated with Illegally Imported Wildlife Products,” was used in August 2014, at the height of the West African Ebola pandemic, as the basis for a Newsweek article titled, “Smuggled Bushmeat Is Ebola’s Back Door to America.”
The article, which quoted an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson, spread a false (not to mention racist and xenophobic) narrative, one that subsequently would be thoroughly debunked, that bushmeat smuggled to the U.S. from Africa could transmit Ebola to Americans.
In January 2015, a meeting of the UK Bushmeat Working Group convened. The group countered Daszak’s misinformation with the facts, in an article titled, “Ebola and Bushmeat: Myth and Reality.” The article stated:
“As the Ebola virus can remain viable in untreated carcasses for up to 3–4 days, there is a risk of transporting it to bushmeat markets (although there is no evidence of this to date). However, the risk of transmitting Ebola in bushmeat overseas to Europe or the USA is extremely low, given the total travel time and the fact that these carcasses are usually smoked (which probably inactivates the virus). The risk of spread to new areas lies with the movement of infected people, not infected meat.”
Tragically, the misinformation about bushmeat as a primary cause of Ebola transmission had already been communicated to West Africans in the midst of the crisis, through international health organizations, including Daszak’s funder, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Daszak’s misinformation campaign overshadowed the truth—that the only way Ebola was actually being transmitted during the pandemic was via contact with the bodily fluids of people sick with Ebola, or with their corpses.
Perpetuating mythical theories
The SARS pandemic is another instance where Daszak’s theories didn’t pan out.
It is commonly accepted that the SARS pandemic began in 2002, when humans caught a bat virus from civet cats at a wet market in Guangdong, China. But Daszak and his collaborators admit they have no evidence to explain how the virus leapt from bats to civets to humans.
SARS-CoV was found in civets at the Guangdong wet market, but civets aren’t the natural reservoir of this virus. Bats are. Only the civets at the market—and no farm-raised or wild civets—carried the virus. None of the animal traders handling the civets at the market had SARS.
When Daszak and his collaborators at the WIV searched the cave in Yunnan for strains of coronavirus similar to human versions, no single bat actually had SARS. Genetic pieces of the various strains would have to be recombined to make up the human version. Adding to the confusion, Yunnan is about 1,000 kilometers from Guangdong.
So, how did viruses from bats in Yunnan combine to become deadly to humans, and then travel to civets and people in Guangdong, without causing any illnesses along the way during this 1,000 kilometer trip?
No one knows. Just like no one knows how SARS-CoV‑2, the virus that causes COVID-19, leapt from bats to pangolins to humans.
(The most recent study, “Broad host range of SARS-CoV‑2 predicted by comparative and structural analysis of ACE2 in vertebrates” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that the SARS-CoV‑2, which infects human cells through binding of the viral Spike protein to ACE2, has a “very high” binding affinity to ACE2 in “Old World” monkeys apes, and humans. But in bats, the binding affinity is “low” and in pangolins it is “very low.” The authors also noted that “neither experimental infection nor in vitro infection with SARS-CoV‑2 has been reported for pangolins.”)
Daszak continues to tell his bat-origin story, but the science doesn’t back it up.
That―along with the fact that dozens of labs conduct “gain-of-function” research on bat coronaviruses and there are troubling safety issues at these labs―is why the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is investigating the possibility that SARS-CoV‑2 escaped from a lab.
Inquiring minds at the NIH want to know . . .
On July 8, the NIH sent a letter to Daszak asking EcoHealth Alliance to arrange for an inspection of the WIV by an outside team that would examine the facility’s lab and records “with specific attention to addressing the question of whether WIV staff had SARS-CoV‑2 in their possession prior to December 2019.”
The WIV and the Wuhan University School of Public Health are listed as subcontractors for EcoHealth Alliance under a $3.7‑million NIH grant titled, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” The two institutions also worked as collaborators under another $2.6‑million grant, “Risk of Viral Emergence from Bats,” and under EcoHealth Alliance’s largest single source of funding, a $44.2 million sub-grant from the University of California at Davis for the PREDICT project (2015–2020).
It’s the $44.2‑million PREDICT grant that EcoHealth Alliance used to fund the gain-of-function experiment by WIV scientist Zhengli Shi and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Ralph Baric. Shi and Baric used genetic engineering and synthetic biology to create a “new bat SARS-like virus . . . that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans.”
Daszak described the work being done by Shi and Baric in a 2019 interview:
“You can manipulate them [coronaviruses] in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus, zoonotic risk. So, you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert it into a backbone of another virus, and do some work in the lab.”
The work, “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence,” published in Nature in 2015 during the NIH’s moratorium on gain-of-function research, was grandfathered in because it was initiated before the moratorium (officially called the U.S. Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses), and because the request by Shi and Baric to continue their research during the moratorium was approved by the NIH.
As a condition of publication, Nature, like most scientific journals, requires authors to submit new DNA and RNA sequences to GenBank, the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information Database. Yet the new SARS-like virus Shi and Baric created wasn’t deposited in GenBank until May 2020.
Why stop with Wuhan?
NIH is right to require that the WIV’s lab and records be opened to outside inspectors.
But why is the government focusing on just one of EcoHealth Alliance’s projects, when the organization has received $100.9 million in grants, primarily from the Department of Defense, to sample, store and study bat coronaviruses at labs around the world?
Coronaviruses, both those that have been collected from animals and those that have been created through genetic engineering and synthetic biology, at all of these labs should be compared with SARS-CoV‑2.
Daszak’s collaborators working under contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) aren’t allowed to conduct gain-of-function research unless specifically approved to do so by the Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) committee. This committee was set up as a condition for lifting the 2014–2017 moratorium on gain-of-function research.
The P3CO committee operates in secret. Not even a membership list has been released. The only information provided to the public is that Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec appointed HHS Senior Science Advisor Christian Hassell as its chair.
It’s time to open the records of the PC3O committee’s deliberations and decisions to examine all gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. And every lab manipulating these viruses should have their coronaviruses compared to SARS-CoV‑2.
The Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for its Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (now called the Biological Threat Reduction Program) isn’t supposed to fund gain-of-function (what they call “dual-use”) research at all. It’s time to determine whether this prohibition on “dual-use” funding has been adhered to, especially in light of the investments the Pentagon is making across the globe in the construction of new laboratories for the “consolidation and securing of pathogens.”
DTRA’s mission was to dismantle the biological weapons programs of hostile or destabilized countries. Instead it is being used to develop new biological weapons programs in dozens of countries around the world.
Even if these programs are purely defensive, they proliferate, around the globe, pathogens with pandemic potential, even though it’s been difficult to keep these dangerous germs under control here in the U.S. (See “The Global Proliferation of High-Containment Biological Laboratories: Understanding the Phenomenon and Its Implications,” and the Government Accountability Office’s reports, “Biological Select Agents and Toxins: Actions Needed to Improve Management of DOD’s Biosafety and Biosecurity Program,” and “High-containment Laboratories: Comprehensive and Up-to-Date Policies and Stronger Oversight Mechanisms Needed to Improve Safety”).
EcoHealth’s tentacles reach far an wide
EcoHealth Alliance is very much involved in the Pentagon’s proliferation of high-containment biological laboratories. It is conducting DTRA-funded work in the following countries, which are all participants in the Pentagon’s Biological Threat Reduction Program.
Tanzania: In Tanzania, a country that is considered only “partly free,” which has a history of foreign medical experimentation and which didn’t ratify the Biological Weapons Convention until 2019, EcoHealth Alliance has a $5‑million Pentagon contract, “Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever: Reducing an Emerging Health Threat in Tanzania.”
Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) is a tick-borne disease, originally only infecting animals, that was discovered by Ottis and Calista Causey while working for the Rockefeller Foundation in Nigeria. There was only ever one case of CCHF in Tanzania, and that was in 1986.
Gain-of-function research on CCHF is being conducted at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) to determine the “mechanisms of CCHF transmission including development of CCHF tick and animal infection methods and CCHF tick-animal transmission models.” (The National Bio and Agro Defense Facility will take over the mission of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and become the lead facility for Foreign Animal Disease research.)
The National Bio and Agro Defense Facility Biosafety Level 4 (BSL4) Zoonotic and Emerging Infectious Disease team’s CCHF Virus Surveillance Project is investigating “the interface between tick vectors, livestock and pastoralist and resource-poor farming communities in Tanzania” as well as the disease’s “molecular pathogenesis.”
Tanzania is the origin of chikungunya, a mosquito-borne virus that the U.S. has long cultivated as a potential biological weapon. according to a patent held by the University of Texas for a “chimeric” chikungunya virus created through genetic engineering and synthetic biology:
“The 39 documented laboratory infections reported by HHS in 1981 strongly suggest that Chikungunya virus is infectious via aerosol route. Chikungunya virus was being weaponized by the U.S. Army army when the offensive program was terminated.”
Tanzania is one of the countries where bat coronaviruses were collected for the PREDICT project.
Tanzania has one Biosafety Level 3 (BSL3) laboratory, the privately owned Ifakara Health Institute, which is partnering with PREDICT to launch “concurrent surveillance of wildlife and people in at-risk areas for viral spillover and spread.”
South Africa: In South Africa, which had a notorious apartheid-era biological weapons program, EcoHealth Alliance has a $5‑million Pentagon contract (2019–2024), “Reducing the Threat of Rift Valley Fever Through Ecology, Epidemiology and Socio-economics.” This is on top of a $4.9‑million grant (2014–2019), “Understanding Rift Valley Fever in the Republic of South Africa.”
The last human outbreak of Rift Valley Fever in South Africa occurred in 2010, when the government reported 237 confirmed cases, including 26 deaths from 9 provinces. But there were also a few cases in 2018 among farmworkers who slaughtered infected animals during an outbreak in livestock. The fever can spread from animals to humans if they come into contact with the blood and other body fluids of an infected animal.
The U.S. military has conducted offensive biological weapons research on Rift Valley Fever.
South Africa’s biological weapons program included the weaponization of Rift Valley Fever virus obtained from the U.S. government.
Known as Project Coast, South Africa’s biological weapons program murdered anti-apartheid activists with narcotics and poisons, and attempted a genocide of the black majority by spreading AIDS and by developing pathogens and vaccines that would selectively attack black people with illness, death and infertility.
Dr. Wouter Basson, the project’s top scientist, told Pretoria High Court in South Africa that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency threatened him with death, presumably to prevent him from revealing the deep connections between Project Coast and the U.S., which had forced President F. W. de Klerk to shut down the project and destroy its records. Basson named the U.S. Centers for Disease Control as his source of eight shipments of Ebola, Marburg and Rift Valley viruses, but claimed that he had obtained the viruses by posing as a medical researcher and hiding his affiliation with the South African Defense Forces.
Surveys of bats in South Africa found no evidence of bats being natural carriers of Rift Valley Fever virus, but experiments have shown that bats can be infected with it in a laboratory setting.
A bat coronavirus collected in South Africa in 2011 was thought to be the closest known relative of the MERS-CoV virus that emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012, until a 100-percent match for MERS-CoV was detected by Daszak and his colleagues in viral RNA fragments from an Egyptian tomb bat found near the home of one of the first MERS victims in Saudi Arabia.
Liberia: In Liberia, which didn’t ratify the Biological Weapons Convention until 2016, EcoHealth Alliance has a $4.91-million Pentagon contract, “Reducing the Threat from High-risk Pathogens Causing Febrile Illness in Liberia.”
Febrile illnesses include Ebola, which has been the subject of some of the most controversial dual-use research.
While the U.S. has a sordid history of biological weapons experimentation on its own people— with conscientious objectors, military “volunteers,” and the general public as frequent subjects—there were some biological weapons tests the Department of Defense considered too unethical to perform within the continental U.S.. Those tests were conducted in other countries, including Liberia.
Likewise, mirroring medical experimentation on African Americans, there is a history of colonial medical experimentation in Liberia going back to 1926 when the Firestone tire company financed surveys of local diseases they feared could curtail the profitability of their rubber plantations.
More recently, a failed Pentagon-funded Ebola drug trial caused many Liberians to suspect that the subsequent Ebola outbreak was the fault of Tekmira, the pharmaceutical company that created TKM-100802. Doubt surrounded the official story, promoted by Daszak, that the West African Ebola outbreak happened because bats flew in with the Ebola Zaire virus from 2,500 miles away.
In January 2014, the Phase I trial for TKM-100802 was launched, but put on clinical hold by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration due to high cytokine release in participants. In a dose-escalation, healthy volunteer study, one (of two) participants dosed at the highest level of 0·5 mg/kg experienced cytokine release syndrome. Cytokine release syndrome is a pro-inflammatory reaction that occurs when activated lymphocytes and/or myeloid cells release soluble immune mediators following administration of certain therapeutic agents, especially monoclonal antibodies. Onset can be rapid (within hours of administration) and can be life-threatening.
Ultimately, TKM-100802 proved useless for Ebola patients, but the Pentagon’s $140-million investment, and the boost Tekmira’s stock experienced on speculation that Ebola would soon spawn the next $1‑billion drug, made many investors rich.
Suspicions were raised because the TKM-100802 Phase I trial on healthy volunteers began in January 2014, before the first cases of the Ebola outbreak in March 2014.
Later, the World Health Organization’s Pierre Formenty traced the first case back to late December 2013, in Meliandou, Guinea. There, 50 meters from the home of patient zero, another researcher, Fabian Leendertz, found DNA fragments that matched the Angolan free-tailed bat, a species known to survive experimental infections with Ebola. Then, Daszak’s EcoHealth team found viral RNA fragments of Ebola Zaire in a greater long-fingered bat, captured in 2016 in Liberia’s Sanniquellie-Mahn District, which borders Guinea. There was a 1982 article in Annals of Virology in which a trio of Germans reported finding Ebola antibodies in 26 of 433 Liberians (6 percent).
Bats aren’t the only place to look for Ebola.
There’s a BSL‑4 lab that was handling Zaire Ebola before the pandemic in Kenema, Sierra Leone. This is where international law attorney Francis Boyle, a drafter of the US Biological Weapons and Anti-Terrorism Act passed into law in 1981, believes the pandemic originated.
There’s also Liberia’s Monkey Island. As the Washington Post reported, that’s where 66 chimpanzees have been since 2004, when they were abandoned by the American scientists at the Liberian labs of the New York Blood Center. From 1974 to 2004, the New York Blood Center captured wild chimps, engaged them in medical experimentation and then released them back into the jungle in a project known as Vilab II (Virology Lab II), which maintained a colony of 200 chimps. Vilab II was built from the remnants of the Liberian Institute of Tropical Medicine. Built by Firestone in 1946, the Liberian Institute of Tropical Medicine had once employed 60 scientists, but by 1974, medical doctor Earl Reber was there alone with eight chimps. The roots of the Liberian Institute of Tropical Medicine go back to the research begun in 1926 by Harvard Department of Tropical Medicine chief Richard Pearson Strong.
Virus hunters like Daszak should have a keen interest in a population of chimpanzees that, for nearly 100 years, has been caught, injected with viruses and then released back into the wild, especially considering the work of the researchers who handled the chimps.
The New York Blood Center is at the center of a theory on the origin of HIV/AIDS, that it came from a contaminated Hepatitis B vaccine the center distributed to gay men from 1978–1981. The New York Blood Center also tested its vaccine on Liberians.
Richard Pearson Strong is infamous for killing 13 men when he infected a group of 24 inmates of Manila’s Bilibid Prison with plague through a contaminated cholera vaccine. That was prior to his work in Liberia, which is only now being explored, and also involved experiments with humans as well as chimpanzees.
Georgia: EcoHealth Alliance has a $6.5‑million Pentagon grant for “Understanding the Risk of Bat-borne Zoonotic Disease Emergence In Western Asia” (2017–2022).
Arms Watch reports that this grant involves genetic studies on coronaviruses in 5,000 bats collected in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Jordan. The studies were conducted at the Lugar Center, a $161-million Pentagon-funded biolaboratory in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi. Russia claims the Georgia lab is the site of a U.S. biological weapons program.
According to USASpending.gov, EcoHealth Alliance has received $2.88 million in grants for work in Georgia. The Lugar Center is one of the labs that hosts EcoHealth Alliance’s Western Asia Bat Research Network.
Malaysia: In Malaysia, which is only now in the process of creating a legislative framework for enforcing the Biological Weapons Convention, EcoHealth Alliance had a $1.6‑million Pentagon grant (2017–2019) for “Serological Biosurveillance for Spillover of Henipaviruses and Filoviruses at Agricultural and Hunting Human Animal Interfaces in Peninsular Malaysia.”
There are no known cases of filovirus infections in humans in Malaysia. But Malaysia is the origin of the Nipah virus, first recognized in 1999, during an outbreak among farmers and farmworkers in factory farms and slaughterhouses producing pork. The virus spread to Singapore. In all, there were 265 cases of acute encephalitis with 105 deaths, and the billion-dollar pig-farming industry nearly collapsed. No new outbreaks have been reported in Malaysia since 1999.
Nipah virus, a zoonotic pathogen for which no treatments exist, is the inspiration for the film “Contagion.” The virus can only be experimented on in BSL‑4 laboratories. The National Bio and Agro-Defence Facility in Kansas will be the first biocontainment facility in the U.S. where research on Nipah and Ebola (a filovirus) can be conducted on livestock.
In 2019, Nipah Malaysia was among the deadly virus strains shipped from Canada’s National Microbiology Lab to the WIV.
Henipaviruses, in the paramyxovirus family, were the first emerging diseases linked to bats. In June 2012, in the same Chinese cave (actually an old copper mine where workers doing cleanup had become sick and died) in which Daszak’s WIV colleagues found SARS-CoV‑2’s most closely related coronavirus, another frequent collaborator of Daszak’s, Zhiqiang Wu of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, found a new henipavirus-like pathogen in a rat, naming it the “Mojiang paramyxovirus,” after the county in Yunnan province where it was found.
Malaysia was the planned site of a BSL‑4 laboratory run by the pharmaceutical company Emergent Biosolutions for the production of a halal version of the BioThrax vaccine. But that project failed.
In addition to the Pentagon funding, Dazsak obtained $1.7 million in grants (2002–2005) from NIH’s Fogarty International Center for “Anthropogenic Change & Emerging Zoonotic Paramyxoviruses.” In 2012–2014, Daszak had a $569,700 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Service for “Development of a Great Ape Health Unit in Sabah, Malaysia.”
Daszak has a new National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases grant, “Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in EID Hotspots of Southeast Asia,” for $1.5 million (2020). The grant is for an “Emerging Infectious Diseases – South East Asia Research Collaboration Hub (EID-SEARCH)” that “brings leaders in emerging disease research from the U.S., Thailand, Singapore and the three major Malaysian administrative regions together to build an early warning system to safeguard against pandemic disease threats. This team will identify novel viruses from Southeast Asian wildlife [and] characterize their capacity to infect and cause illness in people…”
Other Pentagon contracts: EcoHealth Alliance had a $1‑million Pentagon contract (2017–2019) for an Inbound Bio-event Information System (IBIS), “a web-based application and early warning system for global infectious disease bio-events that threaten the U.S. via international transportation networks.”
EcoHealth Alliance also had another $4.5‑million Pentagon contract (HDTRA115C0041) for 2015–2017. No other information is available on this contract other than that it is for “Applied Research/Exploratory Development” in the “Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (except Biotechnology).”
Department of Homeland Security Contracts: EcoHealth Alliance has a $566,300 contract (2019–2021) with the Department of Homeland Security for the Rapid Evaluation of Pathogens to Prevent Epidemics in Livestock (REPEL) project “to apply biological-based, pathogen agnostic medical countermeasure vaccine and diagnostic platforms to develop foreign animal and emerging zoonotic livestock disease vaccines.”
Department of Health and Human Services Funding: Daszak obtained a $300,000-grant in 2012 from NIH’s Fogarty International Center for research on “Comparative Spillover Dynamics of Avian Influenza In Endemic Countries.” While most of the research listed in the “results” section of the grant are flu-related, it also includes the WIV’s paper, “Isolation and Characterization of a Bat SARS-like Coronavirus that Uses the ACE2 Receptor.”
Daszak was given $3.7 million in grants (2002–2012) from NIH’s Fogarty International Center for “The Ecology, Emergence And Pandemic Potential of Nipah Virus in Bangladesh.”
The grants Daszak used to support the work of the WIV were a $3.7‑million grant (2014–2020) “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” and a $2.6‑million grant (2008–2012) “Risk of Viral Emergence From Bats,” each from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funding: In Thailand, EcoHealth Alliance has a $647,200-grant for “One Health Workforce – Next Generation” (2019–2020).
Alexis Baden-Mayer is political director for the Organic Consumers Association (OCA).
1c. It is important to note that, in effect serving as an advance element or Fifth Column for the neo-Liberal policies presided over by Yeltsin and crafted by Sachs & Company, the Free Congress Foundation served as an extension of The Crusade For Freedom and the projection of the ABN milieu into the GOP. This was the political predecessor to the Yeltsin policies.
Dominating the Reagan administration, the ABN milieu was projected back into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union by the Free Congress Foundation, heavily overlapped with Laszlo Pasztor and the GOP Nazis dating from the Crusade For Freedom.
Heavily overlapping the Free Congress Foundation of Paul Weyrich, the GOP “ethnics” and the OUN/B, in particular, played a leading role in the political tutoring of Boris Yeltsin’s IRG organization. Ultimately, Yeltsin’s forces were instrumental in breaking up the U.S.S.R.
We note that the head of the liberation sub-group of the Free Congress Foundation was Hungarian Arrow Cross veteran Laszlo Pasztor, the head of the GOP “ethnics.”
“The Free Congress Foundation Goes East” by Russ Bellant and Louis Wolf; Covert Action Information Bulletin #35; Fall/1990.
With the rapid pace of political change sweeping Eastern Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, many opportunities have emerged for western interests to intervene in the politics of that region. In some cases, such a vacuum has been created that virtual strangers to the area several years ago are now able to actively participate in changing those societies from within.
These interventions are not only being practiced by mainstream organizations. The involvement of the United States Far Right brings with it the potential revival of fascist organizations in the East. One U.S. group, the Free Congress Foundation, has been plahying a role in Eastern European and Soviet politics and has ties to Boris Yeltsin and the Inter-Regional Deputies Group (IRG) in the U.S.S.R.
The Free Congress Foundation (FCF) was founded in 1974 by Paul Weyrich as the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. Weyrich, who had started the Heritage Foundation the year before, was heavily funded by the Coors family for both organizations.
Weyrich has kept one foot in the right wing of the Republican Party while dallying with the racist Right and the extreme Christian Right. In 1976, for instance, he and a handful of other New Rights (William Rusher, Morton Blackwell, Richard Viguerie) attempted to take over the segregationist American Independent Party (AIP), formed by George Wallace in 1968. The AIP was an amalgam of Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society elements. . . .
. . . . The IRG was established by Andrei Sakharov, Boris Yeltsin and others in the summer of 1989. By the end of that year, a training school had been established for candidates to put forward the IRG program. Their electoral success this year propelled Yeltsin to the leadership of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. He immediately began forging collaborative relationships with the deeply reactionary leaders of the Lithuanian Sajudis party. The IRG has also served as a source of right-wing pressure on Gorbachev to dismantle socialism and the Soviet Union itself.
One of the key dangers in this agenda is the political vacuum it creates, allowing ultra-nationalist forces in a number of republics to take power. Such nationalist and fascist elements are already evident in Lithuania and the Ukraine. In the latter republic, the pro-Nazi Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) has gained influence in several parties and has mobilized large demonstrations that honor OUN leaders who abetted Hitler’s war on the Eastern Front. Similarly, several deputies Sajudis deputies served in German military units in 1944, and Sajudis has made declarations against ethnic Russians living in Lithuania. According to some reports, Poles have also been denigrated.
It should also be noted that the “radical reformer” Boris Yeltsin has dallied with Pamyat, the foremost Russian fascist group to emerge in the last several years. Pamyat’s virulent anti-Semitism compares to the crude propaganda of the early German Nazi Party in the 1920’s.
The FCF is not entirely disconnected from the history of the OUN. The Treasurer of the FCF board is Georgetown University Professor Charles Moser. Moser is also serves on the editorial advisory board of the Ukrainian Quarterly, published by the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, a group dominated by the OUN. The Ukrainian Quarterly has praised military units of the German SS and otherwise justified the OUN alliance with the Third Reich which reflects the fact that the OUN was politically and militarily allied with Hitler and the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine.
The OUN, an international semi-secret cadre organization headquartered in Bavaria, has received financial assistance from the late Franz Joseph Strauss, the rightist head of the Bavarian state. Strauss also had a working relationship with Weyrich. . . .
. . . . Finally, FCF’s insinuation into the politics of the East must be judged by their selection of Laszlo Pasztor to head their Liberation Support Alliance, “which seeks to liberate peoples in Central and Eastern European Nations.”
Pasztor’s involvement in East European politics began in World War II when he joined the youth organization of the Arrow Cross, the Nazi party of Hungary.
When the Arrow Cross was installed in power by a German commando operation, Pasztor was sent to Berlin to help facilitate the liaison between the Arrow Cross and Hitler.
Pasztor was tried and served two years in jail for his Arrow Cross activities after an anticommunist government was elected in 1945. He eventually came to the U.S. and established the ethnic arm of the Republican National Committee for Richard Nixon. He brought other Nazi collaborators from the Eastern front into the GOP. Some were later found to have participated in mass murder during the war.
The dormant Arrow Cross has surfaced again in Hungary, where there have been attempts to lift the ban on the organization. Pasztor spent several months in Hungary. When Weyrich later conducted training there, he was provided a list of Pasztor’s contacts inside the country. Weyrich reports that he conducted training for the recently formed and now governing New Democratic Forum.
Pasztor claims to have assisted some of his friends in Hungary in getting NED funds through his advisory position with NED. In 1989 he spoke at the Heritage Foundation under the sponsorship of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a multinational umbrella organization of emigre fascists and Nazis founded in alliance with Hitler in 1943. It is led by the OUN. Pasztor spoke for the “Hungarian Organization” of ABN, which is the Arrow Cross. . . . .
1d. As seen above, Daszak will be joined in his Lancet inquiry by Jeffrey Sachs, an economist with no scientific or medical credentials. As discussed in FTR#953, Sachs is a member of the Sanders Institute, and advises the organization’s namesake, Bernie Sanders. He also advises AOC.
Of primary significance–Sachs was an advisor to the Yeltsin government in Russia from 1991 to 1994 . . .”
In that regard, he presided over the HIID: ” . . . . the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), led by Jeffrey Sachs and partly funded by the U.S. government. . . .”
What we view as a definitive analysis of Sachs was expressed by a Russian journalist: ” . . . . he’s viewed by scores of millions of Russians, as one journalist has put it, as either an emissary of Satan or of the CIA. . . . He [Sachs] sung the praises of ‘transparency and honesty in government,’ even though the Yeltsin regime he was advising was opaque and corrupt. . . .”
Are the Russians right–IS Sachs CIA? Is THAT what he is doing on the Lancet commission?
. . . . Sachs was an advisor to the Yeltsin government in Russia from 1991 to 1994, and also advised Poland, Slovenia, and Estonia as they were beginning their transitions to capitalism. The last three are mixed successes — on the surface, Poland looks like a success to some, but with the transition came higher unemployment, falling real wages, and aimless cycles of political discontent. Russia, though, was a thorough disaster, one of the worst collapses in human history. Living standards fell and the population shrank, an almost unprecedented event in a country not at war.
[U2 Singer] Bono’s new best friend refuses to accept any blame for the disaster, offering the defense that the Russians didn’t take his advice, and the West didn’t come through with the big aid package he insisted was necessary. Apparently this is an well-practiced strategy. A 1992 Euromoney profile notes: “Sachs is reluctant to acknowledge mistakes, defining them in terms of regret when governments do not take his advice.” In that case, he blamed Poland for not privatizing fast enough. Contrasting with Sachs’s regrets over advice not taken, several governments he’s consulted with have since characterized the material produced by him and his associates as irrelevant, or, as a Slovenian official put it at the time, “simplistic...kindergarten stuff.”
But the outcome illustrates precisely the danger of having the likes of Sachs parachute in bearing the timeless truths of neoclassical economics. Anyone who knew Russia knew that any rapid privatization would immediately lead to the creation of a new corrupt elite through massive theft of state property. Anyone who knew Washington knew that no big aid package was ever going to come through; adding to usual U.S. cheapness, a lot of hardliners wanted to see Russia ground into the dirt. In the words of former World Bank economist David Ellerman, who frequently collided with Sachs’s work in Slovenia and has followed him intently ever since, “Only the mixture of American triumphalism and the academic arrogance of neoclassical economics could produce such a lethal dose of gall.” . . . .
During what officialdom called the transition, there were divisions between those who wanted to reform the existing socialist system and experiment with hybrid forms of ownership, and what Ellerman calls the “clean postsocialist revolutionaries,” many of them with American economics PhDs, who dismissed the reformers as tainted nomenklatura and wanted immediate privatization. Adding to the prestige of the revolutionaries were their trusted foreign advisors, like those from the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), led by Jeffrey Sachs and partly funded by the U.S. government. . . .
. . . . HIID eventually collapsed in scandal, when it was revealed that the principals of its Russian project, Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay, along with their wives (who happened to be mutual fund managers), had been buying Russian stocks and dickering for the privilege of getting the country’s first mutual fund license, while dispensing advice to the Russian government. (Shleifer was one of the trinity of so-called Harvard Wunderkinder who were to Russia what the Chicago Boys were to Pinochet’s Chile; the other two were Lawrence Summers — and Sachs.) The U.S. government sued, and Harvard shuttered the institute. Sachs, who was not involved in the scandal, decamped to Columbia (it’s said there was no going-away party from his Harvard colleagues). At Columbia, he was appointed to head its new Earth Institute, an interdisciplinary enterprise that would bring together physical, health, and social scientists to promote sustainable economic development. . . .
. . . . Sachs admits to no responsibility for the Russian catastrophe. When I interviewed him in November 2002, I asked him to comment on the (incontrovertible) fact that he’s viewed by scores of millions of Russians, as one journalist has put it, as either an emissary of Satan or of the CIA. . . . He sung the praises of “transparency and honesty in government,” even though the Yeltsin regime he was advising was opaque and corrupt. Asked to comment on published reports that he supported creating an inflation, so as to wipe out the savings of Russians (part of the shock therapists’ attempts to start post-Soviet Russia with a clean slate), he bristled further, denouncing the quote as “phony,” the question as “indecent,” and the interview itself as not being in “good faith.”
In his academic work, however, Sachs argued that since China was only very lightly industrialized, it could afford to take its transition slowly. Russia, however, was burdened with the bad inheritance of Soviet industry, which was hopeless and had to go. . . .
Banking with Bin Laden
Is there a new version of the SARS-CoV‑2 virus circulating in the UK that could defy the new vaccines? That’s the troubling possibility that’s recently emerged based on new reports of a highly mutated strain of the virus that was first detected in the southeastern UK and appears to spread much faster than the previous dominant strain. The new strain, dubbed both “VUI – 202012/01” and “B.1.1.7”, appears to be so much more infectious than previous version of virus that the UK has imposed a new stay home order for the London area and southeast part of the country and countries are starting to impose a new travel ban on UK travelers. It’s still unclear if the new strain is genuinely more infectious than older versions or if the higher rates of observed spreading of this variant is due to some other factor.
So why might this new strain thwart the vaccine? Well, there are 17 observed mutations on this strain. That includes 14 mutations specific to this lineage that cause changes to amino acids. So 14 mutations that just happen to cause changes to amino acids — not all mutations cause amino acid mutations — found only in this novel strain first detected in September. As researchers describe it, this has never been seen before. Virology Andrew Rambaut recently authored a paper characterizing this new strain — Preliminary genomic characterisation of an emergent SARS-CoV‑2 lineage in the UK defined by a novel set of spike mutations — and described it as follows:
As we’ll see, eight of these mutations are on the spike protein, which is the part of the virus that antibodies and vaccines target. So the more mutations there are on the spike protein the higher probability that the virus can elude the immune system and therefore elude immune responses generated by a vaccine calibrated for an earlier strain of the virus. Two of the spike protein mutations are especially worrisome. One, called N501Y, has been previously shown to increase how tightly the protein binds to the ACE2 receptor. The other mutation, 69–70del, leads to the loss of two amino acids in the spike protein that and appears to help the virus elude the immune system in immunocompromised patients.
Adding to concerns about the N501Y mutation are reports out of south Africa where scientists found a separate lineage of the the virus the same mutation that appears to be rapidly spreading in three provinces. In addition, there are anecdotal reports out of South Africa that the N501Y mutation causes more severe sickness in otherwise young and healthy populations. Now, we don’t know yet if those anecdotes will pan out upon closer scrutiny. But it sounds like it’s possible that we’re already seeing multiple versions of the SARS-CoV‑2 virus emerge around the wall that attacks ALL age ranges with the kind of intensity that had previously been reserved for elderly and immunocompromised demographics.
Here’s where it gets extra disturbing: No one has ever observed this many mutations in a strain before and it’s as if this new highly mutated strain popped out of nowhere. In other words, its sounds like researchers can’t trace an obvious lineage from this virus back to the other known strains (like a version with 16 of the 17 mutations, and another version with 15 of those 16 mutations, etc). Virologist are saying they’ve never seen a virus accumulate more than a dozen mutation seemingly all at once. This has led to suspicions that the strain emerged in a single long-haul patient who had multiple strains competing inside their body at the same time.
So, did this sudden accumulation of mutations emerge spontaneously in a long-haul patient suffering from multiple strains? Well, we can’t rule out that possibility. But there’s another very obvious source of a strain of this virus that suddenly emerges with over a dozen mutations that haven’t been previously seen together: it’s man-made, perhaps through a ‘gain-of-function’ experiment. Perhaps a ‘gain-of-function’ experiment done in good faith that somehow escaped. How plausible is this scenario? Well, given that scientists are already conducting experiments that sure sound like ‘gain-of-function’ experiments to characterize these new strains, it’s hard to rule it out. But this still remains an absolutely unspeakable possibility that no professional will ever even remotely suggest could be the source of new viral strains. So if this is the result of ‘gain-of-function’ experiments we will steadfastly ensure we don’t realize it until its way too late.
Ok, first here’s a Daily Mail piece describing how shocked scientists are to find this many mutations on a new strain. A strain that doesn’t appear to have emerged from elsewhere in the world and seemed to pop out of nowhere in the southeast UK back in September:
“ ‘It’s striking. There’s a really long branch going back to the common ancestor, and it’s a matter of great interest as to why that is the case.””
Why is the lineage for this version of the virus so ‘long’, i.e. why is this version SO different from the rest of the known strains with so many more mutations? It’s a matter of great interest. Especially since there’s no indication that the strain came from elsewhere. It seemed to just pop up in the southeast UK back in September, bristling with mutations:
And that alarming large number of mutations on spike protein just might make this virus resistant to the new vaccine. In other words, this new version of the virus is so different from the other strains floating around that it might be effectively a different virus from the immune system’s perspective. A new virus that requires a new and different vaccine:
Next, here’s a report in Science Magazine that gives more details on the how unexpectedly different this version of the virus is to all other known strains circulating the globe, with over a dozen mutations that seemingly popped out of no where. Including the two spike protein mutations that have already been seen in a separate strain that has emerged in South Africa and that appears to help the virus evade the immune system (and therefore evade the immune responses to the current vaccine). The article describes how researchers are keenly interested in characterizing these new mutations, especially the mutations on the spike protein. So how are they characterizing the mutations? By what conducting what sure sounds a lot like ‘gain-of-function’ experiments. For example, in one lab they engineered a lentivirus to express mutated versions of the SARS-CoV‑2 spike protein and found that the “69–70del” mutation deletion alone made that virus twice as infectious. They are carrying out similar experiments with the N501Y mutation. Those are gain-of-functions experiments. Experiments presumably conducted in good faith for the purpose of helping humanity understand the biology of this virus but gain-of-function nonetheless that carry the inherent risk that such experiments inevitably have. It raises the question of just how much more ‘gain-of-function’ experimentation has taken place globally in 2020 than otherwise would have happened had this pandemic not taken place and points to another danger created by the pandemic: there’s probably A LOT more people learning how to carrying out ‘gain-of-function’ experiments in response to the pandemic than otherwise would have developed this very risky skill set :
“Scientists, meanwhile, are hard at work trying to figure out whether B.1.1.7 is really more adept at human-to-human transmission—not everyone is convinced yet—and if so, why. They’re also wondering how it evolved so fast. B.1.1.7 has acquired 17 mutations all at once, a feat never seen before. “There’s now a frantic push to try and characterize some of these mutations in the lab,” says Andrew Rambaut, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh.”
A feat never seen before. All 17 mutations all at once. That’s how Andrew Rambaut characterized this virus. How did this happen and what are the implications of those mutations? That’s what scientists are scrambling to answer. But they already have some answers about two of the spike protein mutations because they appear to have popped up independently in South Africa and also appear to be helping the virus spreading faster there. Then there’s anecdotal evidence that the new UK strain is causing severe disease even in the young and healthy. So there really is an urgent need to understand the nature of these mutations because we could be looking at at vaccine-resistent super-strain:
And there’s only a few ways to answer those questions about the importance of these mutations. ‘Gain-of-function’ style experiments where different versions of the virus are created and studied in the lab are kind of a necessity in order to get those answers. Hence, we have researchers engineering lentiviruses with mutated versions of the SARS-CoV‑2 virus:
Let’s hope there aren’t any SARS-like Lentivirus outbreaks any time soon. But that’s one of the inherent risks of this kind of research.
And as the article points out, if it does turn out to be the case that this strain of the virus is more resistant to the vaccines, then if an evolutionary process really did drive the creation of this new strain (assuming it wasn’t man-made), that same process is going to be playing out as the world gets vaccinated. In other words, we could see versions of this virus spontaneously pop up all over the world:
Keep in mind that one of the main big advantages of the new mRNA vaccine technology is supposed to be the ability to come up with new vaccines tailored to particular strains of a virus relatively quickly and easily. Which is exactly what happened with the current version of the Moderna mRNA vaccine that was designed within two days of the SARS-CoV‑2 sequence being released. So if there really is a vaccine resistant super-strain spreading around, it’s possible the solution will be as simple as another round of new vaccine. But that’s assuming getting everyone vaccinated is something simple which is obviously not the case these days.
Still, in a weird way we should kind of hope this new version of the virus really is man-made. Because if it’s a man-made strain that’s highly unlikely to emerge on its own naturally, that makes it a lot less likely versions of this strain will spontaneously pop up in response to the vaccine. Then again, if it is man-made, that means there could be a lot more man-made strains coming our way in the future. Especially if civilization continues to refuse to acknowledge the obvious implications that come with living in the era of synthetic biology.