Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR#1185 Harvest Time, Part 4: The Oswald Institute of Virology, Part 4

You can sub­scribe to e‑mail alerts from Spitfirelist.com HERE.

You can sub­scribe to RSS feed from Spitfirelist.com HERE.

You can sub­scribe to the com­ments made on pro­grams and posts–an excel­lent source of infor­ma­tion in, and of, itself, HERE.

Mr. Emory’s entire life’s work is avail­able on a 32GB flash dri­ve, avail­able for a con­tri­bu­tion of $65.00 or more (to KFJC). Click Here to obtain Dav­e’s 40+ years’ work, com­plete through Fall of 2020 (through FTR #1156).

Please con­sid­er sup­port­ing THE WORK DAVE EMORY DOES.

Note: This web­site is licensed for Fair Use under Cre­ative Com­mons. No mon­ey what­so­ev­er is, has been, or will be made from this web­site by Mr. Emory.

FTR #1185 This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: Con­tin­u­ing dis­cus­sion and analy­sis from FTR#’s 1183 and 1184, we fin­ish ana­lyz­ing an arti­cle about Shi Zhengli, Pen­ta­gon and USAID fund­ing for her research into bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es through Eco­Health Alliance.

The Pen­ta­gon fund­ing for these projects must be seen against the back­ground of three over­lap­ping areas of con­sid­er­a­tion:

  1. The fact that any virus can be syn­the­sized or mod­i­fied from scratch. As detailed in a very impor­tant arti­cle from The Guardian: “ . . . 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. . . 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. . . . Today, the genet­ic code of almost any mam­malian virus can be found online and syn­the­sised. ‘The tech­nol­o­gy to do this is avail­able now,’ said [Michael] “It requires some exper­tise, but it’s some­thing that’s rel­a­tive­ly easy to do, and that is why it tops the list. . . .”
  2. Also fun­da­men­tal to an under­stand­ing of the Covid “op” is the dev­as­tat­ing nature of bat-borne virus­es when intro­duced into the human body. “ . . . . As Boston Uni­ver­si­ty micro­bi­ol­o­gist Thomas Kepler explained to the Wash­ing­ton Post in 2018, the bat’s unique approach to viral infec­tion explains why virus­es that trans­fer from bats to humans are so severe. . . . ‘A virus that has co-evolved with the bat’s antivi­ral sys­tem is com­plete­ly out of its ele­ment in the human,’ Kepler said. ‘That’s why it is so dead­ly — the human immune sys­tem is over­whelmed by the inflam­ma­to­ry response.’ The bat immune sys­tem responds very dif­fer­ent­ly from ours to viral infec­tion. Instead of attack­ing and killing an infect­ed cell, which leads to a cas­cade of inflam­ma­to­ry respons­es, the bat immune sys­tem can starve the virus by turn­ing down cel­lu­lar metab­o­lism. The bat ori­gin of SARS-CoV­‑2 may explain the cytokine storms that are has­ten­ing some COVID-19 deaths. . . .”
  3. Analy­sis pre­sent­ed in the lib­er­al New York Mag­a­zine by Nichol­son Bak­er takes stock of the impli­ca­tions of con­tem­po­rary biotech­nol­o­gy and what we have termed (in past broad­casts) “The Mag­ic Virus The­o­ry.” “. . . . SARS‑2 seems almost per­fect­ly cal­i­brat­ed to grab and ran­sack our breath­ing cells and choke the life out of them. . . . Per­haps viral nature hit a bull’s‑eye of air­borne infec­tiv­i­ty, with almost no muta­tion­al drift, no peri­od of accom­mo­da­tion and adjust­ment, or per­haps some lab work­er some­where, inspired by Baric’s work with human air­way tis­sue, took a spike pro­tein that was spe­cial­ly groomed to col­o­nize and thrive deep in the cil­i­at­ed, mucos­al tun­nels of our inner core and cloned it onto some exist­ing viral bat back­bone. It could have hap­pened in Wuhan, but — because any­one can now ‘print out’ a ful­ly infec­tious clone of any sequenced dis­ease — it could also have hap­pened at Fort Det­rick, or in Texas, or in Italy, or in Rot­ter­dam, or in Wis­con­sin, or in some oth­er citadel of coro­n­avi­ral inquiry. . . .”

Tak­en togeth­er and in the con­text of the full-court press against Chi­na dis­cussed in many pro­grams includ­ing FTR#’s 1090, 1091, 1178, 1179, 1180, the Pentagon/USAID fund­ing of Eco­Health Alliance and the research into bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es being con­duct­ed at the WIV and else­where in and around Chi­na, the three con­sid­er­a­tions just enu­mer­at­ed point omi­nous­ly to the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic as an “op.”

The pro­gram opens with more mate­r­i­al from an arti­cle by Alex­is Baden-May­er about Shi Zhengli, which con­cludes with an inter­est­ing, impor­tant detail.

The Peo­ple’s Lib­er­a­tion Army assumed con­trol of the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy on Jan­u­ary 26, 2020–roughly two weeks after the  genome for the SARS Cov‑2 was pub­lished: ” . . . . The Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy is China’s only biosafe­ty lev­el 4 lab. While it has always been under the con­trol of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, since Jan­u­ary 26, 2020, it has been under the com­mand of the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army, specif­i­cal­ly its top bio­log­i­cal-weapons spe­cial­ist, a major gen­er­al named Chen Wei. . . .”

An arti­cle in The Asia Times pro­vides more depth on the grow­ing ten­sion between the U.S. and Chi­na.

Author Pepe Esco­bar feels that Chi­na became aware that they had been the focal point of a bio­log­i­cal war­fare attack. This dove­tails with the analy­sis we pre­sent­ed about the WIV being tak­en over by the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army on 1/26/2020.

Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping has dropped ver­bal clues as to the Chi­nese view of the ori­gin of the Covid-19: ” . . . . Bei­jing is care­ful­ly, incre­men­tal­ly shap­ing the nar­ra­tive that, from the begin­ning of the coro­n­avirus attack, the lead­er­ship knew it was under a hybrid war attack. The ter­mi­nol­o­gy of Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a ‘people’s war’ had to be launched. More­over, he described the virus as a demon or dev­il. Xi is a Con­fu­cian­ist. Unlike some oth­er ancient Chi­nese thinkers, Con­fu­cius was loath to dis­cuss super­nat­ur­al forces and judg­ment in the after­life. How­ev­er, in a Chi­nese cul­tur­al con­text, dev­il means ‘white dev­ils’ or ‘for­eign dev­ils’: guai­lo in Man­darin, gwei­lo in Can­tonese. This was Xi deliv­er­ing a pow­er­ful state­ment in code. . . .”

Esco­bar also notes Event 201, which we high­light­ed in FTR #‘s 1111 and 1112: ” . . . . Extra ques­tions linger about the opaque Event 201 in New York on Octo­ber 18, 2019: a rehearsal for a world­wide pan­dem­ic caused by a dead­ly virus – which hap­pened to be coro­n­avirus. This mag­nif­i­cent coin­ci­dence hap­pened one month before the out­break in Wuhan. Event 201 was spon­sored by Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion, the World Eco­nom­ic Forum (WEF), the CIA, Bloomberg, John Hop­kins Foun­da­tion and the UN.  The World Mil­i­tary Games opened in Wuhan on the exact same day. . . .”

As not­ed by Pepe Esco­bar, Event 201–which began on the same day as the Mil­i­tary World Games in Wuhan–helped to set the PR tem­plate for Covid-19.

Avril Haines was a key par­tic­i­pant in the event. For­mer Deputy CIA Direc­tor Avril Haines is Biden’s Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence.

The cog­ni­tive tem­plate for Covid-19 was also set by Peter Daszak, who has wide­ly dis­sem­i­nat­ed the sup­po­si­tion that “Dis­ease X” would over­take the world.

It is our view that the efforts of Daszak, the Event 201 play­ers and oth­ers could be com­pared to the pro­pa­gan­diz­ing that ele­ments of the WACCFL and the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, as well as ele­ments of the U.S. far right did in the run-up to the JFK assas­si­na­tion.

That pro­pa­gan­diz­ing was a key ele­ment in the “Paint­ing of Oswald Red.”

The pro­gram con­cludes with rumi­na­tion about the pos­si­ble sig­nif­i­cance of Dasza­k’s Ukrain­ian her­itage. This dis­cus­sion will be fleshed out in our next pro­gram, review­ing the con­stel­la­tion of covert “ops” against Chi­na and the par­tic­i­pa­tion of ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence and Ukrain­ian fas­cism in the desta­bi­liza­tion of Hong Kong and the prop­a­ga­tion of the Uighur myth.

1.  Cen­tered pri­mar­i­ly on the work of respect­ed Chi­nese sci­en­tist Shi Zhengli and her gain-of-func­tion exper­i­ments on bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es, this arti­cle does points out that her work is inex­tri­ca­bly-linked with the Pen­ta­gon, USAID-fund­ed Eco­health Alliance.

Although Ms. Baden-May­er’s arti­cle uncrit­i­cal­ly presents mate­r­i­al from dubi­ous sources such as The Nation­al Review, it does not shirk on cov­er­age of the impor­tance of Dasza­k’s orga­ni­za­tion and the many mil­i­tary and nation­al secu­ri­ty links to the work at the WIV per­formed by Shi Zhengli and her col­leagues.

NB: A major–albeit under­stand­able– flaw in Ms. Baden-May­er’s research is the fact that nei­ther she, nor many of the peo­ple she quotes, takes stock of the fact that ANY VIRUS CAN BE SYNTHESIZED OR ALTERED IN A LABORATORY USING CONTEMPORARY TECHNOLOGY!

Key Points of Dis­cus­sion and Analy­sis Include: 

  1. A Nation­al Insti­tute of Health query of the work at WIV, the ques­tions in which were pre­sent­ed to Dasza­k’s Eco­Health Alliance! ” . . . . The let­ter with these demands didn’t go to Shi or WIV, it went to Eco­Health Alliance, a U.S.-based non-prof­it fund­ed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment, includ­ing [pri­mar­i­ly] the U.S. mil­i­tary, to sup­port sci­en­tists work­ing in 30 coun­tries. Eco­Health Alliance is list­ed as a fund­ing source on some of Shi’s most con­tro­ver­sial papers. And Eco­Health Alliance sci­en­tists, includ­ing its pres­i­dent Peter Daszak, often co-author, with Shi, pub­lished papers. . . .”
  2. Review of the oper­a­tional rela­tion­ship between Dasza­k’s orga­ni­za­tion, and Shi Zhengli’s coop­er­a­tion with Ralph Bar­ic: ” . . . . Shi’s most infa­mous Eco­Health Alliance-fund­ed paper is, ‘A SARS-Like Clus­ter of Cir­cu­lat­ing Bat Coro­n­avirus­es Shows Poten­tial for Human Emer­gence.’ In this con­tro­ver­sial gain-of-func­tion research col­lab­o­ra­tion with U.S. sci­en­tist Ralph Bar­ic of the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na at Chapel Hill, Shi and Bar­ic used genet­ic engi­neer­ing and syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy to weaponize a bat coro­n­avirus, max­i­miz­ing its poten­tial human infec­tiv­i­ty. . . .”
  3. Review of the USAID fund­ing of the Eco­Health Alliance/Shi/Baric col­lab­o­ra­tion (USAID is a State Depart­ment sub­sidiary which serves as one of CIA’s most com­mon and insid­i­ous front orga­ni­za­tions. ) ” . . . . Shi’s fund­ing for this study came through a USAID Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic Threats-PRE­DICT grant to Eco­Health Alliance—but the record for this grant appears to have been scrubbed from the U.S. government’s data­base. . . .”
  4. Review of the obfus­ca­tion of the USAID fund­ing for the Eco­Health Alliance for this peri­od. “. . . . Eco­Health Alliance was a PREDICT part­ner dur­ing the 2009–2014 fund­ing cycle, but there is no record of a USAID grant to Eco­Health Alliance for this time peri­od among the $100.9 mil­lion in grants it has received from the U.S. gov­ern­ment since 2003. . . .”
  5. Dis­cus­sion of Shi/Daszak col­lab­o­ra­tion on on a key sequence–the RsSh­Co14-CoV Sequence: ” . . . . Shi’s con­tri­bu­tion to the work she did with Bar­ic was the ‘RsSHC014-CoV Sequence That Was Iso­lat­ed from Chi­nese Horse­shoe Bats.’ . . . . Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak announced their dis­cov­ery of RsSHC014 in their 2013 paper, ‘Iso­la­tion and Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of a Bat SARS-Like Coro­n­avirus that Uses the ACE2 Recep­tor,’ and stat­ed that it was found dur­ing ‘a 12-month lon­gi­tu­di­nal sur­vey (April 2011–September 2012) of SL-CoVs in a colony of Rhi­nolo­phus sini­cus at a sin­gle loca­tion in Kun­ming, Yun­nan Province, Chi­na.’ . . . .”
  6. Fund­ing for the Kun­ming virus research came from a num­ber of insti­tu­tions, includ­ing the NIH and USAID, which both have col­lab­o­rat­ed with Pen­ta­gon and CIA in the past.
  7. Eco­Health Alliance helped finance Shi’s research in Mojiang: ” . . . . Shi’s paper, ‘Coex­is­tence of Mul­ti­ple Coro­n­avirus­es in Sev­er­al Bat Colonies in an Aban­doned Mine­shaft,’ was writ­ten by a team of sci­en­tists who were all Chi­nese nation­als work­ing at Chi­nese insti­tu­tions. Nev­er­the­less, in addi­tion to fund­ing from the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, the authors acknowl­edged sup­port from the U.S. Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gies and Infec­tious Dis­ease (R01AI110964), a $3.7‑million grant to Eco­Health Alliance for ‘Under­stand­ing the Risk of Bat Coro­n­avirus Emer­gence,’ (2014–2025). . . .”
  8. Fur­ther review of Shi’s research fund­ing from the Pen­ta­gon, via Eco­Health Alliance: ” . . . . Shi Zhengli and her col­lab­o­ra­tors are also fund­ed by the U.S. mil­i­tary. Peter Daszak’s Eco­Health Alliance cur­rent­ly receives more mon­ey from the Depart­ment of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA) for Sci­en­tif­ic Research Com­bat­ting Weapons of Mass Destruc­tion than any oth­er mil­i­tary contractor—$15 mil­lion (25.575 per­cent) of the $60.2 mil­lion dis­persed in the last 6 months. . . .”
  9. More about mil­i­tary col­lab­o­ra­tion with Shi: ” . . . . In addi­tion to mil­i­tary fund­ing through DTRA, Shi’s paper was co-authored by two U.S. mil­i­tary sci­en­tists, Christo­pher C. Broder and Eric D. Laing of the Uni­formed Ser­vices Uni­ver­si­ty of the Health Sci­ences, Depart­ment of Micro­bi­ol­o­gy and Immunol­o­gy. . . .”
  10. The Peo­ple’s Lib­er­a­tion Army assumed con­trol of the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy on Jan­u­ary 26, 2020 at the time that the genome for the SARS Cov‑2 was pub­lished: ” . . . . The Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy is China’s only biosafe­ty lev­el 4 lab. While it has always been under the con­trol of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, since Jan­u­ary 26, 2020, it has been under the com­mand of the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army, specif­i­cal­ly its top bio­log­i­cal-weapons spe­cial­ist, a major gen­er­al named Chen Wei. . . .”

A stun­ning­ly impor­tant por­tion of the paper mer­its high­light­ing at length: ” . . . . A Google Schol­ar search pro­duced two papers Shi has pub­lished that lists DTRA as a fun­der.

To see how the first paper, ‘Com­par­a­tive Analy­sis of Bat Genomes Pro­vides Insight into the Evo­lu­tion of Flight and Immu­ni­ty,’ is rel­e­vant to bio­log­i­cal weapon­ry, it helps to under­stand the military’s inter­est in bat immu­ni­ty.

As Boston Uni­ver­si­ty micro­bi­ol­o­gist Thomas Kepler explained to the Wash­ing­ton Post in 2018, the bat’s unique approach to viral infec­tion explains why virus­es that trans­fer from bats to humans are so severe.

This was the sub­ject of a paper, ‘The Egypt­ian Rousette Genome Reveals Unex­pect­ed Fea­tures of Bat Antivi­ral Immu­ni­ty,’ that he pub­lished with mil­i­tary sci­en­tists and DTRA fund­ing.

‘A virus that has co-evolved with the bat’s antivi­ral sys­tem is com­plete­ly out of its ele­ment in the human,’ Kepler said. ‘That’s why it is so dead­ly — the human immune sys­tem is over­whelmed by the inflam­ma­to­ry response.’

The bat immune sys­tem responds very dif­fer­ent­ly from ours to viral infec­tion. Instead of attack­ing and killing an infect­ed cell, which leads to a cas­cade of inflam­ma­to­ry respons­es, the bat immune sys­tem can starve the virus by turn­ing down cel­lu­lar metab­o­lism.

The bat ori­gin of SARS-CoV­‑2 may explain the cytokine storms that are has­ten­ing some COVID-19 deaths. Accord­ing to Web­MD:

‘Cer­tain kinds of cytokines trig­ger cell death. When you have many cells doing this at the same time, a lot of tis­sue can die. In COVID-19, that tis­sue is most­ly in the lung. As the tis­sue breaks down, the walls of the lungs’ tiny air sacs become leaky and fill with flu­id, caus­ing pneu­mo­nia and starv­ing the blood of oxy­gen.’

Kepler says the mil­i­tary is using its exper­i­ments on bat immu­ni­ty to ‘devel­op drugs that damp­en down inflam­ma­tion and arrest the virus by depriv­ing it of what it needs to grow rather than try­ing to kill it out­right.’ But, it clear­ly has anoth­er objec­tive, as well: to make virus­es more dead­ly by ‘pas­sag­ing’ them through bats. . . .”

“Shi Zhengli: Weaponiz­ing Coro­n­avirus­es with Pen­ta­gon Fund­ing, at a Chi­nese Mil­i­tary Lab” by Alex­is Baden-May­er; Organ­ic Con­sumers Asso­ci­a­tion; 09/24/2020.

. . . .Shi’s work involves col­lect­ing bat virus­es and using tech­niques of genet­ic engi­neer­ing and syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy to enable these virus­es to infect human beings.

Since the Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion took effect, what sci­en­tists like Shi do has been called “gain-of-func­tion” research or “dual-use research of con­cern” (DURC).

In oth­er words, Shi, and oth­er sci­en­tists like her, are in the busi­ness of weaponiz­ing virus­es by genet­i­cal­ly engi­neer­ing or oth­er­wise alter­ing them to make them more lethal, and more eas­i­ly trans­mit­ted, to humans.

Did Shi have a hand in cre­at­ing the SARS-CoV­‑2 virus caus­ing the cur­rent COVID-19 pan­dem­ic?

The Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health is inves­ti­gat­ing. . . .

. . . . The let­ter with these demands didn’t go to Shi or WIV, it went to Eco­Health Alliance, a U.S.-based non-prof­it fund­ed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment, includ­ing the U.S. mil­i­tary, to sup­port sci­en­tists work­ing in 30 coun­tries. Eco­Health Alliance is list­ed as a fund­ing source on some of Shi’s most con­tro­ver­sial papers. And Eco­Health Alliance sci­en­tists, includ­ing its pres­i­dent Peter Daszak, often co-author, with Shi, pub­lished papers.

Shi’s most infa­mous Eco­Health Alliance-fund­ed paper is, “A SARS-Like Clus­ter of Cir­cu­lat­ing Bat Coro­n­avirus­es Shows Poten­tial for Human Emer­gence.” In this con­tro­ver­sial gain-of-func­tion research col­lab­o­ra­tion with U.S. sci­en­tist Ralph Bar­ic of the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na at Chapel Hill, Shi and Bar­ic used genet­ic engi­neer­ing and syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy to weaponize a bat coro­n­avirus, max­i­miz­ing its poten­tial human infec­tiv­i­ty.

Shi’s fund­ing for this study came through a USAID Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic Threats-PRE­DICT grant to Eco­Health Alliance—but the record for this grant appears to have been scrubbed from the U.S. government’s data­base.

Eco­Health Alliance was a PREDICT part­ner dur­ing the 2009–2014 fund­ing cycle, but there is no record of a USAID grant to Eco­Health Alliance for this time peri­od among the $100.9 mil­lion in grants it has received from the U.S. gov­ern­ment since 2003.

Shi’s con­tri­bu­tion to the work she did with Bar­ic was the “RsSHC014-CoV Sequence That Was Iso­lat­ed from Chi­nese Horse­shoe Bats.”

Where did RsSHC014 come from?

Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak announced their dis­cov­ery of RsSHC014 in their 2013 paper, “Iso­la­tion and Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of a Bat SARS-Like Coro­n­avirus that Uses the ACE2 Recep­tor,” and stat­ed that it was found dur­ing “a 12-month lon­gi­tu­di­nal sur­vey (April 2011–September 2012) of SL-CoVs in a colony of Rhi­nolo­phus sini­cus at a sin­gle loca­tion in Kun­ming, Yun­nan Province, Chi­na.”

What they don’t men­tion in their paper is that, in Kun­ming dur­ing this same peri­od (April and May of 2012), six men were hos­pi­tal­ized after remov­ing bat feces from a cave, and that the WIV was involved in their treat­ment, test­ing the patients for Serum IgM, the first anti­body the body makes when it fights a new infec­tion. . . .

. . . . Shi Zhengli told her ver­sion of the sto­ry about the min­ers to Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can:

“[In 2012] Shi’s team had been called in to inves­ti­gate the virus pro­file of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s moun­tain­ous Mojiang County—famous for its fer­ment­ed Pu’er tea—where six min­ers suf­fered from pneu­mo­nia like dis­eases and two died. After sam­pling the cave for a year, the researchers dis­cov­ered a diverse group of coro­n­avirus­es in six bat species. “In many cas­es, mul­ti­ple viral strains had infect­ed a sin­gle ani­mal, turn­ing it into a fly­ing fac­to­ry for new virus­es.

“‘The mine shaft stunk like hell,’ says Shi, who, like her col­leagues, went in wear­ing a pro­tec­tive mask and cloth­ing. ‘Bat guano, cov­ered in fun­gus, lit­tered the cave.’ Although the fun­gus turned out to be the pathogen that had sick­ened the min­ers, she says it would have been only a mat­ter of time before they caught the coro­n­avirus­es if the mine had not been prompt­ly shut.”

This incon­sis­ten­cy between Shi’s sto­ry and the master’s the­sis is hard to rec­on­cile. Con­sid­er­ing WIV’s involve­ment in the treat­ment of the min­ers, how could Shi have not known that the min­ers died of a SARS-like virus, and not a fun­gal infec­tion, as she told Scien­tif­ic Amer­i­can?

The virus Shi says she found in Mojiang was RaTG13. In a paper pub­lished on Feb­ru­ary 3, 2020, Shi announced that RaTG13 was 96 per­cent iden­ti­cal to the genom­ic sequence of the nov­el coro­n­avirus, even­tu­al­ly named SARS-CoV­‑2. [This was rough­ly a week after the genome of the virus was first pub­lished and the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army took over the man­age­ment of the WIV—D.E.]

Here’s anoth­er trou­bling incon­sis­ten­cy: Accord­ing to the Genome Sequence Archive, RaTG13 was “was extract­ed from bron­choalve­o­lar lavage flu­id,” which sug­gests that the virus was tak­en from a sick per­son, but RaTG13 is sup­pos­ed­ly an RNA sequence tak­en from a bat fecal swab.

Daszak has his own ver­sion of the sto­ry of the dis­cov­ery of RaTG13. Daszak claims they took the virus back to the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy and left it in a freez­er for sev­en years untouched. But, as Boston Mag­a­zine report­ed, this claim was dis­cov­ered to be untrue by “sci­en­tist turned detec­tive” Ali­na Chan, who fact-checked him on Twit­ter:

Even though that virus had killed three min­ers, Daszak said it wasn’t con­sid­ered a pri­or­i­ty to study at the time. “We were look­ing for SARS-relat­ed virus­es, and this one was 20 per­cent dif­fer­ent. We thought it was inter­est­ing, but not high risk. So we didn’t do any­thing about it and put it in the freez­er,” he told a reporter from Wired. It was only in 2020, he main­tained, that they start­ed look­ing into it once they real­ized its sim­i­lar­i­ty to COVID-19. But Chan point­ed to an online data­base show­ing that the WIV had been genet­i­cal­ly sequenc­ing the mine virus in 2017 and 2018, ana­lyz­ing it in a way they had done in the past with oth­er virus­es in prepa­ra­tion for run­ning exper­i­ments with them. Diplo­mat­ic yet dead­pan, she wrote, “I think Daszak was mis­in­formed.”. . .

Why the lies? Why won’t Shi and Daszak admit that WIV took sam­ples from the hos­pi­tal­ized min­ers for diag­no­sis and study, know­ing that the patients died from a SARS-like bat coro­n­avirus? Why do they deny that the bat coro­n­avirus most like SARS-CoV­‑2 was col­lect­ed in the mine where the work­ers were exposed? Why don’t they acknowl­edge that this is a virus that was active­ly sequenced, ana­lyzed and exper­i­ment­ed on, not one that had been for­got­ten in a freez­er for sev­en years?

Are they afraid to admit that the first SARS-like coro­n­avirus­es that use the ACE2 recep­tor was dis­cov­ered in humans in a hos­pi­tal, not bats in a cave?

Do they fear the public’s reac­tion to the idea of gain-of-func­tion researchers tak­ing advan­tage of the min­ers’ grue­some deaths to har­vest a pathogen unique­ly primed to infect human cells? . . . .

. . . . Who fund­ed the Kun­ming virus hunt?

In addi­tion to fund­ing from Chi­na and Aus­tralia, the Kun­ming virus hunt report­ed in “Iso­la­tion and Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of a Bat SARS-Like Coro­n­avirus that Uses the ACE2 Recep­tor,” was sup­port­ed by:

  • Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases (NIAID) award num­ber R01AI079231a $2.6‑million grant to Eco­Health Alliance for “Risk of Viral Emer­gence from Bats,” (2008–2013).
  • NIH and Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion (NSF) “Ecol­o­gy and Evo­lu­tion of Infec­tious Dis­eases” $3.7‑million award from the NIH Fog­a­r­ty Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter (R01TW005869to Eco­Health Alliance for “The Ecol­o­gy, Emer­gence and Pan­dem­ic Poten­tial of Nipah Virus in Bangladesh,” (2002–2013).
  • A $300,000 award from the NIH Fog­a­r­ty Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter sup­port­ed by Inter­na­tion­al Influen­za Funds from the Office of the Sec­re­tary of the Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices (R56TW009502to Eco­Health Alliance for “Com­par­a­tive Spillover Dynam­ics of Avian Influen­za in Endem­ic Coun­tries,” (2012–2017).
  • Unit­ed States Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment (USAID) Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic Threats PREDICT, amount unknown.

Who fund­ed Shi’s virus hunt­ing in Mojiang?

Shi’s paper, “Coex­is­tence of Mul­ti­ple Coro­n­avirus­es in Sev­er­al Bat Colonies in an Aban­doned Mine­shaft,” was writ­ten by a team of sci­en­tists who were all Chi­nese nation­als work­ing at Chi­nese insti­tu­tions. Nev­er­the­less, in addi­tion to fund­ing from the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, the authors acknowl­edged sup­port from the U.S. Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gies and Infec­tious Dis­ease (R01AI110964), a $3.7‑million grant to Eco­Health Alliance for “Under­stand­ing the Risk of Bat Coro­n­avirus Emer­gence,” (2014–2025).

Shi’s Pen­ta­gon fund­ing

Shi Zhengli and her col­lab­o­ra­tors are also fund­ed by the U.S. mil­i­tary. Peter Daszak’s Eco­Health Alliance cur­rent­ly receives more mon­ey from the Depart­ment of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA) for Sci­en­tif­ic Research Com­bat­ting Weapons of Mass Destruc­tion than any oth­er mil­i­tary contractor—$15 mil­lion (25.575 per­cent) of the $60.2 mil­lion dis­persed in the last 6 months.

A Google Schol­ar search pro­duced two papers Shi has pub­lished that lists DTRA as a fun­der.

To see how the first paper, “Com­par­a­tive Analy­sis of Bat Genomes Pro­vides Insight into the Evo­lu­tion of Flight and Immu­ni­ty,” is rel­e­vant to bio­log­i­cal weapon­ry, it helps to under­stand the military’s inter­est in bat immu­ni­ty.

As Boston Uni­ver­si­ty micro­bi­ol­o­gist Thomas Kepler explained to the Wash­ing­ton Post in 2018, the bat’s unique approach to viral infec­tion explains why virus­es that trans­fer from bats to humans are so severe.

This was the sub­ject of a paper, “The Egypt­ian Rousette Genome Reveals Unex­pect­ed Fea­tures of Bat Antivi­ral Immu­ni­ty,” that he pub­lished with mil­i­tary sci­en­tists and DTRA fund­ing.

“A virus that has co-evolved with the bat’s antivi­ral sys­tem is com­plete­ly out of its ele­ment in the human,” Kepler said. “That’s why it is so dead­ly — the human immune sys­tem is over­whelmed by the inflam­ma­to­ry response.”

The bat immune sys­tem responds very dif­fer­ent­ly from ours to viral infec­tion. Instead of attack­ing and killing an infect­ed cell, which leads to a cas­cade of inflam­ma­to­ry respons­es, the bat immune sys­tem can starve the virus by turn­ing down cel­lu­lar metab­o­lism.

The bat ori­gin of SARS-CoV­‑2 may explain the cytokine storms that are has­ten­ing some COVID-19 deaths. Accord­ing to Web­MD:

“Cer­tain kinds of cytokines trig­ger cell death. When you have many cells doing this at the same time, a lot of tis­sue can die. In COVID-19, that tis­sue is most­ly in the lung. As the tis­sue breaks down, the walls of the lungs’ tiny air sacs become leaky and fill with flu­id, caus­ing pneu­mo­nia and starv­ing the blood of oxy­gen.”

Kepler says the mil­i­tary is using its exper­i­ments on bat immu­ni­ty to “devel­op drugs that damp­en down inflam­ma­tion and arrest the virus by depriv­ing it of what it needs to grow rather than try­ing to kill it out­right.” But, it clear­ly has anoth­er objec­tive, as well: to make virus­es more dead­ly by “pas­sag­ing” them through bats.

With­out stricter enforce­ment of the Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion, it is impos­si­ble to pre­vent so-called “defen­sive” pro­grams from pro­duc­ing bio­log­i­cal weapons, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing the stealth and plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­i­ty with which bio­log­i­cal weapons can be used, and how vul­ner­a­ble labs are to acci­dents and “miss­ing” agents.

The reg­u­la­to­ry chal­lenges asso­ci­at­ed with try­ing to pre­vent defen­sive bio­log­i­cal weapons research from being used offen­sive­ly were high­light­ed recent­ly in India’s reac­tion to Shi’s oth­er DTRA fund­ed paper, “Filovirus-reac­tive anti­bod­ies in humans and bats in North­east India imply zoonot­ic spillover,” pub­lished in 2019.

The study alarmed the pub­lic by find­ing “the pres­ence of filovirus (e.g. ebolavirus, mar­burgvirus and dianlovirus) reac­tive anti­bod­ies in both human (e.g. bat hunters) and bat pop­u­la­tions in North­east India, a region with no his­tor­i­cal record of Ebo­la virus dis­ease.”

The Hin­du report­ed that for­eign enti­ties oper­at­ing the study should have been required to seek spe­cial per­mis­sion to access live sam­ples of bats and human bat hunters, but they did not do so. The Indi­an Coun­cil of Med­ical Research cre­at­ed a five-mem­ber com­mit­tee to inves­ti­gate.

In addi­tion to mil­i­tary fund­ing through DTRA, Shi’s paper was co-authored by two U.S. mil­i­tary sci­en­tists, Christo­pher C. Broder and Eric D. Laing of the Uni­formed Ser­vices Uni­ver­si­ty of the Health Sci­ences, Depart­ment of Micro­bi­ol­o­gy and Immunol­o­gy.

China’s People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army con­trols the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy

The Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy is China’s only biosafe­ty lev­el 4 lab. While it has always been under the con­trol of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, since Jan­u­ary 26, 2020, it has been under the com­mand of the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army, specif­i­cal­ly its top bio­log­i­cal-weapons spe­cial­ist, a major gen­er­al named Chen Wei. . . .

3.  An arti­cle in The Asia Times pro­vides more depth on the grow­ing media war between the U.S. and Chi­na.

Key points of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis:

  • Chi­na now open­ly views the U.S. as a threat: ” . . . . For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Bei­jing open­ly regards the U.S. as a threat, as stat­ed a month ago by For­eign Min­is­ter Wang Yi at the Munich Secu­ri­ty Con­fer­ence dur­ing the peak of the fight against coro­n­avirus. . . .”
  • Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping has dropped ver­bal clues as to the Chi­nese view of the ori­gin of the Covid-19: ” . . . . Bei­jing is care­ful­ly, incre­men­tal­ly shap­ing the nar­ra­tive that, from the begin­ning of the coro­n­avirus attack, the lead­er­ship knew it was under a hybrid war attack. The ter­mi­nol­o­gy of Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a ‘people’s war’ had to be launched. More­over, he described the virus as a demon or dev­il. Xi is a Con­fu­cian­ist. Unlike some oth­er ancient Chi­nese thinkers, Con­fu­cius was loath to dis­cuss super­nat­ur­al forces and judg­ment in the after­life. How­ev­er, in a Chi­nese cul­tur­al con­text, dev­il means ‘white dev­ils’ or ‘for­eign dev­ils’: guai­lo in Man­darin, gwei­lo in Can­tonese. This was Xi deliv­er­ing a pow­er­ful state­ment in code. . . .”
  • A Chi­nese For­eign Min­istry offi­cial cit­ed the Mil­i­tary World Games in Wuhan as a pos­si­ble vec­tor­ing point. (We believe this is pos­si­ble, although we sus­pect the Shin­cheon­ji cult and a USAMRIID asso­ci­a­tion with a Wuhan viro­log­i­cal insti­tute as oth­er pos­si­ble vec­tors.) IF, for the sake of argu­ment, fas­cist ele­ments (CIA, Under­ground Reich or what­ev­er) chose the US mil­i­tary ath­letes as a vec­tor, it would have been alto­geth­er pos­si­ble to do so with­out attract­ing atten­tion. Mil­i­tary ath­letes are in superb con­di­tion and, if infect­ed with one of the milder strains of Covid-19, their robust immune sys­tems might well leave them asymp­to­matic, yet still con­ta­gious, or mild­ly ill at worst. They could then com­mu­ni­cate the virus to oth­er mil­i­tary ath­letes, who would then serve as a vec­tor for oth­er coun­tries. ” . . . . Zhao’s explo­sive con­clu­sion is that COVID-19 was already in effect in the U.S. before being iden­ti­fied in Wuhan – due to the by now ful­ly doc­u­ment­ed inabil­i­ty of the U.S. to test and ver­i­fy dif­fer­ences com­pared with the flu. . . .”
  • Author Pepe Esco­bar reit­er­ates the con­tention that the vari­ants of the virus in Italy and Iran are dif­fer­ent from the vari­ants that infect­ed Wuhan, an inter­pre­ta­tion whose sig­nif­i­cance is debat­ed by sci­en­tists.
  • The arti­cle high­lights the shut­ter­ing of Ft. Det­rick, which has now been par­tial­ly re-opened. ” . . . . Adding all that to the fact that coro­n­avirus genome vari­a­tions in Iran and Italy were sequenced and it was revealed they do not belong to the vari­ety that infect­ed Wuhan, Chi­nese media are now open­ly  ask­ing ques­tions and draw­ing a con­nec­tion with the shut­ting down in August last year of the “unsafe” mil­i­tary bioweapon lab at Fort Det­rick, the Mil­i­tary Games, and the Wuhan epi­dem­ic. Some of these ques­tions had been asked– with no response – inside the U.S. itself. . . .”
  • Esco­bar also notes Event 201, which we high­light­ed in FTR #‘s 1111 and 1112: ” . . . . Extra ques­tions linger about the opaque Event 201 in New York on Octo­ber 18, 2019: a rehearsal for a world­wide pan­dem­ic caused by a dead­ly virus – which hap­pened to be coro­n­avirus. This mag­nif­i­cent coin­ci­dence hap­pened one month before the out­break in Wuhan. Event 201 was spon­sored by Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion, the World Eco­nom­ic Forum (WEF), the CIA, Bloomberg, John Hop­kins Foun­da­tion and the UN.  The World Mil­i­tary Games opened in Wuhan on the exact same day. . . .”
  • We note that, although we have not been able to con­clu­sive­ly prove that CIA was one of the spon­sors of the event, a for­mer Deputy Direc­tor of the Agency was a key par­tic­i­pant. Hav­ing reached such a lev­el of promi­nence with­in the agency, one nev­er “leaves” alto­geth­er. It is prob­a­ble that there was Agency par­tic­i­pa­tion.
  • Fur­ther dis­cus­sion notes the pos­si­ble use of a coro­n­avirus as part of a psy-op: ” . . . . The work­ing hypoth­e­sis of coro­n­avirus as a very pow­er­ful but not Armaged­don-pro­vok­ing bio-weapon unveils it as a per­fect vehi­cle for wide­spread social con­trol — on a glob­al scale. . . .”
  • Esco­bar alleges that Cuba has devel­oped an anti-viral that is promis­ing against the virus: ” . . . . The anti-viral Heberon – or Inter­fer­on Alpha 2b – a ther­a­peu­tic, not a vac­cine, has been used with great suc­cess in the treat­ment of coro­n­avirus. A joint ven­ture in Chi­na is pro­duc­ing an inhal­able ver­sion, and at least 15 nations are already inter­est­ed in import­ing the ther­a­peu­tic. . . .” 
  • Quot­ing Ital­ian ana­lyst San­dro Mez­zadra, Esco­bar notes the Covid-19 out­break as a social Dar­win­ian psy-op: ” . . . .We are fac­ing a choice between a Malthu­sian strand – inspired by social Dar­win­ism – ‘led by the John­son-Trump-Bol­sonaro axis’ and, on the oth­er side, a strand point­ing to the “requal­i­fi­ca­tion of pub­lic health as a fun­da­men­tal tool,’ exem­pli­fied by Chi­na, South Korea and Italy. There are key lessons to be learned from South Korea, Tai­wan and Sin­ga­pore. The stark option, Mez­zadra notes, is between a ‘nat­ur­al pop­u­la­tion selec­tion,’ with thou­sands of dead, and ‘defend­ing soci­ety’ by employ­ing ‘vari­able degrees of author­i­tar­i­an­ism and social con­trol.’ . . .”
  • Like many ana­lysts, Escobar–correctly in our opinion–notes that the Covid-19 out­break threat­ens the glob­al econ­o­my and may col­lapse the deriv­a­tive mar­ket. That this may be intend­ed to mask an over­val­ued equi­ties mar­ket seems prob­a­ble to us.

Chi­na Locked in Hybrid War with U.S.” by Pepe Esco­bar [Asia Times]Con­sor­tium News; 3/18/2020.

Among the myr­i­ad, earth-shat­ter­ing geopo­lit­i­cal effects of coro­n­avirus, one is already graph­i­cal­ly evi­dent. Chi­na has re-posi­tioned itself. For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Bei­jing open­ly regards the U.S. as a threat, as stat­ed a month ago by For­eign Min­is­ter Wang Yi at the Munich Secu­ri­ty Con­fer­ence dur­ing the peak of the fight against coro­n­avirus. 

Bei­jing is care­ful­ly, incre­men­tal­ly shap­ing the nar­ra­tive that, from the begin­ning of the coro­n­avirus attack, the lead­er­ship knew it was under a hybrid war attack. More­over, he described the virus as a demon or dev­il. Xi is a Con­fu­cian­ist. Unlike some oth­er ancient Chi­nese thinkers, Con­fu­cius was loath to dis­cuss super­nat­ur­al forces and judg­ment in the after­life. How­ev­er, in a Chi­nese cul­tur­al con­text, dev­il means “white dev­ils” or “for­eign dev­ils”: guai­lo in Man­darin, gwei­lo in Can­tonese. This was Xi deliv­er­ing a pow­er­ful state­ment in code.

When Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chi­nese For­eign Min­istry, voiced in an incan­des­cent tweet the pos­si­bil­i­ty that “it might be US Army who brought the epi­dem­ic to Wuhan” – the first blast to this effect to come from a top offi­cial – Bei­jing was send­ing up a tri­al bal­loon sig­nal­ing that the gloves were final­ly off. Zhao Lijian made a direct con­nec­tion with the Mil­i­tary Games in Wuhan in Octo­ber 2019, which includ­ed a del­e­ga­tion of 300 U.S. mil­i­tary.

He direct­ly quot­ed U.S. CDC Direc­tor Robert Red­field who, when asked last week whether some deaths by Coro­n­avirus had been dis­cov­ered posthu­mous­ly in the U.S., replied that “some cas­es have actu­al­ly been diag­nosed this way in the U.S. today.”

Zhao’s explo­sive con­clu­sion is that COVID-19 was already in effect in the U.S. before being iden­ti­fied in Wuhan – due to the by now ful­ly doc­u­ment­ed inabil­i­ty of the U.S. to test and ver­i­fy dif­fer­ences com­pared with the flu. 

Adding all that to the fact that coro­n­avirus genome vari­a­tions in Iran and Italy were sequenced and it was revealed they do not belong to the vari­ety that infect­ed

The ter­mi­nol­o­gy of Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a “people’s war” had to be launched. Wuhan, Chi­nese media are now open­ly  ask­ing ques­tions and draw­ing a con­nec­tion with the shut­ting down in August last year of the “unsafe” mil­i­tary bioweapon lab at Fort Det­rick, the Mil­i­tary Games, and the Wuhan epi­dem­ic. Some of these ques­tions had been asked– with no response – inside the U.S. itself.

Extra ques­tions linger about the opaque Event 201 in New York on Octo­ber 18, 2019: a rehearsal for a world­wide pan­dem­ic caused by a dead­ly virus – which hap­pened to be coro­n­avirus. This mag­nif­i­cent coin­ci­dence hap­pened one month before the out­break in Wuhan.

Event 201 was spon­sored by Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion, the World Eco­nom­ic Forum (WEF), the CIA, Bloomberg, John Hop­kins Foun­da­tion and the UN.  The World Mil­i­tary Games opened in Wuhan on the exact same day.

Irre­spec­tive of its ori­gin, which is still not con­clu­sive­ly estab­lished, as much as Trump tweets about the “Chi­nese virus,” COVID-19 already pos­es immense­ly seri­ous ques­tions about biopol­i­tics (where’s Fou­cault when we need him?) and bio-ter­ror.

The work­ing hypoth­e­sis of coro­n­avirus as a very pow­er­ful but not Armaged­don-pro­vok­ing bio-weapon unveils it as a per­fect vehi­cle for wide­spread social con­trol — on a glob­al scale.   

Cuba Ris­es as Biotech Pow­er

Just as a ful­ly masked Xi vis­it­ing the Wuhan front­line last week was a graph­ic demon­stra­tion to the whole plan­et that Chi­na, with immense sac­ri­fice, is win­ning the “people‘s war” against COVID-19, Rus­sia, in a Sun Tzu move on Riyadh whose end result was a much cheap­er bar­rel of oil, helped for all prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es to kick-start the inevitable recov­ery of the Chi­nese econ­o­my. This is how a strate­gic part­ner­ship works.

The chess­board is chang­ing at break­neck speed. Once Bei­jing iden­ti­fied coro­n­avirus as a bio-weapon attack the “people’s war” was launched with the full force of the state. Method­i­cal­ly. On a “what­ev­er it takes” basis. Now we are enter­ing a new stage, which will be used by Bei­jing to sub­stan­tial­ly recal­i­brate the inter­ac­tion with the West, and under very dif­fer­ent frame­works when it comes to the U.S. and the EU.

Soft pow­er is para­mount. Bei­jing sent an Air Chi­na flight to Italy car­ry­ing 2,300 big box­es full of masks bear­ing the script, “We are waves from the same sea, leaves from the same tree, flow­ers from the same gar­den.” Chi­na also sent a hefty human­i­tar­i­an pack­age to Iran, sig­nif­i­cant­ly aboard eight flights from Mahan Air — an air­line under ille­gal, uni­lat­er­al Trump admin­is­tra­tion sanc­tions. 

Ser­bian Pres­i­dent Alek­san­dar Vucic could not have been more explic­it: “The only coun­try that can help us is Chi­na. By now, you all under­stood that Euro­pean sol­i­dar­i­ty does not exist. That was a fairy tale on paper.” 

Under harsh sanc­tions and demo­nized since for­ev­er, Cuba is still able to per­form break­throughs – even on biotech­nol­o­gy. The anti-viral Heberon – or Inter­fer­on Alpha 2b – a ther­a­peu­tic, not a vac­cine, has been used with great suc­cess in the treat­ment of coro­n­avirus. A joint ven­ture in Chi­na is pro­duc­ing an inhal­able ver­sion, and at least 15 nations are already inter­est­ed in import­ing the ther­a­peu­tic.  

Now com­pare all of the above with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion offer­ing $1 bil­lion to poach Ger­man sci­en­tists work­ing at biotech firm Cure­vac, based in Thuringia, on an exper­i­men­tal vac­cine against COVID-19, to have it as a vac­cine “only for the Unit­ed States.”

Social Engi­neer­ing Psy-Op?

San­dro Mez­zadra, co-author with Brett Neil­son of the sem­i­nal “The Pol­i­tics of Oper­a­tions: Exca­vat­ing Con­tem­po­rary Cap­i­tal­ism,” is already try­ing to con­cep­tu­al­ize where we stand now in terms of fight­ing COVID-19.   

We are fac­ing a choice between a Malthu­sian strand – inspired by social Dar­win­ism – “led by the John­son-Trump-Bol­sonaro axis” and, on the oth­er side, a strand point­ing to the “requal­i­fi­ca­tion of pub­lic health as a fun­da­men­tal tool,” exem­pli­fied by Chi­na, South Korea and Italy. There are key lessons to be learned from South Korea, Tai­wan and Sin­ga­pore.

The stark option, Mez­zadra notes, is between a “nat­ur­al pop­u­la­tion selec­tion,” with thou­sands of dead, and “defend­ing soci­ety” by employ­ing “vari­able degrees of author­i­tar­i­an­ism and social con­trol.” It’s easy to imag­ine who stands to ben­e­fit from this social re-engi­neer­ing, a 21st cen­tu­ry remix of Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.”

Amid so much doom and gloom, count on Italy to offer us Tiepo­lo-style shades of light. Italy chose the Wuhan option, with immense­ly seri­ous con­se­quences for its already frag­ile econ­o­my. Quar­an­tined Ital­ians remark­ably react­ed by singing on their bal­conies: a true act of meta­phys­i­cal revolt. . . .

. . . . Not even tril­lions of dol­lars rain­ing from the sky by an act of divine Fed mer­cy were able to cure Covid-19. G‑7 “lead­ers” had to resort to a video­con­fer­ence to real­ize how clue­less they are – even as China’s fight against coro­n­avirus gave the West a head start of sev­er­al weeks.

Shang­hai-based Dr. Zhang Wen­hong, one of China’s top infec­tious dis­ease experts, whose analy­ses have been spot on so far, now says Chi­na has emerged from the dark­est days in the “people’s war” against Covid-19. But he does not think this will be over by sum­mer. Now extrap­o­late what he’s say­ing to the West­ern world.

It’s not even spring yet, and we already know it takes a virus to mer­ci­less­ly shat­ter the God­dess of the Mar­ket. Last Fri­day, Gold­man Sachs told no few­er than 1,500 cor­po­ra­tions that there was no sys­temic risk. That was false.

New York bank­ing sources told me the truth: sys­temic risk became way more severe in 2020 than in 1979, 1987 or 2008 because of the huge­ly height­ened dan­ger that the $1.5 quadrillion deriv­a­tive mar­ket would col­lapse.

As the sources put it, his­to­ry had nev­er before seen any­thing like the Fed’s inter­ven­tion via its lit­tle under­stood elim­i­na­tion of com­mer­cial bank reserve require­ments, unleash­ing a poten­tial unlim­it­ed expan­sion of cred­it to pre­vent a deriv­a­tive implo­sion stem­ming from a total com­mod­i­ty and stock mar­ket col­lapse of all stocks around the world.

Those bankers thought it would work, but as we know by now all the sound and fury sig­ni­fied noth­ing. The ghost of a deriv­a­tive implo­sion – in this case not caused by the pre­vi­ous pos­si­bil­i­ty, the shut­ting down of the Strait of Hor­muz – remains.

We are still bare­ly start­ing to under­stand the con­se­quences of Covid-19 for the future of neolib­er­al tur­bo-cap­i­tal­ism. What’s cer­tain is that the whole glob­al econ­o­my has been hit by an insid­i­ous, lit­er­al­ly invis­i­ble cir­cuit break­er. This may be just a “coin­ci­dence.” Or this may be, as some are bold­ly argu­ing, part of a pos­si­ble, mas­sive psy-op cre­at­ing the per­fect geopolitl­cal and social engi­neer­ing envi­ron­ment for full-spec­trum dom­i­nance.

Addi­tion­al­ly, along the hard slog down the road, with immense, inbuilt human and eco­nom­ic sac­ri­fice, with or with­out a reboot of the world-sys­tem, a more press­ing ques­tion remains: will impe­r­i­al elites still choose to keep wag­ing full-spec­trum-dom­i­nance hybrid war against Chi­na?  

4a. As not­ed by Pepe Esco­bar, Event 201–which began on the same day as the Mil­i­tary World Games in Wuhan–helped to set the PR tem­plate for Covid-19.

Avril Haines (see below) was a key par­tic­i­pant in the event.

“Event 201 Play­ers: Avril Haines;” centerforhealthsecurity.org

Avril Haines is a Senior Research Schol­ar at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty; a Senior Fel­low at the Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty Applied Physics Lab­o­ra­to­ry; a mem­ber of the Nation­al Com­mis­sion on Mil­i­tary, Nation­al, and Pub­lic Ser­vice; and a prin­ci­pal at Wes­t­Ex­ec Advi­sors.

Dur­ing the last admin­is­tra­tion, Dr. Haines served as Assis­tant to the Pres­i­dent and Prin­ci­pal Deputy Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advi­sor. She also served as the Deputy Direc­tor of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and Legal Advis­er to the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil.

Dr. Haines received her bachelor’s degree in physics from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go and a law degree from George­town Uni­ver­si­ty Law Cen­ter. She serves on a num­ber of boards and advi­so­ry groups, includ­ing the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Bio Advi­so­ry Group, the Board of Trustees for the Voda­fone Foun­da­tion, and the Refugees Inter­na­tion­al Advi­so­ry Coun­cil.

4b. A key par­tic­i­pant in Even 201, for­mer Deputy CIA Direc­tor Avril Haines is Biden’s direc­tor of nation­al intel­li­gence.

“Intel­li­gence Chief Picks a For­mer Bush Aide to Lead Brief­in­gs for Biden” by Julian E. Barnes and Adam Gold­man;” The New York Times; 1/30/2021; p. A17 [West­ern Print Edi­tion].

 The new direc­tor of nation­al intel­li­gence [Avril Haines] has been reshap­ing the office, installing a new offi­cial to lead Pres­i­dent Biden’s dai­ly brief­in­gs by tap­ping a vet­er­an of the last Bush admin­is­tra­tion, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer gov­ern­ment offi­cials. . . .

5. Peter Daszak voiced the (self-ful­fill­ing?) opinion/prophecy that Covid-19 is indeed “Dis­ease X.”

The cog­ni­tive tem­plate for Covid-19 was par­tial­ly set by Peter Daszak, who has wide­ly dis­sem­i­nat­ed the sup­po­si­tion that “Dis­ease X” would over­take the world.

It is our view that the efforts of Daszak, the Event 201 play­ers and oth­ers could be com­pared to the pro­pa­gan­diz­ing that ele­ments of the WACCFL and the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, as well as ele­ments of the U.S. far right did in the run-up to the JFK assas­si­na­tion.

That pro­pa­gan­diz­ing was a key ele­ment in the “Paint­ing of Oswald Red.”

“We Knew Dis­ease X Was Com­ing. It’s Here Now.” by Peter Daszak; The New York Times; 02/27/2020

In ear­ly 2018, dur­ing a meet­ing at the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion in Gene­va, a group of experts I belong to (the R&D Blue­print) coined the term “Dis­ease X”: We were refer­ring to the next pan­dem­ic, which would be caused by an unknown, nov­el pathogen that hadn’t yet entered the human pop­u­la­tion. As the world stands today on the edge of the pan­dem­ic precipice, it’s worth tak­ing a moment to con­sid­er whether Covid-19 is the dis­ease our group was warn­ing about.

Dis­ease X, we said back then, would like­ly result from a virus orig­i­nat­ing in ani­mals and would emerge some­where on the plan­et where eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment dri­ves peo­ple and wildlife togeth­er. Dis­ease X would prob­a­bly be con­fused with oth­er dis­eases ear­ly in the out­break and would spread quick­ly and silent­ly; exploit­ing net­works of human trav­el and trade, it would reach mul­ti­ple coun­tries and thwart con­tain­ment. Dis­ease X would have a mor­tal­i­ty rate high­er than a sea­son­al flu but would spread as eas­i­ly as the flu. It would shake finan­cial mar­kets even before it achieved pan­dem­ic sta­tus.

In a nut­shell, Covid-19 is Dis­ease X. . . .

6.  We present an obvi­ous­ly speculative–but very important–element of dis­cus­sion.

In FTR #‘s 1157, 1158, 1159, 1170, 1183 and 1184 we exam­ined Peter Dasza­k’s Eco­Health Alliance, which looks dis­turbing­ly like a bio­log­i­cal war­fare front. (Dasza­k’s last name is pro­nounced “Daysh-ak,” BTW.)

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.

We have learned that Daszak is of Ukrain­ian her­itage, with his father Bohdan hav­ing (appar­ent­ly) been born in Ukraine and being 19 years old in 1945.

Par­ents — Father is Bohdan Daszak (born March 21, 1926)

Moth­er’s maid­en name was “Wal­ton” — [HL0043][GDrive] , born in Eng­land (Ash­ton dis­trict)

Sib­lings — John Daszak”

We won­der if Daszak, Sr. might be part of the OUN/B dias­po­ra which we have cov­ered exten­sive­ly, and which is at the foun­da­tion of a glob­al res­ur­rec­tion of fas­cism?

Discussion

One comment for “FTR#1185 Harvest Time, Part 4: The Oswald Institute of Virology, Part 4”

  1. Some good COVID-relat­ed news was just released by a research team in Tel Aviv: a drug test­ed on 90 seri­ous coro­n­avirus patients found 93% of them were dis­charged from the hos­pi­tal in five days or few­er. It’s the kind of promis­ing results we’ve been hop­ing to see from remde­sivir but nev­er real­ly panned out. Even bet­ter, this new drug, CD24, appears to have few side-effects, in part because it’s lit­er­al­ly a nat­ur­al part of the immune sys­tem. Specif­i­cal­ly, it’s the part of the immune involved with reg­u­lat­ing cytokine storms. And as we’ve seen, it’s the induc­tion of cytokine storms that makes SARS-CoV­‑2 such a dead­ly virus in humans. This may be due to the bat-borne nature of the virus­es, where bat immune sys­tems have evolved an approach to deal­ing with coro­n­avirus­es focused on starv­ing the virus meta­bol­i­cal­ly. Humans immune sys­tems don’t respond the same way, so when these bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es enter a human body they are oper­at­ing in a very dif­fer­ent kind of immuno­log­i­cal envi­ron­ment that makes the induc­tion of a cytokine storm far more like­ly. This new drug appears to blunt that process. So this new ther­a­peu­tic approach to treat­ing COVID19 involves giv­ing the body more of a sub­stance it nat­u­ral­ly pro­duces to reg­u­late the immune sys­tem.

    Inter­est­ing­ly, the drug deliv­ery mech­a­nism has some par­al­lels to the new mRNA-based vac­cines. CD24 is deliv­ered in exo­somes, lit­tle lipid bub­bles used by bio­log­i­cal sys­tems to shut­tle com­pounds between cells. So the lipid nanopar­ti­cles used as the deliv­ery vehi­cles in the new mRNA vac­cines or kind of like arti­fi­cial exo­somes. It’s anoth­er exam­ple of the pow­er­ful util­i­ty of this approach to med­i­cine, as well as a reminder of the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try’s incred­i­ble incen­tives to ensure this kind of tech­nol­o­gy is even­tu­al­ly giv­en the green light from reg­u­la­tors for wider use.

    Final­ly, it’s worth not­ing one of the fea­tures about this new drug that the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try will be decid­ed not pleased about: it’s cheap. So it’s effec­tive and cheap, mak­ing it the oppo­site of remde­sivir. The researchers are vow­ing that, if the pos­i­tive results from the lat­est tri­al is con­firmed, it’s going to be avail­able rel­a­tive­ly quick­ly and at low cost. The promise of effec­tive and cheap med­i­cine. Good luck with that:

    The Jerusalem Post

    COVID: 90% of patients treat­ed with new Israeli drug dis­charged in 5 days

    The Phase II tri­al for an Israeli COVID drug saw some 29 out of 30 patients, mod­er­ate to seri­ous, recov­er with­in days.

    By ROSSELLA TERCATIN
    AUGUST 5, 2021 22:24

    Some 93% of 90 coro­n­avirus seri­ous patients treat­ed in sev­er­al Greek hos­pi­tals with a new drug devel­oped by a team at Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Med­ical Cen­ter as part of the Phase II tri­al of the treat­ment were dis­charged in five days or few­er.

    The Phase II tri­al con­firmed the results of Phase I, which was con­duct­ed in Israel last win­ter and saw 29 out of 30 patients in mod­er­ate to seri­ous con­di­tion recov­er with­in days.

    “The main goal of this study was to ver­i­fy that the drug is safe,” Prof. Nadir Arber said. “To this day we have not reg­is­tered any sig­nif­i­cant side effect in any patient from both groups.”

    The tri­al was con­duct­ed in Athens because Israel did not have enough rel­e­vant patients. The prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tor was Greece’s coro­n­avirus com­mis­sion­er, Prof. Sotiris Tsio­dras.

    Arber and his team, includ­ing Dr. Shi­ran Shapi­ra, devel­oped the drug based on a mol­e­cule that the pro­fes­sor has been study­ing for 25 years called CD24, which is nat­u­ral­ly present in the body.

    “It is impor­tant to remem­ber that 19 out of 20 COVID-19 patients do not need any ther­a­py,” Arber said. “After a win­dow of five to 12 days, some 5% of the patients start to dete­ri­o­rate.”

    The main cause of the clin­i­cal dete­ri­o­ra­tion is an over acti­va­tion of the immune sys­tem, also known as a cytokine storm. In case of COVID-19 patients, the sys­tem starts attack­ing healthy cells in the lungs.

    “This is exact­ly the prob­lem that our drug tar­gets,” he said.

    CD24 is a small pro­tein that is anchored to the mem­brane of the cells and it serves many func­tions includ­ing reg­u­lat­ing the mech­a­nism respon­si­ble for the cytokine storm.

    Arber stressed that their treat­ment, EXO-CD24, does not affect the immune sys­tem as a whole, but only tar­gets this spe­cif­ic mech­a­nism, help­ing find again its cor­rect bal­ance.

    “This is pre­ci­sion med­i­cine,” he said. “We are very hap­py that we have found a tool to tack­le the phys­i­ol­o­gy of the dis­ease.”

    “Steroids for exam­ple shut down the entire immune sys­tem,” he fur­ther explained. “We are bal­anc­ing the part respon­si­ble for the cytokine storms using the endoge­nous mech­a­nism of the body, mean­ing tools offered by the body itself.”

    Arber not­ed that anoth­er break­through ele­ment of this treat­ment is its deliv­ery.

    “We are employ­ing exo­somes, very small vesi­cles derived from the mem­brane of the cells which are respon­si­ble for the exchange of infor­ma­tion between them,” he said.

    “By man­ag­ing to deliv­er them exact­ly where they are need­ed, we avoid many side effects,” he added.

    The team is now ready to launch the last phase of the study.

    “As promis­ing as the find­ings of the first phas­es of a treat­ment can be, no one can be sure of any­thing until results are com­pared to the ones of patients who receive a place­bo,” he said.

    Some 155 coro­n­avirus patients will take part in the study. Two-thirds of them will be admin­is­tered the drug, and one-third a place­bo.

    ...

    “We hope to com­plete it by the end of the year,” Arber said.

    If the results are con­firmed, he vowed that the treat­ment can be made avail­able rel­a­tive­ly quick­ly and at a low cost.

    “In addi­tion, a suc­cess could pave the wave to treat many oth­er dis­eases,” he con­clud­ed.

    ————-

    “COVID: 90% of patients treat­ed with new Israeli drug dis­charged in 5 days” by ROSSELLA TERCATIN; Jerusalem Post; 08/05/2021

    ““Steroids for exam­ple shut down the entire immune sys­tem,” he fur­ther explained. “We are bal­anc­ing the part respon­si­ble for the cytokine storms using the endoge­nous mech­a­nism of the body, mean­ing tools offered by the body itself.”

    A rebal­anc­ing of an immune sys­tem thrown out of whack. That’s how they’re describ­ing the approach to this ther­a­py. It’s not a focus on killing the virus. It’s a focus on ensur­ing the virus does­n’t con­vince the immune sys­tem to kill the host with a lethal cytokine storm:

    ...
    The main cause of the clin­i­cal dete­ri­o­ra­tion is an over acti­va­tion of the immune sys­tem, also known as a cytokine storm. In case of COVID-19 patients, the sys­tem starts attack­ing healthy cells in the lungs.

    “This is exact­ly the prob­lem that our drug tar­gets,” he said.

    CD24 is a small pro­tein that is anchored to the mem­brane of the cells and it serves many func­tions includ­ing reg­u­lat­ing the mech­a­nism respon­si­ble for the cytokine storm.

    Arber stressed that their treat­ment, EXO-CD24, does not affect the immune sys­tem as a whole, but only tar­gets this spe­cif­ic mech­a­nism, help­ing find again its cor­rect bal­ance.

    “This is pre­ci­sion med­i­cine,” he said. “We are very hap­py that we have found a tool to tack­le the phys­i­ol­o­gy of the dis­ease.”
    ...

    And note that, as with the mRNA vac­cines, this new ther­a­peu­tic approach of using exoge­nous exo­somes as the deliv­er the CD24 drug, if proven suc­cess­ful, could be applied to all sorts of oth­er ther­a­pies. This real­ly is poten­tial­ly a very big deal beyond treat­ments for SARS-CoV­‑2. Exo­some-based ther­a­peu­tics, like mRNA-based ther­a­peu­tics, is an area of med­i­cine that’s just get­ting start­ed with immense future poten­tial:

    ...
    Arber not­ed that anoth­er break­through ele­ment of this treat­ment is its deliv­ery.

    “We are employ­ing exo­somes, very small vesi­cles derived from the mem­brane of the cells which are respon­si­ble for the exchange of infor­ma­tion between them,” he said.

    “By man­ag­ing to deliv­er them exact­ly where they are need­ed, we avoid many side effects,” he added.
    ...

    Final­ly, note the promise of low cost COVID ther­a­peu­tics if the next phase of their study proves suc­cess­ful. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how low those costs ulti­mate­ly get giv­en the high cost of its less-effec­tive com­peti­tor, remde­sivir. And how long it takes for the drug to actu­al­ly get approved in places like the US where remde­sivir has received favored gov­ern­ment treat­ment:

    ...
    The team is now ready to launch the last phase of the study.

    ...

    “We hope to com­plete it by the end of the year,” Arber said.

    If the results are con­firmed, he vowed that the treat­ment can be made avail­able rel­a­tive­ly quick­ly and at a low cost.

    “In addi­tion, a suc­cess could pave the wave to treat many oth­er dis­eases,” he con­clud­ed.
    ...

    This is prob­a­bly a good time to recall the sto­ry of Oya‑1, the well-stud­ied drug that showed immense promise as a safe, effec­tive, and cheap anti-viral. It nev­er received FDA approval for rapid tri­als and remains lan­guish­ing in some sort of drug devel­op­ment lim­bo. We’ll see what kind of fate EXO-CD24 has, but it’s hard to avoid being skep­ti­cal that we’re on the verge of see­ing cheap and effec­tive COVID ther­a­peu­tics. But if EXO-CD24 ends up being expen­sive and effec­tive that will still be a dra­mat­ic improve­ment.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 6, 2021, 3:01 pm

Post a comment