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FTR #1189 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: This program continues our series analyzing the Wuhan Institute of Virology as having been set up to take the fall for the Covid-19 pandemic, which–in our considered opinion–is a covert operation by the U.S. as part of the full-court press against China.
Underscoring a point of analysis from previous broadcasts, we note that, of paramount importance in this context, is the fact that ANY virus can be made in a laboratory, from scratch as is being done for the SARS-CoV‑2 (Covid-19) virus.
Ralph Baric–who did the gain-of-function modification on the Horseshoe Bat coronavirus, has been selected to engineer the Covid-19.
Note what might be termed a “virologic Jurassic Park” manifestation: ” . . . . The technology immediately created bio-weapon worries. . . . Researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) drove that point home in 2005 when they resurrected the influenza virus that killed tens of millions in 1918–1919. . . .”
Central to the inquiry about a laboratory genesis for the virus is Ralph Baric. We note that:
- Baric’s modification of a horseshoe bat virus to make it more infectious (in collaboration with Shi Zhengli and in an EcoHealth Alliance affiliated project) took place in North Carolina, not Wuhan. “. . . . Critics have jumped on this paper as evidence that Shi was conducting “gain of function” experiments that could have created a superbug, but Shi denies it. The research cited in the paper was conducted in North Carolina.
- Baric has been using related techniques to text remdesivir (in 2017) and the Moderna vaccine. This places him in a milieu inextricably linked to the military and pre-dating the pandemic. ” . . . . Using a similar technique, in 2017, Baric’s lab showed that remdesivir — currently the only licensed drug for treating covid — could be useful in fighting coronavirus infections. Baric also helped test the Moderna covid vaccine and a leading new drug candidate against covid. . . .”
Next, we present analysis of a very important, albeit slanted Vanity Fair article:
- Pompeo State Department officials pursuing the lab-leak hypothesis were told to cover it up lest it shed light on U.S. government funding of research at the “Oswald Institute of Virology!”: ” . . . . In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it. . . . . In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that. . . staff from two bureaus . . . “warned” leaders within his bureau ‘not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19’ because it would ‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.’ . . . . As the group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a ‘Pandora’s box,’ said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. . . .”
- Setting the orthodoxy in early 2020 with a Lancet article ruling out a laboratory origin for the virus was Peter Daszak, with approval from Ralph Baric: ” . . . . It soon emerged, based on emails obtained by a Freedom of Information group called U.S. Right to Know, that Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity. . . .”
- ” . . . . In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. . . . ”
- Matthew Pottinger, a China hawk in the Trump administration, headed up a team to investigate the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis. Note that the gain-of-function milieu in the U.S. national security establishment was a retarding factor in the inquiry: ” . . . . By then, Matthew Pottinger had approved a COVID-19 origins team, run by the NSC directorate that oversaw issues related to weapons of mass destruction. A longtime Asia expert and former journalist, Pottinger purposefully kept the team small . . . . In addition, many leading experts had either received or approved funding for gain-of-function research. Their ‘conflicted’ status, said Pottinger, ‘played a profound role in muddying the waters and contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.’ . . . .”
- Note that Lawrence Livermore scientists were involved with the genesis of the “China did it” hypothesis, after allegedly being alerted by a foreign source to look into their own files. ” . . . . An intelligence analyst working with David Asher sifted through classified channels and turned up a report that outlined why the lab-leak hypothesis was plausible. It had been written in May by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which performs national security research for the Department of Energy. But it appeared to have been buried within the classified collections system. . . .”
- Note, also, that Chris Ford, a China hawk, was working to suppress the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis: ” . . . . Their frustration crested in December, when they finally briefed Chris Ford, acting undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security. He seemed so hostile to their probe that they viewed him as a blinkered functionary bent on whitewashing China’s malfeasance. But Ford, who had years of experience in nuclear nonproliferation, had long been a China hawk. . . .”
- The “China did it/Wuhan lab leak” hypothesis survived from the Trump administration and Mike Pompeo’s State Department to the Biden administration: ” . . . . The statement withstood ‘aggressive suspicion,’ as one former State Department official said, and the Biden administration has not walked it back. ‘I was very pleased to see Pompeo’s statement come through,’ said Chris Ford, who personally signed off on a draft of the fact sheet before leaving the State Department. ‘I was so relieved that they were using real reporting that had been vetted and cleared.’ . . . .”
- Avril Haines, whom we have cited in this series as a key participant in the Deep State shepherding of the “Lab-Leak Hypothesis,” looms large in the inquiry into the perpetuation of this propaganda meme: ” . . . . Inside the U.S. government, meanwhile, the lab-leak hypothesis had survived the transition from Trump to Biden. On April 15, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the House Intelligence Committee that two ‘plausible theories’ were being weighed: a lab accident or natural emergence. . . .”
- The article concludes with the interesting use of the term “cut-out” to describe the EcoHealth Alliance. The term generally refers to an intelligence-community front organization. Is the author hinting at more? Did her editor take information out? ” . . . . The United States deserves a healthy share of blame as well. Thanks to their unprecedented track record of mendacity and race-baiting, Trump and his allies had less than zero credibility. And the practice of funding risky research via cutouts like EcoHealth Alliance enmeshed leading virologists in conflicts of interest at the exact moment their expertise was most desperately needed. . . .”
We conclude with two important points from an article used earlier in the program.
- Shi Zhengli has noted that opening up the WIV’s records is unacceptable: ” . . . . That demand is ‘definitely not acceptable,’ responded Shi Zhengli, who directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute. ‘Who can provide evidence that does not exist?’ she told MIT Technology Review. Shi has said that thousands of attempts to hack its computer systems forced the institute to close its database. . . .”
- The U.S. would not be acceptable to such a proposition, if the Chinese demanded access to Ft. Detrick (part of which was shut down by the CDC in early August of 2019 on the eve of the pandemic). A commenter also noted the Rocky Mountain lab in his analysis, which we noted was one of the areas where Willy Burgdorfer appears to have worked on the development of Lyme Disease.) ” . . . . If a disease had emerged from the U.S. and the Chinese blamed the Pentagon and demanded access to the data, ‘what would we say?’ [Dr. Gerald] Keusch asked. ‘Would we throw out the red carpet, ‘Come on over to Fort Detrick and the Rocky Mountain Lab?’ We’d have done exactly what the Chinese did, which is say, ‘Screw you!’’ . . . .”
1a. Underscoring a point of analysis from previous broadcasts, we note that, of paramount importance in this context, is the fact that ANY virus can be made in a laboratory, from scratch as is being done for the SARS-CoV‑2 (Covid-19) virus.
Ralph Baric–who did the gain-of-function modification on the Horseshoe Bat coronavirus, has been selected to engineer the Covid-19.
Note what might be termed a “virologic Jurassic Park” manifestation: ” . . . . The technology immediately created bio-weapon worries. . . . Researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) drove that point home in 2005 when they resurrected the influenza virus that killed tens of millions in 1918–1919. . . .”
The world is watching with alarm as China struggles to contain a dangerous new virus, now being called SARS-CoV‑2. It has quarantined entire cities, and the US has put a blanket ban on travellers who’ve been there. Health officials are scrambling to understand how the virus is transmitted and how to treat patients.
But in one University of North Carolina lab, there’s a different race. Researchers are trying to create a copy of the virus. From scratch.
Led by Ralph Baric, an expert in coronaviruses—which get their name from the crown-shaped spike they use to enter human cells—the North Carolina team expects to recreate the virus starting only from computer readouts of its genetic sequence posted online by Chinese labs last month.
The remarkable ability to “boot up” viruses from genetic instructions is made possible by companies that manufacture custom DNA molecules, such as Integrated DNA Technology, Twist Bioscience, and Atum. By ordering the right genes, which cost a few thousand dollars, and then stitching them together to create a copy of the coronavirus genome, it’s possible to inject the genetic material into cells and jump-start the virus to life.
The ability to make a lethal virus from mail-order DNA was first demonstrated 20 years ago. It’s enough of a bioterrorism concern that companies carefully monitor who is ordering which genes. . . . The technology immediately created bio-weapon worries. . . . Researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) drove that point home in 2005 when they resurrected the influenza virus that killed tens of millions in 1918–1919. . . .”
1b. Central to the inquiry about a laboratory genesis for the virus is Ralph Baric. We note that:
- Baric’s modification of a horseshoe bat virus to make it more infectious (in collaboration with Shi Zhengli and in an EcoHealth Alliance affiliated project) took place in North Carolina, not Wuhan. “. . . . Critics have jumped on this paper as evidence that Shi was conducting “gain of function” experiments that could have created a superbug, but Shi denies it. The research cited in the paper was conducted in North Carolina. . . .”
- Baric has been using related techniques to text remdesivir (in 2017) and the Moderna vaccine. This places him in a milieu inextricably linked to the military and pre-dating the pandemic. ” . . . . Using a similar technique, in 2017, Baric’s lab showed that remdesivir — currently the only licensed drug for treating covid — could be useful in fighting coronavirus infections. Baric also helped test the Moderna covid vaccine and a leading new drug candidate against covid. . . .”
. . . . Critics have jumped on this paper as evidence that Shi was conducting “gain of function” experiments that could have created a superbug, but Shi denies it. The research cited in the paper was conducted in North Carolina.
Using a similar technique, in 2017, Baric’s lab showed that remdesivir — currently the only licensed drug for treating covid — could be useful in fighting coronavirus infections. Baric also helped test the Moderna covid vaccine and a leading new drug candidate against covid.
Research into covid-like viruses is vital, Baric said. “A terrible truth,” he said, “is that millions of coronaviruses exist in animal reservoirs, like bats, and unfortunately many appear poised for rapid transmission between species.”
Baric told KHN he does not believe covid resulted from gain-of-function research. But he signed the Science letter calling for a more thorough investigation of his Chinese colleagues’ laboratory, he said in an email, because while he “personally believe[s] in the natural origin hypothesis,” WHO should arrange for a rigorous, open investigation. . . .
. . . . The more than $50 million EcoHealth Alliance had received in U.S. funding since 2007 includes contracts and grants from two NIH institutes, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as Pentagon funds to look for organisms that could be fashioned into bioterror weapons. . . .
. . . . Scaling the Wall of Secrecy
U.S.-China tensions will make it very difficult to conclude any such study, scientists on both sides of the issue suggest. With their anti-China rhetoric, Trump and his aides “could not have made it more difficult to get cooperation,” said Dr. Gerald Keusch, associate director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory Institute at Boston University. If a disease had emerged from the U.S. and the Chinese blamed the Pentagon and demanded access to the data, “what would we say?” Keusch asked. “Would we throw out the red carpet, ‘Come on over to Fort Detrick and the Rocky Mountain Lab?’ We’d have done exactly what the Chinese did, which is say, ‘Screw you!’”
3. Next, we present analysis of a very important, albeit slanted Vanity Fair article:
- Pompeo State Department officials pursuing the lab-leak hypothesis were told to cover it up lest it shed light on U.S. government funding of research at the “Oswald Institute of Virology!”: ” . . . . In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it. . . . . In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that. . . staff from two bureaus . . . “warned” leaders within his bureau ‘not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19’ because it would ‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.’ . . . . As the group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a ‘Pandora’s box,’ said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. . . .”
- Setting the orthodoxy in early 2020 with a Lancet article ruling out a laboratory origin for the virus was Peter Daszak, with approval from Ralph Baric: ” . . . . It soon emerged, based on emails obtained by a Freedom of Information group called U.S. Right to Know, that Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity. . . .”
- ” . . . . In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. . . . ”
- Matthew Pottinger, a China hawk in the Trump administration, headed up a team to investigate the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis. Note that the gain-of-function milieu in the U.S. national security establishment was a retarding factor in the inquiry: ” . . . . By then, Matthew Pottinger had approved a COVID-19 origins team, run by the NSC directorate that oversaw issues related to weapons of mass destruction. A longtime Asia expert and former journalist, Pottinger purposefully kept the team small . . . . In addition, many leading experts had either received or approved funding for gain-of-function research. Their ‘conflicted’ status, said Pottinger, ‘played a profound role in muddying the waters and contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.’ . . . .”
- Note that Lawrence Livermore scientists were involved with the genesis of the “China did it” hypothesis, after allegedly being alerted by a foreign source to look into their own files. ” . . . . An intelligence analyst working with David Asher sifted through classified channels and turned up a report that outlined why the lab-leak hypothesis was plausible. It had been written in May by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which performs national security research for the Department of Energy. But it appeared to have been buried within the classified collections system. . . .”
- Note, also, that Chris Ford, a China hawk, was working to suppress the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis: ” . . . . Their frustration crested in December, when they finally briefed Chris Ford, acting undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security. He seemed so hostile to their probe that they viewed him as a blinkered functionary bent on whitewashing China’s malfeasance. But Ford, who had years of experience in nuclear nonproliferation, had long been a China hawk. . . .”
- The “China did it/Wuhan lab leak” hypothesis survived from the Trump administration and Mike Pompeo’s State Department to the Biden administration: ” . . . .. . . . The statement withstood ‘aggressive suspicion,’ as one former State Department official said, and the Biden administration has not walked it back. ‘I was very pleased to see Pompeo’s statement come through,’ said Chris Ford, who personally signed off on a draft of the fact sheet before leaving the State Department. ‘I was so relieved that they were using real reporting that had been vetted and cleared.’ . . . .”
- Avril Haines, whom we have cited in this series as a key participant in the Deep State shepherding of the “Lab-Leak Hypothesis,” looms large in the inquiry into the perpetuation of this propaganda meme: ” . . . . Inside the U.S. government, meanwhile, the lab-leak hypothesis had survived the transition from Trump to Biden. On April 15, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the House Intelligence Committee that two ‘plausible theories’ were being weighed: a lab accident or natural emergence. . . .”
- The article concludes with the interesting use of the term “cut-out” to describe the EcoHealth Alliance. The term generally refers to an intelligence-community front organization. Is the author hinting at more? Did her editor take information out? ” . . . . The United States deserves a healthy share of blame as well. Thanks to their unprecedented track record of mendacity and race-baiting, Trump and his allies had less than zero credibility. And the practice of funding risky research via cutouts like EcoHealth Alliance enmeshed leading virologists in conflicts of interest at the exact moment their expertise was most desperately needed. . . .”
. . . . At times, it seemed the only other people entertaining the lab-leak theory were crackpots or political hacks hoping to wield COVID-19 as a cudgel against China. President Donald Trump’s former political adviser Steve Bannon, for instance, joined forces with an exiled Chinese billionaire named Guo Wengui to fuel claims that China had developed the disease as a bioweapon and purposefully unleashed it on the world. As proof, they paraded a Hong Kong scientist around right-wing media outlets until her manifest lack of expertise doomed the charade. . . .
. . . . On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.” . . . .
. . . . It soon emerged, based on emails obtained by a Freedom of Information group called U.S. Right to Know, that Daszak had not only signed but organized the influential Lancet statement, with the intention of concealing his role and creating the impression of scientific unanimity.
Under the subject line, “No need for you to sign the “Statement” Ralph!!,” he wrote to two scientists, including UNC’s Dr. Ralph Baric, who had collaborated with Shi Zhengli on the gain-of-function study that created a coronavirus capable of infecting human cells: “you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” Daszak added, “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.”
Baric agreed, writing back, “Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.” . . . .
. . . . A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step.In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.
In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.” . . . .
. . . . But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. . . .
. . . . In the words of David Feith, former deputy assistant secretary of state in the East Asia bureau, “The story of why parts of the U.S. government were not as curious as many of us think they should have been is a hugely important one.” . . . .
. . . . By then, Matthew Pottinger had approved a COVID-19 origins team, run by the NSC directorate that oversaw issues related to weapons of mass destruction. A longtime Asia expert and former journalist, Pottinger purposefully kept the team small, because there were so many people within the government “wholly discounting the possibility of a lab leak, who were predisposed that it was impossible,” said Pottinger. In addition, many leading experts had either received or approved funding for gain-of-function research. Their “conflicted” status, said Pottinger, “played a profound role in muddying the waters and contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.” . . . .
. . . . Believing they had uncovered important evidence in favor of the lab-leak hypothesis, the NSC investigators began reaching out to other agencies. That’s when the hammer came down. “We were dismissed,” said Anthony Ruggiero, the NSC’s senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense. “The response was very negative.” . . . .
. . . . By the summer of 2020, Gilles Demaneuf was spending up to four hours a day researching the origins of COVID-19, joining Zoom meetings before dawn with European collaborators and not sleeping much. He began to receive anonymous calls and notice strange activity on his computer, which he attributed to Chinese government surveillance. “We are being monitored for sure,” he says. He moved his work to the encrypted platforms Signal and ProtonMail. . . .
. . . . As officials at the meeting discussed what they could share with the public, they were advised by Christopher Park, the director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government’s own role in gain-of-function research, according to documentation of the meeting obtained by Vanity Fair.
Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” Dr. Richard Ebright said. “It’s three places.”
Some of the attendees were “absolutely floored,” said an official familiar with the proceedings. That someone in the U.S. government could “make an argument that is so nakedly against transparency, in light of the unfolding catastrophe, was…shocking and disturbing.”
Park, who in 2017 had been involved in lifting a U.S. government moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research, was not the only official to warn the State Department investigators against digging in sensitive places. As the group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box,” said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. The admonitions “smelled like a cover-up,” said Thomas DiNanno, “and I wasn’t going to be part of it.” . . . .
. . . . In the first year of the Trump administration, the moratorium was lifted and replaced with a review system called the HHS P3CO Framework (for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight). It put the onus for ensuring the safety of any such research on the federal department or agency funding it. This left the review process shrouded in secrecy. “The names of reviewers are not released, and the details of the experiments to be considered are largely secret,” said the Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Marc Lipsitch, whose advocacy against gain-of-function research helped prompt the moratorium. (An NIH spokesperson told Vanity Fair that “information about individual unfunded applications is not public to preserve confidentiality and protect sensitive information, preliminary data, and intellectual property.”)
Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.” . . . .
. . . . By the summer of 2020, the State Department’s COVID-19 origins investigation had gone cold. Officials in the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance went back to their normal work: surveilling the world for biological threats. “We weren’t looking for Wuhan,” said Thomas DiNanno. That fall, the State Department team got a tip from a foreign source: Key information was likely sitting in the U.S. intelligence community’s own files, unanalyzed. In November, that lead turned up classified information that was “absolutely arresting and shocking,” said a former State Department official. Three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, all connected with gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, had fallen ill in November 2019 and appeared to have visited the hospital with symptoms similar to COVID-19, three government officials told Vanity Fair.
While it is not clear what had sickened them, “these were not the janitors,” said the former State Department official. “They were active researchers. The dates were among the absolute most arresting part of the picture, because they are smack where they would be if this was the origin.” The reaction inside the State Department was, “Holy shit,” one former senior official recalled. “We should probably tell our bosses.” The investigation roared back to life.
An intelligence analyst working with David Asher sifted through classified channels and turned up a report that outlined why the lab-leak hypothesis was plausible. It had been written in May by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which performs national security research for the Department of Energy. But it appeared to have been buried within the classified collections system.
Now the officials were beginning to suspect that someone was actually hiding materials supportive of a lab-leak explanation. “Why did my contractor have to pore through documents?” DiNanno wondered. Their suspicion intensified when Department of Energy officials overseeing the Lawrence Livermore lab unsuccessfully tried to block the State Department investigators from talking to the report’s authors.
Their frustration crested in December, when they finally briefed Chris Ford, acting undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security. He seemed so hostile to their probe that they viewed him as a blinkered functionary bent on whitewashing China’s malfeasance. But Ford, who had years of experience in nuclear nonproliferation, had long been a China hawk. Ford told Vanity Fair that he saw his job as protecting the integrity of any inquiry into COVID-19’s origins that fell under his purview. Going with “stuff that makes us look like the crackpot brigade” would backfire, he believed.
There was another reason for his hostility. He’d already heard about the investigation from interagency colleagues, rather than from the team itself, and the secrecy left him with a “spidey sense” that the process was a form of “creepy freelancing.” He wondered: Had someone launched an unaccountable investigation with the goal of achieving a desired result?
He was not the only one with concerns. As one senior government official with knowledge of the State Department’s investigation said, “They were writing this for certain customers in the Trump administration. We asked for the reporting behind the statements that were made. It took forever. Then you’d read the report, it would have this reference to a tweet and a date. It was not something you could go back and find.”
After listening to the investigators’ findings, a technical expert in one of the State Department’s bioweapons offices “thought they were bonkers,” Ford recalled.
The State Department team, for its part, believed that Ford was the one trying to impose a preconceived conclusion: that COVID-19 had a natural origin. A week later, one of them attended the meeting where Christopher Park, who worked under Ford, advised those present not to draw attention to U.S. funding of gain-of-function research. . . .
. . . . The statement withstood “aggressive suspicion,” as one former State Department official said, and the Biden administration has not walked it back. “I was very pleased to see Pompeo’s statement come through,” said Chris Ford, who personally signed off on a draft of the fact sheet before leaving the State Department. “I was so relieved that they were using real reporting that had been vetted and cleared.” . . . .
Inside the U.S. government, meanwhile, the lab-leak hypothesis had survived the transition from Trump to Biden. On April 15, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the House Intelligence Committee that two “plausible theories” were being weighed: a lab accident or natural emergence. . . .
. . . . China obviously bears responsibility for stonewalling investigators. Whether it did so out of sheer authoritarian habit or because it had a lab leak to hide is, and may always be, unknown.
The United States deserves a healthy share of blame as well. Thanks to their unprecedented track record of mendacity and race-baiting, Trump and his allies had less than zero credibility. And the practice of funding risky research via cutouts like EcoHealth Alliance enmeshed leading virologists in conflicts of interest at the exact moment their expertise was most desperately needed.
4. We conclude with two important points from an article used earlier in the program.
- Shi Zhengli has noted that opening up the WIV’s records is unacceptable: ” . . . . That demand is ‘definitely not acceptable,’ responded Shi Zhengli, who directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute. ‘Who can provide evidence that does not exist?’ she told MIT Technology Review. Shi has said that thousands of attempts to hack its computer systems forced the institute to close its database. . . .”
- The U.S. would not be acceptable to such a proposition, if the Chinese demanded access to Ft. Detrick (part of which was shut down by the CDC in early August of 2019 on the eve of the pandemic). A commenter also noted the Rocky Mountain lab in his analysis, which we noted was one of the areas where Willy Burgdorfer appears to have worked on the development of Lyme Disease. ” . . . . If a disease had emerged from the U.S. and the Chinese blamed the Pentagon and demanded access to the data, ‘what would we say?’ [Dr. Gerald] Keusch asked. ‘Would we throw out the red carpet, ‘Come on over to Fort Detrick and the Rocky Mountain Lab?’ We’d have done exactly what the Chinese did, which is say, ‘Screw you!’’ . . . .”
. . . . The more than $50 million EcoHealth Alliance had received in U.S. funding since 2007 includes contracts and grants from two NIH institutes, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as Pentagon funds to look for organisms that could be fashioned into bioterror weapons. . . .
On Friday, 18 virus and immunology experts published a letter in the journal Science demanding a deeper dive. “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable,” they said, adding that the Wuhan Institute should open its records. One of the signatories was a North Carolina virologist who has worked directly with the Wuhan Institute’s top scientists.
. . . . That demand is “definitely not acceptable,” responded Shi Zhengli, who directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute. “Who can provide evidence that does not exist?” she told MIT Technology Review. Shi has said that thousands of attempts to hack its computer systems forced the institute to close its database. . . .
. . . . Scaling the Wall of Secrecy
U.S.-China tensions will make it very difficult to conclude any such study, scientists on both sides of the issue suggest. With their anti-China rhetoric, Trump and his aides “could not have made it more difficult to get cooperation,” said Dr. Gerald Keusch, associate director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory Institute at Boston University. If a disease had emerged from the U.S. and the Chinese blamed the Pentagon and demanded access to the data, “what would we say?” Keusch asked. “Would we throw out the red carpet, ‘Come on over to Fort Detrick and the Rocky Mountain Lab?’ We’d have done exactly what the Chinese did, which is say, ‘Screw you!’”
Banking with Bin Laden
As usual, brilliant research, commentary and analysis — Dave Emory is a national treasure
Thanks so much for the kind words!
Here’s a story with intriguing implications: Peter Daszak just recused himself from the Lancet’s inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. While there’s no shortage of reasons for why Daszak should have recused himself and never been on the commission in the first place, no reason for the recusal was given. The commission website simply states that Daszak has recused himself.
So was this move a genuine attempt at avoid a conflict of interest? Or was this merely intended to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest? Well, as we’re also going to see, the Lancet has also updated the conflict-of-interest statements that were published in the Feb 2020 letter published in the Lancet by Daszak and numerous other top virologist dismissing the possibility of a lab leak. So it isn’t just Daszak doing the retroactive recusing here:
“On the commission’s website it states that Dr Daszak has “recused himself from Commission work on the origins of the pandemic” but gives no further information.”
The commission doesn’t tell us why Daszak recused himself. But it’s not exactly a mystery. Especially when the Lancet simultaneously updates the conflict-of-interest statement on the February 2020 letter published in the Lancet where Daszak and others dismissed the possibility of a lab leak:
Now here’s an excerpt with a bit more on what the Lancet published with this updated conflict-of-interest disclosure for that February 2020 letter. While the updated statement on Daszak’s conflicts-of-interest don’t explicitly mention the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it does point out that the EcoHealth Alliance worked in China “assessing the risk of viral spillover across the wildlife-livestock-human interface, and includes behavioural and serological surveys of people, and ecological and virological analyses of animals” and that this work involved “the production of a small number of recombinant bat coronaviruses to analyse cell entry and other characteristics of bat coronaviruses for which only the genetic sequences are available.” So Daszak’s conflict-of-interest statement was updated to include his organization’s work creating recombinant bat coronaviruses in partnership with Chinese researchers, which is a pretty big update to a conflict-of-interest statement for a letter dismissing the possibility of a lab leak:
“Criticism of The Lancet has focused on its failure to declare in the original letter that Dr Daszak had for years funded and worked with the lab at the centre of the leak theory – the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This link, in the eyes of critics, could make Dr Daszak partially culpable if the lab leak hypothesis was true.”
Yeah, it’s about as big a conflict as you could get with a conflict-of-interest statement on a lab leak theory: if it turns out the theory is true, the people asserting it can’t possibly be true — and yet are engaged in recombinant viral work with bat coronaviruses — could themselves be partially culpable:
So we’ll see what, if any, impact the recusal of Daszak from the Lancet commission on the origins of the virus actually has on that commission’s work. On the one hand, it’s not hard to cynically view this move as an attempt to preemptively address criticisms for the conclusion by the commission of a natural origin. On the other hand, that’s quite an update to Daszak’s conflict-of-interest statement that included the EcoHealth Alliance’s work on recombinant bat coronavirus work. But on the other other hand, it was an update that was basically irrefutable and unavoidable. Interpreting the belated acknowledgement of the irrefutable can be a tricky task.
With the annual Davos meeting of global elites currently underway we’re getting our expected deluge of updates on all the different things that are being discussed at the conference. And that brings us to a truly chilling three paragraph report on one of the topics discussed. According to Anna van Pouke, the head 0f global health care at KPMG, there’s a new threat to civilization even larger than nuclear weapons. Although it’s not exactly a new threat: the threat of hackers manipulating the genomic experiments taking place inside research lab. A nuclear bomb is “nothing” compared to the threat posed by this genomic research lab hacking, according to van Pouke.
And that’s more or less all we know about van Pouke’s warnings at Davos. Cybersecurity at bioresearch facilities should be a top priority. But the scenario von Pouke is describing does at least sound technically plausible in the era of made-to-order viruses and other snippets of DNA and RNA: if the genomic sequences being generated for research purposes are specified in the software running the genomic synthesis equipment, there’s nothing theoretically stopping a hacker from inserting the genomic sequences of highly dangerous viruses in place of the intended sequence. Heck, someone could trick a lab into recreating small pox if they so intended.
Also don’t forget the other major context of this warning: the fact that just about every single major company on the planet has had their networks penetrated in SolarWinds and/or Microsoft Exchange Mega-hacks of 2021. The notion that hackers have access to the direct computer networks running these facilities is far from fanciful. On the contrary, it’s a safe bet biological research and production facilities around the world are indeed thorough hacked at this point.
That’s the context of this warning: it simultaneously seemed kind of out of the blue, but also very necessary. So while this part of the Davos report was just three paragraphs, they were some extremely ominous paragraphs:
““Just imagine if we have several cases even more severe than that because of genome manipulation in medication, coming from a lab,” van Pouke said. “If someone hacks the genome project with malicious intentions — a nuclear bomb is nothing compared to that. We need to have cyber security working very hard.””
Keep in mind one of the obvious applications of these warnings: if indeed a novel virus is discovered to have been leaked from a lab, they can potentially claim they were hacked! They didn’t actually intend on creating those viruses that escaped from the lab. The malicious hackers did it, framing this innocent lab! And yes, such a scenario lab-hack might technically be plausible for certain kinds of research, but it’s sure hard not to notice now this doubles as a wonderful catch all excuse to deflect blame from a genuine lab leak.
But given that we’re now in an era of mRNA vaccines — with mRNA therapeutics presumably on the way after the vaccines have been deemed safe enough for routine use — it’s also important to realize that if we’re talking about disaster scenarios involving the hacking of equipment where genomic sequences are generated, the potential risks don’t just involve hackers hitting research facilities or the release of new contagious viruses. Imagine hackers affecting the content of mRNA vaccines. The mRNA vaccines the US government is pushing on virtually everyone in the US at the moment now that the government has warned the public away from taking the non-mRNA J&J vaccine for highly questionable reasons. Imagine the machines creating those batches getting hacked. Beyond the immediate potential to cause serious disease, don’t forget that mRNA can potentially be used to deliver permanent changes into the genome via the use of CRISPR technology. In other words, while you could hack the mRNA vaccine supply to effectively kill off large numbers of people or cause serious disease, you could also use it to quietly introduce permanent genetic alternations in large swathes of the a population. Alterations no one necessarily has to ever discover. And alternations that could potentially be targeted at specific populations if its known where the vaccine batches are going to be sent.
So let’s hope the issue of cybersecurity in biological facilities is indeed being taken very seriously. There really is abundant reason for genuine concern about this kind of scenario. But at this point we had also better hope that this warning at Davos wasn’t the kind of vague warning about security concerns companies initially send out to cushion the blow when they eventually disclose all their customer accounts were hacked.
Well that was great to hear. From a rather interesting source: A call for a new independent inquiry into the origins of the SARS-CoV‑2 virus was published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The piece succinctly but effectively lays out the established relationships between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and its many US-based collaborators — the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), Ralph Baric’s lab at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC), the University of California at Davis (UCD), the NIH, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), and USAID — and makes the simple observation that there’s been no indication at all that the US intelligence community’s prior investigations into the origins of the virus have seriously considered the possibility that the virus emerged on the US side of this years long international collaboration.
The piece calls for the release of all relevant materials — lab manuals, emails, etc — from these US collaborators to independent investigators for a real independent investigation. They go on to suggest a tightly focused science-based bipartisan Congressional inquiry with full investigative powers as an example of the kind of body that could carry it out.
The piece also points out a now leaked 2018 grant proposal submitted to DARPA by this collaboration that would have involved putting new furin cleavage sites (FCSs) in coronaviruses. DARPA claims it didn’t fund the grant, but it certainly shows intent and ability.
The piece also reminds us of how SARS-CoV‑2 is the only known virus in the betacoronavirus subfamily, which has long been one of the more suspicious coincidences that the zoonotic theory of origin relies on. Also recall how Moderna filed a patent in February of 2020 for a universal betacoronavirus vaccine that in theory could cover all other coronaviruses other than SARS-CoV‑2. So when we learn about that 2018 DARPA grant proposal by this international collaboration to insert different FCSs into coronaviruses, it’s worth asking if any of that ultimately went into Moderna’s pre-COVID-19 betacoronavirus vaccine research.
Here’s the somewhat surprising, but not actually all that surprising part: it’s written by two professors from Colombia University. Niel L. Harrison and Jeffrey D. Sachs. Yep, Jeffrey Sachs is one of the authors of this damning piece calling for the massive release of information on the US’s coronavirus research efforts for independent investigators.
On one level, this isn’t at all surprising to see Sachs authoring this. Recall how Sachs was tasked with leading the Lancet’s investigation into the origins of the pandemic and ended up literally disbanding it over the massive conflicts of interest it demonstrated in appointing Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance to join him on the investigative commission. If he was willing to disband the Lancet’s investigation it’s all that surprising to see this letter published.
Still, it’s pretty remarkable just how damning this piece is given that Sachs is someone in a position to bring real public attention to this topic. They really do make a compelling case for an independent investigation, and who is in a better position than Sachs to make this case publicly after he disbanded his Lancet Commission over these kinds of concerns? That’s all part of what is going to make this a story to watch. This has been a growing undeniable scandal just sitting out there waiting for someone to draw attention to it, and Sachs appears to trying to do exactly that:
“The US intelligence community (IC) was tasked, in 2021 by President Joe Biden (4), with investigating the origin of the virus. In their summary public statement, the IC writes that “all agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident” (4). The IC further writes that “China’s cooperation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of COVID-19 [coronavirus disease 2019].” Of course, such cooperation is highly warranted and should be pursued by the US Government and the US scientific community. Yet, as outlined below, much could be learned by investigating US-supported and US-based work that was underway in collaboration with Wuhan-based institutions, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), China. It is still not clear whether the IC investigated these US-supported and US-based activities. If it did, it has yet to make any of its findings available to the US scientific community for independent and transparent analysis and assessment. If, on the other hand, the IC did not investigate these US-supported and US-based activities, then it has fallen far short of conducting a comprehensive investigation.”
Did the US intelligence community even investigate the possibility as to whether or not these US-based research program played a role in the pandemic? That remains unclear to this day. Which more or less tells us the answer.
There’s also the question of how the intelligence community arrived at the conclusions it eventually made from its investigation. In particular, the conclusion that the initial outbreak in Wuhan may have occurred no later than November 2019 and therefore the virus was already circulating before the known clinical clusters in December. No evidence for this has ever been given just as no information has been given about when the US government and researchers first became aware of a potential new outbreak. It’s a pretty notable omission:
Then they point out how the US-based coronavirus research was more or less exactly the kind of research that should prompt fears of a COVID-like lab release. Except we can’t say that for sure because the details about the kind of work that was done by the WIV’s US collaborators hasn’t been publicly disclosed either. But that lack of public disclosure doesn’t mean we know nothing about the nature of the research being done in the US as part of this international collaboration. The research proposals were released as a result of FOIA requests, revealing that it wasn’t just the WIV engaged in coronavirus research under BSL‑2 and BSL‑3 conditions. The EHA-WIV-UNC side of this international collaboration was also involved in the collection of a large number of so-far undocumented SARS-like viruses and was engaged in their manipulation under BSL‑2 and BSL‑3 conditions:
They go on to note the remarkable coincidence of SARS-CoV‑2 just happening to contain a canonical human furin cleavage site (FCS), making the virus highly adapted at infecting human airways. As they note, while this FCS has been found in other coronaviruses, SARS-CoV‑2 is the only identified member of its viral family — the subgenus sarbecovirus — that contains it. But the coincidence is more remarkable when we factor in that the EcoHealth Alliance-WIV-UNC collaboration submitted a grant proposal to DARPA in 2018 that would have involved research inserting FCSs into coronaviruses. The grant was turned down, but it demonstrates intent:
Finally, there was the FOIA release that showed NIH leadership took active steps to ensure the initial government line on the nature of this virus was that it was zoonotic in origin, despite emails from Feb 1, 2020, showing concerns expressed by several researchers that it could have been released from a lab:
So what’s going on here? Is Sachs going to continue pressing this and actually raise enough hell to make an independent inquiry happen? If so, wow.
Or perhaps we’re being set up for some sort of limited hangout. But even in that case, with all the dirt already hanging out there, it’s hard to see how limited a hangout it could be. For example, there’s no way of denying that 2018 DARPA grant proposal to conduct what appear to be gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Whether DARPA approved the grant is kind of beside the point. Now, since the documents showing this 2018 grant proposal were apparently leaked anonymously, it’s possible the documents aren’t authentic. But as we can see in the following article from back in September, 2021, when this these documents were first leaked, no one appeared to be contesting its authenticity either:
“DRASTIC states the research proposal would have involved “advanced and dangerous” research into bat coronaviruses in cooperation with the WIV and other facilities, and said the research would qualify as Gain of Function (GoF)—a process that can be used to make viruses more dangerous so that humans can investigate them and improve understanding.”
The grant proposal was basically gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. That was the assessment of DRASTIC, the group that received the grant from an anonymous source. And note how the grant was for research to be conducted between 2018 and 2022. So they were ready to go with this gain-of-function research immediately. Which, of course, implies they were already conducting this kind of research, at least for pilot feasibility projects. They just wanted DARPA to fund the scaled up version of the research:
And note the range of US research institutions involved: UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke-National University in Singapore, the USGS National Wildlife Health Center (NWHC) and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). That’s a lot of public and private US institutions involved with this gain-of-function coronavirus research grant proposal:
So good luck to Jeffrey Sachs in his apparent quest to see an independent investigation of the origins of the pandemic that includes an examination of this entire international research network involved with pre-pandemic coronavirus gain-of-function research. It’s hard to imagine all of the relevant evidence to be released for a real independent investigation. But it’s not quite as unthinkable as before. Let’s hope this isn’t all part of a limited hangout.
The dangers involved with ‘gain-of-function’ research has been a hot top over the last couple of years following the COVID-19. But it’s not a new topic. ‘Gain-of-function’ research has been going on for decades. And as the following fascinating piece published by organic food activist Alexis Baden-Mayer lays out, the history of gain-of-function research is much more directly related to contemporary gain-of-function research than is perhaps recognized. As Baden-Mayer describes, the US government has been funding ‘gain-of-function’ research on avian flu viruses going back the early 1990. And the two researchers who have long led the US government’s ‘gain-of-function’ research into avian flu were none other than the Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Tokyo. So when Kawaoka and Fouchier published their now notorious 2011 study showing how they could easily drive the mutation of the deadly H5N1 avian flu to spread between ferrets using simple passaging techniques, this was after years of government funded efforts.
Although the US government hasn’t been the only entity financing this. For example, when National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Anthony Fauci initially commissioned Fouchier and Kawaoka’s ‘gain-of-function’ studies in 2006, that effort was paid for, in part, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Recall how Bill Gates has been influencing international vaccine development efforts for years. And as we got to see at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gates’s vaccine ‘philanthropy’ doesn’t just involve financing the vaccine develop research but also demands that the world maintain intellectual property rights regimes that ensure monopoly status is maintained even in the face of a global pandemic. When WHO came out with its Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C‑TAP) — designed to ensure all countries could access new vaccines as soon as they are available — Gates came out with his own COVID-19 ACT-Accelerator — designed to ensure the maintenance of the global intellectual property monopoly system for vaccines remains intact. And in the end, Gates won and his model was ultimately adopted.
But Fouchier and Kawaoka aren’t the only researchers involved with modifying avian flu. When the avian flu outbreak of 1997 happened in Hong Kong, the jump from bird to humans was seen as so improbably that scientists first suspected contamination from Kennedy Shortridge’s lab at the University of Hong Kong. Shortridge was the head of the WHO’s reference laboratory there. And it turns out Shortridge’s research had some interesting ties to government-funded the work Fouchier and Kawaoka had been doing on avian flu since 1990. Kawaoka’s mentor, Robert G. Webster, is a close colleague of Shortridge, co-publishing with Shortridge and spending three months each year at Shortridge’s lab. Webster also happens to be one of the first gain-of-function scientists, publishing a successful creation of a recombinant virus in 1973.
Shortridge and Webster were both, in turn, mentored by none other than Sir Macfarlane Burnet. Recall how Burnet, Australia’s top post-WWII microbiologist, actually advocated for the use of biological warfare on Southeast Asian countries. And the reasoning he used for why it would be ‘safe’ for Australia to do so without risking blowback is the fact that Australia’s climate is temperate compared to its tropical neighbors. And that’s really the big historic arc to note here: the mentors for Fouchier and Kawaoka — the two scientists leading the modern efforts to develop weaponized version of avian flu capable of infecting humans — were themselves mentored by gain-of-0function pioneers Webster and Shortridge, who were mentored by Sir Macfarlane Burnet, a major figure in the history of biological warfare. But while Burnet made no bones about his desire to unleash bioweapons against Australia’s tropical neighbors, contemporary ‘gain-of-function’ research is all given the veneer of purely academic or ‘defensive’ uses.
And that brings us to the other part of Baden-Mayers’s piece: given the troubling but well documented history surrounding gain-of-function research making avian viruses capable of infecting humans, what are we to make of Russia’s claims about Pentagon-funded Ukrainian biolabs working on avian flu gain-of-function research. And as Baden-Mayer lays out, not only are Russia’s claims based on publicly available evidence that the US government doesn’t refute, but that evidence ties directly back to this history of US-funded avian flu research. Beyond that, it turns out these same US-funded entities operating in Ukraine were also directly involved with the joint international collaboration between the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in the study of novel coronaviruses. Yep.
Some of that US-funded biological research in Ukraine goes back to 2008, when the firm Black & Veatch first got what eventually become $208.5 million in Pentagon contracts to design, construct and equip 11 bio-labs in Ukraine. Another firm involved with these US-funded efforts in Ukraine is Metabiota, which has received enormous attention in right-wing circles for the investment it received by an investment firm affiliated with Hunter Biden. As we’re going to see, Metabiota basically emerged as a for-profit version of an earlier non-profit initiative, the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI), which was funded with at least $5.5 million in 2008 as part of a $30 million effort by Google to finance virus hunting and gain-of-function efforts. GVFI’s other funders included the Skoll Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Merck Research Laboratories and the US Department of Defense. It soon became the for-profit Metabiota. So while a firm associated with Hunter Biden is indeed a Metabiota investor, there are a lot of other very interesting entities involved it its creation.
It also turns out that Metabiota was was part of the USAID-funded PREDICT team hunting viruses in China in 2013 when they found what it now believed to be the closest known relative of SARS-CoV‑2, the RaTG13 bat virus. PREDICT also got its initial funding from Google. So if there’s ever a real investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, an investigation of Metabiota’s work coronavirus research efforts has to be part of it.
And that’s all just a taste of what’s contained in this fascinating piece that attempts to answer the questions about what has been going on in the US-funded biolabs in Ukraine with publicly available information all pointing back towards that disturbing history where biological warfare research was allowed to continue under a ‘gain-of-function’ cloak:
“Kawaoka and Fouchier are of post-Biological Weapons Convention era where the weaponization of pathogens is euphemistically called “gain-of-function” research, but their older colleagues, De Jong, Shortridge and Webster came of age prior to 1972 and their mentors were of the pre-Biological Weapons Convention era when virologists knowingly and openly engineered viruses for military purposes.”
A transition from overt formal biological warfare research pre-1972 to covert ‘gain-of-function’ research for ‘defensive’ reasons following the Biological Weapons Convention. It’s that historic arc that ominously guides us in this look at the kind of Pentagon-funded biological research that has been carried out in Ukraine over the past decade. We can’t make separate the whole Metabiota story from the broader story of how biological warfare was given a public mask in the form of ‘gain-of-function’ research.
And the two researchers who have long led the US government’s ‘gain-of-function’ research into avian flu were none other than the Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Tokyo. So when Kawaoka and Fouchier published their now notorious 2011 study showing how they could easily drive the mutation of the deadly H5N1 avian flu to spread between ferrets using simple passaging techniques, they were following in a long tradition of biological warfare research. A tradition they were directly trained in by their mentors.
And as the piece describes, that now infamous research that resulted in the creation of a version of H5N1 that could infect ferrets — and therefore likely humans too — was commissioned in 2006 under an NIAID project. Bill Gates was even involved. It’s all why Russian claims about weaponized bird flu viruses being created in labs Ukraine aren’t some dark fantasy. This kind of research is extremely well documented and already highly controversial:
But Fouchier and Kawaoka didn’t start their government-funded avian flu gain-of-function efforts in 2006. They had been doing it since 1990. Research that was directly related to the avian flu research taking place in Kennedy Shortridge’s lab in Hong Kong. Shortridge was directly involved in the initial identification of the first known instance of avian flu infecting humans: the 1997 H5N1 Hong Kong outbreak. It turns out Kawaoka’s mentor, Robert G. Webster, was working and publishing with Shortridge throughout the 90s and spent three months each year with Shortridge at the University of Hong Kong. Webster was one of the first gain-of-function scientists, publishing a successful creation of a recombinant virus in 1973. So seven years before the first known instance of avian flu jumping to humans, we had government funded research into learning how to make that happen. And one of the figures involved, Webster, is one of the pioneers of gain-of-function techniques. It’s the kind of history that reminds us that not only has this kind of research been happening for years, but we’re also still fairly new at it. The pioneers current leaders in the field were trained by the pioneers in the field:
And then we get to the chilling historic tie back to the biological warfare norms of the 1940s and 50s: both Shortridge and Webster were trained by none other than Frank Macfarlane Burnet:
And that all brings us to the the question of what kind of research has the Pentagon been financing in Ukraine. Russia has basically be asserting that Ukraine has become the Pentagons new location of choice for avian flu gain-of-function research. Claims based on public sources and claims that US government hasn’t denied. So it’s important to keep in mind another aspect of the US’s gain-of-function research that was a direct result of the infamous 2011–2012 ferret passaging experiments: The NIH’s 2014 three-year ban on new gain-of-function research imposed as a result of the outcry over Fluchier’s and Kawaoka’s dangerous studies. And while that ban was lifted by the Trump administration in 2017, it underscores one of the key dynamics we should keep in mind in with this topic: this kind of research is so dangerous it might get banned. At least banned in some countries. Having research like this take place in Ukraine (or at the WIV in Wuhan) solves a lot of these public relations problems:
Then there’s the timing of when the US began investing in this bioresearch collaboration in Ukraine: Black & Veatch got a total of $208.5 million in Pentagon contracts to design, construct and equip 11 bio-labs in Ukraine in 2008, 2012 and 2020, completing Ukraine’s first Bio-Safety Level 3 (BSL‑3) laboratory in 2010. So this relationship started back in 2008, when the NIAID was still funding Fouchier’s and Kawaoka’s gain-of-function research on H5N1 and before all the public outcry over their publications on that research in 2011–2012:
Also note how Metabiota’s Pentagon contract for research into Ukraine includes $307,091 million for “Ukraine Research Projects” in 2014. For starters, the fact that this happened in 2014 suggests these new projects were being approved by the newly installed post-Maidan government that was heavily dependent on US military support as the country descended into civil war. But also keep in mind that it was 2014 when the NIH paused new funding for gain-of-function research following the public outcry over Fouchier’s and Kawaoka’s experiments. The timing of that 2014 Metabiota Ukrainian work sure was convenient. Convenient both in terms of the NIH gain-of-function pause but also convenient in that the Ukrainian government was probably the most receptive its ever been towards placating US requests for otherwise controversial projects:
Also note how the DRTA isn’t the only US agency funding these research efforts in Ukraine led by Black & Veatch and Metabiota. The Center of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance (CEIRS) — part of the NIAID — is also involved:
But the US-funded biological research efforts in Ukraine aren’t just being led by Black & Veatch and Metabiota. Southern Research and Battelle are also involved. The piece links to a short Youtube video by Greg Reese where those connections are laid out. Note that Greg Reese sadly made that video as a part of InfoWars, meaning it effectively has negative credibility. But that’s part of why the public nature of the evidence of all of this is so important to keep in mind: whether we’re talking about garbage sources like InfoWars or obviously biased sources like the Russian ambassador, the evidence for this is based on publicly available information:
Then we get to the fascinating ties connecting Metabiota to the origins of COVID019: it turns out the company was part of the PREDICT team hunting viruses in China in 2013 when they found the RaTG13 virus. Recall how we’ve now learned that Shi Zhengli’s lab at the WIV has not only started sequencing the RaTG13 viral genome back in 2017, but they published some of that work in a PhD disseartion that became part of a 2017 published paper co-authored with Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance. So when we learn that Metabiota was involved with the efforts to obtain that initial RaTG13 sample back in 2013, we also have to ask if they were involved with all of the subsequent research we now know took place.
But it’s also important to keep in mind that Metabiota was originally funded by Google, with addition funds coming from the Skoll Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Merck Research Laboratories and the US Department of Defense. And this group of Metabiota investors just happened to finance the COVID Commission Planning Group, headed by 9/11 cover-up artist Philip Zelikow. So when we hear Jeffrey Sachs slamming the COVID Commission investigation for being riddled with conflicts of interest, that’s part of what he’s talking about:
Another very interesting figure in all of this is David Franz, a science and policy advisor for the EcoHealth Alliance. As we’ve seen, Franz is a former commander of Fort Detrick. Franz went on to work at Southern Research on DARPA related work involving the weaponization of anthrax. Anthrax that investigators have forensically tied back to the 2001 anthrax attacks. It’s the kind of resume that suggests Franz isn’t lacking in experience involving highly sensitive secret biowarfare programs:
Again, all of this analysis was based on publicly available information. We certainly need to ask more questions about the nature of this cover biological research activity. But we don’t have to ask if it’s happening. It’s definitely happening and has been for decades. Including years of Pentagon funded research in Ukraine. The question at this point is where the research involving gain-of-function research involving the weaponization of avian flu is taking place. Ukraine? Somewhere else? We don’t know. But we can be very confident, based on publicly available information, that it’s happening. And has been for quite a while in a lot of different countries.
This could become a very interesting lawsuit: Moderna is getting extra greedy again. In a newly filed lawsuit, Moderna asserts that the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA coronavirus vaccines are infringing on Moderna’s patents. On one level it’s not particularly surprising. But what’s rather eyebrow-raising in this lawsuit is the timeframe of Moderna’s claims. The company is arguing that Pfizer’s vaccine basically copied work Moderna had already done on coronavirus vaccines involving human trials going back to 2015 and 2016. Beyond that, Moderna asserts the the full-sequence coronavirus spike protein used in Pfizer’s vaccine was developed by Moderna years before the pandemic. So this is potentially the kind of lawsuit that could end up revealing all sorts of information about the nature of Moderna’s pre-pandemic coronavirus-related research.
And perhaps the biggest set of questions that might be answered in this lawsuit involve Moderna’s possible collaborative role in the broader US-government-funded gain-of-function research being lead by the EcoHealthAlliance in collaboration with labs around the world like Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and Ralph Baric’s lab at UNC Chapel Hill. As we’ve seen, Ralph Baric was working on developing coronavirus therapeutics back in 2017 using gain-of-function-created coronaviruses in collaboration with Shi Zhengli’s lab at the WIV. And Baric also helped test the Moderna covid vaccine in 2020. So was Moderna — which was funded by DARPA — at all involved in this other NIH-funded coronavirus-related gain-of-function work? The circumstantial evidence sure points in that direction.
And then there’s the part of the lawsuit claiming that Pfizer effectively stole the full-sequence coronavirus spike protein sequence Moderna had worked out years earlier. This is a somewhat confusing part of the lawsuit since, as we’ve been told, it was the SARs-CoV‑2 spike protein sequence that was at the heart of the mRNA COVID vaccine developed in record-breaking time back in January of 2020. So what is Moderna talking about when claiming that it already developed a coronavirus spike protein years earlier. Well, recall how Moderna was criticized back in 2020 over its decision to file a patent in Feb 2020 for a “Betacoronavirus vaccine” — a broad-spectrum vaccine designed for non-COVID coronaviruses — without acknowledging the US governments role in that research. Pfizer/BioNTech filed a patent for a similar “universal coronavirus vaccine” back in June. So odds are that’s what Moderna is referring to when it claims to have developed a coronavirus spike protein sequence years before the pandemic. But, again, that just raises the obvious question: was Moderna part of the whole EcoHealthAlliance gain-of-function research on coronaviruses back in their 2015–2016 period? Don’t forget that gain-of-function research was technically banned in the US from 2014 until the Trump administration lifted it in 2017. Also recall how Baric’s gain-of-function work that was started before the moratorium was put into place was allowed to continue under a special exemption. So if Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine develop involved the use of any viruses being generated by Baric under and exemption to the gain-of-function moratorium, that would obviously be a very sensitive area of research.
There’s another facet of this story to keep in mind: recall that fascinating September 2016 STAT News article that described how Moderna had shifted its focus from mRNA therapeutics — which require numerous shots over years — to mRNA vaccines. It was seen as as disappointment by industry observers and sign that Moderna was running into undisclosed setbacks involving side effects triggered by the lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery vehicle for the mRNA. But as we saw, Moderna was insisting at the time that it was experiencing no such set backs. And yet observers were just forced to take their word because the company was being so secretive and releasing almost no information about its internal trials. There is no mention of coronavirus-related research at all in that article, while there is mention of work on things like a Zika virus vaccine. And yet, in the new lawsuit, Moderna claims it successfully carried out human trials on a coronavirus vaccine as far back as 2015. It would seem that Moderna’s coronavirus-related vaccine research was being kept under wraps during this period.
So while it has long appeared that Moderna’s secrecy during this period was likely driven by a desire to cover up side effects-related setbacks, we also have to ask if the extreme secrecy around its work during this period was driven in part by the controversial nature of developing coronavirus vaccines using gain-of-function coronaviruses generated by the EcoHealthAlliance network. We don’t know for sure that Moderna was doing that, but boy is the circumstantial evidence pointing in that direction. Will any still-secret research from that period get released as part of this lawsuit? Let’s hope so:
““We are filing these lawsuits to protect the innovative mRNA technology platform that we pioneered, invested billions of dollars in creating, and patented during the decade preceding the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive. “This foundational platform, which we began building in 2010, along with our patented work on coronaviruses in 2015 and 2016, enabled us to produce a safe and highly effective Covid-19 vaccine in record time after the pandemic struck.””
A lawsuit based on Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine work from 2015 and 2016. This could be quite an interesting lawsuit. How much are we going to learn about that early coronavirus vaccine research? A lot, hopefully. Because at this point we still don’t actually know all that much about Moderna’s pre-COVID work on vaccines, let alone coronavirus vaccines. Was this work in conjunction with the EcoHealthAlliance’s pre-COVID coronavirus gain-of-function research? As we’ve seen, Ralph Baric was working on developing coronavirus therapeutics back in 2017 using gain-of-function-created coronaviruses in collaboration with Shi Zhengli’s lab at the WIV. And Baric also helped test the Moderna covid vaccine in 2020. So was Baric or anyone else involved in the coronavirus gain-of-function research during this pre-pandemic period also working with Moderna on theri coronavirus vaccines? Hopefully we’ll be getting some more info on that as this lawsuit plays out. Because at this point, the main detail that we know about Moderna’s pre-pandemic coronavirus vaccine research is that the company got billions in tax payer money to carry it out. And yet, according to Moderna, none of the patent disputes in this lawsuit involve work that was done post-COVID. This was all pre-COVID work. In fact, Moderna assert that it first validated the technology in human trials in 2015. It sure sounds like Moderna was engaged in a lot of pre-COVD coronavirus vaccine research, including human trials of coronavirus vaccines:
And that brings us to the following very interesting detail in Moderna’s complaint: the company is also asserting that Pfizer and BioNTech copied Moderna’s full-length spike protein formulation for a coronavirus, which Modern claims to have created years before the emergence of COVID-19. So what exactly is Moderna claiming here? Recall how the sharing of the genetic sequence of SAR-CoV‑2 by Chinese researchers with the global community allowed for Moderna to and its NIH collaborators to design the vaccine in just two days with just that spike protein sequence information. So if Moderna is suing Pfizer over the theft of a coronavirus spike protein sequence developed years earlier, we have to ask whether or not this part of the lawsuit is related to the “universal coronavirus” vaccine Pfizer and BioNTech started testing back in June. Recall how Moderna caught flack back in August of 2020 after it filed patents related to the coronavirus vaccine that didn’t disclose the billions in dollars in DARPA money, including DARPA involvement in the development of a broad specturm “Betacoronavirus” vaccine that Moderna had filed a patent for in February 2020. And that, again, returns us to questions regarding Moderna’s involvement with the pre-pandemic gain-of-function coronavirus research carried out by the EcoHealth Alliance and collaborators like the WIV. Because as we’ve seen, the creation of a broad-spectrum coronavirus vaccine was part of the pre-pandemic work done by the EcoHealthAlliance, the WIV, and Ralph Baric’s lab at UNC Chapel Hill. So was Moderna involved in that broad-spectrum coronavirus vaccine research? It sure sounds like it:
So with that intriguing lawsuit in mind, here’s a quick look back at some of that important September 2016 STAT News article that describes Moderna’s decision to shift its focus from mRNA therapeutics to vaccines. As we’ve seen, the move was seen as a disappointment by some in the company since vaccines have far less profit potential than therapeutics that involve regular injections for years. But was we also saw, it was the fact that vaccines require as little as one dose that made this shift a tempting choice for Moderna because that would reduce the potential for side-effects associated with mRNA therapy. At least that was what others in the industry suggested was behind Moderna’s decision. But Moderna insisted at the time that side effects were not at all a factor. And yet, as the article pointed out, everyone was forced to take Moderna at its word because the company wasn’t releasing any of its research results. That’s all part of what could make this lawsuit very interesting given that its focused on innovations Moderna allegedly made during this exact period:
“Outsiders and competitors, looking only at Moderna’s public statements, have noted a shift in strategy that might signal undisclosed setbacks.”
Was Moderna experiencing undisclosed setbacks involving side-effects when it made the decision to pivot away from mRNA therapeutics to vaccines? That’s what industry insiders were strongly speculating back in 2016. But it was pure speculation because the company wasn’t releasing any info. For example, there’s no mention of coronaviruses in that entire article. And yet, now, Moderna is insisting that it had already developed coronavirus vaccines by this period. But Moderna insisted at the time that it wasn’t hiding any set backs. Was the highly controversial nature of gain-of-function research — which was still banned in the US in 2016 — at all a factor in Moderna’s extreme secretiveness during this time?
Moderna’s claims that it chose vaccines because they presented the fastest path to human trials is a rather interesting claim given the notoriously difficult vaccine approval process. But the company may have been sincere in one key respect: if it was working with DARPA on creating a broad-spectrum coronavirus vaccine, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that Moderna was have had an easy time getting approval for human trials. In other words, the decision to shift to vaccine research may have been driven, in part, by the desires of its main partner: the US government. DARPA wanted a coronavirus vaccine and Moderna was clearly the company of choice for making that a reality.
And that’s also part of what’s going to make this lawsuit very interesting to play out. Moderna is apparently suing over patents it developed during its mostly-still-secret DARPA collaboration. A collaboration that just might be directly related to the mostly-still-secret US-government-financed international collaboration dedicated to making and studying novel coronaviruses. Lawsuit have a tendency to unintentionally reveal secrets. And there are clearly an abundance of secrets still waiting to be revealed about Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine research. Moderna is making quite a few claims in this lawsuit. Let’s hope their forced to actually prove them.
Following up on that fascinating lawsuit filed last week by Moderna against Pfizer/BioNTech, here’s an article that adds an important detail regarding Moderna’s assertion that Pfizer/BioNTech copied the work on a betacoronavirus vaccine that Moderna had carried out years earlier back in 2015–2016: Moderna is also asserting in its lawsuit that the company invented the very idea of using mRNA vaccines for the betacoronavirus family of viruses. It’s the kind of claim that raises the question of how central coronaviruses were to Moderna’s initial vaccine work, which only furthers adds to questions about the role of the US government in that early phase of Moderna’s vaccine research and whether or not Moderna was quietly involved with the gain-of-function work on coronaviruses taking place during this period with the EcoHealthAlliance.
First, recall how Moderna was criticized back in 2020 over its decision to file a patent in Feb 2020 for a “Betacoronavirus vaccine” — a broad-spectrum vaccine designed for non-COVID coronaviruses — without acknowledging the US governments role in that research. The NIH sued Moderna in response to that patent filing, arguing that the spike protein sequence was developed as part of Moderna’s joint pre-pandemic work withe NIH on betacoronavirus vaccines. So right out of the gate we have have to ask: was the US government at all involved with Moderna’s initial plans to develop betacoronavirus mRNA vaccines? If so, it sounds like Moderna is back to its old tricks of trying to claim exclusive patent rights over US government-funded research.
But let’s also not forget that the early coronavirus research done by Moderna was largely kept a secret up until now. Recall that important September 2016 STAT News article that described how Moderna had shifted its focus from mRNA therapeutics — which require numerous shots over years — to mRNA vaccines. As we saw, there was no mention at all of coronavirus vaccine development in that article. They mentioned a Zika virus vaccine, but nothing about coronaviruses and observers noted how the company was operating in extreme secrecy. So the idea that Moderna really was working on coronavirus vaccines during this period would actually be kind of consistent with the company’s extreme secrecy during this period...especially if it involved controversial gain-of-function work on novel coronaviruses. But that also makes any assertions that Moderna exclusively developed the idea of using mRNA vaccines for betacoronaviruses on its own, without any US government input, all the more difficult to believe. And that raises the grim question regarding the possibility that Moderna is once again trying to make exclusive claims to patents that really should be shared with the government: would the US government risk challenging Moderna’s claims if that also meant risking the exposure of controversial gain-of-function mRNA coronavirus vaccine experiments that the world still largely doesn’t know about? It’s the kind of question that may have figured significantly in Moderna’s decision to wage this lawsuit.
But there’s another reason we should suspect Moderna might be trying to exclusively claim patent rights to something that was jointly developed with US government researchers: at the heart of Moderna’s lawsuit is the claim that Pfizer stole the innovation of using a modified ribonucleotide, 1‑methylpseudouridine, in its mRNA formulations. Pfizer points to its own patent involving 1‑methylpseudouridine filed six years earlier. And yet, as we’ve seen, the NIH asserts that its researchers developed those techniques as part of the NIH’s early vaccine work and cited a 2017 publication that involved analogous chemical modifications that stabilized a MERS spike protein. So this lawsuit with Pfizer appears to double down on Moderna’s patent disputes with the NIH. And as we saw, if Moderna won that patent fight, it would potentially be able to block a broad array of potential competitors for all sorts of vaccines for years to come around the world, including in developing countries. Moderna wants it all, and it just might get it if this lawsuit succeeds:
“Moderna’s complaint alleges two other patent/intellectual property infringements. The company “further discovered that packaging that chemically-modified mRNA in a lipid nanoparticle formulation allowed for the efficient delivery of the mRNA to cells,” it says. Moderna also claims it invented the specific use of mRNA vaccines to protect against betacoronaviruses, the genus that includes SARS-CoV‑2. Noonan, who knows the details of these claims, characterizes them as “incredibly broad.””
Yes, Moderna is asserting that it invented the specific use of using mRNA vaccines to protect against betacoronaviruses. That’s quite a claim. The kind of claim that suggests Moderna had coronaviruses in mind very early on. Don’t forget the company was only started in 2010. Now claiming it was validating coronavirus vaccines with human trials in 2015.
But then there’s the claims at the heart of the lawsuit: that Pfizer stole Moderna’s approach of using a modified ribonucleotide, 1‑methylpseudouridine, which plays a key role in helping in reducing the immune response to the mRNA while increasing protein production. The catch with this claim is that Pfizer issued its own patents involving 1‑methylpseudouridine six years earlier:
Is Moderna making a BS legal claim? Perhaps, but it looks like it’s basically the same kind of BS Moderna has been trying to pull with the NIH about the development of ribonucleotide modifications for mRNA vaccines. With the end result being that only Moderna will be allowed to create new mRNA-based vaccines around the world for the duration of these patents. Don’t forget that these patent fights have global implications. That’s what Moderna fighting for. Global intellectual property capture of mRNA vaccines for years to come. It’s quite a prize. A prize so tempting that Moderna appears to be flirting with the prospect of having to share with the world — or at least the courts — all sorts of details about its early coronavirus vaccine work in order to get that prize. So let’s hope the global public finally gets a chance to learn those details. Details like when exactly did Moderna decide to develop coronavirus vaccines and how much of that work was carried out in partnership with government researchers? It’s the least we can ask if we’re going to let Moderna steal exclusive rights on the development of new mRNA vaccines for decades to come.
This should be interesting: The NIH recently announced its terminating the EcoHealth Alliance’s grant. Not the whole grant. Just the sub-award doled out to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The EcoHealth Alliance is still free to rework a new grant without the WIV.
That’s the news we got last week, with the NIH stating that it was cutting the sub-award to the WIV “for failure to meet award terms and conditions requiring provision of records to NIH upon request.” Specifically, the NIH is taking action because EcoHealth did not include terms and conditions on its sub-award to the WIV, including a requirement that EcoHealth Alliance be allowed access to the institute’s records and financial statements. “NIH has determined that [Wuhan Institute of Virology’s] refusal to provide the requested records, and [EcoHealth’s] failure to include the required terms in [the] subaward agreement represent material failures to comply with the terms of award.” In other words, the NIH is playing dumb and taking the stand that it had no idea what was going on inside the WIV.
Now, as the following article notes, this comes roughly a year after the NIH chided the WIV were not providing notice that the experiments taking place at the WIV involving chimeric coronaviruses on humanized mice resulted in viruses that replicated much faster (up to 10,000 times faster) than the unmodified viruses and results in greater weight loss in the mice. The NIH should have been immediately informed and the experiments should have been halted under the rules of the contract. We’re told that this never happened. And yet, as The Intercept reported last September based on documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the NIH was fully informed about these experiments back in May of 2018 basically came up with excuses for why the experiments should be allowed to continue. One excuse involved citing a 2017 paper published by Shi Zhengli’s lab showing chimeric viruses replicated at slower rates than modified viruses. The NIH appeared to view the creation of less aggressive viruses as a technical reason for concluding these these were not gain-of-function experiments.
And yet, as those FOIA documents show, the EcoHealth Alliance sent the NIH a report in 2018 citing the 10k-fold higher viral load in these chimeric viruses at early time points in these experiments. So how did the NIH conclude that these weren’t examples of gain-of-function experiments? By pointing to similar viral loads by the end of the experiment. So even though the chimeric viruses causes massive differences in viral loads early on, it wasn’t gain-of-function because it was evened out in the end. And the fact the the mice infected with the chimeric viruses lost more weight was apparently just ignored. It’s an example of highly motivated reasoning. And the motivation was to keep these experiments going. If that required defining them as non-gain-of-function, so be it.
Also keep in mind that we still don’t fully understand the nature of the NIH’s work with Moderna in the creation of coronavirus mRNA vaccines. But we do know Moderna claims it conducted human vaccine trials on coronaviruses as early as 2015. So when we’re looking at the highly motivated decision-making by the NIH surrounding these EcoHealth Alliance experiments, keep in mind that those Moderna coronavirus vaccine experiments may have been part of that motivation.
That’s all part of the context of the termination of the WIV’s sub-contract in the EcoHealth Alliance’s grant: the grant is going to continue. Just not the the WIV collaboration. Instead, it appears that the WIV is being set up as the fall guy for all the gain-of-function work while everyone else plays dumb. Which is, of course, a recipe for just continuing the same model of research but with a new fall guy:
“A letter from NIH to EcoHealth staff, also dated Aug. 19, said the NIH is taking action because EcoHealth did not include terms and conditions on its sub-award to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including a requirement that EcoHealth Alliance be allowed access to the institute’s records and financial statements. “NIH has determined that [Wuhan Institute of Virology’s] refusal to provide the requested records, and [EcoHealth’s] failure to include the required terms in [the] subaward agreement represent material failures to comply with the terms of award,” the letter said.”
The EcoHealth Alliance’s sub-contract with the WIV didn’t include terms that allowed access to the institute’s records and financial statements. That’s the stated reason the NIH game for terminating EcoHealth Alliances grant. But it’s not a complete termination. It sounds like it’s just that sub-grant to the WIV that’s getting terminated:
And as the article notes, this termination notice comes roughly a year after the NIH chided the EcoHealth Alliance for not immediately notifying the agency about experiments involving the creation of modified coronaviruses that replicated at a faster rate in experiment (humanized) mice. In other words, The EcoHealth Alliance didn’t immediately notify the NIH of what amounts to gain-of-function experiments:
Importantly, it doesn’t at all sound like the EcoHealth Alliance’s overall NIH-funded work is ending. It’s just not going to continue with the WIV. And that’s what all the questions from critics about what other risky research might be going on at the WIV missing one of the biggest pieces of this whole story: it’s not like this kind of research is just taking place at the WIV:
As we can see, the narrative we’re getting now appears to be that the NIH didn’t know about all this gain-of-function research taking place under the EcoHealth Alliance’s grant because the EcoHealth Alliance wasn’t sharing that info and because the WIV hasn’t been forthcoming with access to to its internal research. Again, that’s the narrative. So it’s worth taking a look at that report from The Intercept last year about the NIH’s ‘chiding’ of the EcoHealth Alliance. As the article makes clear, not only was the NIH thoroughly informed about the gain-of-function nature of these experiments back in 2018, but it appeared to go out of its way to come up with excuses for why the research should be allowed to continue. Excuses that come down to highly technical quibbles over whether or not gain-of-function research should really be considered gain-of-function:
“All but two of the scientists consulted agreed that, whatever title it is given, the newly public experiment raised serious concerns about the safety and oversight of federally funded research. “In my point of view, the debate about the definition of ‘gain-of-function’ has been too much focused on technical aspects,” said Jacques van Helden, a professor of bioinformatics at Aix-Marseille Université. “The real question is whether or not research has the potential to create or facilitate the selection of viruses that might infect humans.” The experiments described in the proposal clearly do have that potential, he said.”
A highly technical quibble. That’s what the debate over whether or not the EcoHealth Alliance’s research constituted gain-of-function research devolved into. A technical quibble over whether or not research involving the creation of chimeric viruses and testing them on humanized mice fell under the technical definition of “gain-of-function.” And a quibble that’s really only being had at all thanks to the NIH’s release of documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act. Documents that the NIH initially tried to avoid releasing on bogus claims of an investigation into the EcoHealth Alliance that never really happened. That’s all part of the context of the recent decision to rescind the WIV-sub award in the EcoHealth Alliance’s contract: that decision to terminated the WIV sub-award came after an investigation that never really appeared to be genuinely run in the first place:
And yet, as we saw, that technical quibble over whether or not the experiments constituted gain-of-function work appears to also largely be a distractions from the the fact that even the NIH wasn’t following its own rules when it came to this grant. Rule like how the research was to be immediately reported and halted if the viruses demonstrated an enhanced ability to reproduce. And yet it appears to the EcoHealth Alliance did indeed issue reports that the chimeric viruses being generated under the grant were demonstrated higher rates of reproduction. Beyond that, they also reported signs that the virus was more pathogenic (causing increased weight loss), and yet the research was never halted and the NIH ultimately concluded that the gain-of-function restrictions did not apply. In other words, the NIH was giving a thumbs up to the creation of chimeric viruses at the WIV the entire time:
And regarding the demands for the WIV’s notebooks, keep in mind that a lot of the this research was published. That’s a pretty good sign of what that grant money was going towards. And here’s where we get to one of the absurd technical quibbles that was used to give this research a waiver under the NIH’s gain-of-function ban put in place in 2014: The 2017 research published by Shi Zhengli’s lab showed the chimeric viruses reproduced less effectively than the original viruses. The NIH cited the research as a reason the gain-of-function moratorium — which wasn’t lifted until December 2017 — as one of the reasons the moratorium shouldn’t apply to the research. And yet, reported data from these humanized mouse experiments indicated that the chimeric virus had viral loads that were up to 10,000 times higher than the native virus at different points in the incubation period! So how on earth did the NIH conclude that the research wasn’t creating viruses with enhanced pathogenicity? By pointing to the viral loads at the end of the incubation period, which weren’t significantly different. It’s the kind of technical quibble that shows how almost any experiment can be deemed not-gain-of-function as long as you try hard enough to find a loophole:
Beyond that, these same chimeric viruses demonstrated an ability to induce greater weight loss, an unambiguous sign of greater pathogenicity. This was all part of the data submitted by the EcoHealth Alliance to the NIH in 2018. And the experiments were never stopped:
Keep in part of the conundrum the NIH found itself in when making these gain-of-function determinations: the moratorium wasn’t lifted until December 2017, and yet the research on those humanized mice was done between June 1017 and May 2018. It started while the moratorium was still in place:
And note the utterly disingenuous reasoning issued by the EcoHealth Alliance itself in defining its work as not falling under the gain-of-function moratorium: They argue that their work didn’t have any pandemic potential because “a bat virus is not known to be able to infect humans.” This is such an absurd statement on so many levels it’s hard to know where to be begin:
Finally, note the scope of the NIH’s grants to the WIV during this period: roughly $750,000. So that’s presumably what the EcoHealth Alliance just lost with the now-terminated sub-award:
How long before the EcoHealth Alliance reworks its grant to continue this research? It looks like that’s just a matter of time. But a far more interesting question is who is going to be the next fall guy? We’ll see, but if you’re an academic virologist working in say, Russia or Iran, and the EcoHealth Alliance approaches you with an exciting collaboration, it might be worth taking a pass.
Here’s a troubling update on the next round of mRNA COVID vaccine boosters slated for roll out this fall: the FDA has decided to approve the latest mRNA boosters based exclusively on mouse data.
The rationale for the decision appears to be rooted, in part, in a perceived need to have vaccines tailored for the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants that largely overtaken all of the other variants in the ongoing pandemic. That last booster for which human clinical trials were completed, the BA.1 variant, was basically replaced by BA.4 and BA.5 this summer. So the FDA is going to rely on the human clinical trial data from the BA.1 booster with mouse data from the BA.4 and BA.5 boosters to issue an emergency authorization for the vaccines this fall. The other part of the rationale for the decision is the inference that, since the BA.4 and BA.5 vaccines are so similar to the BA.1 vaccine, the safety profile will be similar too.
The primary concerns we’re hearing from experts is concern over the possible loss in public faith in the vaccine approval process if it turns out the new boosters don’t confer as much protection as the original vaccines against the new variants. As they remind us, mice aren’t people. Even if the mouse data demonstrates the new boosters illicit superior antibody responses against the new variants, that doesn’t mean that will be the case in human. It will probably be the case, but there’s a risk this vaccine gamble is a bust.
But as we’ve seen, while these concerns over inadequate antibody responses are valid, that’s far from the only health risk we need to watching for with this brand new technology. Don’t forget that side-effects related to the lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery vehicle for the mRNA may have played a role in Moderna’s decision to transition from mRNA therapeutics — which requires repeated doses over time — to mRNA vaccines, which only theoretically requires a single does over time and for which any immunological side effects could be seen as a positive adjuvant-like side-effect. The entire mRNA therapeutics industry was thwarted for years on this issue and we’ve never hear about a solution. Instead, the ‘solution’ was to shift to a vaccines where those side-effects are seen as a bonus. At least a bonus in the short-term. And here we are, slated to advise people to get an mRNA booster shot every few months.
What are the long-term effects of these repeated short-term immunological ‘bonuses’? We still don’t know. But keep in mind the we could be looking at a situation where mRNA vaccines are indeed net-helpful in the short-term and medium term but end up slowly becoming net-harmful over time as the inflammation induced by the side-effects from the LNP steadily accumulates. Again, we still don’t know. It’s been one of the biggest questions facing this entire gambit from the beginning of the pandemic. And now, predictably, we’re seeing our ability to even ask and answer these crucial long-term questions thwarted from the outset:
“Because the Biden administration has pushed for a fall booster campaign to begin in September, the mRNA vaccine-makers Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have only had time to test the reformulated shots in mice, not people. That means the Food and Drug Administration is relying on the mice trial data — plus human trial results from a similar vaccine that targets the original omicron strain, called BA.1 — to evaluate the new shots, according to a recent tweet from the FDA commissioner, Dr. Robert Califf.”
Mouse trials and human trials on a different vaccine. That’s the data that the FDA is going to be relying on when it authorizes the the next round of mRNA COVID boosters tailored for the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants. A decision that has experts divided, with many cautioning that it’s a gamble that risks the public’s confidence in the vaccines, especially if it doesn’t turn out to provide better protection than the older boosters that actually have some well-powered human trials behind them:
And note the somewhat ironic justification for the rushed authorization: it isn’t possible for Moderna and Pfizer to test these boosters on nearly as many people as the tens of thousands who were used in the initial human trials because of the high levels of immunity and vaccination that already exist. Yes, we have to rush the next version of the vaccines due to the existing high levels of vaccination and immunity:
But also note what is implied in that kind of reasoning: the assumption that we need people who haven’t already been vaccinated or already had COVID in order to test what are intended to be boosters. Isn’t the target population for the boosters people who already had a vaccine or an infection? It’s confusing reasoning.
And it’s the kind of reasoning that completely side-steps what should be one of the major safety questions being asked by these companies and the FDA. A question that only grows with each new round of boosters: what are the health risks of repeated exposures to mRNA vaccines over time? Because at this point repeated exposure is what the doctor has ordered. Everyone is supposed to be boosted multiple times a year for the foreseeable future. Longitudinal data on the effects of repeated mRNA doses is an absolute necessity. And yet we hear nothing about this risk, even in the critiques of this decision to rely on mouse data. The only perceived risks are the risks of a loss of public faith should the boosters not be as effective as the original vaccines. There’s basically no concern about detecting what could be emerging long-term health issues that only arise from repeated doses of this technology. Health issues that, as we saw, may have played a role in Moderna’s decision to transition from mRNA therapeutics — which requires repeated doses over time — to mRNA vaccines, which only theoretically requires a single does over time and for which any immunological side effects could be seen as a positive adjuvant-like side-effect. That’s all part of why it’s somewhat absurd to point to the lack of human trials with each new round of influenza vaccines. Influenza vaccines have been used for decades while the entire world is basically on its 4th collective dose of this mRNA technology:
And again, look at the “Big Picture” message in the article: if you’re older than 50 or immunocompromised and you haven’t been boosted in three months, go get a booster. We’re telling the most immunologically challenged demographics to get multiple shots of this new technology every year indefinitely without looking into the long-term immunological side-effects:
And now here’s a piece on Science about the FDA’s controversial decision that gives us more info on the kind of data Moderna and Pfizer did actually deliver to the FDA. Both companies provided the FDA initial data during a meeting back on June, where they also presented on the human clinical trial data generated from their BA.1 booster trials. Pfizer’s data consisted of a few vague statements about how the “reactogenicity profile” has similar profiles to the original vaccine. That was it. The Moderna document had more data on the actual side-effects measured.
But as we’re going to see, it’s still exclusively longitudinal data on the kinds of acute side-effects that we’re already familiar with like fever or chills. The far more diverse and complicated health complications that could arise from immunological disturbances associated with repeated doses simply are not being examined.
And as we’re also going to see, while the median duration between the 2nd and 3rd vaccine doses in Moderna’s trial was 8 months, it was only 4.5 months between the 3rd and 4th doses. It’s a reflection of how we’ve just casually adopted a policy of issuing booster shots at shorter and shorter duration. It’s going to be 3–4 boosters a year at this rate:
“For the BA.4/BA.5 boosters, the companies have submitted animal data. They have not released those data publicly, although at the June FDA meeting, Pfizer presented preliminary findings in eight mice given BA.4/BA.5 vaccines as their third dose.. Compared with the mice that received the original vaccine as a booster, the animals showed an increased response to all Omicron variants tested: BA.1, BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5.”
Eight Mice. That was the animal data that the Pfizer presented to the FDA during a June meeting on the new subvariant vaccines. It’s not exactly impressive, statistically speaking.
But Moderna and Pfizer did have some data from human clinical trials available at that meeting from its BA.1 booster. So based on the data from those BA.1 trials and the mouse data, both Moderna and Pfizer are set to granted emergency authorizations for the new subvariant boosters this fall, before the human clinical trials can be completed. Full authorization will only come after the human trials. Of course, by that point we’ll be on the next subvariant and the next urgently felt need to roll out even newer vaccines as soon as possible. It points towards one of the perverse dynamics emerging in this situation: part of the appeal of mRNA vaccines is that you can easily design and manufacture new varieties to keep up with new viral variants. So these vaccines are always technologically available long before there’s been time to study their effects. In other words, there’s always going to be an incentive to issue an emergency authorization. The vaccines are ready to go almost immediately. The safety data is the main hold up. So as long as regulators treat the situation like an ongoing emergency, there’s an incentive to keep issuing the next generation of mRNA COVID boosters with the human trials only coming later:
So what did the human clinical trial data from the BA.1 trials that Moderna and Pfizer showed to the FDA actually say about how these trials were being conducted? Well, for example, if you look at the PDFs of the data presented to the FDA by Moderna back in June, we can find slides describing the side-effects testing already done by the companies on the new vaccines. Pfizer’s data consisted of a few vague statements about how the “reactogenicity profile” has similar profiles to the original vaccine. That was it.
The Moderna document had more data on the actual side-effects measured. There are two figures comparing the side-effects observed in Moderna’s clinical studies on human trials following the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th doses of the company’s mRNA vaccine. This data was much more in line with what we would want to see in terms of gathering longitudinal data on the possibly effects of repeated dosing with the vaccine over time. One figure, entited “Local Reactogenicity After 4thDose of mRNA-1273.214 Similar to 2ndDose of Primary Series and 3rdDose of mRNA-1273”, shows the rates of pain, erythema, swelling, and axillary swelling or tenderness following the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th doses with the vaccine.
The next figure, “Systemic Reactogenicity After 4thDose of mRNA-1273.214 Similar to 2ndDose of Primary Series and 3rdDose of mRNA-1273”, shows the rates of additional side effects following the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th doses: Fever, Headache, Fatigue, Myalgia, Arthralgia, Nausea/Vomiting, and Chills.
Keep in mind that the 2nd dose would have typically been delivered 30 days after the 1st days as part of the initial two-dose inoculation. So this data is following people who have been boosted up to two times and being used for the emergency authorization for what will be the 5th dose for many people.
Now, as we can see in the figures, there were 14,677 people with data following a second dose, but only 167 people with data following a 3rd dose and 437 people with data following a 4th dose. So the statistical power of of these trials dropped dramatically from that initially clinical trial on the safety of giving boosters.
And when we look at the figure entitled “Demographics and Baseline Characteristics”, we see that the medium interval between the 2nd and 3rd doses for the people in these trials was 8 months, while the medium interval between the 3nd and 4rd doses was 4.5 months. So the rate of dosing has been going up as the power to find side effects associated with that repeated doses has collapsed. And at this point it looks like people in the US are going to be advised to get COVID boosters every few months for the foreseeable future.
Now, in terms of assessing the prevalence of the specific acute side effects they’re already looking for like fever and fatigue, having smaller and smaller samples over time is probably adequate. But in terms of looking for side-effects that specifically pop up in response to repeated doses over time — side-effects associated with complications from chronic inflammation that can manifest in a myriad of different ways — that’s going to be a woefully inadequate sample size. Especially when they’re not even looking for these kinds of side-effect. This is basically a safety-screening system set up exclusively to detect short-term acute side-effects. Not side-effects associated with long-term immunological disturbances that might be induced by repeated exposing people to the LNP delivery vehicle for this mRNA. And now even this woefully inadequately safety-screening regiment is being short-circuited further.
On the plus side, there’s a giant clinical trial currently underway that will help future generations understand the risks of repeated doses of mRNA technology. Hundreds of millions, even billions, of people are going to be enrolled by the time it’s done. Well, not formally enrolled. It’s an informal clinical trial. And while it’s very well-powered, statistically speaking, it’s not actually very well designed. Or ethical. But it’s happening. Let’s hope future generations are actually allowed to learn something from this giant informal clinical trial. Better late than never.