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FTR#1249 The Ukraine War Meets “The Oswald Institute of Virology,” Part 2

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“Polit­i­cal language…is designed to make lies sound truth­ful and mur­der respectable, and to give an appear­ance of solid­i­ty to pure wind.”

— George Orwell, 1946

EVERYTHING MR. EMORY HAS BEEN SAYING ABOUT THE UKRAINE WAR IS ENCAPSULATED IN THIS VIDEO FROM UKRAINE 24

ANOTHER REVEALING VIDEO FROM UKRAINE 24

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FTR#1249 This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: This is the sec­ond pro­gram in a short series updat­ing not only our inquiry into the Covid “op” but the over­lap­ping inquiry into the Metabiota/Pentagon bio­log­i­cal research/warfare pro­gram in Ukraine.

In our “Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now” pro­grams, we not­ed Gilead Sci­ences’ devel­op­ment of the Tam­i­flu anti-viral devel­oped for use in the event of a human adap­ta­tion of H5N1 avian flu.

Pre­vi­ous­ly the chair­man of Gilead­’s board of direc­tors, Defense Sec­re­tary Don­ald Rums­feld had the Pen­ta­gon stock­pile Tam­i­flu, while retain­ing gen­er­ous amounts of Gilead stock–Rumsfeld prof­it­ed hand­some­ly there­by.

We have also dis­cussed the gain-of-func­tion research done on H5N1 to make it more infec­tive in numer­ous pro­grams.

This pro­gram explores the Ukraine pro­grams and the alle­ga­tion that weaponized H5N1 was being devel­oped in that coun­try.

Our research into Metabio­ta  and the Ukraine bio­log­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries is dis­cussed in–among oth­er pro­grams–FTR#1239. 

Research into the alle­ga­tion of “dig­i­tized” migra­to­ry birds to be used as weapons is high­light­ed in FTR#1243.

In this and suc­ceed­ing pro­grams, we will ana­lyze a very impor­tant arti­cle pre­sent­ing depth on a num­ber of over­lap­ping con­sid­er­a­tions about bio­log­i­cal war­fare, the Covid “op” and the Ukraine war.

Key Points of Analy­sis and Dis­cus­sion Include:

  • ” . . . . The emer­gence of the virus in 1997 in Hong Kong was eeri­ly pre­dict­ed by Kennedy Short­ridge, the sci­en­tist who would dis­cov­er it. H5N1 didn’t infect humans until Short­ridge and his col­leagues had been study­ing its human infec­tion poten­tial in their labs for sev­er­al years. At the time, the nat­ur­al leap of a flu direct­ly from poul­try to humans was so improb­a­ble that sci­en­tists first sus­pect­ed that it was the result of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from Shortridge’s lab. . . .”
  • Nor­mal­ly, H5N1 human infec­tions are extreme­ly rare” . . . . H5N1 hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. News about high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian influen­za usu­al­ly leads with how dead­ly it is. Rarely is it men­tioned that the dis­ease hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. H5N1 kills more than half of the peo­ple who get it, but H5N1 has cir­cled the globe for decades and there have only ever been 860 human infec­tions world­wide. . . .”
  • More about how rare human infec­tions are and the rise of avian infec­tions in 2022: ” . . . . There has nev­er been an H5N1 pan­dem­ic and no human infec­tionwith H5N1 bird flu has ever been iden­ti­fied in the U.S. That’s an extra­or­di­nary safe­ty record, giv­en how filthy U.S. fac­to­ry farms and slaugh­ter­hous­es are and how fast the infec­tion spreads among crowd­ed birds. So far in 2022, 29 states have report­ed out­breaks of bird flu in 213 flocks result­ing in the culling of near­ly 31 mil­lion birds, includ­ing almost 5 per­cent of egg-lay­ing hens. In 2015, it was even worse with 50 mil­lion birds culled, but there wasn’t a sin­gle human case. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Antho­ny Fau­ci has made sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments in gain-of-func­tion research to give H5N1 pan­dem­ic poten­tial, mak­ing it eas­i­ly trans­mis­si­ble from per­son to person—and Bill Gates chipped in, too! . . .”
  • ” . . . . In Feb­ru­ary 2006, Fau­ci con­vened a one-day in-house ‘NIAID Influen­za Research Sum­mit’ to  iden­ti­fy influen­za research pri­or­i­ties. In Sep­tem­ber, he opened up the top­ic to a 35-mem­ber ‘Blue Rib­bon Pan­el on Influen­za Research’ that includ­ed Fouch­i­er and Kawao­ka. The Blue Rib­bon panel’s report doesn’t men­tion gain-of-func­tion exper­i­ments, but Fau­ci gave them grants to do just that. [Ron] Fouch­i­er and [Yoshi­hi­ro] Kawaoka’s now infa­mous gain-of-func­tion research showed that, through lab manip­u­la­tion, H5N1 could be altered to become high­ly trans­mis­si­ble among humans via air­borne infec­tion. . . .”
  • ” . . . . The first human H5N1 out­break occurred in Hong Kong in 1997, the year of what the British call the ‘Hong Kong han­dover,’ when sov­er­eign­ty over Hong Kong was trans­ferred from the U.K. to Chi­na. It was dur­ing this ‘polit­i­cal­ly sen­si­tive’ year that Kennedy Short­ridge, an Aus­tralian sci­en­tist who was the direc­tor of the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion’s ref­er­ence lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, con­firmed human cas­es of high­ly path­o­gen­ic bird flu. . . .”
  • ” . . . .The 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 virus was unique in every respect. Time mag­a­zine report­ed, ‘On the H gene at a point called the cleav­age site, [was] found a tell­tale muta­tion, the same kind of muta­tion found in oth­er high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian virus­es. …The virus … had regions that were iden­ti­cal to por­tions of [an] avian virus that struck Penn­syl­va­nia [chick­ens] in 1983.” The L.A. Times report­ed, ‘The H5 piece came from a virus in a goose. The N1 piece came from a sec­ond virus in a quail. The remain­ing flu genes came from a third virus, also in quail.’ . . . .”
  • ” . . . . Short­ridge had been study­ing how avian influen­za virus­es spread to humans since 1975. Pri­or to dis­cov­er­ing H5N1, Short­ridge eeri­ly pre­dict­ed its emer­gence. As Frank Ching report­ed in ‘Bird Flu, SARS and Beyond’: As ear­ly as 1982, Short­ridge had labeled south­ern Chi­na, where humans and domes­tic ani­mals lived in close prox­im­i­ty, ‘an epi­cen­ter for the ori­gin of pan­demics.’ Ten years lat­er, he called south­ern Chi­na a ‘virus soup’ and warned that pan­dem­ic influen­za was a zoono­sis, that is, it could be trans­mit­ted from ani­mals to humans and, in 1995, he warned that influen­za in south­ern Chi­na could not prop­er­ly be called an ’emerg­ing’ infec­tion because it was con­stant­ly lurk­ing. ‘Elu­sive might be more apt,’ he wrote. . . .”
  • ” . . . . An exam­ple of Shortridge’s pen­chant for such pre­dic­tions is his 1995 Lancet arti­cle “The next pan­dem­ic influen­za virus?” Curi­ous­ly, H5N1 emerged two years lat­er, in 1997, in the same city where Short­ridge worked, Hong Kong. . . .”
  • ” . . . . At the time, the nat­ur­al leap of a flu direct­ly from poul­try to humans was thought to be so unlike­ly that sci­en­tists first sus­pect­ed con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from Shortridge’s lab was the cause of the high­ly improb­a­ble H5N1 diag­no­sis. How would that con­t­a­m­i­na­tion hap­pen unless Short­ridge hadn’t already been work­ing with H5N1 in the lab? . . .”
  • ” . . . . H5N1 didn’t cause dis­ease in humans until this poten­tial had been stud­ied in a lab for sev­er­al years. Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawao­ka and Fouchier’s efforts to get bird flu to leap to humans since 1990 and their work was con­nect­ed to what Short­ridge was doing in Hong Kong. For sev­en years pri­or to the first human H5N1 out­break in 1997, Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawaoka’s gain-of-func­tion bird flu research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hos­pi­tal and Kawaoka’s men­tor there, Robert G. Web­ster, was work­ing and pub­lish­ing with Short­ridge. Every year, Web­ster spent three months work­ing with Short­ridge at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, accord­ing to this pro­file of Web­ster which men­tions Kawao­ka as his pro­tege. . . .”
  • ” . . . . The most eerie con­nec­tion between Short­ridge and Webster’s labs is that the clos­est known rel­a­tive of the 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 was the avian virus that struck Penn­syl­va­nia chick­ens in 1983—that Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka had stud­ied. Accord­ing to Time mag­a­zine: Web­ster assigned a young sci­en­tist, Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka, to try to fig­ure out how the [1983] virus trans­formed itself into such a ‘hot’ pathogen. Kawao­ka, now a pro­fes­sor of virol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, Madi­son, com­pared the genet­ic struc­ture of virus­es from the first and sec­ond waves and found only a sin­gle, extreme­ly sub­tle change in the H gene. The two virus­es dif­fered by just one nucleotide–one of 1,700 nucleotides that made up the gene. . . .”
  • “. . . . There’s also a con­nec­tion to Fouch­i­er, through his men­tor at the Eras­mus Med­ical Cen­ter in Rot­ter­dam, the Nether­lands, Jan De Jong, also a col­league and col­lab­o­ra­tor of Short­ridge and Webster’s. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Kawaoka’s col­league and men­tor Robert G. Web­ster and Fouchier’s col­league and men­tor Jan De Jong were the first sci­en­tists out­side of Hong Kong to receive sam­ples of the 1997 H5N1 flu from Shortridge’s lab. . . .”
  • ” . . . . De Jong is often cred­it­ed with being the one who iden­ti­fied the 1997 Hong Kong flu as H5N1, but he did so with ‘a pan­el of reagents to every type of flu strain yet known’ that had been brought from Webster’s lab in Mem­phis to the Nation­al Influen­za Cen­tre in Rot­ter­dam. . . .”
  • ” . . . . 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. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Short­ridge and Web­ster were trained by Frank Mac­far­lane Bur­net who served on the Aus­tralian Depart­ment of Defence’s New Weapons and Equip­ment Devel­op­ment Com­mit­tee in the 1940s and 50s. The Fed­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can Sci­en­tists lists some of the most chill­ing things Bur­net rec­om­mend­ed: Bur­net … said Aus­tralia should devel­op bio­log­i­cal weapons that would work in trop­i­cal Asia with­out spread­ing to Aus­trali­a’s more tem­per­ate pop­u­la­tion cen­tres. . . .”
  • Bur­net’s obser­va­tions: . . . . ‘Specif­i­cal­ly to the Aus­tralian sit­u­a­tion, the most effec­tive counter-offen­sive to threat­ened inva­sion by over­pop­u­lat­ed Asi­at­ic coun­tries would be direct­ed towards the destruc­tion by bio­log­i­cal or chem­i­cal means of trop­i­cal food crops and the dis­sem­i­na­tion of infec­tious dis­ease capa­ble of spread­ing in trop­i­cal but not under Aus­tralian con­di­tions.’ . . .”
  • The broad­cast notes a fright­en­ing rela­tion­ship between Metabio­ta and the selec­tion of Philip Zelikow to head a com­mis­sion to deter­mine the ori­gin of Covid-19: ” . . . . In 2008, Google.org com­mit­ted $30 mil­lion to virus hunt­ing and gain-of-func­tion research on poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens through a project it called Pre­dict and Pre­vent. At least $5.5 mil­lion of that went to Dr. Nathan Wolfe’s non-prof­it Glob­al Viral Fore­cast­ing Ini­tia­tive, which was soon to become the for-prof­it Metabio­ta. Oth­er GVFI fun­ders at the time includ­ed the Skoll Foun­da­tion, which also gave $5.5 mil­lion, the Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion, Mer­ck Research Lab­o­ra­to­ries and the US Depart­ment of Defense. . . .”
  • ” . . . . When the GVFI became the for-prof­it Metabio­ta, Google Ven­tures con­tin­ued to invest. In addi­tion, it cre­at­ed a busi­ness part­ner­ship with Metabio­ta, ‘offer­ing its big-data exper­tise to help the com­pa­ny serve its customers–insurers, gov­ern­ment agen­cies and oth­er organizations–by offer­ing them fore­cast­ing and risk-man­age­ment tools.’ In oth­er words, they sell pan­dem­ic insur­ance. . . .”
  • “. . . . Now that Metabio­ta has got­ten caught up in the COVID ori­gins scan­dal, its orig­i­nal investors, Eric Schmidt of Google, Jef­frey Skoll of EBay, Rajiv Shah of The Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion (for­mer­ly USAID direc­tor, Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion) chipped in to fund the COVID Com­mis­sion Plan­ning Group, a white-wash led by Philip Zelikow who gave us the 9–11 Com­mis­sion cov­er-up. . . .”
  • In past pro­grams, we have not­ed that David Franz, for­mer head of the U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D at Fort Det­rick was a key advi­sor to Eco­HealthAl­liance. Franz helped pro­duce the encap­su­lat­ed, weapons-grade anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks: . . . . One of Metabiota’s PREDICT part­ners is Eco­Health Alliance, whose sci­ence and pol­i­cy advi­sor, David Franz, pro­duced the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks while work­ing for South­ern Research and part­ner­ing with sci­en­tists at Bat­telle. . . .” 

1.   A very impor­tant arti­cle presents depth on a num­ber of over­lap­ping con­sid­er­a­tions about bio­log­i­cal war­fare, the Covid “op” and the Ukraine war.

Key Points of Analy­sis and Dis­cus­sion Include:

  • ” . . . . The emer­gence of the virus in 1997 in Hong Kong was eeri­ly pre­dict­ed by Kennedy Short­ridge, the sci­en­tist who would dis­cov­er it. H5N1 didn’t infect humans until Short­ridge and his col­leagues had been study­ing its human infec­tion poten­tial in their labs for sev­er­al years. At the time, the nat­ur­al leap of a flu direct­ly from poul­try to humans was so improb­a­ble that sci­en­tists first sus­pect­ed that it was the result of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from Shortridge’s lab. . . .”
  • Nor­mal­ly, H5N1 human infec­tions are extreme­ly rare” . . . . H5N1 hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. News about high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian influen­za usu­al­ly leads with how dead­ly it is. Rarely is it men­tioned that the dis­ease hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. H5N1 kills more than half of the peo­ple who get it, but H5N1 has cir­cled the globe for decades and there have only ever been 860 human infec­tions world­wide. . . .”
  • More about how rare human infec­tions are and the rise of avian infec­tions in 2022: ” . . . . There has nev­er been an H5N1 pan­dem­ic and no human infec­tionwith H5N1 bird flu has ever been iden­ti­fied in the U.S. That’s an extra­or­di­nary safe­ty record, giv­en how filthy U.S. fac­to­ry farms and slaugh­ter­hous­es are and how fast the infec­tion spreads among crowd­ed birds. So far in 2022, 29 states have report­ed out­breaks of bird flu in 213 flocks result­ing in the culling of near­ly 31 mil­lion birds, includ­ing almost 5 per­cent of egg-lay­ing hens. In 2015, it was even worse with 50 mil­lion birds culled, but there wasn’t a sin­gle human case. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Antho­ny Fau­ci has made sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments in gain-of-func­tion research to give H5N1 pan­dem­ic poten­tial, mak­ing it eas­i­ly trans­mis­si­ble from per­son to person—and Bill Gates chipped in, too! . . .”
  • ” . . . . In Feb­ru­ary 2006, Fau­ci con­vened a one-day in-house ‘NIAID Influen­za Research Sum­mit’ to  iden­ti­fy influen­za research pri­or­i­ties. In Sep­tem­ber, he opened up the top­ic to a 35-mem­ber ‘Blue Rib­bon Pan­el on Influen­za Research’ that includ­ed Fouch­i­er and Kawao­ka. The Blue Rib­bon panel’s report doesn’t men­tion gain-of-func­tion exper­i­ments, but Fau­ci gave them grants to do just that. [Ron] Fouch­i­er and [Yoshi­hi­ro] Kawaoka’s now infa­mous gain-of-func­tion research showed that, through lab manip­u­la­tion, H5N1 could be altered to become high­ly trans­mis­si­ble among humans via air­borne infec­tion. . . .”
  • ” . . . . The first human H5N1 out­break occurred in Hong Kong in 1997, the year of what the British call the ‘Hong Kong han­dover,’ when sov­er­eign­ty over Hong Kong was trans­ferred from the U.K. to Chi­na. It was dur­ing this ‘polit­i­cal­ly sen­si­tive’ year that Kennedy Short­ridge, an Aus­tralian sci­en­tist who was the direc­tor of the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion’s ref­er­ence lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, con­firmed human cas­es of high­ly path­o­gen­ic bird flu. . . .”
  • ” . . . .The 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 virus was unique in every respect. Time mag­a­zine report­ed, ‘On the H gene at a point called the cleav­age site, [was] found a tell­tale muta­tion, the same kind of muta­tion found in oth­er high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian virus­es. …The virus … had regions that were iden­ti­cal to por­tions of [an] avian virus that struck Penn­syl­va­nia [chick­ens] in 1983.” The L.A. Times report­ed, ‘The H5 piece came from a virus in a goose. The N1 piece came from a sec­ond virus in a quail. The remain­ing flu genes came from a third virus, also in quail.’ . . . .”
  • ” . . . . Short­ridge had been study­ing how avian influen­za virus­es spread to humans since 1975. Pri­or to dis­cov­er­ing H5N1, Short­ridge eeri­ly pre­dict­ed its emer­gence. As Frank Ching report­ed in ‘Bird Flu, SARS and Beyond’: As ear­ly as 1982, Short­ridge had labeled south­ern Chi­na, where humans and domes­tic ani­mals lived in close prox­im­i­ty, ‘an epi­cen­ter for the ori­gin of pan­demics.’ Ten years lat­er, he called south­ern Chi­na a ‘virus soup’ and warned that pan­dem­ic influen­za was a zoono­sis, that is, it could be trans­mit­ted from ani­mals to humans and, in 1995, he warned that influen­za in south­ern Chi­na could not prop­er­ly be called an ’emerg­ing’ infec­tion because it was con­stant­ly lurk­ing. ‘Elu­sive might be more apt,’ he wrote. . . .”
  • ” . . . . An exam­ple of Shortridge’s pen­chant for such pre­dic­tions is his 1995 Lancet arti­cle “The next pan­dem­ic influen­za virus?” Curi­ous­ly, H5N1 emerged two years lat­er, in 1997, in the same city where Short­ridge worked, Hong Kong. . . .”
  • ” . . . . At the time, the nat­ur­al leap of a flu direct­ly from poul­try to humans was thought to be so unlike­ly that sci­en­tists first sus­pect­ed con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from Shortridge’s lab was the cause of the high­ly improb­a­ble H5N1 diag­no­sis. How would that con­t­a­m­i­na­tion hap­pen unless Short­ridge hadn’t already been work­ing with H5N1 in the lab? . . .”
  • ” . . . . H5N1 didn’t cause dis­ease in humans until this poten­tial had been stud­ied in a lab for sev­er­al years. Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawao­ka and Fouchier’s efforts to get bird flu to leap to humans since 1990 and their work was con­nect­ed to what Short­ridge was doing in Hong Kong. For sev­en years pri­or to the first human H5N1 out­break in 1997, Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawaoka’s gain-of-func­tion bird flu research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hos­pi­tal and Kawaoka’s men­tor there, Robert G. Web­ster, was work­ing and pub­lish­ing with Short­ridge. Every year, Web­ster spent three months work­ing with Short­ridge at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, accord­ing to this pro­file of Web­ster which men­tions Kawao­ka as his pro­tege. . . .”
  • ” . . . . The most eerie con­nec­tion between Short­ridge and Webster’s labs is that the clos­est known rel­a­tive of the 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 was the avian virus that struck Penn­syl­va­nia chick­ens in 1983—that Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka had stud­ied. Accord­ing to Time mag­a­zine: Web­ster assigned a young sci­en­tist, Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka, to try to fig­ure out how the [1983] virus trans­formed itself into such a ‘hot’ pathogen. Kawao­ka, now a pro­fes­sor of virol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, Madi­son, com­pared the genet­ic struc­ture of virus­es from the first and sec­ond waves and found only a sin­gle, extreme­ly sub­tle change in the H gene. The two virus­es dif­fered by just one nucleotide–one of 1,700 nucleotides that made up the gene. . . .”
  • “. . . . There’s also a con­nec­tion to Fouch­i­er, through his men­tor at the Eras­mus Med­ical Cen­ter in Rot­ter­dam, the Nether­lands, Jan De Jong, also a col­league and col­lab­o­ra­tor of Short­ridge and Webster’s. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Kawaoka’s col­league and men­tor Robert G. Web­ster and Fouchier’s col­league and men­tor Jan De Jong were the first sci­en­tists out­side of Hong Kong to receive sam­ples of the 1997 H5N1 flu from Shortridge’s lab. . . .”
  • ” . . . . De Jong is often cred­it­ed with being the one who iden­ti­fied the 1997 Hong Kong flu as H5N1, but he did so with ‘a pan­el of reagents to every type of flu strain yet known’ that had been brought from Webster’s lab in Mem­phis to the Nation­al Influen­za Cen­tre in Rot­ter­dam. . . .”
  • ” . . . . 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. . . .”
  • ” . . . . Short­ridge and Web­ster were trained by Frank Mac­far­lane Bur­net who served on the Aus­tralian Depart­ment of Defence’s New Weapons and Equip­ment Devel­op­ment Com­mit­tee in the 1940s and 50s. The Fed­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can Sci­en­tists lists some of the most chill­ing things Bur­net rec­om­mend­ed: Bur­net … said Aus­tralia should devel­op bio­log­i­cal weapons that would work in trop­i­cal Asia with­out spread­ing to Aus­trali­a’s more tem­per­ate pop­u­la­tion cen­tres. . . .”
  • Bur­net’s obser­va­tions: . . . . ‘Specif­i­cal­ly to the Aus­tralian sit­u­a­tion, the most effec­tive counter-offen­sive to threat­ened inva­sion by over­pop­u­lat­ed Asi­at­ic coun­tries would be direct­ed towards the destruc­tion by bio­log­i­cal or chem­i­cal means of trop­i­cal food crops and the dis­sem­i­na­tion of infec­tious dis­ease capa­ble of spread­ing in trop­i­cal but not under Aus­tralian con­di­tions.’ . . .”
  • The broad­cast notes a fright­en­ing rela­tion­ship between Metabio­ta and the selec­tion of Philip Zelikow to head a com­mis­sion to deter­mine the ori­gin of Covid-19: ” . . . . In 2008, Google.org com­mit­ted $30 mil­lion to virus hunt­ing and gain-of-func­tion research on poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens through a project it called Pre­dict and Pre­vent. At least $5.5 mil­lion of that went to Dr. Nathan Wolfe’s non-prof­it Glob­al Viral Fore­cast­ing Ini­tia­tive, which was soon to become the for-prof­it Metabio­ta. Oth­er GVFI fun­ders at the time includ­ed the Skoll Foun­da­tion, which also gave $5.5 mil­lion, the Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion, Mer­ck Research Lab­o­ra­to­ries and the US Depart­ment of Defense. . . .”
  • ” . . . . When the GVFI became the for-prof­it Metabio­ta, Google Ven­tures con­tin­ued to invest. In addi­tion, it cre­at­ed a busi­ness part­ner­ship with Metabio­ta, ‘offer­ing its big-data exper­tise to help the com­pa­ny serve its customers–insurers, gov­ern­ment agen­cies and oth­er organizations–by offer­ing them fore­cast­ing and risk-man­age­ment tools.’ In oth­er words, they sell pan­dem­ic insur­ance. . . .”
  • “. . . . Now that Metabio­ta has got­ten caught up in the COVID ori­gins scan­dal, its orig­i­nal investors, Eric Schmidt of Google, Jef­frey Skoll of EBay, Rajiv Shah of The Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion (for­mer­ly USAID direc­tor, Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion) chipped in to fund the COVID Com­mis­sion Plan­ning Group, a white-wash led by Philip Zelikow who gave us the 9–11 Com­mis­sion cov­er-up. . . .”
  • In past pro­grams, we have not­ed that David Franz, for­mer head of the U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D at Fort Det­rick was a key advi­sor to Eco­HealthAl­liance. Franz helped pro­duce the encap­su­lat­ed, weapons-grade anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks: . . . . One of Metabiota’s PREDICT part­ners is Eco­Health Alliance, whose sci­ence and pol­i­cy advi­sor, David Franz, pro­duced the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks while work­ing for South­ern Research and part­ner­ing with sci­en­tists at Bat­telle. . . .” 

  “Is Bird Flu Being Weaponized?” by Alex­is-Baden May­er; Organ­ic Con­sumers Asso­ci­a­tion; 4/22/2022.

There’s been a lot of talk about the con­flict in Ukraine caus­ing the release of dan­ger­ous pathogens, includ­ing high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian influen­za (H5N1), from U.S. fund­ed bio­labs.

This isn’t the first time that H5N1 bioweapons fears have gripped Ukraine. In 2009, when a flu broke out in Ukraine (the offi­cial sto­ry is that it was H1N1), rumors cir­cu­lat­ed that it was H5N1, spread via vac­cines or aer­i­al spray­ing.

Mak­ing the whole H5N1 saga even sketch­i­er is its ori­gin sto­ry in the late 1990s. The emer­gence of the virus in 1997 in Hong Kong was eeri­ly pre­dict­ed by Kennedy Short­ridge, the sci­en­tist who would dis­cov­er it. H5N1 didn’t infect humans until Short­ridge and his col­leagues had been study­ing its human infec­tion poten­tial in their labs for sev­er­al years. At the time, the nat­ur­al leap of a flu direct­ly from poul­try to humans was so improb­a­ble that sci­en­tists first sus­pect­ed that it was the result of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from Shortridge’s lab. The 1997 H5N1 out­break in Hong Kong was the first flu to be diag­nosed by PCR test.

Does this sce­nario sound famil­iar?

I’ve doc­u­ment­ed all of that below, but there are sev­er­al even more obvi­ous rea­sons why, if there’s ever a human H5N1 out­break or vac­ci­na­tion push, we’ll know we’re in the midst of anoth­er Plan­dem­ic:

  1. H5N1 hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. News about high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian influen­za usu­al­ly leads with how dead­ly it is. Rarely is it men­tioned that the dis­ease hard­ly ever infects peo­ple. H5N1 kills more than half of the peo­ple who get it, but H5N1 has cir­cled the globe for decades and there have only ever been 860 human infec­tionsworld­wide.
  2. There has nev­er been an H5N1 pan­dem­ic and no human infec­tionwith H5N1 bird flu has ever been iden­ti­fied in the U.S. That’s an extra­or­di­nary safe­ty record, giv­en how filthy U.S. fac­to­ry farms and slaugh­ter­hous­es are and how fast the infec­tion spreads among crowd­ed birds. So far in 2022, 29 states have report­ed out­breaks of bird flu in 213 flocks result­ing in the culling of near­ly 31 mil­lion birds, includ­ing almost 5 per­cent of egg-lay­ing hens. In 2015, it was even worse with 50 mil­lion birds culled, but there wasn’t a sin­gle human case.
  3. H5N1 isn’t trans­mit­ted per­son-to-per­son. There are only a hand­ful of “pos­si­ble” cas­es world­wide. That’s how the CDC puts it. My research sug­gests that virus hunters like the Gates Foundation’s Scott Dow­ellhave stretched the truth in their search for trans­mis­si­ble H5N1. Regard­less, the CDC says there is no evi­dence from those “pos­si­ble” cas­es that spread could be sus­tained beyond a sin­gle trans­mis­sion.
  4. There are no food safe­ty risks asso­ci­at­ed with H5N1. If farm work­ers and meat pack­ers don’t get bird flu in filthy fac­to­ry farms or slaugh­ter­hous­es, it’s no sur­prise the rest of us don’t get bird flu from eat­ing raw eggs or han­dling raw chick­en.
  5. Antho­ny Fau­ci has made sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments in gain-of-func­tion research to give H5N1 pan­dem­ic poten­tial, mak­ing it eas­i­ly trans­mis­si­ble from per­son to person—and Bill Gates chipped in, too!

In this arti­cle, I lay out the evi­dence that:

  1. Fau­ci and Gates fund­ed the weaponiza­tion of H5N1.
  2. Fauci’s H5N1 research is ongo­ing and is being done all over the world, includ­ing in Pen­ta­gon-fund­ed bio­labs in Ukraine.
  3. Some of the scari­est, most scan­dal-plagued cor­po­ra­tions on the plan­et are involved in the Ukraine bio­labs, from our Mil­lions Against Mon­san­to neme­sis Bay­er to the likes of Bat­telle, Metabio­ta and South­ern Research, biode­fense con­trac­tors var­i­ous­ly linked to the Biden fam­i­ly, the ori­gins of COVID-19 and the 2001 anthrax attacks.
  4. The U.S. has already autho­rized and stock­piled a human H5N1 vac­cine.

Chris­t­ian West­brook at IceAgeFarmer.com is warn­ing that bird flu will be the next human pan­dem­ic and that the cat­a­stro­phe is being engi­neered to ush­er in the post-meat/­post-farmer world that Bill Gates aspires to. I sin­cere­ly hope he’s wrong, but it’s hard to be opti­mistic when peo­ple like Robert Red­field, who was CDC direc­tor under Trump and is known for his sus­pi­cion that COVID-19 orig­i­nat­ed in a lab, are com­ing out of the wood­work to make the same eerie pre­dic­tion.

Fau­ci & Gates Fund­ed the Weaponiza­tion of H5N1

Fau­ci and Gates fig­ured out how to get sci­en­tists to par­tic­i­pate in bio­log­i­cal weapons research with a clean con­science:

They pay them to...

  1. Believe pan­demics are caused by pathogens that don’t infect humans.
  2. Use genet­ic engi­neer­ing and syn­thet­ic biol­o­gy to “pre­dict” how those pathogens will infect humans.

In his 2006 piece, “The Sci­ence: How a Human Pan­dem­ic Could Start,” Scott Dow­ell, wrote:

“While rare instances of H5N1 pass­ing from per­son to per­son have been doc­u­ment­ed, there is no indi­ca­tion that it can do so effi­cient­ly. That could change. … A series of muta­tions or a sin­gle genet­ic reas­sort­ment event (a type of gene swap­ping among virus­es) could enable H5N1 to spread effi­cient­ly among humans, trig­ger­ing a pan­dem­ic. … H5N1 may evolve into some­thing that’s eas­i­ly spread through cough­ing, sneez­ing, or con­tact with con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed hands.”

In his wis­dom, Fau­ci decid­ed to see if he could make that hap­pen in a lab. 

As direc­tor of the Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases (NIAID), Fau­ci com­mis­sioned two gain-of-func­tion research teams with grants titled “Pan­dem­ic Poten­tial of H5N1 Influen­za Virus­es” and “Under­stand­ing the Emer­gence of High­ly Path­o­gen­ic Avian Influen­za Virus­es.” 

Gates chipped in, too, with grants 48339 and OPPGH5383 from the Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion. (Ice Age Farmer’s West­brook found a lot more doc­u­men­ta­tion of Gates’ fund­ing of gain-of-func­tion research to make high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian influen­za even more path­o­gen­ic and trans­mis­si­ble.)

The sci­en­tists Fau­ci chose to lead the H5N1 teams, 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, were sci­en­tists Fau­ci had fund­ed since 1990 under grants with titles includ­ing “Influen­za Virus Assem­bly.”

In Feb­ru­ary 2006, Fau­ci con­vened a one-day in-house “NIAID Influen­za Research Sum­mit” to iden­ti­fy influen­za research pri­or­i­ties. In Sep­tem­ber, he opened up the top­ic to a 35-mem­ber “Blue Rib­bon Pan­el on Influen­za Research” that includ­ed Fouch­i­er and Kawao­ka. The Blue Rib­bon panel’s report doesn’t men­tion gain-of-func­tion exper­i­ments, but Fau­ci gave them grants to do just that.

Fouch­i­er and Kawaoka’s now infa­mous gain-of-func­tion research showed that, through lab manip­u­la­tion, H5N1 could be altered to become high­ly trans­mis­si­ble among humans via air­borne infec­tion. 

Did Fau­ci & Gates’ Weaponized H5N1 End Up In Ukraine?

In this video from IceAge Farmer, Chris­t­ian West­brook talks about Russia’s claim that the U.S. fund­ed Ukraine exper­i­ments with engi­neered strains of bird flu that could kill 50 per­cent of human­i­ty:

Russia’s accu­sa­tion was pre­sent­ed to the Unit­ed Nations:

Russia’s infor­ma­tion on U.S. fund­ing of pathogen research in Ukraine was gleaned from pub­lic sources. Rob­bie Mar­tin of Media Roots Radio has com­piled the doc­u­men­ta­tion in a search­able data­base housed by Our Hid­den His­to­ry. Mar­tin did a great pod­cast on the sub­ject, “Is the US Mak­ing Bioweapons Under the Guise of ‘Biode­fense’ in Ukraine & Else­where? w/ Gum­by.”

As Igor Kir­illov, the head of the Nuclear, Bio­log­i­cal, and Chem­i­cal Pro­tec­tion Troops of the Russ­ian Armed Forces, has report­ed, the Pen­ta­gon-fund­ed pathogens projects in Ukraine were labeled UP for Ukraine Project and giv­en num­bers start­ing with UP‑1.

Cur­rent­ly, the project lead for U.S.-funded H5N1 research in Ukraine (the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA) refers to it as UP‑4 or Ukraine Project 4) is Denys Muzy­ka. (The link goes to his pub­li­ca­tions on Google Schol­ar.)

This is all very well doc­u­ment­ed and the U.S. has­n’t denied it (although it insists it is in full com­pli­ance with the Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion):

Ukraine is a hub for Pen­ta­gon bio­lab fund­ing, and biotech & phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies are going where the gov­ern­ment con­tracts are. Our Mil­lions Against Mon­san­to neme­sis Bay­er is sidling up to the trough, too.

 A series of bioweapons scan­dals that pre­date the cur­rent cri­sis reveal that the U.S. has been fund­ing H5N1 research in Ukraine for many years.

Begin­ning in 2018, Dilyana Gay­tandzhie­va of Arm­sWatch pub­lished a series of reports on U.S.-funded bio­labs, reveal­ing that defense con­trac­tor Black & Veatch got a total of $208.5 mil­lion in Pen­ta­gon con­tracts to design, con­struct and equip 11 bio-labs in Ukraine in 20082012 and 2020. The com­pa­ny com­plet­ed Ukraine’s first Bio-Safe­ty Lev­el 3 (BSL‑3) lab­o­ra­to­ry in 2010. Black & Veatch also main­tains the Pentagon’s sys­tems in Ukraine for the “con­trol and account­ing of bio­log­i­cal mate­ri­als in lab­o­ra­to­ries” and the “ear­ly detec­tion of a dis­ease out­break and assist[ance] in an effec­tive response.”

Gay­tandzhie­va was also the first to report Metabiota’s Pen­ta­gon con­tracts to research pathogens in Ukraine.

Metabio­ta received a Pen­ta­gon con­tract worth up to $23.9 mil­lion that includ­ed a 2014 line item allo­cat­ing $307,091 for “Ukraine Research Projects.” As men­tioned above, Rus­sia claimed that the U.S. labeled its Ukraine bio­lab projects as UP for Ukraine Project and gave them num­bers. This match­es the way Amer­i­can sci­en­tists work­ing on these projects refer to them, but they call them “Metabio­ta Ukraine Projects.” For exam­ple, there’s this ref­er­ence to “Metabio­ta UP‑8” on LinkedIn.

Black & Veatch and Metabio­ta co-lead the Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency’s so-called Sci­ence Writ­ers Men­tor­ship Pro­gram (SWMP) in Ukraine, begun in 2016. That’s how the Pen­ta­gon puts one degree of sep­a­ra­tion between itself and Ukrain­ian sci­en­tists. The sci­en­tists put a dis­claimer on their pub­lished research that says that their research isn’t fund­ed by DTRA but their pub­li­ca­tions are, through the SWMP.

For exam­ple, the authors of “Phy­lo­ge­net­ic Analy­sis of H5N8 High­ly Path­o­gen­ic Avian Influen­za Virus­es in Ukraine, 2016–2017” thank “Greg Glass [pro­gram direc­tor for DTRA’s Coop­er­a­tive Bio­log­i­cal Engage­ment Pro­gram (CBEP) in Ukraine] and the sci­en­tif­ic staff at BV/Metabiota (Kyiv, Ukraine) for crit­i­cal read­ing and assis­tance with prepa­ra­tion of the arti­cle.” They also thank the “Sci­ence Writ­ers Men­tor­ship Pro­gram (SWMP) for their sup­port in pro­vid­ing resources for writ­ing this man­u­script.” Then, they claim that “DTRA/CBEP did not direct­ly sup­port the research described here­in.” They leave out the fact that they work in lab­o­ra­to­ries designed, built and equipped by the Pen­ta­gon. But, their most reveal­ing acknowl­edg­ment is to the Cen­ter of Excel­lence for Influen­za Research and Sur­veil­lance (CEIRS).

CEIRS fund­ing comes from Fau­ci.

As Gay­tandzhie­va report­ed in “Poten­tial pan­dem­ic bird flu mod­i­fied to be more dan­ger­ous in new risky NIH research,” CEIRS is one of Fauci’s fund­ing streams for research that could start a human bird flu Plan­dem­ic.

The I.I. Mech­nikov Anti-Plague Sci­en­tif­ic Research Insti­tute of Ukraine is Fauci’s region­al CEIRS hub.

Is the Mech­nikov Insti­tute being set up as the next Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy?

The Sur­pris­ing Links Between the Ori­gins of COVID-19, Ukraine Bio­labs and the 2001 Anthrax Attacks

In addi­tion to Black & Veatch, Fauci’s Cen­ter of Excel­lence for Influen­za Research and Sur­veil­lance, and Metabio­ta, there are two oth­er notable U.S. orga­ni­za­tions work­ing in the Pen­ta­gon-fund­ed bio­labs in Ukraine: South­ern Research and Bat­telle.

South­ern Research has had Pen­ta­gon projects in Ukraine since 2008 and a Ukraine office since 2010. It has received $688.5 mil­lion in gov­ern­ment fund­ing since 2001.

Accord­ing to this LinkedIn pro­file, Bat­telle is also oper­at­ing Ukraine bio­labs, run­ning Pen­ta­gon-fund­ed “projects in Virol­o­gy, Bac­te­ri­ol­o­gy, Decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion, Aerosol sci­ence, BSL‑2/3 lab­o­ra­to­ry activ­i­ties, CONOP, Data Ana­lyt­ics and Mol­e­c­u­lar Biol­o­gy.”

 Bat­telle, Metabio­ta and South­ern Research’s involve­ment con­nects U.S.-funded pathogens research in Ukraine to two very hot top­ics: 1) the Biden family’s eco­nom­ic inter­ests in Ukraine; and 2) the truth about COVID-19, as well a much old­er inci­dent that shouldn’t be mem­o­ry-holed: the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The above video from the Reese Report, ties it all togeth­er, but here are a few addi­tion­al details, as well as infor­ma­tion about how Metabio­ta, Eco­Health Alliance, South­ern Research and Bat­telle link back to the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Metabio­ta was part of the 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, a bat virus named RaTG13. PREDICT is a USAID project, fund­ed by U.S. tax dol­lars, but it got its start at Google.org.

In 2008, Google.org com­mit­ted $30 mil­lion to virus hunt­ing and gain-of-func­tion research on poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens through a project it called Pre­dict and Pre­vent. At least $5.5 mil­lion of that went to Dr. Nathan Wolfe’s non-prof­it Glob­al Viral Fore­cast­ing Ini­tia­tive, which was soon to become the for-prof­it Metabio­ta. Oth­er GVFI fun­ders at the time includ­ed the Skoll Foun­da­tion, which also gave $5.5 mil­lion, the Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion, Mer­ck Research Lab­o­ra­to­ries and the US Depart­ment of Defense.

When the GVFI became the for-prof­it Metabio­ta, Google Ven­tures con­tin­ued to invest. In addi­tion, it cre­at­ed a busi­ness part­ner­ship with Metabio­ta, “offer­ing its big-data exper­tise to help the com­pa­ny serve its customers–insurers, gov­ern­ment agen­cies and oth­er organizations–by offer­ing them fore­cast­ing and risk-man­age­ment tools.” In oth­er words, they sell pan­dem­ic insur­ance. 

Google’s Pre­dict and Pre­vent was a prof­itable invest­ment. The com­pa­ny par­layed the $30 mil­lion it bun­dled through its non-prof­it Google.org, into hun­dreds of mil­lions in gov­ern­ment grants for its part­ners in the pan­dem­ic indus­tri­al com­plex, includ­ing $99.5 mil­lion for its for-prof­it part­ner Metabio­ta since 2008.

Now that Metabio­ta has got­ten caught up in the COVID ori­gins scan­dal, its orig­i­nal investors, Eric Schmidt of Google, Jef­frey Skoll of EBay, Rajiv Shah of The Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion (for­mer­ly USAID direc­tor, Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion) chipped in to fund the COVID Com­mis­sion Plan­ning Group, a white-wash led by Philip Zelikow who gave us the 9–11 Com­mis­sion cov­er-up.

One of Metabiota’s PREDICT part­ners is Eco­Health Alliance, whose sci­ence and pol­i­cy advi­sor, David Franz, pro­duced the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks while work­ing for South­ern Research and part­ner­ing with sci­en­tists at Bat­telle.

Franz, a for­mer com­man­der of the U.S. Army Med­ical Research Insti­tute of Infec­tious Dis­eases went from Fort Det­rick to work­ing at South­ern Research for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which from 1999–2001 con­tract­ed with Advanced Biosys­tems for microen­cap­su­lat­ed anthrax. Franz’s South­ern Research was a sub­con­trac­tor on that project. His part­ners, Advanced Biosys­tems’ Ken Alibek, a for­mer Sovi­et bioweapons sci­en­tist, and Charles L. Bai­ley, anoth­er for­mer Fort Det­rick com­man­der, filed a patent on the sil­i­con microen­cap­su­la­tion tech­nol­o­gy in 2001. In their 2012 arti­cle in the peer-reviewed Jour­nal of Bioter­ror­ism & Biode­fense, “Evi­dence for the Source of the 2001 Attack Anthrax,” Mar­tin E. Hugh-Jones, Bar­bara Hatch Rosen­berg and Stu­art Jacob­sen link the foren­sic evi­dence from the attack anthrax to the Alibek, Bai­ley and Franz’s microen­cap­su­la­tion tech­niques. The trio like­ly engi­neered the attack anthrax in Battelle’s West Jef­fer­son, Ohio, facil­i­ty. As Whit­ney Webb has report­ed, the Pen­ta­gon con­tract­ed with Bat­telle to “cre­ate the genet­i­cal­ly-mod­i­fied anthrax, a task that was over­seen by Battelle’s then-pro­gram man­ag­er for all things bioweapons, Ken Alibek.”

The 2009 Ukraine Flu Pan­ic

One of the many phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies work­ing under U.S. gov­ern­ment con­tracts at Ukraine bio­labs is the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny Bax­ter.

In 2009, after the com­pa­ny near­ly sparked an H5N1 pan­dem­ic, rumors cir­cu­lat­ed that Bax­ter caused the flu out­break that swept Ukraine lat­er the same year.

In ear­ly Feb­ru­ary 2009, Bax­ter acci­den­tal­ly com­bined the high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian influen­za with an H3N2 flu that com­mon­ly infects humans. The mis­take occurred in Baxter’s Aus­tri­an lab­o­ra­to­ries, and the dead­ly chimera was dis­trib­uted to sub­con­trac­tors in the Czech Repub­lic, Slove­nia and Ger­many. The con­t­a­m­i­na­tion was discovered—and human lives were spared—when what they called an “exper­i­men­tal virus mate­r­i­al” killed fer­rets in a test con­duct­ed by researchers who believed they were work­ing with a com­mon sea­son­al flu. Bax­ter nev­er explained what hap­pened.

An H1N1 swine flu pan­dem­ic began the next month, March 2009. The U.S. gov­ern­ment gave Bax­ter con­tracts to pro­duce swine flu vac­cines despite the H5N1 con­t­a­m­i­na­tion inci­dent. “Coin­ci­den­tal­ly,” Bax­ter had filed a patent on its H1N1 vac­cine on August 28, 2008.

When the swine flu hit Ukraine in Octo­ber 2009, the recent Bax­ter H5N1 scan­dal and their lab­o­ra­to­ries in Kyiv caused rumors to cir­cu­late that it was actu­al­ly H5N1 spread via vac­cines or aer­i­al spray­ing.

An inter­est­ing bit of his­to­ry from the 2009 pan­dem­ic is an opin­ion piece in For­eign Pol­i­cy claim­ing that “Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrain­ian prime min­is­ter and pres­i­den­tial can­di­date pur­pose­ly inflat­ed fears of an ongo­ing swine-flu epi­dem­ic to aid her pres­i­den­tial run.” It mocked her “full-blown pan­ic over swine flu, com­plete with quar­an­tines, school clo­sures, runs on phar­ma­cies” and alleged that “she also banned all mass gath­er­ings and polit­i­cal ral­lies — after she had already had hers.” (For­eign Pol­i­cy revealed its true rea­son for attack­ing Tymoshenko when it men­tioned her “pan­der­ing to Rus­sia on gas deals.”)

The Curi­ous Ori­gin of H5N1

The first human H5N1 out­break occurred in Hong Kong in 1997, the year of what the British call the “Hong Kong han­dover,” when sov­er­eign­ty over Hong Kong was trans­ferred from the U.K. to Chi­na.

It was dur­ing this “polit­i­cal­ly sen­si­tive” year that Kennedy Short­ridge, an Aus­tralian sci­en­tist who was the direc­tor of the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion’s ref­er­ence lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, con­firmed human cas­es of high­ly path­o­gen­ic bird flu.

Shortridge’s col­league Yuen Kwok-Yung attend­ed to the H5N1 patients and devised a rapid diag­nos­tic test known as RT-PCR to ana­lyze res­pi­ra­to­ry secre­tions from these patients. As they pub­lished in the Lancet, this was the first time that a pure­ly avian virus had been iso­lat­ed from peo­ple with a res­pi­ra­to­ry dis­ease and the first time that a PCR test was used for rapid diag­no­sis of such patients in a clin­i­cal set­ting.

The 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 virus was unique in every respect.

Time mag­a­zine report­ed, “On the H gene at a point called the cleav­age site, [was] found a tell­tale muta­tion, the same kind of muta­tion found in oth­er high­ly path­o­gen­ic avian virus­es. …The virus … had regions that were iden­ti­cal to por­tions of [an] avian virus that struck Penn­syl­va­nia [chick­ens] in 1983.”

The L.A. Times report­ed, “The H5 piece came from a virus in a goose. The N1 piece came from a sec­ond virus in a quail. The remain­ing flu genes came from a third virus, also in quail.”

Short­ridge had been study­ing how avian influen­za virus­es spread to humans since 1975. Pri­or to dis­cov­er­ing H5N1, Short­ridge eeri­ly pre­dict­ed its emer­gence. As Frank Ching report­ed in “Bird Flu, SARS and Beyond”:

As ear­ly as 1982, Short­ridge had labeled south­ern Chi­na, where humans and domes­tic ani­mals lived in close prox­im­i­ty, “an epi­cen­ter for the ori­gin of pan­demics.” Ten years lat­er, he called south­ern Chi­na a “virus soup” and warned that pan­dem­ic influen­za was a zoono­sis, that is, it could be trans­mit­ted from ani­mals to humans and, in 1995, he warned that influen­za in south­ern Chi­na could not prop­er­ly be called an “emerg­ing” infec­tion because it was con­stant­ly lurk­ing. “Elu­sive might be more apt,” he wrote.

An exam­ple of Shortridge’s pen­chant for such pre­dic­tions is his 1995 Lancet arti­cle “The next pan­dem­ic influen­za virus?” Curi­ous­ly, H5N1 emerged two years lat­er, in 1997, in the same city where Short­ridge worked, Hong Kong.

At the time, the nat­ur­al leap of a flu direct­ly from poul­try to humans was thought to be so unlike­ly that sci­en­tists first sus­pect­ed con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from Shortridge’s lab was the cause of the high­ly improb­a­ble H5N1 diag­no­sis.

How would that con­t­a­m­i­na­tion hap­pen unless Short­ridge hadn’t already been work­ing with H5N1 in the lab?

Time mag­a­zine report­ed, “In an ear­li­er study, con­duct­ed with great dis­cre­tion, his lab had found that res­i­dents of rur­al Hong Kong had anti­bod­ies to all the known bird-flu virus­es.”

H5N1 didn’t cause dis­ease in humans until this poten­tial had been stud­ied in a lab for sev­er­al years.

Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawao­ka and Fouchier’s efforts to get bird flu to leap to humans since 1990 and their work was con­nect­ed to what Short­ridge was doing in Hong Kong. For sev­en years pri­or to the first human H5N1 out­break in 1997, Fau­ci had been fund­ing Kawaoka’s gain-of-func­tion bird flu research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hos­pi­tal and Kawaoka’s men­tor there, Robert G. Web­ster, was work­ing and pub­lish­ing with Short­ridge. Every year, Web­ster spent three months work­ing with Short­ridge at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong, accord­ing to this pro­file of Web­ster which men­tions Kawao­ka as his pro­tege.

The most eerie con­nec­tion between Short­ridge and Webster’s labs is that the clos­est known rel­a­tive of the 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 was the avian virus that struck Penn­syl­va­nia chick­ens in 1983—that Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka had stud­ied. Accord­ing to Time mag­a­zine:

Web­ster assigned a young sci­en­tist, Yoshi­hi­ro Kawao­ka, to try to fig­ure out how the [1983] virus trans­formed itself into such a “hot” pathogen. Kawao­ka, now a pro­fes­sor of virol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, Madi­son, com­pared the genet­ic struc­ture of virus­es from the first and sec­ond waves and found only a sin­gle, extreme­ly sub­tle change in the H gene. The two virus­es dif­fered by just one nucleotide–one of 1,700 nucleotides that made up the gene.

In 1997, Fau­ci reward­ed Short­ridge and Webster’s team for the H5N1 out­break by cre­at­ing and fund­ing the St. Jude Cen­ter of Excel­lence for Influen­za Research and Sur­veil­lance which con­tin­ues to oper­ate today in the U.S., Cana­da, Bangladesh, Chi­na, Colom­bia, and Egypt.

Web­ster was one of the first gain-of-func­tion sci­en­tists, pub­lish­ing a suc­cess­ful cre­ation of a recom­bi­nant virus in 1973. As Lyle Fearn­ley writes in “Wild Goose Chase”:

For an influen­za pan­dem­ic to arise, a new form of the virus is nec­es­sary, one able to escape the immune respons­es cul­ti­vat­ed by human pop­u­la­tions dur­ing pre­vi­ous flu out­breaks. The Amer­i­can Robert Web­ster had pre­vi­ous­ly shown that such new virus­es can be exper­i­men­tal­ly pro­duced in the lab­o­ra­to­ry: tak­ing virus­es derived from dif­fer­ent species, he co-infect­ed a sin­gle ani­mal host, a process that Web­ster and his coau­thors observed had encour­aged the two virus­es to swap genet­ic mate­r­i­al and cre­ate “recom­bi­nant” forms.

There’s also a con­nec­tion to Fouch­i­er, through his men­tor at the Eras­mus Med­ical Cen­ter in Rot­ter­dam, the Nether­lands, Jan De Jong, also a col­league and col­lab­o­ra­tor of Short­ridge and Webster’s.

Kawaoka’s col­league and men­tor Robert G. Web­ster and Fouchier’s col­league and men­tor Jan De Jong were the first sci­en­tists out­side of Hong Kong to receive sam­ples of the 1997 H5N1 flu from Shortridge’s lab.

De Jong is often cred­it­ed with being the one who iden­ti­fied the 1997 Hong Kong flu as H5N1, but he did so with “a pan­el of reagents to every type of flu strain yet known” that had been brought from Webster’s lab in Mem­phis to the Nation­al Influen­za Cen­tre in Rot­ter­dam.

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.

Short­ridge and Web­ster were trained by Frank Mac­far­lane Bur­net who served on the Aus­tralian Depart­ment of Defence’s New Weapons and Equip­ment Devel­op­ment Com­mit­tee in the 1940s and 50s. The Fed­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can Sci­en­tists lists some of the most chill­ing things Bur­net rec­om­mend­ed:

Bur­net … said Aus­tralia should devel­op bio­log­i­cal weapons that would work in trop­i­cal Asia with­out spread­ing to Aus­trali­a’s more tem­per­ate pop­u­la­tion cen­tres.

“Specif­i­cal­ly to the Aus­tralian sit­u­a­tion, the most effec­tive counter-offen­sive to threat­ened inva­sion by over­pop­u­lat­ed Asi­at­ic coun­tries would be direct­ed towards the destruc­tion by bio­log­i­cal or chem­i­cal means of trop­i­cal food crops and the dis­sem­i­na­tion of infec­tious dis­ease capa­ble of spread­ing in trop­i­cal but not under Aus­tralian con­di­tions.”

… Bur­net argued that Aus­trali­a’s tem­per­ate cli­mate could give it a sig­nif­i­cant mil­i­tary advan­tage.

“The main con­tri­bu­tion of local research so far as Aus­tralia is con­cerned might be to study inten­sive­ly the pos­si­bil­i­ties of bio­log­i­cal war­fare in the trop­ics against troops and civ­il pop­u­la­tions at a rel­a­tive­ly low lev­el of hygiene and with cor­re­spond­ing­ly high resis­tance to the com­mon infec­tious dis­eases.”

[In] Note on War from a Bio­log­i­cal Angle sug­gest­ing that bio­log­i­cal war­fare could be a pow­er­ful weapon to help defend a sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed Aus­tralia… [he] urged the gov­ern­ment to encour­age Aus­tralian uni­ver­si­ties to research areas of bio­log­i­cal sci­ence of rel­e­vance to bio­log­i­cal weapons.

“The main strate­gic use of bio­log­i­cal war­fare may well be to admin­is­ter the coup de grace to a vir­tu­al­ly defeat­ed ene­my and com­pel sur­ren­der in the same way that the atom­ic bomb served in 1945. Its use has the tremen­dous advan­tage of not destroy­ing the ene­my’s indus­tri­al poten­tial which can then be tak­en over intact. Overt bio­log­i­cal war­fare might be used to enforce sur­ren­der by psy­cho­log­i­cal rather than direct destruc­tive mea­sures.”

***

In a report … Bur­net con­clud­ed that “In a coun­try of low san­i­ta­tion the intro­duc­tion of an exot­ic intesti­nal pathogen, e.g. by water con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, might ini­ti­ate wide­spread dis­sem­i­na­tion.”

“Intro­duc­tion of yel­low fever into a coun­try with appro­pri­ate mos­qui­to vec­tors might build up into a dis­abling epi­dem­ic before con­trol mea­sures were estab­lished.”

[And] …“the pos­si­bil­i­ties of an attack on the food sup­plies of S‑E Asia and Indone­sia using B.W. agents should be con­sid­ered by a small study group”.

Con­clu­sion

The 1972 Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion could and should be enforced, but so far it hasn’t been. It mere­ly changed bio­log­i­cal weapons research from overt to covert.

While it is still large­ly fund­ed and car­ried out by the Pen­ta­gon (and the CIA, which the New York Times report­ed was involved in anthrax research pri­or to the 2001 attacks), bio­log­i­cal weapons research today is draped with the fig leaf of Antho­ny Fauci’s Nation­al Insti­tutes of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases fund­ing to main­tain the image of peace­ful, pub­lic-health pur­pos­es. It is entire­ly pos­si­ble that the whole con­tro­ver­sy around Fauci’s “gain-of-func­tion” research is an elab­o­rate red her­ring and it is the Pen­ta­gon and/or the CIA that are behind the plan­demics.

As the World Social­ist Web Site reports, Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s 2023 mil­i­tary bud­get proposal—more than $2 bil­lion per day—contains a mas­sive amount of mon­ey that could be used for bio­log­i­cal weapons:

A record $130 bil­lion will be devot­ed to mil­i­tary research and devel­op­ment, includ­ing hyper­son­ic weapons, biotech­nol­o­gy and micro­elec­tron­ics.

Anoth­er $40 bil­lion in the Air Force bud­get will go to oth­er agen­cies on a clas­si­fied basis. This is known as the “black bud­get” and finances oper­a­tions which the nation­al-secu­ri­ty state does not report even to Con­gress, let alone the Amer­i­can peo­ple.

In addi­tion, the Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence is request­ing a $67.1 bil­lion clas­si­fied bud­get.

Anoth­er fund­ing pause on gain-of-func­tion research wouldn’t be a bad thing, but it isn’t going to stop the next plan­dem­ic. Indict­ing Fau­ci is impor­tant, but even that isn’t the end-game.

Ulti­mate­ly, we need to declas­si­fy and cut the Pen­ta­gon and CIA’s bud­gets and work for enforce­ment of the Bio­log­i­cal Weapons Con­ven­tion.

 

Discussion

One comment for “FTR#1249 The Ukraine War Meets “The Oswald Institute of Virology,” Part 2”

  1. There’s a new sto­ry about some sort of mys­te­ri­ous US mil­i­tary research in Ukraine. We don’t know many details but it’s a great exam­ple of the kind of sto­ry where you just have to won­der what else is hid­ing under this rock: We’re get­ting reports about a dra­mat­ic res­cue oper­a­tion for John Spor, a US nuclear sci­en­tist who was trapped in Ukraine. Spor has been cred­it­ed with design­ing sen­si­tive tech­nol­o­gy found in dozens of laser-guid­ed weapons sys­tems used by the U.S. mil­i­tary and we’re told he was a high val­ue tar­get of Russ­ian forces since the out­break of the Russ­ian inva­sion. Spor was liv­ing in Mar­i­upol at the time of the out­break of the war.

    Spor’s escape was report­ed­ly car­ried out by a pri­vate char­i­ty, Project DYNAMO, which appears to be the run by US mil­i­tary vet­er­ans and spe­cial­izes in extract­ing peo­ple trapped in war zone. We’re told that Project DYNAMO has res­cued more than 2,000 peo­ple from Russ­ian-occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries in Ukraine to date, so it sounds like the group has a sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence in the coun­try. We’re also told Spor’s fam­i­ly ini­tial­ly reached to Texas Sen­a­tor Ted Cruz and Con­gress­man Randy Weber to request emer­gency evac­u­a­tion assis­tance for Spor. Cruz and Weber sug­gest­ed they try Project DYNAMO.

    So what exact­ly was Spor doing in Mar­i­upol that made him such a high val­ue tar­get? Well, busi­ness records avail­able online indi­cate that Spor is the Pres­i­dent of a com­pa­ny called Mar­i­upol Elec­tron­ics, reg­is­tered in Rowlett, Texas. That’s basi­cal­ly all we know about what this com­pa­ny does. Inter­est­ing­ly, how­ev­er, when we look at the dates of fil­ings asso­ci­at­ed with the busi­ness, we find that Mar­i­upol Elec­tron­ics appears to have become “active” on March 26, 2014. So Mar­i­upol Elec­tron­ics appears to have start­ed up around a month after the Maid­an-trig­gered col­lapse of the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment. So while we don’t know exact­ly what the com­pa­ny has been up to, that tim­ing is a big clue.

    So a US nuclear sci­en­tist with a his­to­ry of build­ing com­po­nents in US laser-guid­ed mis­sile sys­tems sets up a com­pa­ny in Mar­i­upol a month after the Maid­an rev­o­lu­tion and ends up as an appar­ent high val­ue tar­get trapped in Ukraine eight years lat­er. Again, what is under this rock?:

    CBS News DFW
    Local News

    Texas sci­en­tist John Spor res­cued from Ukraine

    By Annie Gim­bel
    Updat­ed on: June 22, 2022 / 11:40 AM

    MARIUPOL, Ukraine (CBSDFW.COM) – A nuclear sci­en­tist from Texas, who’s cred­it­ed with design­ing sen­si­tive tech­nol­o­gy found in dozens of laser-guid­ed weapons sys­tems used by the U.S. mil­i­tary, was res­cued from war-torn Ukraine.

    ...

    Spor, was liv­ing in Mar­i­upol, Ukraine, when the city was attacked and occu­pied by invad­ing Russ­ian forces in Feb­ru­ary. Fol­low­ing the siege and unre­lent­ing bru­tal artillery and mis­sile attacks, he fled his home and went into hid­ing.

    Chechen-Russ­ian forces ran­sacked his home and hunt­ed Spor for months, accord­ing to a spokesman for the orga­ni­za­tion.

    A news release explained that “due to the sen­si­tive U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty inter­ests of his work, Spor is con­sid­ered a high val­ue tar­get to Russ­ian forces and intel­li­gence ser­vices.”

    Accord­ing to Project DYNAMO, Spor’s sis­ter con­tact­ed the U.S. State Depart­ment, Sen­a­tor Ted Cruz and U.S. Con­gress­man Randy Weber to request emer­gency evac­u­a­tion assis­tance for her broth­er.

    They rec­om­mend­ed the non-prof­it, an Amer­i­can, vet­er­an-run, donor-fund­ed, res­cue orga­ni­za­tion spe­cial­iz­ing in chal­leng­ing exfil­tra­tion mis­sions from hos­tile regions around the world. It took more than a month to res­cue Spor.

    “Project DYNAMO has been with our fam­i­ly every step of the way through this night­mare. DYNAMO has been the answer to our fam­i­ly’s prayers,” said Lau­ri Wei­gle, Spor’s sis­ter. “We are in amaze­ment that he is final­ly on his way to us and safe after months of hop­ing and pray­ing.”

    Co-founder of Project DYNAMO, Bryan Stern, a high­ly dec­o­rat­ed U.S. mil­i­tary offi­cer, moved Spor through Russ­ian ter­ri­to­ry, cross­ing more than 30 Russ­ian check­points and into Ukraine. Stern employed a series of com­plex tac­tics and tech­niques, honed over many years of gov­ern­ment ser­vice, to mask Spor, his loca­tion, and his move­ment from Russ­ian secu­ri­ty ser­vices. Project DYNAMO was able to res­cue Spor via Kher­son and through Myko­laiv and he is now enroute to a neigh­bor­ing coun­try where is fam­i­ly is eager­ly wait­ing.

    “I’m so grate­ful for Project DYNAMO and the sup­port they have pro­vid­ed to me and my fam­i­ly dur­ing this time,” said Sean Spor, John’s son, who flew to Europe for the reunion. “They’ve res­cued my dad from har­m’s way and I am eager­ly await­ing his arrival.”

    To date, the orga­ni­za­tion has res­cued more than 2,000 peo­ple from the most war-torn, con­test­ed, and Russ­ian-occu­pied areas of Ukraine and trans­port­ed them safe­ly to neigh­bor­ing coun­tries, accord­ing to the release.

    ———-

    “Texas sci­en­tist John Spor res­cued from Ukraine” By Annie Gim­bel; CBS News DFW; 06/22/2022

    “A news release explained that “due to the sen­si­tive U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty inter­ests of his work, Spor is con­sid­ered a high val­ue tar­get to Russ­ian forces and intel­li­gence ser­vices.””

    We don’t know what Spor was work­ing on, oth­er than being told that what he was work­ing on was so sen­si­tive that they can’t talk about it. Did it involve nuclear tech­nol­o­gy? Laser-guid­ed weapon sys­tems? They aren’t shar­ing. But they are shar­ing that what­ev­er he was doing made him a high val­ue tar­get the Rus­sians spent months search­ing for:

    ...
    A nuclear sci­en­tist from Texas, who’s cred­it­ed with design­ing sen­si­tive tech­nol­o­gy found in dozens of laser-guid­ed weapons sys­tems used by the U.S. mil­i­tary, was res­cued from war-torn Ukraine.

    ...

    Spor, was liv­ing in Mar­i­upol, Ukraine, when the city was attacked and occu­pied by invad­ing Russ­ian forces in Feb­ru­ary. Fol­low­ing the siege and unre­lent­ing bru­tal artillery and mis­sile attacks, he fled his home and went into hid­ing.

    Chechen-Russ­ian forces ran­sacked his home and hunt­ed Spor for months, accord­ing to a spokesman for the orga­ni­za­tion.
    ...

    But per­haps the biggest ques­tion sur­round­ing Spor’s activ­i­ty in Ukraine is why there? What is it that Spor was doing that required he oper­ate in Mar­i­upol? And why did Mar­i­upol Elec­tron­ics sud­den­ly decide start oper­at­ing in March of 2014, imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing the Maid­an regime change and the out­break of civ­il war? And what exact­ly did Spor leave behind in Mar­i­upol? There’s plen­ty of linger. Includ­ing the gen­er­al ques­tion of just how many oth­er secret US mil­i­tary mys­tery projects were there oper­at­ing in Ukraine and now in need of an emer­gency extrac­tion?

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 23, 2022, 2:26 pm

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