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FTR#1253 Pandemics, Inc., Part 3

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FTR#1253 This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Alba­tross

Intro­duc­tion: This pro­gram con­tin­ues analy­sis of the “Pan­demics, Inc.” con­sor­tium of Metabio­ta, Eco­Health Alliance, In-Q-Tel and Munich Re.

We note that Andrew C. Weber–a key exec­u­tive of Metabiota–had an inter­est­ing back­ground” . . . . He joined Metabio­ta in Feb­ru­ary 2016 as Head of Glob­al Part­ner­ships in the Gov­ern­ment Busi­ness Unit. . . . He served until Octo­ber 2014 as Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Defense for Nuclear, Chem­i­cal & Bio­log­i­cal Defense Pro­grams. . . .”

Weber was in that post at Metabio­ta when, in Octo­ber of 2016, Metabio­ta ini­ti­at­ed its projects in Ukraine.

Next, the pro­gram reviews an excerpt­ing of a Wired Mag­a­zine arti­cle about the Metabiota/Munich Rein­sur­ance project.

Bear in mind that In-Q-Tel, the ven­ture cap­i­tal arm of the CIA and the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, is greas­ing the wheels of this project with financ­ing.

We high­light two key points of infor­ma­tion:

  • The busi­ness suc­cess of the pan­dem­ic insur­ance would nec­es­sar­i­ly incor­po­rate analy­sis of the “fear fac­tor” of poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens: ” . . . . As sophis­ti­cat­ed as Metabiota’s sys­tem was, how­ev­er, it would need to be even more refined to incor­po­rate into an insur­ance pol­i­cy. The mod­el would need to cap­ture some­thing much more dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy than his­tor­i­cal deaths and med­ical stock­piles: fear. The eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of a scourge, the his­tor­i­cal data showed, were as much a result of society’s response as they were to the virus itself. . . . The Sen­ti­ment Index was built to be, as Oppen­heim put it, ‘a cat­a­log of dread.’ For any giv­en pathogen, it could spit out a score from 0 to 100 accord­ing to how fright­en­ing the pub­lic would find it. . . . Mad­hav and her team, along with Wolfe and Oppen­heim, also researched the broad­er eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of dis­ease out­breaks, mea­sured in the ‘cost per death pre­vent­ed’ incurred by soci­etal inter­ven­tions. ‘Mea­sures that decreased per­son-to-per­son con­tact, includ­ing social dis­tanc­ing, quar­an­tine, and school clo­sures, had the great­est cost per death pre­vent­ed, most like­ly because of the amount of eco­nom­ic dis­rup­tion caused by those mea­sures,’ they wrote in a 2018 paper. . . .”
  • More sin­is­ter, still, is the fact that Metabio­ta had ana­lyzed the sce­nario of a nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic two years before it hap­pened. This appears to be the 2018 paper referred to above. Do not fail to note that, at the time that Metabio­ta was run­ning this sce­nario, they were part­nered with Eco­Health Alliance, which was using Pen­ta­gon and USAID mon­ey to research and per­form gain-of-func­tion on these types of coro­n­avirus­es!! ” . . . . As the human and eco­nom­ic dev­as­ta­tion mul­ti­plied in tan­dem across the globe, Metabiota’s employ­ees sud­den­ly found them­selves liv­ing inside their own model’s pro­jec­tions. Just two years ear­li­er, the com­pa­ny had run a large set of sce­nar­ios fore­cast­ing the con­se­quences of a nov­el coro­n­avirus spread­ing around the globe. . . .”

Next, we review aspects of impor­tant arti­cle presents depth on a num­ber of over­lap­ping con­sid­er­a­tions about bio­log­i­cal war­fare, the Covid “op” and the Ukraine war.

Of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance, here, is H5N1’s poten­tial sig­nif­i­cance of the In-Q-Tel, Metabio­ta, Munich Re pan­dem­ic insur­ance con­sor­tium.

In addi­tion to the H5N1’s real or poten­tial impact on busi­ness­es involved with one aspect or anoth­er of com­mer­cial poul­try, the pos­si­bil­i­ty that a weaponized/zoonotic muta­tion of the virus could spawn a dev­as­tat­ing human pan­dem­ic could be a major dri­ver of “fear” and the will­ing­ness of busi­ness­es to pur­chase pan­dem­ic insur­ance.

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. . . .”

The pro­gram con­cludes with dis­cus­sion of Munich Re’s deep polit­i­cal asso­ci­a­tion with the Third Reich, both in its  ini­tial, above-ground phase and in its role as a crit­i­cal ele­ment of the remark­able, lethal Bor­mann cap­i­tal asso­ci­a­tion. 

1. We note that Andrew C. Weber–a key exec­u­tive of Metabiota–had an inter­est­ing back­ground: ” . . . . He joined Metabio­ta in Feb­ru­ary 2016 as Head of Glob­al Part­ner­ships in the Gov­ern­ment Busi­ness Unit. . . . He served until Octo­ber 2014 as Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Defense for Nuclear, Chem­i­cal & Bio­log­i­cal Defense Pro­grams. . . .”

Weber was in that post at Metabio­ta when, in Octo­ber of 2016, Metabio­ta ini­ti­at­ed its projects in Ukraine.

“Con­tem­po­rary US-Russ­ian Nuclear Risks and Means for Risk Reduc­tion: Sem­i­nar with Major Gen­er­al Pavel Zolotarev (ret.) and The Hon­or­able Andrew C. Weber;” Mid­dle­bury Insti­tute of Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies at Mon­terey; 10/18/2016.

. . . . The Hon­or­able Andrew C. Weber is a non-res­i­dent senior fel­low at Har­vard Kennedy School’s Belfer Cen­ter for Sci­ence and Inter­na­tion­al Affairs. He joined Metabio­ta in Feb­ru­ary 2016 as Head of Glob­al Part­ner­ships in the Gov­ern­ment Busi­ness Unit. Mr. Weber served thir­ty years in the US Gov­ern­ment, most recent­ly as the Deputy Coor­di­na­tor for Ebo­la Response at the U.S. Depart­ment of State. He served until Octo­ber 2014 as Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Defense for Nuclear, Chem­i­cal & Bio­log­i­cal Defense Pro­grams. . . .

2.  Next, the pro­gram reviews an excerpt­ing of a Wired Mag­a­zine arti­cle about the Metabiota/Munich Rein­sur­ance project.

Bear in mind that In-Q-Tel, the ven­ture cap­i­tal arm of the CIA and the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, is greas­ing the wheels of this project with financ­ing.

We high­light two key points of infor­ma­tion:

  • The busi­ness suc­cess of the pan­dem­ic insur­ance would nec­es­sar­i­ly incor­po­rate analy­sis of the “fear fac­tor” of poten­tial pan­dem­ic pathogens: ” . . . . As sophis­ti­cat­ed as Metabiota’s sys­tem was, how­ev­er, it would need to be even more refined to incor­po­rate into an insur­ance pol­i­cy. The mod­el would need to cap­ture some­thing much more dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy than his­tor­i­cal deaths and med­ical stock­piles: fear. The eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of a scourge, the his­tor­i­cal data showed, were as much a result of society’s response as they were to the virus itself. . . . The Sen­ti­ment Index was built to be, as Oppen­heim put it, ‘a cat­a­log of dread.’ For any giv­en pathogen, it could spit out a score from 0 to 100 accord­ing to how fright­en­ing the pub­lic would find it. . . . Mad­hav and her team, along with Wolfe and Oppen­heim, also researched the broad­er eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of dis­ease out­breaks, mea­sured in the ‘cost per death pre­vent­ed’ incurred by soci­etal inter­ven­tions. ‘Mea­sures that decreased per­son-to-per­son con­tact, includ­ing social dis­tanc­ing, quar­an­tine, and school clo­sures, had the great­est cost per death pre­vent­ed, most like­ly because of the amount of eco­nom­ic dis­rup­tion caused by those mea­sures,’ they wrote in a 2018 paper. . . .”
  • More sin­is­ter, still, is the fact that Metabio­ta had ana­lyzed the sce­nario of a nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic two years before it hap­pened. This appears to be the 2018 paper referred to above. Do not fail to note that, at the time that Metabio­ta was run­ning this sce­nario, they were part­nered with Eco­Health Alliance, which was using Pen­ta­gon and USAID mon­ey to research and per­form gain-of-func­tion on these types of coro­n­avirus­es!! ” . . . . As the human and eco­nom­ic dev­as­ta­tion mul­ti­plied in tan­dem across the globe, Metabiota’s employ­ees sud­den­ly found them­selves liv­ing inside their own model’s pro­jec­tions. Just two years ear­li­er, the com­pa­ny had run a large set of sce­nar­ios fore­cast­ing the con­se­quences of a nov­el coro­n­avirus spread­ing around the globe. . . .”

“We Can Pro­tect the Econ­o­my From Pan­demics. Why Didn’t We?” by Evan Ratliff; Wired; 06/16/2020

3. Next, we review aspects of impor­tant arti­cle presents depth on a num­ber of over­lap­ping con­sid­er­a­tions about bio­log­i­cal war­fare, the Covid “op” and the Ukraine war.

Of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance, here, is H5N1’s poten­tial sig­nif­i­cance of the In-Q-Tel, Metabio­ta, Munich Re pan­dem­ic insur­ance con­sor­tium.

In addi­tion to the H5N1’s real or poten­tial impact on busi­ness­es involved with one aspect or anoth­er of com­mer­cial poul­try, the pos­si­bil­i­ty that a weaponized/zoonotic muta­tion of the virus could spawn a dev­as­tat­ing human pan­dem­ic could be a major dri­ver of “fear” and the will­ing­ness of busi­ness­es to pur­chase pan­dem­ic insur­ance.

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.

4a. The pro­gram con­cludes with dis­cus­sion of Munich Re’s deep polit­i­cal asso­ci­a­tion with the Third Reich, both in its  ini­tial, above-ground phase and in its role as a crit­i­cal ele­ment of the remark­able, lethal Bor­mann cap­i­tal asso­ci­a­tion. 

Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile; Paul Man­ning; Copy­right 1981 [HC]; Lyle Stu­art Inc.; ISBN 0–8184-0309–8; pp. 80; 149.

. . . . The Munich Rein­sur­ance Com­pa­ny had already pen­e­trat­ed France before 1939 through the Soci­ete Anonyme de Reas­sur­ance de Paris. . . .

. . . . There was also the impor­tant Ger­man rein­sur­ance firm of El Fenix Sudamer­i­cano Cia. de Rease­guros S.A., an affil­i­ate of the Munich Rein­sur­ance Com­pa­ny. All South Amer­i­can big busi­ness came to depend on El Fenix as the prin­ci­pal rein­sur­ers of com­merce and indus­try in Latin Amer­i­ca. . . .

4b. In FTR#511, we high­light­ed the role of Munich Re in the dev­as­tat­ing espi­onage that cost the lives of a large per­cent­age of the Mer­chant Marine sea­men sail­ing the North Atlantic dur­ing World War II.

All Hon­or­able Men by James Stew­art Mar­tin; Copy­right 1950 by James Stew­art Mar­tin; Lit­tle Brown [HC] 1950.

. . . . On a bleak night in Feb­ru­ary 1945 I found myself stand­ing with my small par­ty of inves­ti­ga­tors in the mist at the Wash­ing­ton air­port, wait­ing to take off. As I stood in the gloom, observ­ing all the secu­ri­ty mea­sures that shroud­ed our rou­tine depar­ture-the black­out of the field and plane, the silence, the sud­den orders — I remem­bered our dis­cov­ery ear­li­er in the war of how eas­i­ly the “secre­cy” of ship sail­ings had been pen­e­trat­ed by the Ger­mans.

In 1940, 1941 and 1942, ships leav­ing Amer­i­can sea­ports had had the same secu­ri­ty mea­sures to pro­tect their depar­ture. Yet many of their bro­ken hulls and water-soaked car­goes had washed up onto the beach­es of New Jer­sey, Vir­ginia and the Car­oli­nas, where Ger­man sub­marines had spot­ted them with­in sight of shore. In case after case, every man on board had been marked before the cap­tain opened his orders. Though they may not have known it, the car­goes they car­ried were rein­sured with Munich. The rou­tine sys­tem of plac­ing insur­ance had put pre­cise infor­ma­tion on their sail­ing date and des­ti­na­tion in the hands of the Ger­mans before the ship left port.

In the sum­mer of 1941, before there was any Eco­nom­ic War­fare Sec­tion, sev­er­al trust busters dis­cov­ered that while the Amer­i­can pub­lic was look­ing more and more askance at Ger­man busi­ness con­nec­tions, insur­ance com­pa­nies doing an inter­na­tion­al busi­ness seemed to have no such doubts about their for­eign com­mit­ments. Insur­ers of large risks, such as ships, car­goes, and indus­tri­al plants,  cus­tom­ar­i­ly spread the risk among oth­er com­pa­nies will­ing to take frac­tion­al shares. The big insur­ance and rein­sur­ance com­pa­nies in the Unit­ed States which han­dle the largest risks have such treaties on an inter­na­tion­al basis, through arrange­ments with the Lloy­d’s group in Eng­land, or with the Zurich group in Switzer­land. It had long been the cus­tom of the Amer­i­can com­pa­nies to place the rein­sur­ance on ships and car­goes with the Zurich group by cabling infor­ma­tion to them so that they could accept respon­si­bil­i­ty for a share of the Amer­i­can insur­er’s risk.

The infor­ma­tion cabled would include the name of the ship, the sail­ing date, the car­go car­ried, the des­ti­na­tion, and the val­ue of the insured prop­er­ty. One detail that should have raised some­one’s eye­brow, but did not until the gov­ern­ment stepped in, was the fact that the Zurich group in turn had a rein­sur­ance treaty with the Munich rein­sur­ance pool in Ger­many. The result was that dur­ing 1940 and ear­ly 1941, by the time a ship had cleared New York or Bal­ti­more har­bor head­ed for a Euro­pean port, the Ger­man intel­li­gence ser­vice already had the sail­ing data in hand.

When men from the Depart­ment of Jus­tice called a con­fer­ence of insur­ance rep­re­sen­ta­tives, the com­pa­nies agreed to stop send­ing such infor­ma­tion by cable. But even then no one real­ized what an effi­cient pipeline the Ger­mans had set up. It appeared lat­er that every­one con­cerned, both gov­ern­ment offi­cials and insur­ance men, assumed that send­ing the infor­ma­tion by mail to Switzer­land would be per­fect­ly all right. Noth­ing was said about stop­ping com­plete­ly the trans­mis­sion of rein­sur­ance infor­ma­tion. In the spring of 1942, after we had start­ed to set up the Eco­nom­ic War­fare Sec­tion, we found that rein­sur­ance infor­ma­tion sheets, or “bor­dereaux,” were still going to Switzer­land by mail.

We also dis­cov­ered that the rein­sur­ance busi­ness, far from being con­fined to ships and car­goes, also cov­ered indus­tri­al plants, and more espe­cial­ly those very large new plants being built for war pro­duc­tion, the ones with secu­ri­ty guards at the gates to see that no unau­tho­rized eyes got inside. In the case of indus­tri­al plants, we found that the rein­sur­ance bor­dereaux did not account for the full extent of the leak­age. The usu­al rein­sur­ance treaty on such risks pro­vides that the rein­sur­ance group has the right to demand copies of a full report by the insur­ance inspec­tor. This includes blue­prints of the instal­la­tion, descrip­tion of the fire haz­ards and risks, and inven­to­ry of the con­tents of the build­ings, room by room. We found that, before 1938, the Zurich group had asked for the full insur­ance inspec­tor’s report in only 5 or 6 per cent of the cas­es. After 1938, the full report was request­ed with increas­ing fre­quen­cy, until the per­cent­age was clos­er to 8o.

It had seemed obvi­ous to us that the gov­ern­ment ought to stop this trans­mis­sion of ship­ping and indus­tri­al infor­ma­tion through Switzer­land to the Reich. Unlike the Unit­ed States, the Ger­man gov­ern­ment as ear­ly as 1936 had closed off such infor­ma­tion about Ger­many. As soon as the Ger­mans occu­pied France, Bel­gium, and Hol­land in 1940 they put a stop to all such trans­mis­sions from those coun­tries. We pro­posed to have the Attor­ney Gen­er­al send a let­ter to each com­pa­ny warn­ing that trans­mis­sion of marine and indus­tri­al plant infor­ma­tion of this type came with­in the scope of the Espi­onage Act. Issuance of such a let­ter in the name of the Attor­ney Gen­er­al, how­ev­er, required approval by the Solic­i­tor Gen­er­al, Charles Fahy. Mr. Fahy would not take this respon­si­bil­i­ty with­out con­sult­ing the oth­er inter­est­ed depart­ments of the gov­ern­ment. At first, no one could believe that Amer­i­cans were hand­ing the Ger­man intel­li­gence ser­vice infor­ma­tion on a sil­ver plat­ter. At one of Mr. Fahy’s inter­de­part­men­tal meet­ings, Joseph Borkin, then of the Antitrust Divi­sion, slapped down on the table a stack of insur­ance inspec­tors’ reports on var­i­ous promi­nent build­ings. He had pur­chased these from sources open to any­one in the insur­ance busi­ness with­out any spe­cial “secu­ri­ty” clear­ance. For fifty-five cents he had the plans of the White House, show­ing the loca­tion of fire extin­guish­ers and oth­er pro­tec­tive appa­ra­tus. For sev­en­ty-five cents he had the plans of a large new mag­ne­sium plant. One of the blue­prints had an arrow point­ing at a valve, with the leg­end: “Under no cir­cum­stances must this valve be closed while the plant is in oper­a­tion, as an explo­sion would result.” To com­plete our case, we had obtained from the Office of Cen­sor­ship copies of insur­ance bor­dereaux pho­tographed from the cur­rent week’s mail des­tined for Switzer­land. . . .

 

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