In a previous post, we chronicled the abrupt changes Trump made in the Defense Department following his defeat. Unnamed officials in NATO countries have opined that the events of 1/6/2021 were a coup attempt by Trump’s forces. In addition, there is an ongoing investigation of an active duty PSYOP officer who operated under the Special Forces command structure for leading a contingent of 100 strong to the “rally” on 1/6/2021.
In past programs, we have spoken of the 1934 coup attempt against FDR, engineered by the most powerful economic and political forces in our country. It was only foiled because Marine Corps General Smedley Butler (right) betrayed the conspirators. The armed confrontation in the Capitol also reminded us of a confrontation that took place in Parkland Hospital on 11/22/1963. A contingent of Secret Service agents and Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell confronted and threatened Parkland physicians who were going to autopsy President Kennedy’s body in accordance with law. (Author Joseph McBride presents convincing evidence that O’Donnell faced probable indictment for corruption. He helped arrange the Kennedy motorcade route through Dealey Plaza, setting JFK up for assassination. O’Donnell succumbed to alcoholism, dying in 1977.) McBride—drawing on scholarship by numerous authors and researchers—concludes that the Federal agents were intent on preventing an autopsy in Dallas, so that JFK’s body could be surgically altered to obscure the fact that Kennedy was killed in a crossfire. The “official version” of the murder—an institutionalized historical fiction–maintains that Oswald—the lone assassin—slew Kennedy by firing from the rear.
The program begins with analytic review of the military’s role in U.S. vaccine development.
In previous posts and programs, we have noted that Moderna’s vaccine work has been financed by DARPA. We have also noted that the overall head of Operation Warp Speed is Moncef Slaoui, formerly in charge of product development for Moderna!
Of great significance is the central role of the military in the development of treatment for Covid-19:
1.–We note that: ” . . . . Remdesivir predates this pandemic. It was first considered as a potential treatment for Ebola, and was developed through a longstanding partnership between the U.S. Army and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. . . .”
2.–Jonathan King, who has chaired the microbial physiology study section for the NIH has sounded the alarm about “vaccine research” masking offensive biological warfare research: “. . . . King, who has chaired the microbial physiology study section for the NIH, believes that without intensive independent scrutiny, the Pentagon is free to obscure its true goals. ‘The Defense Department appears to be pursuing many narrow, applied goals that are by nature offensive, such as the genetic ‘improvement’ of BW agents,’ King says. ‘But to achieve political acceptability, they mask these intentions under forms of research, such as vaccine development, which sound defensive. . . .”
3.–Moderna’s vaccine development was overseen by an unnamed Pentagon official: ” . . . . Moderna’s team was headed by a Defense Department official whom company executives described only as ‘the major,’ saying they don’t know if his name is supposed to be a secret. . . . .”
4.–The pervasive role of the military in Operation Warp Speed (the Trump administration’s vaccine development program) has generated alarm in civilian participants:”. . . . Scores of Defense Department employees are laced through the government offices involved in the effort, making up a large portion of the federal personnel devoted to the effort. Those numbers have led some current and former officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to privately grumble that the military’s role in Operation Warp Speed was too large for a task that is, at its core, a public health campaign. . . .”
5.–General Gustave Perna–one of the principals in Operation Warp Speed–has chosen a retired Lieutenant General to oversee much of the program: ” . . . . ‘Frankly, it has been breathtaking to watch,’ said Paul Ostrowski, the director of supply, production and distribution for Operation Warp Speed. He is a retired Army lieutenant general who was selected to manage logistics for the program by Gen. Gustave F. Perna, the chief operating officer for Operation Warp Speed. . . .”
6.–The military will be able to trace the destination and administration of each dose: ” . . . . Military officials also came up with the clever idea — if it works — to coordinate the delivery of vaccines to drugstores, medical centers and other immunization sites by sending kits full of needles, syringes and alcohol wipes. Vaccine makers will be alerted when the kits arrive at an immunization site so they know to ship doses. Once the first dose is given, the manufacturer will be notified so it can send the second dose with a patient’s name attached several weeks later. The military will also monitor vaccine distribution through an operations center. ‘They will know where every vaccine dose is,’ Mr. [Paul] Mango said on a call with reporters. . . .”
Obfuscating the nature of U.S. vaccine contracting is the fact that the contracting is done through ATI. ” . . . . In part, it’s because of the way many Operation Warp Speed contracts have been executed, with their terms largely invisible to the public. . . . under the hood, the effort’s largest agreements with vaccine companies—totaling more than $6 billion—have been managed by a third party, a defense-oriented nonprofit called Advanced Technology International (ATI). . . . with ATI as an intermediary, these billion-dollar deals instead fall under something called an ‘other transaction agreement’ that isn’t subject to the same kinds of cross-checks and accountability. . . .”
The balance of the program consists of analysis of the capital interests behind BioNTech–the German corporate partner producing a Covid vaccine with Pfizer.
Headed by a German MD couple whose parents were “gastarbeiter” (guest workers), BioNTech has soared exponentially in value since the approval of the vaccine by a number of countries.
A dominant consideration in power politics remains the advisory to “Follow the Money.”
Against the background of I.G. Farben and its successor companies’ dominant position in both the global pharmaceutical and chemical market, as well as its major position within the remarkable and deadly Bormann capital network, the program explores the capitalization of Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci’s Ganymed firm and BioNTech.
Of paramount significance in both Ganymed (the couple’s initial commercial venture) and BioNtech are twin brothers Thomas and Andreas Struengmann.
Key points of analysis:
1.–The brothers are major players in the pharmaceutical and biotech market.
2.–They keep a purposefully low professional profile–a professional behavior characteristic of the deadly Bormann network.
3.–Thomas was an important member of the board of Wacker Chemie, a major successor to two I.G. Farben subsidiary companies.
4.–Wacker Chemie has apparently obfuscated its Nazi past.
5.–Andreas initiated his medical career in apartheid South Africa, and the brothers’ Hexal firm began its significant international expansion in that country. (The apartheid regime was an offshoot of the Third Reich.)
6.–Firms that evolved from I.G. Farben figure prominently in the dealings of Hexal, Wacker Chemie and BioNTech (Novartis, the Hoechst division of Sanofi-Aventis.)
The program begins with discussion of operational links between the Nazi/GOP milieu analyzed in FTR #1159 and elements we have analyzed in the context of the destabilization of China. (For the convenience of the listener and reader, key points of that discussion are included in the broadcast and below in this description.)
In FTR #‘s 1103, 1143, 1144, 1153 and 1154, we detailed the presence of OUN/B‑connected elements in Hong Kong and working in a propaganda role vis a vis the Uighurs in Xinjiang province. In Hong Kong, elements of the Azov Battalion and Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) have been active in conjunction with the “pro-democracy” movement in Hong Kong (under the auspices of an EU NGO.)
German national and End Times Christian Adrian Zenz, a fellow with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, has been the go-to figure for Western media on the alleged persecution of the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is a subsidiary element of the Captive Nations Committee and the OUN/B.
In previous programs, we examined in detail the activity of Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance–an organization crafted to “prevent” future pandemics, yet networked with the Pentagon and other national security bodies in work disturbingly suggestive of biological warfare research.
Joining Daszak in a commission assembled by the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet is Jeffrey Sachs, economic adviser to Bernie Sanders and AOC and the principal economic adviser to Russian president Boris Yeltsin. Sachs’ advice drove the Russian economy back to the Stone Age.
In this program we detail the strong, eugenicist overlap between “mainstream” anti-abortion organizations and their closely linked white supremacist colleagues. Seeking to maximize the birth rate of “Aryan” offspring and their percentage in the world’s population, they may be seen as being part of a political continuum which includes the Third Reich.
” . . . . Coexisting in abortion opposition is . . . . a white supremacist ideology that only desires to prevent white women from obtaining abortions, but uses universal opposition to abortion as a pragmatic screen for its goals. As Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement in Paramilitary America, told The Nation in an interview in September, for white supremacists, ‘opposing abortion, opposing gay rights, opposing feminism, in white power discourse, all of this is tied to reproduction and the birth of white children.’ . . . Tim Bishop, a representative of the white nationalist Aryan Nations, said, ‘Lots of our people join [the anti-abortion movement]…. It’s part of our Holy War for the pure Aryan race.’ . . . . ”
Central to our analysis is a speculative, yet terrifying biotechnological element–gene drive technology. We have spoken about this in numerous previous programs.
” . . . . Gene drives have been dubbed an ‘extinction technology’ and with good reason: gene drive organisms are created by genetically engineering a living organism with a particular trait, and then modifying the organism’s reproductive system in order to always force the modified gene onto future generations, spreading the trait throughout the entire population. . . .”
” . . . . the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is forcing dangerous gene drive technologies onto the world. BMGF is either the first or second largest funder of gene drive research (alongside the shadowy U.S. military organisation Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] ). . . .”
Just imagine what such technology–applied to human reproductive capacity–could do when deployed by fascist and Nazi elements in the military/medical establishment!
The emergence of such a development is being facilitated:
” . . . . a private PR firm called Emerging Ag, was paid US$1.6 million by the BMGF. Part of their work involved coordinating the ‘fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents,’ as well as running a covert advocacy coalition to exert influence on the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the key body for gene drive governance. After calls in 2016 for a global moratorium on the use of gene drive technology, the CBD sought input from scientists and experts in an online forum. Emerging Ag recruited and coordinated over 65 experts, including a Gates Foundation senior official, a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) official, and government and university scientists, in an attempt to flood the official UN process with their coordinated inputs. . . .”
At the conclusion of the program we present a very disturbing hypothetical concept: we fear that the effort to find viral pathogens around the world and make them more infectious via gain-of-function manipulations is intended to realize a global, eugenicist, exterminationist and white supremacist agenda by creating pandemics in the Third World, profit enormously by making vaccines to treat those pandemics and introduce gene drive technology into those populations via the vaccines in order to diminish reproduction in those populations.
The mRNA and DNA vaccines being produced by the DARPA-supported Moderna and Inovio firms should be considered in connection with this nightmarish working hypothesis.
This post supplements and is intended to call attention to FTR #‘s 1157, 1158 and 1159. A consummately important article about Peter Daszak (right) and the EcoHealth Alliance provides troubling insights into the uneven professional track record of Daszak and the profound involvement of the organization he heads with the Pentagon and other U.S. national security establishment institutions. Exemplifying EcoHealth Alliance’s work is a Pentagon contract with Tanzania, researching CCHF–Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever. ” . . . . EcoHealth Alliance has a $5‑million Pentagon contract, ‘Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever: Reducing an Emerging Health Threat in Tanzania.’ Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) is a tick-borne disease, originally only infecting animals. . . . There was only ever one case of CCHF in Tanzania, and that was in 1986. . . . Gain-of-function research on CCHF is being conducted at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) . . . . (The National Bio and Agro Defense Facility will take over the mission of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and become the lead facility for Foreign Animal Disease research.) . . .”
A noteworthy development in the Covid-19 “op” concerns the selection of experts to oversee The Lancet’s investigation of the origins of the SARS CoV‑2.
In FTR #1156, we looked at the involvement of known U.S. intelligence cut-outs–notably USAID–and their funding of programs ostensibly aimed at preventing epidemics. Those programs involved the “Gain-of-Function” mutation of bat-borne coronaviruses, creating novel “chimeric” viruses that never existed before.
The ostensible purpose was to “prevent” future epidemics. We wondered in FTR #1156 if those ostensible epidemic “prevention” programs may have masked epidemic propagation programs, rather like Unit 731.
Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was selected to lead the project.
His perspective would, on the surface, appear to be less than objective, in as much as he championed the very type of GOF experiments that are at the center of this inquiry.
Of interest, as well, is the selection of Jeffrey Sachs, an economist, member of the [Bernie] Sanders Institute, economic adviser to Bernie Sanders, economic adviser to AOC and, most importantly, head of the [partly] government financed Harvard Institute of International Development which (as advisers to Boris Yeltsin) drove the Russian economy back to the Stone Age.
Sachs has no medical or scientific credentials.
A consummately important article about Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance provides troubling insights into the uneven professional track record of Daszak and the profound involvement of the organization he heads with the Pentagon and other U.S. national security establishment institutions.
EcoHealth Alliance looks disturbingly like an organization that fronts for elements and individuals involved with biological warfare research.
“Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, is a top scientific collaborator, grantwriter and spokesperson for virus hunters and gain-of-function/dual-use researchers, in labs both military and civilian.
Daszak works with dozens of high-containment laboratories around the world that collect pathogens and use genetic engineering and synthetic biology to make them more infectious, contagious, lethal or drug-resistant. These include labs controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense, in countries in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.
Many of these labs are staffed by former biological weapons scientists. (See Arms Watch’s reports.) Before the Biological Weapons Convention was ratified, this research was called what it is: biological weapons research. Now, it’s euphemistically called gain-of-function or dual-use research.
Gain-of-function research to alter coronaviruses for the infection of humans goes back to 1999 or earlier, years before the first novel coronavirus outbreak. On behalf of the U.S. government, often the military, Daszak scours the globe for animal pathogens and brings them back to the lab to be catalogued, investigated and manipulated. . . .”
Key points of analysis and discussion include:
1.–EcoHealth Alliance contracts with the Pentagon in Tanzania, South Africa, Georgia and Malaysia, as well as the U.S.
2.–” . . . . A recent Wired magazine article quoting Daszak described how a virus collected in 2012 was found to be a 96-percent match to SARS-CoV‑2 in 2020 . . . ‘a lack of funding meant they couldn’t further investigate the virus strain now known to be 96 percent genetically similar to the virus that causes Covid-19’ . . . .”
3.–Daszak’s claim that they couldn’t further investigate that virus because of a lack of funding is dubious, in that recent grants to the organization are on top of ” . . . . $100.9 million that EcoHealth Alliance has received in government grants and contracts since 2003. . . .”
4.–Daszak does not explain how that virus (discovered in 2012) turned into SARS-CoV‑2. ” . . . . Some scientists say it would take 50 years for RaTG13 [the virus in question–D.E.] to turn into SARS-CoV‑2. . . .”
5.–Daszak is heavily networked with the Department of Homeland Security: ” . . . . the Department of Homeland Security’s National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) . . . . gave Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance a $2.2‑million contract (2016–2019) to create a ‘Ground Truth Network’ of ‘subject matter experts’ who could provide ‘contextual information pertaining to biological events.’ . . . .”
6.–The intellectual and professional track record of Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance is porous. EcoHealth Alliance floated a canard about Ebola potentially traveling to the U.S. ” . . . . an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson, spread a false (not to mention racist and xenophobic) narrative, one that subsequently would be thoroughly debunked, that bushmeat smuggled to the U.S. from Africa could transmit Ebola to Americans. . . .”
7.–Daszak missed the boat badly with regard to SARS: ” . . . . It is commonly accepted that the SARS pandemic began in 2002, when humans caught a bat virus from civet cats at a wet market in Guangdong, China. But Daszak and his collaborators admit they have no evidence to explain how the virus leapt from bats to civets to humans. . . .”
8.–” . . . . SARS-CoV was found in civets at the Guangdong wet market, but civets aren’t the natural reservoir of this virus. Bats are. Only the civets at the market—and no farm-raised or wild civets—carried the virus. None of the animal traders handling the civets at the market had SARS. . . .”
9.–” . . . . When Daszak and his collaborators at the WIV searched the cave in Yunnan for strains of coronavirus similar to human versions, no single bat actually had SARS. Genetic pieces of the various strains would have to be recombined to make up the human version. Adding to the confusion, Yunnan is about 1,000 kilometers from Guangdong. . . .”
10.–” . . . . So, how did viruses from bats in Yunnan combine to become deadly to humans, and then travel to civets and people in Guangdong, without causing any illnesses along the way during this 1,000 kilometer trip? . . .”
11.–Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance were deeply involved with a USAID and NIH funded joint WIV/University of North Carolina project we have covered extensively in past programs. ” . . . . The two institutions also worked as collaborators under another $2.6‑million grant, ‘Risk of Viral Emergence from Bats,’ and under EcoHealth Alliance’s largest single source of funding, a $44.2 million sub-grant from the University of California at Davis for the PREDICT project (2015–2020). . . .”
12.–” . . . . It’s the $44.2‑million PREDICT grant that EcoHealth Alliance used to fund the gain-of-function experiment by WIV scientist Zhengli Shi and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Ralph Baric. Shi and Baric used genetic engineering and synthetic biology to create a ‘new bat SARS-like virus . . . that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans.’ . . .”
13.–” . . . . The work . . . published in Nature in 2015 during the NIH’s moratorium on gain-of-function research, was grandfathered in because it was initiated before the moratorium (officially called the U.S. Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses), and because the request by Shi and Baric to continue their research during the moratorium was approved by the NIH. . . .”
14.–” . . . . As a condition of publication, Nature, like most scientific journals, requires authors to submit new DNA and RNA sequences to GenBank, the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information Database. Yet the new SARS-like virus Shi and Baric created wasn’t deposited in GenBank until May 2020. . . .”
15.–” . . . . why is the government focusing on just one of EcoHealth Alliance’s projects, when the organization has received $100.9 million in grants, primarily from the Department of Defense, to sample, store and study bat coronaviruses at labs around the world? Coronaviruses, both those that have been collected from animals and those that have been created through genetic engineering and synthetic biology, at all of these labs should be compared with SARS-CoV‑2. . . . .”
16.–” . . . . Daszak’s collaborators working under contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) aren’t allowed to conduct gain-of-function research unless specifically approved to do so by the Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO) committee. This committee was set up as a condition for lifting the 2014–2017 moratorium on gain-of-function research. The P3CO committee operates in secret. Not even a membership list has been released. . . .”
17.–Exemplifying EcoHealth Alliance’s work is a Pentagon contract with Tanzania, researching CCHF–Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever. ” . . . . EcoHealth Alliance has a $5‑million Pentagon contract, ‘Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever: Reducing an Emerging Health Threat in Tanzania.’ Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) is a tick-borne disease, originally only infecting animals. . . . There was only ever one case of CCHF in Tanzania, and that was in 1986. . . . Gain-of-function research on CCHF is being conducted at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) . . . . (The National Bio and Agro Defense Facility will take over the mission of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and become the lead facility for Foreign Animal Disease research.) . . .”
Program Highlights Include: The prominent role in the Sanders Institute and AOC’s advisory team of Jeffrey Sachs, whose HIID team of advisers (with government funding) sent Russia back to the Stone Age, economically; the “handoff” to Jeffrey Sachs and his HIID of Russia and other former Soviet Republics by the Gehlen/GOP Nazis manifesting through the Free Congress Foundation; review of the operational political continuum stretching from the Third Reich, through the OSS, the CIA and the GOP; review of the roles of Allen Dulles, William Casey, Resorts International and Donald Trump in that continuum.
It’s been the same headline for months now:
* April of 2020: American billionaires have gotten $280 billion richer since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic
* May of 2020: American billionaires got $434 richer during the pandemic
* August of 2020: American billionaires got $637 richer during the pandemic
* September of 2020: U.S. billionaires got $845 billion richer since the start of the pandemic/Wealth of US billionaires rises by nearly a third during pandemic
* October of 2020: US billionaires saw their net worth rise by almost $1 trillion between March and October — Jeff Bezos remains the richest, a study says.
From nearly the start of the COVID-19 pandemic it’s been clear that the public health disaster wasn’t a disaster for everyone, with the wealthiest individuals being not only largely insulated from the economic lockdown but in many cases well positioned to profit from it. The pandemic was turning into a giant upward transfer of wealth. And as we’re going to see, giant upward transfers of wealth are essentially what the private equity industry is all about. The rise of ‘supply-side’ economics in the 1980s coincided with the rise of private equity and that’s no coincidence. The philosophy behind the private equity movement is the philosophy of supply-side economics. An anti-New Deal philosophy, where ruthlessness is a virtue, that fueled a 40 year giant fascist leveraged buyout of society.
In past programs, we have briefly noted that military and [ostensibly] civilian programs officially involved with “epidemic prevention” might conceal clandestine biological warfare applications designed to create epidemics.
This program further develops that inquiry
The official distinction between “offensive” and “defensive” biological warfare research is academic.
In that context, one should note that the official title of Unit 731, the notorious Japanese biological warfare unit was “the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army.”
Noteworthy in that general context is the observation by Jonathan King (professor of molecular biology at MIT), that Pentagon research into the application of genetic engineering to biological warfare could be masked as vaccine research, which sounds “defensive.”
In FTR #1130, we noted the role of four-star general Gustave Perna in Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed,” instituted by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Whether the program serves as cover for military research seems a reasonable question to ask, under the circumstances.
In our last program, we weighed New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s thoughts about a white-supremacist minority grouped around the GOP. Blow saw those interests working to preserve their privilege in a number of respects.
This program asks, in effect, if the global equivalent of Blow’s malefactors might be doing something similar with the Covid-19 “op” and related, overlapping clandestine operations. How might the interests we saw in FTR #1128
Selected excerpts of a Whitney Webb article provide insight into the possible offensive nature of programs ostensibly aimed at preventing epidemics. Like Unit 731 (see above), “Epidemic Prevention” may well be masking “epidemic creation.”
In connection with that possibility, the DARPA focus on gene-driving technology is frightening and fraught with devastating possibilities.
Whether or not gene-driving impacts DARPA assisted Covid-19 vaccine development by Moderna and Inovio, the Pentagon underwriting of these firms is of concern.
Some interesting points raised by Dr. Daniel R. Lucey are particularly important in light of the information we have developed in the past about gain of function experiments.
Lucey’s points of inquiry–although not discussed in this article–are particularly important when considered in conjunction with the joint U.S./Chinese program to investigate bat-borne coronaviruses, a program whose American funding apparatus involved USAID, a frequent front for CIA operations.
The gain of function experiments we discussed in FTR #‘s 1116, 1117 and 1121 involving adapting the H5N1 avian flu virus to ferrets is worth contemplating in the context of information indicating that the SARS Cov‑2 virus is particularly infective for ferrets.
Was part of the modified H5N1 flu virus adapted to SARS Cov‑2?
A key factor spurring our suspicion concerning genetic-engineering of one or more variant of the Covid-19 virus concerns a 2015 Gain-of-Function experiment. This should answer Dr. Lucey’s query.
“. . . . Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice. . . . The results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus—or other coronaviruses found in bat species—may be capable of making the leap to people without first evolving in an intermediate host, Nature reported . . . .”
Critics have flagged Gain-Of-Function research as dangerous. Proponents are not dissuaded, including Peter Daszak. “. . . . But Baric and others argued the study’s importance. ‘[The results] move this virus from a candidate emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger,’ Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which samples viruses from animals and people in emerging-diseases hotspots across the globe, told Nature. . . .”
Of more than passing interest is the disclosure that the project on bat-borne coronaviruses conducted in the Wuhan laboratory was a joint U.S./Chinese project, and that Ralph Baric was a key American partner in the project.
This is the undertaking about which we have reported and discussed extensively in the past! ” . . . . One of Dr Shi’s co-authors on that paper, Professor Ralph Baric from North Carolina University, said in an interview with ‘Science Daily’ at the time: ‘This virus is highly pathogenic and treatments developed against the original SARS virus in 2002 and the ZMapp drugs used to fight ebola fail to neutralise and control this particular virus.’ . . . .”
We note that the WIV project co-funded by USAID involved genetic manipulation of bat-borne coronaviruses.
” . . . . Now Dr Richard Ebright, an infectious disease expert at Rutgers University (USA), has alerted the public to evidence that WIV and US-based researchers were genetically engineering bat viruses to investigate their ability to infect humans, using commonly used methods that leave no sign or signature of human manipulation. Ebright flagged up a scientific paper published in 2017 by WIV scientists, including Shi Zhengli, the virologist leading the research into bat coronaviruses, working in collaboration with Peter Daszak of the US-based EcoHealth Alliance. Funding was shared between Chinese and US institutions, the latter including the US National Institutes of Health and USAID. The researchers report having conducted virus infectivity experiments where genetic material is combined from different varieties of SARS-related coronaviruses to form novel ‘chimeric’ versions. . . .”
In May, the Trump administration terminated the funding for the project. A key point of analysis was set forth by Dr. Christine Johnson: ” . . . . Virus samples in labs are almost never still infectious, after being frozen in nitrogen during the collection process and then inactivated in the lab to preserve their genetic sequence. . . .
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