FTR #1156 Bio-Psy-Op Apocalypse Now, Part 16: An Ounce of Prevention . . . .

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. . . .

FTR #1155 Bio-Psy-Op Apocalypse, Now Part 15: Covid-19 Updates, Part 4

Con­tin­u­ing cov­er­age of the Covid-19 pandemic–almost cer­tain­ly a bio­log­i­cal war­fare project craft­ed by the U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty establishment–the broad­cast cen­ters on the dual func­tion of “epi­dem­ic pre­ven­tion” and “epi­dem­ic cau­sa­tion” and sup­ple­ment­ing a Charles Blow op-ed piece in “The New York Times.”

Build­ing on the con­cept (dis­cussed many times in the past) that the dif­fer­ence between “offen­sive” and “defen­sive” bio­log­i­cal war­fare research is aca­d­e­m­ic, we note that cre­den­tialed observers have cit­ed Pen­ta­gon “vac­cine” research as a cov­er for offen­sive BW research. In addi­tion, we observe that numer­ous, over­lap­ping pro­grams osten­si­bly aimed at “pre­vent­ing” epi­demics may well mask efforts at gen­er­at­ing them.

One of the most noto­ri­ous and advanced bio­log­i­cal war­fare pro­grams in his­to­ry was Japan’s Unit 731, meld­ed into the U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare pro­gram at the end of World War II. The pro­gram was offi­cial­ly labeled: “the Epi­dem­ic Pre­ven­tion and Water Purifi­ca­tion Depart­ment of the Kwan­tung Army.”

Revis­it­ing the con­sum­mate­ly impor­tant Whit­ney Webb arti­cle about Pen­ta­gon research into bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es, we note:

1.–The DARPA research is osten­si­bly aimed at pre­vent­ing pan­demics but–very possibly–masking prepa­ra­tions for offen­sive bio­log­i­cal war­fare projects.
2.–The Pen­ta­gon is research­ing  “gene-driving”–a biotech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment that can per­ma­nent­ly alter the genet­ic make­up of entire pop­u­la­tion groups and lead to the extinc­tion of oth­er groups.
3.–The Pen­ta­gon research is heav­i­ly net­worked with com­pa­nies using DNA and mRNA vac­cines for Covid-19.

The fun­da­men­tal point of analy­sis and dis­cus­sion in this pro­gram, and the next, con­cerns the use of “Epi­dem­ic Pre­ven­tion” to mask exter­mi­na­tion­ist offen­sive bio­log­i­cal war­fare pro­grams to entrench, expand or intro­duce a white-suprema­cist/­First World Dom­i­na­tion dynam­ic in the U.S. and abroad.

Is this the lega­cy of Unit 731, nom­i­nal­ly an “Epi­dem­ic Pre­ven­tion” pro­gram?!

A col­umn by Charles Blow cor­rect­ly notes that the right-wing is work­ing to “lock-in” pow­er. Blow’s obser­va­tion is far more impor­tant when the con­text is expand­ed to include the full-court press against Chi­na and the effects of Covid-19 in the U.S.

Not a super­pow­er at this point in time, Chi­na has made rapid, remark­able progress:

1.–In 1981, 88% of the Chi­nese pop­u­la­tion lived in pover­ty. That was down to 0.7% in 2015.
2.–The Chi­nese mid­dle class was 4% of their pop­u­la­tion in 2002. By 2018, that was up to 31% of their pop­u­la­tion.
3.–In 2000, just 2% of the Chi­nese pop­u­la­tion had access to the inter­net. That was up to 29% by 2009.

With the stun­ning progress made by Chi­na, in com­bi­na­tion with their enor­mous pop­u­la­tion, the nation will be a major pow­er in the future.

Because they are not white and because their sys­tem of state cap­i­tal­ism is at log­ger­heads with the neo-lib­er­al dog­ma to which the West is enthrall, that coun­try will be brought to heel. The anti-Chi­na push by the West is fun­da­men­tal­ly white suprema­cist in nature.

Pur­suant to dis­cus­sion of the Charles Blow col­umn, Mr. Emory reads the head­lines and bylines from a num­ber of New York Times arti­cles under­scor­ing how the pan­dem­ic is work­ing against two trends that Blow cites as inim­i­cal to con­tin­ued GOP con­trol.

The pan­dem­ic is bad­ly dam­ag­ing the for­tunes of urban cen­ters and edu­ca­tion, both at the pub­lic school and uni­ver­si­ty lev­els. In that regard, the pan­dem­ic is accom­plish­ing what the Charles Blow col­umn enun­ci­ates.

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?

Anoth­er sub­ject worth con­tem­plat­ing con­cerns Gilead Sci­ences, Tam­i­flu and the prog­nos­ti­ca­tions con­cern­ing a “twindem­ic” this fall, with influen­za and Covid-19 com­bin­ing to over­whelm the health sys­tem.

Might we see an enhanced H5N1 avian influen­za this fall, pro­vid­ing enor­mous prof­its to Gilead Sci­ences, which, as we saw in FTR #1138, made an enor­mous amount of mon­ey (for itself and for­mer Chair­man of the Board Don­ald Rums­feld) devel­op­ing Tam­i­flu to negate the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an H5N1 pan­dem­ic?

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 per­formed by Ralph Bar­ic, employed in a joint U.S./Chinese exper­i­ment part­ly financed by USAID (a front for CIA activ­i­ty in the past) and NIH (used by both CIA and the Pen­ta­gon in the past). In that project, Bar­ic: ” . . . . 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 . . .” 

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.’ . . . .”

FTR #1131 Bio-Psy-Op Apocalypse Now, Part 7: Moderna Uber Alles

We begin by Intro­duc­ing the top­ic of Mod­er­na’s SARS Cov‑2 vac­cine as a mon­ey mak­er for both Mod­er­na and as a dri­ver for the mar­ket as a whole, we note last Mon­day’s announce­ment which gen­er­at­ed a major boost in the val­ue of Mod­er­na’s stock and a strong, gen­er­al ral­ly. The lat­ter appar­ent­ly stems from opti­mism that a sucess­ful vac­cine will alle­vi­ate the eco­nom­ic dam­age from Covid-19.

A Mar­ket­Watch piece about the rapid fluc­tu­a­tion of Mod­er­na’s stock under­scores the sig­nif­i­cance of the tim­ing of an announce­ment cast­ing Mod­er­na’s vac­cine tri­al in over­ly opti­mistic light:

1.–Moderna’s CEO (Stephen Ban­cel) and CFO (Lorence Kim) both sold stock on Fri­day, in accor­dance with pre­arranged trans­ac­tions. Bear in mind, that (as dis­cussed in FTR #1130) Mod­er­na’s stock was trad­ing at $23.46 at the begin­ning of the year, and the company–which has nev­er mar­ket­ed a vaccine–was the ben­e­fi­cia­ry of $483 mil­lion dol­lars in fed­er­al fund­ing ear­li­er in the year.) ” . . . . On Fri­day, Ban­cel sold 11,046 shares at a weight­ed aver­age price of $65.56 for about $724,200, as part of a pre­de­ter­mined trad­ing plan adopt­ed Dec. 28, 2018, accord­ing to a Form 4 fil­ing with the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion. He also dis­posed of 1,577 shares as part of a ‘bona fide’ gift. . . . Also, on Fri­day, Kim sold 20,000 shares at a weight­ed aver­age price of $65.53 for about $1.31 mil­lion, as part of a pre­de­ter­mined trad­ing plan. . . .”

2.–Kim also simul­ta­ne­ous­ly bought and sold shares of his firm for a net prof­it of $16.79 mil­lion on Mon­day, the day of an over­ly opti­mistic announce­ment by Mod­er­na. The for­tu­itous­ly timed Mod­er­na announce­ment made the fir­m’s CFO rough­ly $4 mil­lion: ” . . . . On Mon­day, he [Kim] exer­cised options to buy 241,000 shares at a weight­ed aver­age price of $12.45 for about $3 mil­lion, also as part of a pre­de­ter­mined plan. At the same time, Kim exe­cut­ed sales of 241,000 shares, at a weight­ed aver­age price of $82.12 for about $19.79 mil­lion. That means Kim net­ted about $16.79 mil­lion on the simul­ta­ne­ous buy and sale of shares. . . . with Monday’s stock price surge fol­low­ing the announce­ment of ear­ly data on its vac­cine can­di­date poten­tial­ly adding $4 mil­lion to Kim’s cof­fers. . . .”

3.–The above-ref­er­enced announce­ment by Mod­er­na led to a dra­mat­ic increase in Mod­er­na’s stock and boost­ed the mar­ket as a whole. Mod­er­na announced that evening that it would sell $1.34 bil­lion in stock to help its vac­cine oper­a­tion: ” . . . . Shares of Mod­er­na closed at a record high of $80.00 on Mon­day after the com­pa­ny released a slice of pos­i­tive inter­im clin­i­cal data from the first phase of its COVID-19 vac­cine tri­al. That night it announced it would sell $1.34 bil­lion in stock to help fund man­u­fac­tur­ing costs asso­ci­at­ed with the exper­i­men­tal COVID-19 vac­cine. . . .”

4.–Moderna’s stock nose­dived at the end of the trad­ing day on Tues­day, due to a crit­i­cal arti­cle from Stat News: ” . . . . The stock took a nose dive on Tues­day, clos­ing at $71.67, like­ly due in some degree to a Stat News sto­ry that ques­tioned a lack of clin­i­cal clar­i­ty in the data it pro­vid­ed to investors. . . .”
Mod­er­na’s announce­ment was crit­i­cal­ly assessed by Stat News, which point­ed out that the results were incom­plete at best: ” . . . . In a clin­i­cal-tri­al data dis­clo­sure on Mon­day, Mod­er­na shared that eight out of 45 par­tic­i­pants in its COVID-19 vac­cine study devel­oped neu­tral­iz­ing anti­bod­ies, a deci­sion that Stat’s Helen Bran­swell described as a ‘rea­son for cau­tion.’ It didn’t share infor­ma­tion about the immune response to the exper­i­men­tal vac­cine in the remain­ing 37 par­tic­i­pants. . . .”

5.–Nonetheless, Mod­er­na’s stock–bolstered by gov­ern­ment investment–has been on a dra­mat­ic upward swing: ” . . . . The company’s stock was up 3.8% in trad­ing on Wednes­day. Year-to-date, it has soared 270.2%, even though the com­pa­ny has no approved prod­ucts. . . .”

There are seri­ous ques­tions about the sub­stance of Mod­er­na’s state­ment:

1.–Moderna’s much tout­ed report on its vaccine—which trig­gered an upsurge in the mar­kets on Monday—appears to have been incom­plete, at best, and pur­pose­ful­ly decep­tive, at worst. “ . . . . While Mod­er­na blitzed the media, it revealed very lit­tle infor­ma­tion — and most of what it did dis­close were words, not data.. . . . If you ask sci­en­tists to read a jour­nal arti­cle, they will scour data tables, not cor­po­rate state­ments. With sci­ence, num­bers speak much loud­er than words. Even the fig­ures the com­pa­ny did release don’t mean much on their own, because crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion — effec­tive­ly the key to inter­pret­ing them — was with­held. . . .”

2.–Part of the rea­son for alarm and skep­ti­cism con­cerns the behav­ior of the NIAID—whose direc­tor is Antho­ny Fau­ci: “ . . . . The Nation­al Insti­tute for Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases has part­nered with Mod­er­na on this vac­cine. Sci­en­tists at NIAID made the vaccine’s con­struct, or pro­to­type, and the agency is run­ning the Phase 1 tri­al. This week’s Mod­er­na read­out came from the ear­li­est of data from the NIAID-led Phase 1. NIAID doesn’t hide its light under a bushel. The insti­tute gen­er­al­ly trum­pets its find­ings, often offer­ing direc­tor Antho­ny Fau­ci . . . or oth­er senior per­son­nel for inter­views. But NIAID did not put out a press release Mon­day and declined to pro­vide com­ment on Moderna’s announce­ment. . . .”

3.–To begin with, Moderna’s announce­ment was only sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sub­stan­tive for 8 of the 45 vol­un­teer sub­jects: “ . . . . The company’s state­ment led with the fact that all 45 sub­jects (in this analy­sis) who received dos­es of 25 micro­grams (two dos­es each), 100 micro­grams (two dos­es each), or a 250 micro­grams (one dose) devel­oped bind­ing anti­bod­ies. Lat­er, the state­ment indi­cat­ed that eight vol­un­teers — four each from the 25-micro­gram and 100-micro­gram arms — devel­oped neu­tral­iz­ing anti­bod­ies. Of the two types, these are the ones you’d real­ly want to see. We don’t know results from the oth­er 37 tri­al par­tic­i­pants. . . .”

4.–It is pos­si­ble that neu­tral­iz­ing anti­bod­ies may have been devel­oped in the 37 test sub­jects whose data was not released because the test­ing process is exact­ing. Still the state­ment war­rants cau­tion, at the least. “ . . . . This doesn’t mean that they didn’t devel­op neu­tral­iz­ing antibodies.Testing for neu­tral­iz­ing anti­bod­ies is more time-con­sum­ing than oth­er anti­body tests and must be done in a biose­cu­ri­ty lev­el 3 lab­o­ra­to­ry. Mod­er­na dis­closed the find­ings from eight sub­jects because that’s all it had at that point. Still, it’s a rea­son for cau­tion . . . .”

5.–In addi­tion, the age of the sub­jects was not released and that is rel­e­vant. “ . . . . Sep­a­rate­ly, while the Phase 1 tri­al includ­ed healthy vol­un­teers ages 18 to 55 years, the exact ages of these eight peo­ple are unknown. If, by chance, they most­ly clus­tered around the younger end of the age spec­trum, you might expect a bet­ter response to the vac­cine than if they were most­ly from the senior end of it. And giv­en who is at high­est risk from the SARS-CoV­‑2 coro­n­avirus, pro­tect­ing old­er adults is what Covid-19 vac­cines need to do. . . .”

6.–In addi­tion, there was no data released as to the dura­bil­i­ty of the neu­tral­iz­ing anti­bod­ies. If, for the sake of argu­ment, they are not long-last­ing, the util­i­ty of the vac­cine is neg­li­gi­ble. “ . . . . The report of neu­tral­iz­ing anti­bod­ies in sub­jects who were vac­ci­nat­ed comes from blood drawn two weeks after they received their sec­ond dose of vac­cine. Two weeks. ‘That’s very ear­ly. We don’t know if those anti­bod­ies are durable,’ said Anna Durbin, a vac­cine researcher at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty. . . .”

7.–Still anoth­er point of contention/alarm con­cerns the vari­abil­i­ty in neu­tral­iz­ing anti­bod­ies among recov­ered patients: “ . . . . But stud­ies have shown anti­body lev­els among peo­ple who have recov­ered from the ill­ness vary enor­mous­ly; the range that may be influ­enced by the sever­i­ty of a person’s dis­ease. John ‘Jack’ Rose, a vac­cine researcher from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty, point­ed STAT to a study from Chi­na that showed that, among 175 recov­ered Covid-19 patients stud­ied, 10 had no detectable neu­tral­iz­ing anti­bod­ies. Recov­ered patients at the oth­er end of the spec­trum had real­ly high anti­body lev­els. So though the com­pa­ny said the anti­body lev­els induced by vac­cine were as good as those gen­er­at­ed by infec­tion, there’s no real way to know what that com­par­i­son means. . . .”

8.–It is less than encour­ag­ing that Mod­er­na dis­closed that more rel­e­vant data will be dis­closed in a report to be released in con­junc­tion with NIAID: “ . . . . STAT asked Mod­er­na for infor­ma­tion on the anti­body lev­els it used as a com­para­tor. The response: That will be dis­closed in an even­tu­al jour­nal arti­cle from NIAID, which is part of the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health. . . .”

9.–Ann Durbin was struck by the word­ing of Moderna’s release: “ . . . . Durbin was struck by the word­ing of the company’s state­ment, point­ing to this sen­tence: ‘The lev­els of neu­tral­iz­ing anti­bod­ies at day 43 were at or above lev­els gen­er­al­ly seen in con­va­les­cent sera.’ ‘I thought: Gen­er­al­ly? What does that mean?’ Durbin said. Her ques­tion, for the time being, can’t be answered. . . .”

10.–Jack Rose com­ment­ed on the opaque nature of Moderna’s release: “. . . . Rose said the com­pa­ny should dis­close the infor­ma­tion. ‘When a com­pa­ny like Mod­er­na with such incred­i­bly vast resources says they have gen­er­at­ed SARS‑2 neu­tral­iz­ing anti­bod­ies in a human tri­al, I would real­ly like to see num­bers from what­ev­er assay they are using,’ he said. . . .”

10.–To date, Mod­er­na issues press releas­es, not papers that can be vet­ted by the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty: “ . . . . It doesn’t pub­lish on its work in sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals. What is known has been dis­closed through press releas­es. That’s not enough to gen­er­ate con­fi­dence with­in the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty. ‘My guess is that their num­bers are mar­gin­al or they would say more,’ Rose said about the company’s SARS‑2 vac­cine, echo­ing a sus­pi­cion that oth­ers have about some of the company’s oth­er work. ‘I do think it’s a bit of a con­cern that they haven’t pub­lished the results of any of their ongo­ing tri­als that they men­tion in their press release. They have not pub­lished any of that,’ Durbin not­ed. . . .”

After sum­ma­riz­ing a high­ly tech­ni­cal arti­cle warn­ing that of the pos­si­ble con­se­quences of intro­duc­ing a SARS Cov‑2 vac­cine that gen­er­ates inad­e­quate­ly high lev­els of anti­bod­ies, we detail a 2016 STAT News arti­cle about Mod­er­na high­lights a num­ber of areas of con­cern, giv­en the speed and rel­a­tive­ly opaque nature of the poten­tial intro­duc­tion of its Covid-19 vac­cine.

The financ­ing of the com­pa­ny by DARPA, and Mon­cef Slaoui’s join­ing with Four Star Gen­er­al Per­na (ele­vat­ed by the Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen­er­al Mark A. Mil­ley) are of addi­tion­al con­cern.

1.–As of 2016, Mod­er­na had the largest val­u­a­tion of any pri­vate biotech firm and for­mer employ­ees felt that Mod­er­na prized mon­ey over sci­ence. Note that, as will be reviewed lat­er in the pro­gram, its stock has risen expo­nen­tial­ly as a result of the injec­tion of hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars. Bear in mind that Mod­er­na has also been under­writ­ten by DARPA. “ . . . . Mod­er­na is worth more than any oth­er pri­vate biotech in the US, and for­mer employ­ees said they felt that Ban­cel prized the company’s ever-increas­ing val­u­a­tion, now approach­ing $5 bil­lion, over its sci­ence. . . .”

2.–Moderna has main­tained a cul­ture of secre­cy, which in 2016, applied to the first two prod­ucts under­go­ing phase 1 tri­als: “ . . . . Mod­er­na just moved its first two poten­tial treat­ments — both vac­cines — into human tri­als. In keep­ing with the cul­ture of secre­cy, though, exec­u­tives won’t say which dis­eases the vac­cines tar­get, and they have not list­ed the stud­ies on the pub­lic fed­er­al reg­istry, ClinicalTrials.gov. List­ing is option­al for Phase 1 tri­als, which are meant to deter­mine if a drug is safe, but most com­pa­nies vol­un­tar­i­ly dis­close their work. . . .”

3.–Protein ther­a­py has been a dri­ving eco­nom­ic and ther­a­peu­tic fac­tor in the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal busi­ness: “ . . . . For decades, com­pa­nies have endeav­ored to craft bet­ter and bet­ter pro­tein ther­a­pies, lead­ing to new treat­ments for can­cer, autoim­mune dis­or­ders, and rare dis­eases. Such ther­a­pies are cost­ly to pro­duce and have many lim­i­ta­tions, but they’ve giv­en rise to a multi­bil­lion-dol­lar indus­try. The anti-inflam­ma­to­ry Humi­ra, the world’s top drug at $14 bil­lion in sales a year, is a shin­ing exam­ple of pro­tein ther­a­py. . . .”

4.–Moderna aims at doing an end run around that tech­nol­o­gy with the injec­tion of mRNA (mes­sen­ger RNA) or DNA. This is a risky tech­nol­o­gy: “ . . . . Moderna’s tech­nol­o­gy promised to sub­vert the whole field, cre­at­ing ther­a­peu­tic pro­teins inside the body instead of in man­u­fac­tur­ing plants. The key: har­ness­ing mes­sen­ger RNA, or mRNA. . . . . It’s high­ly risky. Big phar­ma com­pa­nies had tried sim­i­lar work and aban­doned it because it’s exceed­ing­ly hard to get RNA into cells with­out trig­ger­ing nasty side effects. . . . .”

5.–CEO Ban­cel has main­tained the company’s cul­ture of secre­cy: “ . . . . Under Ban­cel, Mod­er­na has been loath to pub­lish its work in Sci­ence or Nature, but enthu­si­as­tic to her­ald its poten­tial on CNBC and CNN, tak­ing part in seg­ments on the world’s most dis­rup­tive com­pa­niesand the poten­tial “cure for can­cer.” . . .”

6.–Moderna had dra­con­ian atti­tude toward employ­ees from its incep­tion: “ . . . . From the begin­ning, Ban­cel made clear that Moderna’s sci­ence sim­ply had to work. And that any­one who couldn’t make it work didn’t belong. The ear­ly Mod­er­na was a chaot­ic, unpre­dictable work­place, accord­ing to for­mer employ­ees. One recalls find­ing him­self out of a job when a quick-turn­around exper­i­ment failed to pan out. Anoth­er helped train a group of new hires only to real­ize they were his replace­ments. . . .”

7.–Joe Bolen exem­pli­fied the treat­ment Mod­er­na met­ed out: “ . . . . Most stun­ning to employ­ees was the abrupt depar­ture of Joseph Bolen, who came aboard in 2013 to lead Moderna’s R&D efforts. Bolen was a big-name hire in biotech cir­cles, an expe­ri­enced chief sci­en­tif­ic offi­cer who had guid­ed Mil­len­ni­um Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals to FDA approval for a block­buster can­cer drug. . . ‘No sci­en­tist in his right mind would leave that job unless there was some­thing wrong with the sci­ence or the per­son­nel,” said a per­son close to the com­pa­ny at the time.’ . . .”

8.–Bolen had com­pa­ny: “ . . . . Bolen wasn’t alone. Chief Infor­ma­tion Offi­cer John Reyn­ders joined in 2013 to make Mod­er­na what he called the world’s “first ful­ly dig­i­tal biotech,”only to step down a year lat­er. Michael Morin, brought in to lead Moderna’s sci­en­tif­ic efforts in can­cer in 2014, last­ed less than 18 months. As did Greg Licholai, hired in 2015 to direct the company’s projects in rare dis­eases. The lat­ter two key lead­er­ship posi­tions remain unfilled. . . .”

9.–The expla­na­tion of CFO Lorence Kim is less than reas­sur­ing from the stand­point of prod­uct safe­ty and reli­a­bil­i­ty: “ . . . . ‘We force every­one to grow with the com­pa­ny at unprece­dent­ed speed,’ Mod­er­na Chief Finan­cial Offi­cer Lorence Kim said. ‘Some peo­ple grow with the com­pa­ny; oth­ers don’t.’ . . .”

10.–Beginning in 2013, Mod­er­na part­nered with a series of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal giants, includ­ing AstraZeneca, which has been select­ed to devel­op a Covid-19 vac­cine: “ . . . . That’s when Mod­er­na — which had just 25 employ­ees — signed a stag­ger­ing $240 mil­lion part­ner­ship with UK phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal giant AstraZeneca. It was the most mon­ey phar­ma had ever spent on drugs that had not yet been test­ed in humans. . . .”

11.–The firm has been lav­ish­ly cap­i­tal­ized: “ . . . . In ear­ly 2015, Mod­er­na dis­closed a $450 mil­lion financ­ing round, the largest ever for a pri­vate biotech com­pa­ny. This month, the com­pa­ny broke its own record, rais­ing anoth­er $474 mil­lion. . . . Though it has yet to reveal data from a sin­gle clin­i­cal tri­al, Mod­er­na is now val­ued at $4.7 bil­lion, accord­ing to Pitch­book. . . .”

12.–Initially, Mod­er­na aimed at devel­op­ing prod­ucts that would be admin­is­tered for a peri­od of years: “ . . . . From the start, Mod­er­na her­ald­ed its abil­i­ty to pro­duce pro­teins with­in cells, which could open up a world of ther­a­peu­tic tar­gets unreach­able by con­ven­tion­al drugs. The most rev­o­lu­tion­ary treat­ments, which could chal­lenge the multi­bil­lion-dol­lar mar­ket for pro­tein ther­a­py, would involve repeat­ed dos­es of mRNA over many years, so a patient’s body con­tin­ued to pro­duce pro­teins to keep dis­ease at bay. . . .”

13.–Instead of pro­duc­ing treat­ments that would be admin­is­tered over a peri­od of years, the com­pa­ny focused on vac­cines: “ . . . . But Moderna’s first human tri­als aren’t so ambi­tious, focus­ing instead on the crowd­ed field of vac­cines, where the com­pa­ny has only been work­ing since 2014. . . . The choice to pri­or­i­tize vac­cines came as a dis­ap­point­ment to many in the com­pa­ny, accord­ing to a for­mer man­ag­er. The plan had been to rad­i­cal­ly dis­rupt the biotech indus­try, the man­ag­er said, so ‘why would you start with a clin­i­cal pro­gram that has very lim­it­ed upside and lots of com­pe­ti­tion?’” . . . .”

14.–The answer to Moderna’s focus on vac­cines may be due to issues of prod­uct safe­ty: “ . . . Deliv­ery — actu­al­ly get­ting RNA into cells — has long bedev­iled the whole field. On their own, RNA mol­e­cules have a hard time reach­ing their tar­gets. They work bet­ter if they’re wrapped up in a deliv­ery mech­a­nism, such as nanopar­ti­cles made of lipids. But those nanopar­ti­cles can lead to dan­ger­ous side effects, espe­cial­ly if a patient has to take repeat­ed dos­es over months or years. . . .”

15.–Vaccines will only admin­is­ter mRNA at the time of vac­ci­na­tion, rather than over a long peri­od of time: “ . . . . ‘I would say that mRNA is bet­ter suit­ed for dis­eases where treat­ment for short dura­tion is suf­fi­cient­ly cura­tive, so the tox­i­c­i­ties caused by deliv­ery mate­ri­als are less like­ly to occur,’ said Katal­in Karikó, a pio­neer in the field who serves as a vice pres­i­dent at BioN­Tech. . . That makes vac­cines the low­est hang­ing fruit in mRNA, said Franz-Wern­er Haas, CureVac’s chief cor­po­rate offi­cer. ‘From our point of view, it’s obvi­ous why [Mod­er­na] start­ed there,’ he said.’ . . .”

16.–Moderna’s expla­na­tion for its focus on vac­cines is not reassuring—the speed with which it can pro­ceed to human tri­als. The firm’s secre­cy has gen­er­at­ed alarm: “ . . . . Mod­er­na said it pri­or­i­tized vac­cines because they pre­sent­ed the fastest path to human tri­als, not because of set­backs with oth­er projects. ‘The notion that [Mod­er­na] ran into dif­fi­cul­ties isn’t borne in real­i­ty,’ said Afeyan. But this is where Moderna’s secre­cy comes into play: Until there’s pub­lished data, only the com­pa­ny and its part­ners know what the data show. Every­one out­side is left guess­ing — and, in some cas­es, wor­ry­ing that Mod­er­na won’t live up to its hype. . . .”

17.–Moderna applies soft­ware and a busi­ness mod­el derived from Tes­la, Ama­zon and Uber: “ . . . . Mod­er­na has pio­neered an auto­mat­ed sys­tem mod­eled on the soft­ware Tes­la uses to man­age orders, Ban­cel said: Sci­en­tists sim­ply enter the pro­tein they want a cell to express, and testable mRNA arrives with­in weeks. . . . That has always been part of the plan, for­mer employ­ees said, point­ing to Bancel’s fas­ci­na­tion with the tech indus­try. Uber and Ama­zon were not the first to come up with their respec­tive busi­ness ideas, but they were the ones that built enough scale to ward off com­pe­ti­tion. And Mod­er­na is posi­tion­ing itself to do the same in mRNA. . . .”

Mon­cef Slaoui’s  opti­mistic state­ment on the Fri­day before the Mon­day announce­ment, presents impor­tant con­text for Moderna’s Mon­day announce­ment. That announce­ment moved mar­kets based on inad­e­quate data. “Oper­a­tion Warp Speed” (head­ed by Slaoui) sug­gests that can­di­date Trump  is very inter­est­ed in those pre­lim­i­nary results as well. 

Eliz­a­beth War­ren scored Slaoui’s con­flict of interest–a con­sid­er­a­tion that will be dis­cussed at length: ” . . . . Fol­low­ing Mon­cef Slaoui’s Fri­day appoint­ment as a co-leader of the Warp Speed pro­gram, he’s set to sell about 155,000 shares in Mod­er­na, accord­ing to press reports. They were worth an esti­mat­ed $10 mil­lion Fri­day, but after Monday’s stock run-up on pos­i­tive ear­ly data, they’re now val­ued at about $12.4 mil­lion. . . . Fol­low­ing Slaoui’s selec­tion, Sen. Eliz­a­beth War­ren tweet­ed that it’s a ‘huge con­flict of inter­est’ for him to keep the Mod­er­na stock as he assumes the new role. She said he should ‘divest imme­di­ate­ly.’ In a now-delet­ed tweet, Slaoui respond­ed that there ‘is no con­flict of inter­est, and there nev­er has been,’ Busi­ness Insid­er reports. . . .”

Even after agree­ing to sell his Mod­er­na stock, Slaoui’s invest­ments raise alarm­ing questions–note that he is a “ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist” and a long­time for­mer exec­u­tive at Glaxo-Smithk­line:

1.–The cir­cum­stances of his appoint­ment will per­mit him to avoid scruti­ny: ” . . . . In agree­ing to accept the posi­tion, Dr. Slaoui did not come on board as a gov­ern­ment employ­ee. Instead, he is on a con­tract, receiv­ing $1 for his ser­vice. That leaves him exempt from fed­er­al dis­clo­sure rules that would require him to list his out­side posi­tions, stock hold­ings and oth­er poten­tial con­flicts. And the con­tract posi­tion is not sub­ject to the same con­flict-of-inter­est laws and reg­u­la­tions that exec­u­tive branch employ­ees must fol­low. . . .”

2.–He will retain a great deal of Glaxo-Smithk­line stock: ” . . . . He did not say how much his GSK shares were worth. When he left the com­pa­ny in 2017, he held about [500,000 in West­ern Print Edi­tion] 240,000 shares and share equiv­a­lents, accord­ing to the drug company’s annu­al report and an analy­sis by the exec­u­tive com­pen­sa­tion firm Equi­lar. . . .”

3.–Further analy­sis of Slaoui’s posi­tion deep­ens con­cern about the integri­ty of the process: ” . . . . ‘This is basi­cal­ly absurd,’ said Vir­ginia Can­ter, who is chief ethics coun­sel for Cit­i­zens for Respon­si­bil­i­ty and Ethics in Wash­ing­ton. ‘It allows for no pub­lic scruti­ny of his con­flicts of inter­est.’ Ms. Can­ter also said fed­er­al law barred gov­ern­ment con­trac­tors from super­vis­ing gov­ern­ment employ­ees. . . . Ms. Can­ter, a for­mer ethics lawyer in the Oba­ma and Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tions, the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion and oth­er agen­cies, point­ed out that GSK’s vac­cine can­di­date with Sanofi could wind up com­pet­ing with oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers vying for gov­ern­ment approval and sup­port. ‘If he retains stock in com­pa­nies that are invest­ing in the devel­op­ment of a vac­cine, and he’s involved in over­see­ing this process to select the safest vac­cine to com­bat Covid-19, regard­less of how won­der­ful a per­son he is, we can’t be con­fi­dent of the integri­ty of any process in which he is involved,’ Ms. Can­ter said. In addi­tion, his affil­i­a­tion with Medicxi could com­pli­cate mat­ters: Two of its investors are GSK and a divi­sion of John­son & John­son, which is also devel­op­ing a poten­tial vac­cine. . . .”

Mod­er­na stands to make bil­lions of dol­lars if their vac­cine goes to mar­ket:

1.–” . . . . What investors are bet­ting on, for Mod­er­na and oth­ers devel­op­ing vac­cines against the SARS-CoV­‑2 virus, is that a third of the devel­oped world’s pop­u­la­tion will get vac­ci­nat­ed every year. That could amount to a $10 bil­lion annu­al busi­ness, at an esti­mat­ed price of $30 per vac­ci­na­tion. . . .”

2.–” . . . . Mor­gan Stan­ley ana­lysts this past week­end sug­gest­ed that pric­ing might start at $5 to $10 a dose dur­ing this first pan­dem­ic cri­sis, then rise to a range of $13 to $30 for pre­ven­tive dos­es in future years. But at BMO Cap­i­tal Mar­kets, ana­lyst George Farmer spec­u­lat­ed that Mod­er­na could start charg­ing $125 per treat­ment in the U.S. mar­ket and raise that price over time to $200. . . . ”

We close the pro­gram with a reminder of the extent to which fed­er­al fund­ing dri­ves the val­ue of Mod­er­na: ” . . . . ‘Instead of wait­ing for the data and then scal­ing up with man­u­fac­tur­ing process … we can make as many dos­es as we can. We are doing both in par­al­lel,’ he said. The com­pa­ny plans to hire up to 150 peo­ple to sup­port the effort. Ban­cel said the com­pa­ny ‘couldn’t have done this’ with­out the fund­ing com­mit­ment from the Bio­med­ical Advanced Research and Devel­op­ment Author­i­ty, which is part of the Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices. . . .”

Supplement to “The Eugenic Virus”

In FTR #1127, we high­light­ed one of the mul­ti-dimen­sion­al facets of the Covid-19 phenomenon–how the pan­dem­ic is ful­fill­ing a eugenic agen­da across many social stra­ta and around the globe. For­mer Ger­man finance min­is­ter Wolf­gang Schauble–the “Aus­ter­i­ty Czar” of the EU–has enun­ci­at­ed the eugenic phi­los­o­phy of Covid-19 pol­i­cy. Schauble pur­sued a Social Dar­win­ian pol­i­cy fol­low­ing the 2008 finan­cial col­lapse: ” . . . Dur­ing the inter­na­tion­al finan­cial cri­sis, when Schäu­ble was Ger­many’s Min­is­ter of Finance, his EU coun­ter­parts trem­bled: Schäu­ble want­ed to force them to adapt harsh aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures. Because the fore­see­able social con­se­quences would cost lives, Schäuble’s tac­tics seemed to scare Europe with ‘trau­mat­ic effects’ and gave it a les­son in Ger­man eco­nom­ic ethics: Teu­ton­ic bru­tal­i­ty and at all costs. ‘Ter­ri­fy­ing,’ was the assess­ment the US Trea­sury Sec­re­tary made fol­low­ing his con­ver­sa­tion with Schäu­ble. Paris and Madrid were also appre­hen­sive; Athens called Schäu­ble an ‘arson­ist,’ on a ram­page through Europe. . . .” Schauble is now one of the most impor­tant fig­ures in Ger­man gov­ern­ment. He has expressed socio-eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy with regard to treat­ing those with Covid-19: ” . . . . Schäu­ble has elab­o­rat­ed in 2020 on what he had already made clear in 2012, dur­ing the inter­na­tion­al finan­cial cri­sis: ‘If I hear that every­thing else must take a back seat to the preser­va­tion of life, I must say that this, in such unequiv­o­cal­ness, is not right.’ Pro­tec­tion of human life does not have an ‘absolute pri­or­i­ty in our Basic Law.’ Death is com­ing soon­er or lat­er any­way. ‘We are all going to die.’ . . . . Schäuble’s state­ments are exem­plary and are of ‘nation­al sig­nif­i­cance’ declared the Ger­man Ethics Coun­cil. The coun­cil is gov­ern­ment financed and pri­or­i­tizes ‘eco­nom­ic rights.’ They should ‘not be uncon­di­tion­al­ly sub­or­di­nat­ed’ to the pro­tec­tion of human life. There is a sort of rival­ry of val­ues. If the val­ue of life would have pri­or­i­ty, ‘free­dom’ would suf­fer, accord­ing to the unan­i­mous judg­ment of the ethics depart­ment of the Ger­man Eco­nom­ic Insti­tute (IW). . . . In fact, the gov­ern­men­t’s oblig­a­tion to the con­sti­tu­tion’s high­est val­ue — the pro­tec­tion of life — must be rel­a­tivized, just as Schäu­ble is doing, con­firm the major­i­ty of Ger­many’s gov­ern­ment lead­ers. . . . a fel­low Green munic­i­pal politi­cian speaks in plain oper­a­tional terms; ‘Let me tell you quite blunt­ly: We may be sav­ing peo­ple in Ger­many, who, because of their age or seri­ous pre­vi­ous med­ical con­di­tions, may, be dead any­way in a half a year.’ . . . .”

FTR #1127 Bio-Psy-Op Apocalypse Now, Part 3–The Eugenic Virus

This pro­gram exam­ines one of the mul­ti-lay­ered effects of the Covid-19 “bio-psy-op.” We stress that the demar­ca­tion of these lay­ers is for cog­ni­tive purposes–to enhance under­stand­ing. The lay­ers are part of a uni­fied whole.

In this broad­cast, we focus on the eugenic effects of the virus. We have cov­ered eugen­ics in many broad­casts over the decades. A few of those: FTR #‘s 1075, 1029, 908, 909, 32, 1013. FTR #1013 is of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance, as Trump has used the Covid-19 out­break to halt immi­gra­tion into the U.S.

Before delv­ing into the eugen­ics man­i­fes­ta­tions of the Covid-19 out­break, we high­light some of the recent devel­op­ments in the pan­dem­ic:

1.–A recent report, based on ran­dom test­ing, indi­cat­ed that up to one fifth of New York­ers may have been infect­ed by the virus. If accu­rate, this is an impor­tant piece of infor­ma­tion, indi­cat­ing that, from an epi­demi­o­log­i­cal stand­point, the virus did NOT orig­i­nate in Chi­na.
2.–We strong­ly sus­pect that New York was delib­er­ate­ly vec­tored by fas­cist ele­ments asso­ci­at­ed with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion at one lev­el, and the Under­ground Reich at anoth­er. This  method­ol­o­gy would not be unprece­dent­ed: “. . . . In the sum­mer of 1966, Spe­cial Oper­a­tions men walked into three New York City sub­way sta­tions and tossed light­bulbs filled with Bacil­lus sub­tilis, a benign bac­te­ria, onto the tracks. The sub­way trains pushed the germs through the entire sys­tem and the­o­ret­i­cal­ly killed over a mil­lion pas­sen­gers. . . .”
3.–We note increased fin­ger-point­ing at, scape­goat­ing of, Chi­na for the pan­dem­ic, on the part of Britain, Ger­many and France, in addi­tion to Trump and ele­ments of the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty: ” . . . .Wash­ing­ton is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly spread­ing delib­er­ate rumors that the virus could have orig­i­nat­ed in a Chi­nese lab­o­ra­to­ry. Where­as, sci­en­tists vehe­ment­ly refute the alle­ga­tions, Ger­man For­eign Min­is­ter Heiko Maas declared, he ‘does not want to exclude’ that the WHO will have to deal with these issues. On Mon­day, Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel called on Bei­jing to show ‘trans­paren­cy’ on the issue. . . . At the same time delib­er­ate rumors are being spread in the Unit­ed States that the Covid-19 virus could have orig­i­nat­ed in a Chi­nese lab­o­ra­to­ry — pos­si­bly in bioweapons lab. The US gov­ern­ment indi­cat­ed that it does not rule out this pos­si­bil­i­ty; US intel­li­gence ser­vices are cur­rent­ly inves­ti­gat­ing the issue. . . Lead­ing British and French politi­cians have expressed sim­i­lar views. British For­eign Min­is­ter Dominic Raab has repeat­ed­ly declared that Chi­na will be held respon­si­ble for the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic. French Pres­i­dent Emmanuel Macron has now joined the cam­paign. Regard­ing the pan­demic’s alleged ori­gin, he declared, ‘there are clear­ly things that have hap­pened’ in Chi­na ‘that we don’t know about.’ . . . . ”
4.–We also note a dis­turb­ing aspect of the symp­toms of a cross-vec­tored, genet­i­cal­ly-engi­neered virus that is the pre­cip­i­tat­ing event for the Nazi takover in the US in Ser­pen­t’s Walk: ” . . . . Pacov‑1 pro­duces only a mild, flu-like infec­tion that dis­ap­pears with­in a day or two. Pub­lic health author­i­ties would over­look it, nev­er con­sid­er it a seri­ous epi­dem­ic, and even if they did they’d have to look care­ful­ly to iso­late it. Once a vic­tim is over the ‘flu,’ Pacov‑1 becomes dor­mant and almost unde­tectable. A month or two lat­er, you send in the sec­ond stage: Pacov‑2 is also a virus, just as con­ta­gious as the first, and just as harm­less by itself. It reacts with Pacov‑1 to pro­duce a pow­er­ful coag­u­lant. . . . you die with­in three min­utes. . . .”
5.–The coag­u­lat­ing pathol­o­gy pro­duced by Pacov‑1 and Pacov‑2 in Ser­pen­t’s Walk is unnerv­ing­ly sim­i­lar to one of the many symp­toms of Covid-19 infec­tion: ” . . . . Doc­tors in hot spots across the globe have begun to report an unex­pect­ed preva­lence of blood clot­ting among COVID cas­es, in what could pose a per­fect storm of poten­tial­ly fatal risk fac­tors. . . . . . . It’s grow­ing so com­mon with severe COVID cas­es, doc­tors are rec­og­niz­ing it as a new pat­tern of clot­ting called COVID-19-asso­ci­at­ed coag­u­lopa­thy, or CAC, which is notably asso­ci­at­ed with high inflam­ma­to­ry mark­ers in the blood, like D‑dimer and fib­rino­gen. . . . ‘In the begin­ning of the out­break, we start­ed only giv­ing them med­i­cine to pre­vent clots. We saw that it was­n’t enough,’ Dr. Cristi­na Abad, an anes­the­si­ol­o­gist at Hos­pi­tal Clínicos San Car­los in Madrid, told ABC News. ‘They start­ed hav­ing pul­monary embolisms, so we start­ed [full] anti­co­ag­u­la­tion on every­one.’ . . .”

Eugen­ics, in its prac­tice, might best be described as a pseu­do-sci­en­tif­ic doc­trine attribut­ing fea­tures of racial, eth­nic and socio-eco­nom­ic prej­u­dice to empir­i­cal sci­en­tif­ic fact. ” . . . Eugen­ics is a set of beliefs and prac­tices that aim to improve the genet­ic qual­i­ty of a human population,[4][5] typ­i­cal­ly by exclud­ing peo­ple and groups judged to be infe­ri­or, and pro­mot­ing those judged to be supe­ri­or. . . . Many coun­tries enacted[49] var­i­ous eugen­ics poli­cies, includ­ing: genet­ic screen­ings, birth con­trol, pro­mot­ing dif­fer­en­tial birth rates, mar­riage restric­tions, seg­re­ga­tion (both racial seg­re­ga­tion and seques­ter­ing the men­tal­ly ill), com­pul­so­ry ster­il­iza­tion, forced abor­tions or forced preg­nan­cies, ulti­mate­ly cul­mi­nat­ing in geno­cide. . . .”

Dis­cus­sion of the eugenic aspects of the Covid-19 phe­nom­e­non include:

1.–De fac­to rationing of health care dur­ing the pan­dem­ic in such a way as to poten­tial­ly lethal­ly dis­crim­i­nate against those with dis­abil­i­ties.
2.–Infection and death rates dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly high among pop­u­la­tions endur­ing the eco­nom­ic and phys­i­o­log­i­cal afflic­tion deriv­ing from prej­u­dice and social dar­win­is­tic doc­trine: African-Amer­i­cans, peo­ple who work in low-pay­ing jobs that require close human con­tact and liv­ing in con­di­tions that do not per­mit social dis­tanc­ing.
3.–The eco­nom­i­cal­ly degrad­ing effect of GOP fis­cal pol­i­cy with regard to pub­lic trans­porta­tion dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.
4.–New York City has been stig­ma­tized dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, as has New York State.  With large Jew­ish, African-Amer­i­can and Lati­no pop­u­la­tions, a tra­di­tion of lib­er­al pol­i­tics, gen­er­ous munic­i­pal union con­tracts, a free city uni­ver­si­ty pro­gram, New York has long been viewed as “Jew York City” by fas­cist ele­ments. Gov­er­nors, as well as Trump him­self, have pro­posed quar­an­ti­ning New York City and New Jer­sey. This fur­ther under­scores the above spec­u­la­tion con­cern­ing the rate of infec­tion in New York City. ” . . . . As Pres­i­dent Trump put it in his short-lived bid to ‘QUARANTINE’ New York, New Jer­sey and Con­necti­cut, ‘Some peo­ple would like to see New York quar­an­tined because it’s a hot spot’ — the impli­ca­tion being that if New York­ers could only be kept where they are, with check­points and guards if need be, Covid-19 could be stopped from spread­ing else­where in the coun­try. Gov. Ron DeSan­tis of Flori­da set up check­points to stop cars with New York or Louisiana license plates, so that state troop­ers can warn dri­vers to self-quar­an­tine or face 60 days in jail — even as he hes­i­tat­ed to put any social dis­tanc­ing in place or close the beach­es for spring break. Instead of admit­ting the dan­ger of com­mu­ni­ty spread in Flori­da, the gov­er­nor framed the prob­lem as one of out­siders bring­ing germs in. Gov­er­nors in Mary­land and oth­er states warned any­one arriv­ing from the New York City area to iso­late them­selves. On Twit­ter, Covid-19 has tak­en on a new sobri­quet: the ‘Cuo­movirus.’ . . .”

Crit­i­cal obser­va­tions by Wolf­gang Schauble, the German/EU “Aus­ter­i­ty Czar” who wrought so much suf­fer­ing fol­low­ing the 2008 eco­nom­ic col­lapse has clear­ly enun­ci­at­ed the func­tion­al and philo­soph­i­cal essence of “cor­po­ratist” and eugenic doc­trine. 

This, too, is reflect­ed in the Trumpian “LIBERATE MICHIGAN etc.”

Some back­ground on Schauble’s out­look: ” . . . . Hard­ly a Ger­man gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tive is more noto­ri­ous than Wolf­gang Schäu­ble — world­wide. Dur­ing the inter­na­tion­al finan­cial cri­sis, when Schäu­ble was Ger­many’s Min­is­ter of Finance, his EU coun­ter­parts trem­bled: Schäu­ble want­ed to force them to adapt harsh aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures. Because the fore­see­able social con­se­quences would cost lives, Schäuble’s tac­tics seemed to scare Europe with ‘trau­mat­ic effects’ and gave it a les­son in Ger­man eco­nom­ic ethics: Teu­ton­ic bru­tal­i­ty and at all costs. ‘Ter­ri­fy­ing,’ was the assess­ment the US Trea­sury Sec­re­tary made fol­low­ing his con­ver­sa­tion with Schäu­ble. Paris and Madrid were also appre­hen­sive; Athens called Schäu­ble an ‘arson­ist,’ on a ram­page through Europe. Schäu­ble has since climbed high­er on the gov­ern­ment lad­der. Schäu­ble now ranks sec­ond, after the Pres­i­dent, in the Fed­er­al Repub­lic of Ger­many’s pro­to­co­lary sys­tem. . . . .”

After the onset of the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, he has redou­bled his “Teu­ton­ic bru­tal­i­ty:” ” . . . . In the midst of the Coro­na cri­sis, Schäu­ble ini­ti­at­ed an inter­view, con­sid­ered to be an unof­fi­cial guide­line for the Ger­man state’s life and death deci­sions. Its tenor deserves atten­tion, even beyond Ger­many’s bor­ders.

“Should peo­ple have to die, because they are deprived of state resources, essen­tial for the eco­nom­ic cycle, such as cur­rent­ly dur­ing the Coro­na cri­sis? Does the pro­tec­tion of human life have absolute pri­or­i­ty in state pol­i­cy? In the inter­view, Schäu­ble has elab­o­rat­ed in 2020 on what he had already made clear in 2012, dur­ing the inter­na­tion­al finan­cial cri­sis: ‘If I hear that every­thing else must take a back seat to the preser­va­tion of life, I must say that this, in such unequiv­o­cal­ness, is not right.’ Pro­tec­tion of human life does not have an ‘absolute pri­or­i­ty in our Basic Law.’ Death is com­ing soon­er or lat­er any­way. ‘We are all going to die.’ (April 26, 2020)

“Schäuble’s state­ments are exem­plary and are of ‘nation­al sig­nif­i­cance’ declared the Ger­man Ethics Coun­cil. The coun­cil is gov­ern­ment financed and pri­or­i­tizes ‘eco­nom­ic rights.’ They should ‘not be uncon­di­tion­al­ly sub­or­di­nat­ed’ to the pro­tec­tion of human life. There is a sort of rival­ry of val­ues. If the val­ue of life would have pri­or­i­ty, ‘free­dom’ would suf­fer, accord­ing to the unan­i­mous judg­ment of the ethics depart­ment of the Ger­man Eco­nom­ic Insti­tute (IW). From the stand­point of Ger­man con­sti­tu­tion­al law, accord­ing to a for­mer judge on the con­sti­tu­tion­al court, ‘the state’s effi­cien­cy’ would encounter its lim­its, if life were giv­en top pri­or­i­ty, where ‘every­thing else must lag arbi­trar­i­ly far behind.’

“In fact, the gov­ern­men­t’s oblig­a­tion to the con­sti­tu­tion’s high­est val­ue — the pro­tec­tion of life — must be rel­a­tivized, just as Schäu­ble is doing, con­firm the major­i­ty of Ger­many’s gov­ern­ment lead­ers. Promi­nent voic­es from the par­lia­men­tary oppo­si­tion par­ties are also in agree­ment that the pro­tec­tion of human life, as the pri­ma­ry legit­imized duty of the state is a ‘ques­tion of assess­ment.’ From this the FDP draws the con­clu­sion: ‘there­fore, please reopen the busi­ness­es.’ ‘Enable pro­duc­tion.’ In har­mo­ny with Ger­many’s export econ­o­my lob­by­ists and the Pres­i­dent of the Bun­destag, the chair of the Greens is also one of the rel­a­tiviz­ers. He finds him­self in an alleged ‘dilem­ma,’ when he thinks of the pro­tec­tion of life dur­ing the Coro­na cri­sis, while a fel­low Green munic­i­pal politi­cian speaks in plain oper­a­tional terms; ‘Let me tell you quite blunt­ly: We may be sav­ing peo­ple in Ger­many, who, because of their age or seri­ous pre­vi­ous med­ical con­di­tions, may, be dead any­way in a half a year.’ . . . .”

The broad­cast con­cludes with an overview of New York Times head­lines, illus­trat­ing var­i­ous aspects of the socio-eco­nom­ic fall­out of the Covid-19 out­break, vic­tim­iz­ing low­er income peo­ple, reduc­ing income and earn­ing abil­i­ty, edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ty, adverse­ly affect­ing access to food and augur­ing cat­a­stro­phe for Third World pop­u­la­tions:

1.–“Colleges Run­ning Out of Cash Wor­ry Stu­dents Will Van­ish, Too” by Anemona Har­to­col­lis; The New York Times; 4/16/2020; pp. A1-A-15 [West­ern Edi­tion].
 2.–“Outbreak Strains States’ Finances” by Mary Williams Walsh; The New York Times; 4/16/2020; pp. B1-B6 [West­ern Edi­tion].
 3.–” ‘This Is Going to Kill Small-Town Amer­i­ca’ ” by David Gelles: The New York Times; 4/16/2020; pp. B1-B5 [West­ern Edi­tion].
 4.–The New York Times [West­ern Edi­tion] head­line for 4/16/2020 said it all, as far as the for­tunes of retail out­lets. “Sales at U.S. Stores Hit ‘Cat­a­stroph­ic’ Depths” by Sap­na Mahesh­wari and Ben Cas­sel­man; The New York Times; 4/16/2020.
5.– “Evi­dence of Virus Effect on Econ­o­my Grows More Omi­nous” [AP]; The New York Times; 4/15/2020.
6.– “135 Mil­lion Face Star­va­tion. That Could Dou­ble” by Abdi Latif Dahir; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; pp. A1-A6; [West­ern Edi­tion].
7.– “This Pan­dem­ic Is Bring­ing Anoth­er” by Nicholas Kristof; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; p. A23 [Op-ed–Western Edi­tion].
8.– “Covid-19 Threat­ens Glob­al Safe­ty Net” Edi­to­r­i­al; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; p. A22 [West­ern Edi­tion].
9.–“How Gov­ern­ment ‘Failed the Elder­ly’ ” Let­ter to the Edi­tor; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; p. A22 [West­ern Edi­tion].
10.– “A Lim­it on Trump’s Immi­gra­tion Pow­er” by Jen­nifer M. Cha­con and Erwin Cher­merin­sky; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; p. A23 [op-ed–Western Edi­tion].
11.– ” ‘The Food Sup­ply Chain Is Break­ing.’ Tyson Foods Warns of Meat Short­age as Plants Close Due to Covid-19” by Sanya Man­soor [Time] Yahoo News; 4/26/2020.

As not­ed in the pro­gram, the eugenic aspects of the pan­dem­ic and effects on the eco­nom­i­cal­ly and social­ly dis­ad­van­taged inside and out­side of the U.S. are inex­tri­ca­ble with the weal-con­cen­trat­ing aspects of the pan­dem­ic. This will be the focus of our next pro­gram:

1.–“Banks Steered Rich­est Clients To Fed­er­al Aid” by Emi­ly Flit­ter and Sta­cy Cow­ley; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; pp. A1-A14 [West­ern Edi­tion].
2.–“Millions In Relief For Backer Of Resorts” by Jean­na Smi­alek, Jim Tanker­s­ley and Alan Rappe­port; The New York Times; 4/23/2020; pp. B1-B5 [West­ern Edi­tion].

Provocation: Covid-19 as a False Flag “Bio-Reichstag Fire” (Updated on 4/22/2020)

In FTR #1126, we exam­ined the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and GOP’s exploita­tion of the Covid-19 out­break as a cam­paign tac­tic and right-wing hints that the virus escaped from a Chi­nese bio­log­i­cal war­fare lab­o­ra­to­ry. Now, Ger­many, France and Britain are join­ing with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and the GOP in hint­ing that the coro­n­avirus escaped from a Chi­nese bio­log­i­cal war­fare lab­o­ra­to­ry. As a “Ger­man For­eign Pol­i­cy” arti­cle notes, the tone of Amer­i­can, British, French and Ger­man rhetoric con­cern­ing Covid-19 is rem­i­nis­cent of the delib­er­ate dis­in­for­ma­tion that led to the inva­sion of Iraq in 2002. A) ” . . . . Last week­end, US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump warned the Peo­ple’s Repub­lic that it should face con­se­quences if it was ‘know­ing­ly respon­si­ble’ for the spread of the pan­dem­ic. Wash­ing­ton is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly spread­ing delib­er­ate rumors that the virus could have orig­i­nat­ed in a Chi­nese lab­o­ra­to­ry. Where­as, sci­en­tists vehe­ment­ly refute the alle­ga­tions, Ger­man For­eign Min­is­ter Heiko Maas declared, he ‘does not want to exclude’ that the WHO will have to deal with these issues. On Mon­day, Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel called on Bei­jing to show ‘trans­paren­cy’ on the issue. . . .”; B) ” . . . . At the same time delib­er­ate rumors are being spread in the Unit­ed States that the Covid-19 virus could have orig­i­nat­ed in a Chi­nese lab­o­ra­to­ry — pos­si­bly in bioweapons lab. The US gov­ern­ment indi­cat­ed that it does not rule out this pos­si­bil­i­ty; US intel­li­gence ser­vices are cur­rent­ly inves­ti­gat­ing the issue. Par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en the lie about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruc­tion, such an alle­ga­tion must be per­ceived as a threat to lend legit­i­ma­cy to new aggres­sions. . . .”; C) ” . . . . Already last week, Ger­man media organs have increas­ing­ly been call­ing Chi­na the ‘cul­prit’ behind the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic out­break. Under the head­line ‘what Chi­na already owes us,’ Ger­many’s Springer press even called for ‘repa­ra­tions.’ (german-foreign-policy.com reported.[5]) Lead­ing British and French politi­cians have expressed sim­i­lar views. British For­eign Min­is­ter Dominic Raab has repeat­ed­ly declared that Chi­na will be held respon­si­ble for the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic. French Pres­i­dent Emmanuel Macron has now joined the cam­paign. Regard­ing the pan­demic’s alleged ori­gin, he declared, ‘there are clear­ly things that have hap­pened’ in Chi­na ‘that we don’t know about.’[6] It is not clear how Macron can know some­thing exists that he does not know about. It is how­ev­er clear that he seeks to impli­cate Bei­jing. . . .” In fact–as we have seen, the DARPA has been doing exten­sive research into bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es. In addi­tion, Fort Det­rick was shut down in ear­ly August of 2019 for safe­ty vio­la­tions.

Supplement to The Magic Virus Theory

As dis­cussed in FTR #1124–among oth­er programs–it is now pos­si­ble to cre­ate ANY virus from scratch, using “mail-order” or “design­er” genes. Sad­ly pre­dictable jour­nal­is­tic bro­mides that the Covid-19 coro­n­avirus could not have been/was not made in a lab­o­ra­to­ry fly in the face of bio-tech­nol­o­gy that has exist­ed for 20 years. In FTR #282–recorded in May of 2001–we not­ed the ter­ri­ble sig­nif­i­cance of the devel­op­ment of such “Design­er Gene” tech­nol­o­gy. A BBC sto­ry from 1999 high­lights the fears of experts that the advent of such tech­nol­o­gy could enable the devel­op­ment of eth­no-spe­cif­ic bio­log­i­cal weapons: ” . . . . Advances in genet­ic knowl­edge could be mis­used to devel­op pow­er­ful bio­log­i­cal weapons that could be tai­lored to strike at spe­cif­ic eth­nic groups, the British Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion has warned. A BMA report Biotech­nol­o­gy, Weapons and Human­i­ty says that con­cert­ed inter­na­tion­al action is nec­es­sary to block the devel­op­ment of new, bio­log­i­cal weapons. It warns the win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty to do so is very nar­row as tech­nol­o­gy is devel­op­ing rapid­ly and becom­ing ever more acces­si­ble. ‘Recipes’ for devel­op­ing bio­log­i­cal agents are freely avail­able on the Inter­net, the report warns. . . . The BMA report warns that legit­i­mate research into micro­bi­o­log­i­cal agents and genet­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed ther­a­peu­tic agents could be dif­fi­cult to dis­tin­guish from research geared towards devel­op­ing more effec­tive weapons. . . . Dr Vivi­enne Nathanson, BMA Head of Health Pol­i­cy Research said: . . . ‘Biotech­nol­o­gy and genet­ic knowl­edge are equal­ly open to this type of malign use. Doc­tors and oth­er sci­en­tists have an impor­tant role in pre­ven­tion. They have a duty to per­suade politi­cians and inter­na­tion­al agen­cies such as the UN to take this threat seri­ous­ly and to take action to pre­vent the pro­duc­tion of such weapons.’ . . . ”

FTR #1124 The Magic Virus Theory: The “Whole-of-Society Response”

This pro­gram takes stock of some of the remark­able fea­tures of the Covid-19 coro­n­avirus, to be seen in the con­text of a coun­try whose political/intellectual elites have accept­ed the “Mag­ic Bul­let The­o­ry.” (This is dis­cussed in–among oth­er programs–The Guns of Novem­ber, Part 2.)

It is our con­sid­ered opin­ion that the virus is part of the desta­bi­liza­tion effort against Chi­na and is found­ed upon research high­light­ed in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR #‘s 1119 and 1120.

As high­light­ed below, all of this must be eval­u­at­ed in light of the fact that the coor­di­na­tor of the anti-Chi­na effort–former Trump cam­paign man­ag­er Steve Bannon–is a fas­cist.

In addi­tion to review­ing how the Covid-19 virus infects human lung tis­sue and both the upper and low­er res­pi­ra­to­ry tracts, we note:

1.–The virus appears to have been a bat virus and the ran­dom muta­tions seen are unlike­ly to be nat­ur­al: ” . . . . What are the odds that a ran­dom bat virus had exact­ly the right com­bi­na­tion of traits to effec­tive­ly infect human cells from the get-go, and then jump into an unsus­pect­ing per­son? ‘Very low,’ [Kris­t­ian] Ander­sen [of the Scripps Research Trans­la­tion­al Insti­tute] says . . . . ”

2.–The abil­i­ty of this bat virus to infect ACE2 was present from day one. ” . . . . . The clos­est wild rel­a­tive of SARS-CoV­‑2 is found in bats, which sug­gests it orig­i­nat­ed in a bat, then jumped to humans either direct­ly or through anoth­er species. . . . When SARS-clas­sic first made this leap, a brief peri­od of muta­tion was nec­es­sary for it to rec­og­nize ACE2 well. But SARS-CoV­‑2 could do that from day one. ‘It had already found its best way of being a [human] virus,’ says Matthew Frie­man of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land School of Med­i­cine. . . .”

3.–Indeed, why was this “sev­enth virus” the one to infect humans “. . . . This fam­i­ly, the coro­n­avirus­es, includes just six oth­er mem­bers that infect humans. . . . . Why was this sev­enth coro­n­avirus the one to go pan­dem­ic? Sud­den­ly, what we do know about coro­n­avirus­es becomes a mat­ter of inter­na­tion­al con­cern. . . .”

4.–Perhaps the most notable obser­va­tion made about this virus thus far: it doesn’t appear to be mutat­ing in evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly sig­nif­i­cant ways. Of the 100-plus muta­tions observed in the virus so far, none has emerged as evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly dominant–unusual for a virus that only recent­ly jumped to humans. and has spread pro­lif­i­cal­ly. It’s as though the virus is already evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly opti­mized for spread­ing among humans and there are no ‘gain-of-func­tion’ muta­tions left for it acquire. As Lisa Gralin­s­ki, a coro­n­avirus expert at the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na Chapel Hill, described it, ‘The virus has been remark­ably sta­ble giv­en how much trans­mis­sion we’ve seen . . . . there’s no evo­lu­tion­ary pres­sure on the virus to trans­mit bet­ter. It’s doing a great job of spread­ing around the world right now.’ . . .”

5.–As dis­cussed in oth­er programs–including FTR #‘s 1117 and 1121, the “cytokine storms” that over­whelm the immune sys­tem of some Covid-19 vic­tims are symp­to­matic of oth­er virus­es that have gone either “Gain-of-Func­tion” alter­ation and/or genet­ic recov­ery and recreation–HN1 Avian Flu, SARS, and the 1918 “Span­ish Flu” virus: ” . . . . These dam­ag­ing over­re­ac­tions are called cytokine storms. They were his­tor­i­cal­ly respon­si­ble for many deaths dur­ing the 1918 flu pan­dem­ic, H5N1 bird flu out­breaks, and the 2003 SARS out­break.  . . . .”

In addi­tion, an arti­cle in Sci­ence Direct char­ac­ter­izes the advent of the furin-like cleav­age site as a “gain-of-func­tion” phe­nom­e­non. “Gain of Func­tion” is a mech­a­nism of action of an “Enhanced Poten­tial Pan­dem­ic Pathogen.” Note the use of the word “strik­ing­ly” in this oth­er­wise dry and pedan­tic aca­d­e­m­ic pre­sen­ta­tion. It is VERY sig­nif­i­cant and–we suspect–betokens aware­ness on the part of the authors that “we aren’t in Kansas, any­more, Toto!” “. . . . STRIKINGLY [caps are ours–D.E.], the 2019-nCoV S‑protein sequence con­tains 12 addi­tion­al nucleotides upstream of the sin­gle Arg↓ cleav­age site 1 (Fig. 1, Fig. 2) lead­ing to a pre­dic­tive­ly sol­vent-exposed PRRAR↓SV sequence, which cor­re­sponds to a canon­i­cal furin-like cleav­age site (Braun and Sauter, 2019; Iza­guirre, 2019; Sei­dah and Prat, 2012). This furin-like cleav­age site, is sup­posed to be cleaved dur­ing virus egress (Mille and Whit­tak­er, 2014) for S‑protein ‘prim­ing’ and may pro­vide a gain-of-func­tion to the 2019-nCoV for effi­cient spread­ing in the human pop­u­la­tion com­pared to oth­er lin­eage b beta­coro­n­avirus­es. This pos­si­bly illus­trates a con­ver­gent evo­lu­tion path­way between unre­lat­ed CoVs. Inter­est­ing­ly, if this site is not processed, the S‑protein is expect­ed to be cleaved at site 2 dur­ing virus endo­cy­to­sis, as observed for the SARS-CoV. . . .”

The arti­cle also notes that the virus dif­fers sig­nif­i­cant­ly from oth­er coro­n­avirus­es of its type. ” . . . . Based on its genome sequence, 2019-nCoV belongs to lin­eage b of Beta­coro­n­avirus (Fig. 1A), which also includes the SARS-CoV and bat CoV ZXC21, the lat­ter and CoV ZC45 being the clos­est to 2019-nCoV. . . . Since furin is high­ly expressed in lungs, an enveloped virus that infects the res­pi­ra­to­ry tract may suc­cess­ful­ly exploit this con­ver­tase to acti­vate its sur­face gly­co­pro­tein (Bassi et al., 2017; Mbikay et al., 1997). Before the emer­gence of the 2019-nCoV, this impor­tant fea­ture was not observed in the lin­eage b of beta­coro­n­avirus­es. . . .”

The fea­tures of the virus not­ed above must be seen in the con­text of the DARPA research into bat coro­n­avirus­es:

1.–” . . . . the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), began spend­ing mil­lions on such research in 2018 and some of those Pen­ta­gon-fund­ed stud­ies were con­duct­ed at known U.S. mil­i­tary bioweapons labs bor­der­ing Chi­na and result­ed in the dis­cov­ery of dozens of new coro­n­avirus strains as recent­ly as last April. Fur­ther­more, the ties of the Pentagon’s main biode­fense lab to a virol­o­gy insti­tute in Wuhan, Chi­na — where the cur­rent out­break is believed to have begun — have been unre­port­ed in Eng­lish lan­guage media thus far. . . . For instance, DARPA spent $10 mil­lion on one project in 2018 ‘to unrav­el the com­plex caus­es of bat-borne virus­es that have recent­ly made the jump to humans, caus­ing con­cern among glob­al health offi­cials.’ Anoth­er research project backed by both DARPA and NIH saw researchers at Col­orado State Uni­ver­si­ty exam­ine the coro­n­avirus that caus­es Mid­dle East Res­pi­ra­to­ry Syn­drome (MERS) in bats and camels ‘to under­stand the role of these hosts in trans­mit­ting dis­ease to humans.’  . . . For instance, one study con­duct­ed in South­ern Chi­na in 2018 result­ed in the dis­cov­ery of 89 new ‘nov­el bat coro­n­avirus’ strains that use the same recep­tor as the coro­n­avirus known as Mid­dle East Res­pi­ra­to­ry Syn­drome (MERS). That study was joint­ly fund­ed by the Chi­nese government’s Min­istry of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy, USAID — an orga­ni­za­tion long alleged to be a front for U.S. intel­li­gence, and the U.S. Nation­al Insti­tute of Health — which has col­lab­o­rat­ed with both the CIA and the Pen­tagonon infec­tious dis­ease and bioweapons research.. . . .”

2.–DARPA is doing this work, in part, at bio­log­i­cal research facil­i­ties ring­ing both Chi­na and Rus­sia. ” . . . .  One of those stud­ies focused on ‘Bat-Borne Zoonot­ic Dis­ease Emer­gence in West­ern Asia’ and involved the Lugar Cen­ter in Geor­gia, iden­ti­fied by for­mer Geor­gian gov­ern­ment offi­cials, the Russ­ian gov­ern­men­tand inde­pen­dent, inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Dilyana Gay­tandzhie­va as a covert U.S. bioweapons lab. . . . Anoth­er U.S. gov­ern­ment-fund­ed study that dis­cov­ered still more new strains of ‘nov­el bat coro­n­avirus’ was pub­lished just last year. Titled ‘Dis­cov­ery and Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Nov­el Bat Coro­n­avirus Lin­eages from Kaza­khstan,’ focused on ‘the bat fau­na of cen­tral Asia, which link Chi­na to east­ern Europe’ and the nov­el bat coro­n­avirus lin­eages dis­cov­ered dur­ing the study were found to be ‘close­ly relat­ed to bat coro­n­avirus­es from Chi­na, France, Spain, and South Africa, sug­gest­ing that co-cir­cu­la­tion of coro­n­avirus­es is com­mon in mul­ti­ple bat species with over­lap­ping geo­graph­i­cal dis­tri­b­u­tions.’ In oth­er words, the coro­n­avirus­es dis­cov­ered in this study were iden­ti­fied in bat pop­u­la­tions that migrate between Chi­na and Kaza­khstan, among oth­er coun­tries, and is close­ly relat­ed to bat coro­n­avirus­es in sev­er­al coun­tries, includ­ing Chi­na. . . .

The unusu­al fea­tures of the virus must also be seen in the con­text of the Steve Ban­non-led anti-Chi­na desta­bi­liza­tion effort. It is our opin­ion that the spread­ing of the virus is intend­ed to pro­voke the “Whole-of-soci­ety” response. As dis­cussed in FTR #947, the dom­i­nant intel­lec­tu­al and polit­i­cal influ­ence on Ban­non is the Ital­ian fas­cist Julius Evola. Orig­i­nal­ly a sup­port­er of Mus­soli­ni, he ulti­mate­ly decid­ed Mus­soli­ni was too mod­er­ate and in an ide­o­log­i­cal “Gain-of-Func­tion” muta­tion, asso­ci­at­ed him­self with the Nazi SS, who were financ­ing his work by the end of World War II. 

Ban­non’s assess­ment of U.S.-China rela­tions amounts to a dec­la­ra­tion of “Totaler Krieg–Total War.” ” . . . ‘These are two sys­tems that are incom­pat­i­ble,’ Mr. Ban­non said of the Unit­ed States and Chi­na. ‘One side is going to win, and one side is going to lose.’ . . . .”

The coro­n­avirus attack we believe was unleashed on the U.S. and the world as a whole (to alien­ate it from Chi­na) and Chi­na itself (to inflect eco­nom­ic dam­age and stir up domes­tic unrest) is the man­i­fes­ta­tion of what the head of the FBI expressed: ” . . . . ‘I think it’s going to take a whole-of-soci­ety response by us.’ . . .”

Of para­mount impor­tance is the fact that state­ments being issued to the effect that the virus was not made in a lab­o­ra­to­ry are not just irrel­e­vant, but absurd. ANY virus can be made in a lab­o­ra­to­ry, from scratch as is being done for the SARS-CoV­‑2 (Covid-19) virus.

The bro­mides being issued–all too predictably–that the virus could not have been/wasn’t made in a lab­o­ra­to­ry are the viro­log­i­cal equiv­a­lent of the Mag­ic Bul­let The­o­ry.

We first dis­cussed “Design­er Genes” in FTR #282.

Ralph Baric–who did the gain-of-func­tion mod­i­fi­ca­tion on the Horse­shoe Bat coro­n­avirus, has been select­ed to engi­neer the Covid-19.

” . . . . The remark­able abil­i­ty to ‘boot up’  virus­es from genet­ic instruc­tions is made pos­si­ble by com­pa­nies that man­u­fac­ture cus­tom DNA mol­e­cules, such as Inte­grat­ed DNA Tech­nol­o­gy, Twist Bio­science, and Atum. By order­ing the right genes, which cost a few thou­sand dol­lars, and then stitch­ing them togeth­er to cre­ate a copy of the coro­n­avirus genome, it’s pos­si­ble to inject the genet­ic mate­r­i­al into cells and jump-start the virus to life. The abil­i­ty to make a lethal virus from mail-order DNA was first demon­strat­ed 20 years ago. . . .”

Note what might be termed a “viro­log­ic Juras­sic Park” man­i­fes­ta­tion: ” . . . . The tech­nol­o­gy imme­di­ate­ly cre­at­ed bio-weapon wor­ries. . . . Researchers at the US Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion (CDC) drove that point home in 2005 when they res­ur­rect­ed the influen­za virus that killed tens of mil­lions in 1918–1919. . . .”

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 done by the above Ralph Bar­ic: “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. They also reignite a debate about whether that infor­ma­tion jus­ti­fies the risk of such work, known as gain-of-func­tion research. ‘If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could pre­dict the tra­jec­to­ry,’ Simon Wain-Hob­son, a virol­o­gist at the Pas­teur Insti­tute in Paris, told Nature. . . .”

Modus Operandi of Covid-19–Does It Reflect Genetic Engineering?

An inter­est­ing piece in “The Atlantic” describes how the SARS-CoV­‑2 virus that caus­es COVID-19 dif­fers from oth­er coro­n­avirus­es known to infect humans. We present this as sup­ple­men­tal to dis­cus­sion of DARPA research into bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es. The virus appears to have been a bat virus and the ran­dom muta­tions seen are unlike­ly to be nat­ur­al: ” . . . . What are the odds that a ran­dom bat virus had exact­ly the right com­bi­na­tion of traits to effec­tive­ly infect human cells from the get-go, and then jump into an unsus­pect­ing per­son? ‘Very low,’ [Kris­t­ian] Ander­sen [of the Scripps Research Trans­la­tion­al Insti­tute] says . . . . ” A) The SARS-CoV­‑2 (Covid-19) virus is unusu­al in that it infects both the upper and low­er res­pi­ra­to­ry tracts. The ‘spike’ part of the SARS-CoV­‑2 virus is unusu­al­ly good at latch­ing into a pro­tein called ACE2 which is found on the exte­ri­or of the cells in human air­ways. This abil­i­ty appears to be fun­da­men­tal to the virus’s abil­i­ty to infect the upper res­pi­ra­to­ry tract. The virus appears to infect the upper air­ways first and then, as cells in them die and are sloughed off, it makes its way down to the low­er res­pi­ra­to­ry tract and lungs where the dead­ly infec­tions occur. This sequen­tial pat­tern of infect­ing the upper res­pi­ra­to­ry tract pri­or to mak­ing its way down to the lungs enables it to silent­ly spread asymp­to­mati­cal­ly before turn­ing more lethal in the low­er res­pi­ra­to­ry tract. B) We note that the ACE2 pro­tein appears to man­i­fest more heav­i­ly in the lung tis­sue of  East-Asians. As indi­cat­ed in the Whit­ney Webb arti­cle, genet­ic mod­i­fi­ca­tion has been envi­sioned as applic­a­ble to bio­log­i­cal war­fare to cre­ate “eth­no-spe­cif­ic” bio­log­i­cal weapons. C) Anoth­er key fea­ture of the virus’s abil­i­ty to infect humans con­cerns a pro­tein bridge con­nect­ing two halves of the virus’s spike. Acti­va­tion of this spike caus­es the virus injects its nucle­ic acid into the cell. Acti­vat­ing the spike requires the cleav­age of a pro­tein bridge con­nect­ing the two halves of the spike. That cleav­age is pre­cip­i­tat­ed by the enzyme furin which is ubiq­ui­tous in human cells. In con­trast, the coro­n­avirus which caused SARS had a pro­tein bridge that was less like­ly to be cleaved. SARS-CoV­‑2 first latch­es onto to human upper air­way cells and, once there, has the pro­tein bridge link­ing the halves of the spike sev­ered by the furin enzyme. D) Per­haps the most notable obser­va­tion made about this virus thus far: it doesn’t appear to be mutat­ing in evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly sig­nif­i­cant ways. Of the 100-plus muta­tions observed in the virus so far, none has emerged as evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly dominant–unusual for a virus that only recent­ly jumped to humans. and has spread pro­lif­i­cal­ly. It’s as though the virus is already evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly opti­mized for spread­ing among humans and there are no ‘gain-of-fuc­tion’ muta­tions left for it acquire. As Lisa Gralin­s­ki, a coro­n­avirus expert at the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na Chapel Hill, described it, “The virus has been remark­ably sta­ble giv­en how much trans­mis­sion we’ve seen . . . . there’s no evo­lu­tion­ary pres­sure on the virus to trans­mit bet­ter. It’s doing a great job of spread­ing around the world right now.” E) Gralin­sky works close­ly with Ralph Baric’s lab. Recall that Bar­ic is the researcher who con­struct­ed a chimeric virus out of a SARS virus and horse­shoe bat coro­n­avirus in 2015. When Gralin­s­ki observes that the virus wouldn’t feel any evo­lu­tion­ary pres­sure to spread because it’s already doing such a good job that is VERY sig­nif­i­cant. Evo­lu­tion doesn’t stop just because the sta­tus quo of an organ­ism is already effec­tive. A muta­tion allow­ing the virus to spread even more read­i­ly would be expect­ed. And nor­mal­ly such an event does hap­pen. But it hasn’t hap­pened so for SARS-CoV­‑2 because it is already at some­thing of a “coro­n­avirus evo­lu­tion­ary peak”. In addi­tion, an arti­cle in “Sci­ence Direct” char­ac­ter­izes the advent of the furin-like cleav­age site as a “gain-of-func­tion” phe­nom­e­non. “Gain of Func­tion” is a mech­a­nism of action of an “Enhanced Poten­tial Pan­dem­ic Pathogen.” “. . . . Strik­ing­ly, the 2019-nCoV S‑protein sequence con­tains 12 addi­tion­al nucleotides upstream of the sin­gle Arg↓ cleav­age site 1 (Fig. 1, Fig. 2) lead­ing to a pre­dic­tive­ly sol­vent-exposed PRRAR↓SV sequence, which cor­re­sponds to a canon­i­cal furin-like cleav­age site (Braun and Sauter, 2019; Iza­guirre, 2019; Sei­dah and Prat, 2012). This furin-like cleav­age site, is sup­posed to be cleaved dur­ing virus egress (Mille and Whit­tak­er, 2014) for S‑protein “prim­ing” and may pro­vide a gain-of-func­tion to the 2019-nCoV for effi­cient spread­ing in the human pop­u­la­tion com­pared to oth­er lin­eage b beta­coro­n­avirus­es. This pos­si­bly illus­trates a con­ver­gent evo­lu­tion path­way between unre­lat­ed CoVs. Inter­est­ing­ly, if this site is not processed, the S‑protein is expect­ed to be cleaved at site 2 dur­ing virus endo­cy­to­sis, as observed for the SARS-CoV. . . .”

FTR #1122 Bio-Psy-Op Apocalypse Now: Fireside Rant about the Covid-19 Outbreak

This broad­cast updates, in a admit­ted­ly stri­dent mode, the Covid-19 out­break. We begin with dis­cus­sion of Mod­er­na, Inc.

Mod­er­na Inc. is one of the DARPA-fund­ed com­pa­nies that has been autho­rized to begin test­ing of vac­cines. As dis­cussed by Whit­ney Webb, Mod­er­na Inc. is get­ting a green light to devel­op its mRNA vac­cine (mRNA 1273) for pre­vent­ing Covid-19 infec­tion. The West­ern Edi­tion of The New York Times con­tains infor­ma­tion NOT con­tained in the online man­i­fes­ta­tion of the arti­cle. 

Although vac­cines that inject nucle­ic acid–either DNA or mes­sen­ger RNA–into cells have been seen as promis­ing, they have NEVER been admin­is­tered to humans. The tri­als for the Mod­er­na vac­cine appear to be “fast-tracked.” 

We have done numer­ous pro­grams about the polio vac­cine and how that “fast-tracked” (and con­se­quent­ly insuf­fi­cient­ly vet­ted) vac­cine was con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed with the SV40 can­cer-caus­ing mon­key virus.

In the con­text of the desta­bi­liza­tion of Chi­na (cov­ered in many pro­grams and a key ele­ment of analy­sis in assess­ing the Covid-19 out­break), we note that the col­laps­ing of economies abroad, includ­ing the U.S., will sig­nif­i­cant­ly and adverse­ly affect Chi­na’s export-ori­ent­ed econ­o­my.

It may lead to the col­lapse of the Chi­nese econ­o­my eagerly–and financially–anticipated by J. Kyle Bass, Tom­my Hicks Jr. and Steve Ban­non.

An op-ed col­umn fur­ther devel­ops the poten­tial dan­ger to Chi­na’s econ­o­my posed by the Covid-19 out­break. ” . . . . While Chi­na is no longer cen­ter stage, as the virus spreads world­wide there are renewed fears that the cri­sis could cir­cle back to its shores by hurt­ing demand for exports. Over the last decade China’s cor­po­rate debt swelled four­fold to over $20 tril­lion — the biggest binge in the world. The Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund esti­mates that one-tenth of this debt is in zom­bie firms, which rely on gov­ern­ment-direct­ed lend­ing to stay alive. . . .”

Next, we tack­le the sub­ject of an esca­lat­ing media war between Chi­na and the U.S.

Trump’s label­ing of Covid-19 as “the Chi­nese virus” is appar­ent­ly in response to sug­ges­tions in Chi­nese social media and some pub­lished mate­r­i­al point­ing to the U.S. and/or nation­al secu­ri­ty ele­ments with­in and/or asso­ci­at­ed with it as the source of the virus.

In FTR #1109, we exam­ined Don­ald Trump’s deal­ings with Deutsche Bank, key “sui­cides” in con­nec­tion with the bank’s records on Trump and Jared Kush­n­er, Trump’s claims of exec­u­tive priv­i­lege in attempts to keep the records secret, the appar­ent destruc­tion of those records by Deutsche Bank and the track­ing of the case to a deci­sion by the Supreme Court.

Now, the Covid-19 out­break may delay that deci­sion indef­i­nite­ly.

As high­light­ed above, Don­ald Trump has been label­ing Covid-19 the “Chi­nese virus” in response to Chi­nese inti­ma­tions (cor­rect in their main con­tention in our opin­ion) that the U.S. is the point of ori­gin of the virus.

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

Key points of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis:

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