FTR #1149 The Space Plane and Covid-19: The Paperclip Legacy, Part 4

Con­clud­ing the dis­cus­sion con­tained in part of FTR #1147 and all of FTR #1148,  we fin­ish the pre­sen­ta­tion of a very impor­tant arti­cle by the bril­liant Peter Dale Scott, writ­ten almost 35 years ago. With the GOP con­ven­tion in full swing as these pro­grams were being record­ed, the sym­bio­sis between Allen Dulles and the Nazi SS is fun­da­men­tal to under­stand­ing not only the gen­e­sis of the U.S. intel­li­gence estab­lish­ment, but how that insti­tu­tion is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the Repub­li­can Par­ty.

The link to this arti­cle per­mits the listener/reader to down­load (for free) the entire issue of Covert Action Quar­ter­ly. Mr. Emory strong­ly rec­om­mends that they do so, as the oth­er arti­cles in this excel­lent issue will sup­ple­ment the analy­sis beau­ti­ful­ly.

Due to the length and com­plex­i­ty of this arti­cle, we are not tran­scrib­ing it, but will sum­ma­rize impor­tant points of infor­ma­tion.

Key Points of Analy­sis:

1.–Dulles’s nego­ti­a­tions with the SS pre­ced­ed by months the offi­cial sto­ry of the con­tact between U.S. intel­li­gence and the Gehlen team. ” . . . . It is inter­est­ing to note that Gehlen knew of Wolf­f’s con­tacts with Dulles s ear­ly as Jan­u­ary 1945, the month in which they were ini­ti­at­ed. From this same peri­od he began to con­sol­i­date his net­works for sur­vival after Hitler’s down­fall, which is to say he already expect­ed to reach a modus viven­di with the Amer­i­cans. In April 1945, one month before the war end­ed, Dulles asked Frank Wis­ner to begin talks with Gehlen, who was not tak­en into U.S. cus­tody until May 20. On the Gehlen side, a plan ‘to gain con­tact with the Amer­i­cans’ was approved on April 9. . . .”
2.–Dulles’s nego­ti­a­tions with the SS, involv­ing Wal­ter Rauff–who devised the mobile gas cham­bers used on the East­ern Front–were con­duct­ed as part of Oper­a­tion Sun­rise. ” . . . . Despite the [U.S.] Army inter­roga­tor’s pleas that Rauff ‘is con­sid­ered a men­ace if ever set free, and fail­ing actu­al elim­i­na­tion, is rec­om­mend­ed for life-long intern­ment,’ Dulles kep his bar­gain and Rauff was released. Accord­ing to usu­al­ly reli­able intel­li­gence sources. Dulles then employed Rauff on anti-com­mu­nist oper­a­tions in Italy, which was Rauf­f’s spe­cial­ty under the Nazis. . . .”
3.–Although the Vat­i­can was deeply involved with the SS/OSS nego­ti­a­tions, Dulles’ team was the pri­ma­ry com­po­nent. ” . . . It was Dulles’s con­tacts, not the Vat­i­can, who han­dled the smug­gling of Nazis. Accord­ing to top secret State Depart­ment doc­u­ments, the Ital­ian police pro­vid­ed the false pass­ports for allied agents; the visas came from the Argen­tine con­sulate in the allied intel­li­gence unit based at Trieste;and the embarka­tion paper­work was han­dled by a U.S. State Depart­ment offi­cer in Genoa. Genoa, inci­den­tal­ly was Rauf­f’s area of juris­dic­tion. All of them worked for Dulles. . . .”

Sup­ple­ment­ing the infor­ma­tion in the Peter Dale Scott arti­cle, we present infor­ma­tion about Men­gele’s work in Paraguay in con­junc­tion with the CIA and Pen­ta­gon: ” . . . . In the last named coun­try, the son of a Bavar­i­an cav­al­ry offi­cer, Pres­i­dent Stroess­ner, coop­er­ates with the Unit­ed States mil­i­tary author­i­ties and the CIA, as he does with Bor­mann and his rep­re­sen­ta­tives. Dur­ing the Viet­nam war, Pres­i­dent Stroess­ner per­mit­ted the U.S. Army Chem­i­cal Corps and the CIA to send in teams of 2,500 men to car­ry out field tests, in the Mat­to Grosso jun­gle, of chem­i­cals for use in Viet­nam. In one instance, sev­er­al Amer­i­can sol­diers became casu­al­ties when they acci­den­tal­ly were sprayed with the gas. They were tak­en to a Paraguayan mil­i­tary field hos­pi­tal; the doc­tor who treat­ed them was Josef Men­gele, now a Paraguayan cit­i­zen and an offi­cer in the Paraguayan Army Med­ical Corps. Under Men­gele’s treat­ment, all sol­diers recov­ered. None, of course, knew the true iden­ti­ty of their med­ical bene­fac­tor. . . .”

Of para­mount impor­tance in the con­text of this pre­sen­ta­tion, is the fact that it was William Casey who was in charge of OSS oper­a­tions in Ger­many in late 1944 and 1945, as Dulles, Dono­van, and the SS were forg­ing their alliance!! This places Casey’s role in the Cru­sade For Free­dom and the deriv­a­tive Rea­gan cam­paign and admin­is­tra­tion in per­spec­tive.

Plac­ing the co-evo­lu­tion of the Cru­sade For Free­dom, the GOP and the Gehlen “Org” in con­text, we note that:

1.–The Gehlen orga­ni­za­tion was a direct exten­sion of the Third Reich’s nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment, coa­lesc­ing with the approval of a Ger­man chain of com­mand that was still in effect after the for­mal con­clu­sion of hos­til­i­ties.
2.–The OUN/B, Iron Guard, Croa­t­ian Ustachis and oth­er East­ern Euro­pean fas­cist groups were part of the Gehlen orga­ni­za­tion. They were the pri­ma­ry ele­ments in the GOP’s Eth­nic Her­itage Out­reach Coun­cil.
3.–This places William Casey’s cen­tral role in the GOP Nazi branch as an ele­ment in the per­pet­u­a­tion of the Third Reich’s nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment.

Next, we review analy­sis of the Cru­sade For Freedom–the covert oper­a­tion that brought Third Reich alum­ni into the coun­try and also sup­port­ed their gueril­la war­fare in East­ern Europe, con­duct­ed up until the ear­ly 1950’s. Con­ceived by Allen Dulles, over­seen by Richard Nixon, pub­licly rep­re­sent­ed by Ronald Rea­gan and real­ized in con­sid­er­able mea­sure by William Casey, the CFF ulti­mate­ly evolved into a Nazi wing of the GOP.

While serv­ing as chair­man of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee, the elder George Bush shep­herd­ed the Nazi émi­gré com­mu­ni­ty into posi­tion as a per­ma­nent branch of the Repub­li­can Par­ty.

Note that the rise of the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion was essen­tial­ly the ascent of the Naz­i­fied GOP, embod­ied in the CFF milieu. Rea­gan (spokesman for CFF) was Pres­i­dent; George H.W. Bush (for whom CIA head­quar­ters is named) was the Vice Pres­i­dent; William Casey (who han­dled the State Depart­ment machi­na­tions to bring these peo­ple into the Unit­ed States) was Rea­gan’s cam­paign man­ag­er and lat­er his CIA direc­tor.

Cen­tral to under­stand­ing the merg­ing of the U.S. with Nazi Ger­many in an anti-Sovi­et alliance–is the under­stand­ing of what glob­al­iza­tion real­ly is and how it pre­cip­i­tat­ed fas­cism and the Sec­ond World War.

Also cen­tral to an under­stand­ing of the real­iza­tion of the con­sum­mate man­i­fes­ta­tion of both glob­al­iza­tion and fascism/Nazism–is analy­sis of the machi­na­tions of the Bush fam­i­ly. The hero­ic Jus­tice Depart­ment inves­ti­ga­tor (lat­er author) John Lof­tus delin­eat­ed the Bush fam­i­ly’s role in the laun­der­ing of Nazi funds between the Thyssen Bank in Berlin, the Bank voor Han­del en Scheep­vaart, N.V. and the Union Bank in the U.S.

The net­work­ing of the Bush fam­i­ly with the Thyssens, and the Rock­e­fellers, in turn, is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the coa­les­cence and oper­a­tion of the remark­able and dead­ly Bor­mann flight cap­i­tal net­work, high­light­ed in FTR #305, among oth­er pro­grams.

Of para­mount impor­tance is the role of the two insti­tu­tions in which Prescott Bush served–Brown Broth­ers Har­ri­man and the Union Bank–as a fun­da­men­tal vehi­cle for laun­der­ing mon­ey from the con­sum­mate­ly pow­er­ful Rock­e­feller fam­i­ly and relat­ed inter­ests in Nazi Ger­many. ” . . . . But what did the Bush fam­i­ly know about their Nazi con­nec­tion and when did they know it? As senior man­agers of Brown Broth­ers Har­ri­man, they had to have known that their Amer­i­can clients, such as the Rock­e­fellers, were invest­ing heav­i­ly in Ger­man cor­po­ra­tions, includ­ing Thyssen’s giant Vere­inigte Stahlw­erke. As not­ed his­to­ri­an Christo­pher Simp­son repeat­ed­ly doc­u­ments, it is a mat­ter of pub­lic record that Brown Brother’s invest­ments in Nazi Ger­many took place under the Bush fam­i­ly stew­ard­ship. . . . It should be recalled that in Jan­u­ary 1937, he hired Allen Dulles to ‘cloak’ his accounts. But cloak from whom? Did he expect that hap­py lit­tle Hol­land was going to declare war on Amer­i­ca? The cloak­ing oper­a­tion only makes sense in antic­i­pa­tion of a pos­si­ble war with Nazi Ger­many. If Union Bank was not the con­duit for laun­der­ing the Rockefeller’s Nazi invest­ments back to Amer­i­ca, then how could the Rock­e­feller-con­trolled Chase Man­hat­tan Bank end up own­ing 31% of the Thyssen group after the war? It should be not­ed that the Thyssen group (TBG) is now the largest indus­tri­al con­glom­er­ate in Ger­many, and with a net worth of more than $50 bil­lion dol­lars, one of the wealth­i­est cor­po­ra­tions in the world. TBG is so rich it even bought out the Krupp fam­i­ly, famous arms mak­ers for Hitler, leav­ing the Thyssens as the undis­put­ed cham­pi­on sur­vivors of the Third Reich. Where did the Thyssens get the start-up mon­ey to rebuild their empire with such speed after World War II? . . . . A for­tune this size could only have come from the Thyssen prof­its made from rearm­ing the Third Reich, and then hid­den, first from the Nazi tax audi­tors, and then from the Allies. The Bush­es knew per­fect­ly well that Brown Broth­ers was the Amer­i­can mon­ey chan­nel into Nazi Ger­many, and that Union Bank was the secret pipeline to bring the Nazi mon­ey back to Amer­i­ca from Hol­land. The Bush­es had to have known how the secret mon­ey cir­cuit worked because they were on the board of direc­tors in both direc­tions: Brown Broth­ers out, Union Bank in. . . .”

Fur­ther solid­i­fy­ing the con­ti­nu­ity between the Third Reich, the Gehlen Org and the GOP, we note that, while it was the BND (the intel­li­gence ser­vice of the Fed­er­al Repub­lic) the “Org” was financ­ing the East­ern Euro­pean fas­cist groups that were part of the Eth­nic Her­itage Out­reach Coun­cil.

Flesh­ing out infor­ma­tion about the BND financ­ing of groups linked to the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations, we present sup­ple­men­tal infor­ma­tion from an unpub­lished man­u­script. The author is well-known to vet­er­an researchers, but will remain anony­mous, since the work was nev­er for­mal­ly com­plet­ed or pub­lished.

Pro­vid­ing back­ground to dis­cus­sion of the rela­tion­ship between the milieu of Resorts Inter­na­tion­al, Nixon, his bank­ing asso­ciate Bebe Rebo­zo and William Casey, we note that Rebo­zo’s bank­ing of funds from the dead­ly Bor­mann net­work, the insti­tu­tion that Mr. Emory feels will prove to be the deci­sive ele­ment on this earth.

Con­tin­u­ing with dis­cus­sion from the unpub­lished man­u­script ref­er­enced above, the broad­cast high­lights inter­ac­tions between the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion, Bebe Rebo­zo, a mys­te­ri­ous and alleged­ly orga­nized-crime con­nect­ed com­pa­ny called Resorts Inter­na­tion­al, an even more mys­te­ri­ous sub­sidiary of Resorts Inter­na­tion­al called the Par­adise Island Bridge Com­pa­ny and the Dewey, Dulles, Nazi, William Casey milieu that is cen­tral to this dis­cus­sion.

Note that Don­ald Trump was a suit­or for the own­er­ship of Resorts Inter­na­tion­al (after the 1986 death of James Cros­by), ulti­mate­ly pur­chas­ing the Taj Mahal Casi­no from the firm after a law­suit with tele­vi­sion star Merv Grif­fin.

FTR #1147 & FTR #1148 The Space Plane and Covid-19: The Paperclip Legacy, Parts 2 and 3

Record­ed as the 2020 GOP con­ven­tion was in full swing against the back­ground of esca­lat­ing vio­lence in the streets of Amer­i­can cities, these pro­grams set forth his­to­ry fun­da­men­tal to the devel­op­ment of the mod­ern GOP and Nazi/SS ele­ments that were incor­po­rat­ed into the foun­da­tion of the U.S. intel­li­gence sys­tem at the end of World War II. Those ele­ments, in turn, are inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the GOP.

Before that dis­cus­sion, how­ev­er, the pro­gram high­lights yet anoth­er ele­ment in the Wall Street/Third Reich/Swiss polit­i­cal and cor­po­rate maneu­ver­ing that set the stage for post­war Transat­lantic fas­cism.

Once again, Allen Dulles and his con­nec­tions are front and cen­ter. With Bernie Sanders and AOC gar­ner­ing rhetor­i­cal grav­i­tas from the so-called pro­gres­sive sec­tor, there has been dis­cus­sion of for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Hen­ry Wal­lace and his high­ly pro­gres­sive polit­i­cal agen­da. The nature of the dis­cus­sion has cen­tered on Wal­lace’s polit­i­cal defen­es­tra­tion by what has been termed “the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty’s Estab­lish­ment.”

In fact, Wal­lace’s polit­i­cal demise was due to his own indis­cre­tion. His broth­er-in-law was Charles Brug­gmann, the Swiss ambas­sador to the Unit­ed States. With the mas­sive invest­ment in the Swiss econ­o­my by Third Reich finance and indus­try and with key hold­ing com­pa­nies in Switzer­land dom­i­nat­ing sig­nif­i­cant ele­ments of the Ger­man-Amer­i­can cor­po­rate rela­tion­ship, Brug­gmann had a vest­ed inter­est in keep­ing Nazi Ger­many abreast of U.S. plans and did so through the Abwehr and Allen Dulles.

” . . . . Both orga­ni­za­tions received a mass of high-val­ue intel­li­gence via the Swiss ambas­sador to Wash­ing­ton, Dr. Charles Brug­gmann. Yet Brug­gmann was no spy: his source was his broth­er-in-law, Hen­ry Wallace—who hap­pened to be the Vice Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. Wal­lace was a pop­u­lar, left-wing New Deal­er; privy to many of America’s most impor­tant secrets, he was also noto­ri­ous­ly indis­creet. . . .”

Allen Dulles

In addi­tion to com­mu­ni­cat­ing the Trea­sury Depart­men­t’s plans to de-indus­tri­al­ize Ger­many to pre­vent future wars, the Bruggmann/Abwehr/Dulles axis was instru­men­tal in betray­ing Oper­a­tion Safe­haven, the plan to inter­dict the Nazi flight cap­i­tal pro­gram that crys­tal­lized as the Bor­mann flight cap­i­tal pro­gram.

” . . . . How­ev­er this effort required the coop­er­a­tion of OSS agents already on the ground, and in Switzer­land this was problematical—since one of the sus­pects of Oper­a­tion Safe­haven was Allen Dulles him­self, because of his exten­sive cor­po­rate con­nec­tions and his links with var­i­ous Nazi groups. Despite this dif­fi­cul­ty, the inves­ti­ga­tion nec­es­sar­i­ly focused on the gold deal­ings under­tak­en by Swiss banks. This became of major con­cern to Swiss ambas­sador Brug­gmann once he learned of Oper­a­tion Safe­haven trough his indis­creet broth­er-in-law, Vice Pres­i­dent Hen­ry Wal­lace. The expo­sure of the explic­it links between Swiss banks and Nazi Ger­many would be a major poten­tial embar­rass­ment to the Swiss gov­ern­ment once the war over; accord­ing­ly the Swiss Secret Ser­vice alert­ed Allen Dulles about the Safe­haven inves­ti­ga­tion into his affairs. . . .”

The rest of FTR #1147 and all of FTR #1148 access­es a very impor­tant arti­cle by the bril­liant Peter Dale Scott, writ­ten almost 35 years ago. With the GOP con­ven­tion in full swing as these pro­grams were being record­ed, the sym­bio­sis between Allen Dulles and the Nazi SS is fun­da­men­tal to under­stand­ing not only the gen­e­sis of the U.S. intel­li­gence estab­lish­ment, but how that insti­tu­tion is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the Repub­li­can Par­ty.

The link to this arti­cle per­mits the listener/reader to down­load (for free) the entire issue of Covert Action Quar­ter­ly. Mr. Emory strong­ly rec­om­mends that they do so, as the oth­er arti­cles in this excel­lent issue will sup­ple­ment the analy­sis beau­ti­ful­ly.

Due to the length and com­plex­i­ty of this arti­cle, we are not tran­scrib­ing it, but will sum­ma­rize impor­tant points of infor­ma­tion.

Key Points of Analy­sis:

1.–Joseph Men­gele, the SS “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz infamy, was net­worked with oth­er SS war crim­i­nals who grav­i­tat­ed seam­less­ly into the ser­vice of the Gehlen “Org” and the CIA. His where­abouts were known to U.S. intel­li­gence, who masked them from Nurem­berg pros­e­cu­tors. Back­ground on Men­gele, his oper­a­tional links with the Kaiser Wil­helm Insti­tute and his posi­tion in the eugen­ics milieu, see, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR #‘s 664 and 908.  ” . . . . the response of Telford Tay­lor, U.S. Chief of Coun­sel for War Crimes at Nurem­berg was “to advise our records show Dr. Menger­le [sic] is dead as of Octo­ber 1946.” (At the time of Gen­er­al Tay­lor’s let­ter, U.S. Army Coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence knew both of Men­gele’s sur­vival and even his loca­tion, in the small Bavar­i­an vil­lage of Aut­en­reid.) . . . .”
2.–One of the net­works with which Men­gele oper­at­ed was the Estrel­la firm. ” . . . . Alfons Sassen, the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Broth­er­hood [Kam­er­aden­werk] Busi­ness enter­prise known as “Estrel­la.” It is said too that Sassen is financed by Dr. Josef Men­gele, who con­trols now such funds as remain liq­uid from the sale of Euro­pean loot. . . . [Klaus Bar­bie] set up a com­pa­ny called Estrel­la, osten­si­bly deal­ing in quin­quina bark. Although no records exist in the pub­lic reg­istry in La Paz, at least one Boli­vian arms deal­er still remem­bers it as a weapons trad­ing com­pa­ny. . . .”
3.–Mengele may have been incor­po­rat­ed into the U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare pro­gram, although me main­tained res­i­dence in Latin Amer­i­ca. ” . . . . Could Mengele–not even a polit­i­cal police­man (like Rauff and Bar­bie), but a doc­tor with a pen­chant for lethal exper­i­ments on human guinea pigs–could even Men­gele have been saved s a result of a secret deal between Dulles and the SS? . . . . we have since been told that his col­league in the Auschwitz human exper­i­ments, Wal­ter Schreiber, was shield­ed by the Amer­i­cans from a Pol­ish con­vic­tion in absen­tia, so that he could help guide the post­war research­es of the U.S. Air Force in bac­te­ri­o­log­i­cal war­fare. . . That Men­gele’s escape and immu­ni­ty were arranged by the Unit­ed States, like those of Schreiber and so many oth­ers, will seem more prob­a­ble once we have stud­ied the incred­i­ble post­war careers of [Klaus] Bar­bie, [Friedrich] Schwend and [Wal­ter] Rauff . . . .”
4.–Allen Dulles’s suc­cess­ful nego­ti­a­tions with the SS were fun­da­men­tal to his goal of estab­lish­ing the post­war CIA as a vehi­cle for the per­pet­u­a­tion of the SS under CIA/Gehlen aus­pices: ” . . . . But they [Allen Dulles and OSS chief William Dono­van] also knew that, just as the OSS was the best hope for the sur­vival of the SS cadres, so in a sense these cadres were their high­est trump card in the impend­ing con­test for the OSS’s own insti­tu­tion­al home for the post­war Gehlen Org. In 1948 Dulles, by now a civil­ian, helped write the memo per­suad­ing Tru­man to take on the Gehlen Org, on Gehlen’s own terms. . . .”
5.–Dulles’s nego­ti­a­tions with the SS pre­ced­ed by months the offi­cial sto­ry of the con­tact between U.S. intel­li­gence and the Gehlen team.
6.–Dulles’s nego­ti­a­tions with the SS, involv­ing Wal­ter Rauff–who devised the mobile gas cham­bers used on the East­ern Front–were con­duct­ed as part of Oper­a­tion Sun­rise. ” . . . . Despite the [U.S.] Army inter­roga­tor’s pleas that Rauff ‘is con­sid­ered a men­ace if ever set free, and fail­ing actu­al elim­i­na­tion, is rec­om­mend­ed for life-long intern­ment,’ Dulles kept his bar­gain and Rauff was released. Accord­ing to usu­al­ly reli­able intel­li­gence sources. Dulles then employed Rauff on anti-com­mu­nist oper­a­tions in Italy, which was Rauf­f’s spe­cial­ty under the Nazis. . . .”
7.–Although the Vat­i­can was deeply involved with the SS/OSS nego­ti­a­tions, Dulles’ team was the pri­ma­ry com­po­nent. ” . . . It was Dulles’s con­tacts, not the Vat­i­can, who han­dled the smug­gling of Nazis. Accord­ing to top secret State Depart­ment doc­u­ments, the Ital­ian police pro­vid­ed the false pass­ports for allied agents; the visas came from the Argen­tine con­sulate in the allied intel­li­gence unit based at Trieste;and the embarka­tion paper­work was han­dled by a U.S. State Depart­ment offi­cer in Genoa. Genoa, inci­den­tal­ly was Rauf­f’s area of juris­dic­tion. All of them worked for Dulles. . . .”

FTR 1146 The Space Plane and Covid-19: The Paperclip Legacy, Part 1

This series of pro­grams should be digest­ed against the back­ground of a very impor­tant devel­op­ment that has not gen­er­at­ed much dia­logue or atten­tion. A new branch of the mil­i­tary has been created–the Space Force, join­ing the Army, Navy and Air Force (the Marines are tech­ni­cal­ly part of the Navy.)

As peo­ple lis­ten to the dis­cus­sion of the space plane, this should be borne in mind.

The pro­gram begins on an inter­roga­to­ry note. In numer­ous pro­grams, we have cov­ered Project HAARP–a  mil­i­tary envi­ron­men­tal mod­i­fi­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy. HAARP came online a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry ago, and should be con­sid­ered in the con­text of a treaty that was con­clud­ed between the U.S. and the for­mer Sovi­et Union in the 1970s that explic­it­ly banned envi­ron­men­tal mod­i­fi­ca­tion for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es.

(Pro­grams fea­tur­ing infor­ma­tion about HAARP include five inter­views with Nick Begich: FTR #‘s 1, 30, 79, 101, 128.)

Mr. Emory had been expect­ing envi­ron­men­tal mod­i­fi­ca­tion war­fare to be employed as part of the full-court press against Chi­na. That coun­try has been beset by enor­mous flood­ing, that some crit­ics see as desta­bi­liz­ing that coun­try’s pol­i­tics. ” . . . . ‘I believe that the Chi­nese pub­lic will ques­tion Bei­jing from this year’s con­tin­u­ous nat­ur­al and man-made dis­as­ters, and even ques­tion China’s gov­er­nance mod­el and its effec­tive­ness,’ said Wu Qiang, an inde­pen­dent polit­i­cal ana­lyst in Bei­jing. . . . Of course, microwaves from space could also, poten­tial­ly, be a weapon. . . . ”

A top secret mil­i­tary project has been under­way for years–a space plane that can stay aloft for long peri­ods of time. This devel­op­ment should be seen against the back­ground of Don­ald Trump’s new Space Force–a nov­el branch of the mil­i­tary.

It should also be seen against the back­ground of envi­ron­men­tal war­fare: HAARP came online 25 years ago and the U.S/U.S.S.R treaty was con­clud­ed more than forty years ago.

Just con­sid­er the advances in mil­i­tary aviation–the Wright broth­ers flew in 1903. Just look at how far mil­i­tary avi­a­tion had advanced by 1928 and, sub­se­quent­ly 1948. It is rea­son­able to assume that envi­ron­men­tal war­fare tech­nol­o­gy has advanced cor­re­spond­ing­ly.

The space plane is involved with tech­no­log­i­cal advances devel­oped by William Brown of Raytheon and Wern­her von Braun, the SS offi­cer and war crim­i­nal who head­ed the Amer­i­can space pro­gram. ” . . . . In the 1960s, Brown went on to work with NASA’s Wern­her von Braun on con­vert­ing microwave beams into elec­tri­cal cur­rent. The con­cept had par­tic­u­lar rel­e­vance for pow­er­ing future space­craft — but also promised a way to har­ness the pow­er of sun­light, up to 10 times more potent above the atmos­phere and its dust, for use on earth. . . Of course, microwaves from space could also, poten­tial­ly, be a weapon. . . . the U.S. Air Force revealed some of the satel­lite pay­loads and exper­i­ments it will car­ry aloft this month [May of 2020], includ­ing one that will try con­vert­ing the sun’s ener­gy into a form that can be sent to Earth . [Such as light­ning strikes?–D.E.] . . .”

Mr. Emory notes that, in ear­ly 2020, the space plane con­clud­ed a long, clas­si­fied mis­sion of more than a year in dura­tion. Short­ly after, North­ern Cal­i­for­nia expe­ri­enced the first Feb­ru­ary on record with no rain­fall at all–and this after what had been a nor­mal rainy sea­son.

After North­ern Cal­i­for­nia was bom­bard­ed with light­ning strikes, the Bay Area was enveloped with record wild­fires, expe­ri­enc­ing some of the worst air qual­i­ty in the world. This prompt­ed sev­er­al points of inquiry:

1.–Might the total absence of rain­fall in Feb­ru­ary and, per­haps, the high­ly unusu­al num­ber of light­ning strikes be linked to the space plane and advances in envi­ron­men­tal war­fare?
2.–With Covid-19’s effects exac­er­bat­ed by dirty air, might this be a har­bin­ger of a dra­mat­ic wors­en­ing of the Pan­dem­ic in the fall?
3.–Might the space plane and advances in envi­ron­men­tal war­fare be involved in Chi­na’s record flood­ing?
4.–The space plane’s mis­sions are opaque: ” . . . . [Secure World Foun­da­tion’s Bri­an] Weeden’s main con­cerns about the X‑37B are that it puts stuff in space and doesn’t tell any­one. ‘On the pre­vi­ous mis­sion they deployed three small satel­lites from the X‑37B and did­n’t even cat­a­log them until after it had land­ed and those satel­lites had decayed from orbit,’ he said. ‘That’s the sort of non-trans­par­ent and poten­tial­ly irre­spon­si­ble behav­ior the U.S. has crit­i­cized the Rus­sians and Chi­nese for in the past.’ . . .”

Mr. Emory’s mus­ings should also be con­sid­ered in the con­text of the the­sis set forth in L‑2.

Much of the pro­gram details the incor­po­ra­tion of the Nazi rock­et pro­gram’s mil­i­tary commander–Walter Dornberger–and SS Major Wern­her von Braun into the U.S. V‑2 pro­gram Project Her­mes (con­tract­ed for by Gen­er­al Elec­tric in Novem­ber of 1944.)

Dorn­berg­er and von Braun were in touch with G.E. in Decem­ber of 1944, months before the sur­ren­der of Nazi Ger­many! They sub­se­quent­ly went to work for G.E. and Project Her­mes!

Key points of analy­sis and dis­cus­sion include:

1.–The over­whelm­ing prob­a­bil­i­ty that the G.E./Dornberger/von Braun liai­son was arranged on the Ger­man end by SS Gen­er­al Hans Kamm­ler, who had over­all super­vi­so­ry con­trol of the Nazi rock­et pro­gram.
2.–The prob­a­bil­i­ty that the arrange­ments were facil­i­tat­ed in Lis­bon by Sigis­mund von Braun–the broth­er of Wern­her von Braun and an agent for the SD. The Sichere­its­di­enst (SD) was the SS intel­li­gence ser­vice.
3.–The prob­a­bil­i­ty that Sigis­mund von Braun’s Lis­bon sojourn and arrange­ment for the G.E./Dornberger/von Braun liai­son was also facil­i­tat­ed by Ernst von Weisza­ck­er, Nazi Ger­many’s ambas­sador to the Vat­i­can.

Sub­se­quent pro­grams in this series will cen­ter on OSS agent and Sul­li­van & Cromwell attor­ney Allen Dulles’s trea­so­nous liai­son with the Nazi SS and col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Vat­i­can to incor­po­rate the SS into the The Gehlen “Org” and the CIA.

In all prob­a­bil­i­ty, it was Allen Dulles who estab­lished con­tact with Kammler/Dornber and the von Braun broth­ers, also with prob­a­ble Vat­i­can com­plic­i­ty.

In FTR #511, we not­ed that AEG–German Gen­er­al Elec­tric (which made elec­tri­cal com­po­nents for the V‑2)–was 30% owned by Amer­i­can G.E. Gen­er­al Elec­tric was not only a client of Sul­li­van & Cromwell, but was formed by it.

Pro­gram High­lights Include:

1.–Review of Sul­li­van & Cromwell’s deci­sive posi­tion in the Amer­i­can cor­po­rate pan­theon.
2.–Review of Wern­her von Braun’s work for the SS and the fact that he was a war crim­i­nal.
3.–Review of Allen Dulles’s trea­so­nous deal­ings with Prince Max Egon von Hohenlohe–an emis­sary of SD for­eign intel­li­gence chief Wal­ter Schel­len­berg.

FTR #1142 Deep Politics and the Death of Park Won-Soon, Part 3

Flesh­ing out the deep pol­i­tics under­ly­ing the life and death of Park Won-soon, this pro­gram builds on the foun­da­tion of first two pro­grams in the series. Park Won-soon’s crit­i­cism of Japan’s colo­nial occu­pa­tion of Korea, his advo­ca­cy of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion between the two Kore­as and his suit against the lead­er­ship of the fas­cist Shin­cheon­ji mind con­trol cult (over­lapped with the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church), all bear on the polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic dynam­ics of the Sec­ond World War, the Cold War, the Kore­an War, and the car­tel arrange­ments that con­sti­tute a crit­i­cal, though large­ly invis­i­ble, under­pin­ning of the events of the Twen­ti­eth and Twen­ty-First cen­turies.

Essen­tial to an under­stand­ing of these over­lap­ping events is the land­mark text Gold War­riors by Peg­gy and Ster­ling Sea­grave. (FTR #‘s 427, 428, 446, 451, 501, 688, 689, 1106, 1107 & 1108 deal with the sub­ject mate­r­i­al of that con­sum­mate­ly impor­tant book.)

Indeed, one can­not prop­er­ly ana­lyze the par­ti­tion of Korea after World War II, the Kore­an War and the Cold War as sep­a­rate events. They are inter­con­nect­ed and, in turn, are out­growths of the com­plex pol­i­tics of the Sec­ond World War and the actions and atti­tudes of Chi­ang Kai-shek’s nar­co-fas­cist dic­ta­tor­ship.

Although nom­i­nal­ly a mem­ber of the Allied nations, Chi­ang’s Kuom­intang gov­ern­ment was pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned with fend­ing off Mao Tse-Tung’s com­mu­nist armies and worked with the invad­ing Japan­ese in crit­i­cal areas. In par­tic­u­lar, the Kuom­intang’s pro­found involve­ment with the nar­cotics trade helped dri­ve its trad­ing with the Japan­ese.

The pro­gram begins with the obit­u­ary of gen­er­al Paik Sun-yup of Korea, whose ser­vice in the Impe­r­i­al Japan­ese Army dur­ing World War II has been a focal point of con­tro­ver­sy in South Korea. Gen­er­al Sun-yup embod­ied the ongo­ing con­tro­ver­sy in Korea over Japan’s occu­pa­tion and the sub­se­quent unfold­ing of events lead­ing up to, and includ­ing the Kore­an War.

Again, the Japan­ese occu­pa­tion of Korea was a major focal point of Park Won-soon’s crit­i­cism. “. . . . In 1941, he joined the army of Manchukuo, a pup­pet state that impe­r­i­al Japan had estab­lished in Manchuria, and served in a unit known for hunt­ing down Kore­an guer­ril­las fight­ing for inde­pen­dence . . .”

A lit­tle known fac­tor in the devel­op­ment of the Kore­an par­ti­tion and Cold War pol­i­tics in Asia was the involve­ment of Chi­ang Kai-shek, his wife (the for­mer Mei-Ling Soong, sis­ter of Chi­ang’s finance min­is­ter T.V. Soong–the wealth­i­est man in the world at the time) and advis­ers in the Cairo Con­fer­ence of 1943 and the sub­se­quent Tehran Con­fer­ence with Stal­in and Churchill.

Accord­ing to Colonel L. Fletch­er Prouty, who flew the Kuom­intang inter­ests to Tehran from Cairo, Chi­ang and com­pa­ny were a dri­ving force in set­ting the stage for war in Korea and Indochi­na.

While in Oki­nawa dur­ing Japan’s sur­ren­der in World War II, Colonel Prouty was wit­ness to the ear­ly com­mit­ment of deci­sive mil­i­tary resources to the wars that were to take place in Korea and Indochina/Vietnam. ” . . . . I was on Oki­nawa at that time, and dur­ing some busi­ness in the har­bor area I asked the har­bor­mas­ter if all that new mate­r­i­al was being returned to the States. His response was direct and sur­pris­ing: ‘Hell, no! They ain’t nev­er goin’ to see it again. One-half of this stuff, enough to equip and sup­ply at least a hun­dred and fifty thou­sand men, is going to Korea, and the oth­er half is going to Indochi­na.’ In 1945, none of us had any idea that the first bat­tles of the Cold War were going to be fought by U.S. mil­i­tary units in those two regions begin­ning in 1950 and 1965–yet that is pre­cise­ly what had been planned, and it is pre­cise­ly what hap­pened. Who made that deci­sion back in 1943–45? . . . .”

To appre­ci­ate Chi­ang’s influ­ence in the Cairo and Tehran con­fer­ences, it is impor­tant to under­stand that he was “work­ing both sides of the street” in World War II.

Amer­i­can mil­i­tary sup­plies flown over the Hump and/or sent along the Bur­ma Road at great risk and cost to Allied ser­vice­men found their way into the hands of the Japan­ese, cour­tesy of KMT gen­er­al Ku Chu-tung and his orga­nized crime broth­er.

Gen­er­al Ku Chu-Tung com­mand­ed a dev­as­tat­ing oper­a­tion against the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist New Fourth Army, illus­trat­ing why the Sea­graves called him “one of the most hat­ed men in Chi­na.”

Although obscured by the sands of time and pro­pa­gan­dized his­to­ry, Ku-Chu Tung’s actions illus­trate why Gen­er­al Joseph Stil­well held Chi­ang Kai-Shek in con­tempt. Still­well not only (cor­rect­ly) viewed Chi­ang Kai-Shek as a fas­cist, but (cor­rect­ly) saw him as an imped­i­ment to opti­miz­ing Chi­nese resis­tance to the hat­ed Japan­ese invaders.

Col­lab­o­rat­ing with Kodama Yoshio, the Japan­ese crime boss and Admi­ral of the Impe­r­i­al Japan­ese Navy, the Ku broth­ers swapped U.S. lend lease sup­plies for drugs.

It is impor­tant to note the role of the Black Drag­on Soci­ety in the ascent of Kodama Yoshio. Black Drag­on, along with Black Ocean, are key Japan­ese ultra-nation­al­ist soci­eties and the appar­ent fore­run­ners of the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church and, pos­si­bly the over­lap­ping Shin­cheon­ji cult that was sued by Park Won-soon.

Kodama played a key role in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church, as dis­cussed in FTR #‘s 291  and 970.

Acquir­ing key strate­gic raw mate­ri­als for the Impe­r­i­al Japan­ese Naval Air Force, Kodama bought many of these direct­ly from the chief of Kuom­intang secret ser­vice, Gen­er­al Tai Li, who was paid direct­ly in hero­in.

Before turn­ing to the sub­ject of the Kore­an War and its deci­sive influ­ence on the dis­po­si­tion of glob­al wealth and the resus­ci­ta­tion of the glob­al car­tel sys­tem, we recount the assas­si­na­tion of Kim Koo, an impor­tant Kore­an patri­ot, whose advo­ca­cy of reuni­fi­ca­tion for Korea placed him in the crosshairs of Amer­i­can Cold War strate­gists. (Park Won-soon was called a “com­mie” for advo­cat­ing rec­on­cil­i­a­tion between the Kore­as.) ” . . . . In June 1949, Gen­er­al Kim Chang-Yong, Rhee’s close advi­sor and Chief of Korea’s Counter-Intel­li­gence Corps (CIC)—founded by and pat­terned after the CIA—conspired with Amer­i­can intel­li­gence offi­cers and a young lieu­tenant to assas­si­nate Kim Koo. On June 26, 1949, while the sev­en­ty-three-year-old Kim was rest­ing in his sec­ond-floor bed­room, Lieu­tenant Ahn Do hi walked past three police­men stand­ing guard out­side, entered the house, pro­ceed­ed to Kim’s bed­room, and shot him to death. . . .”

On the eve of the out­break of the Kore­an War, John Fos­ter Dulles was in Seoul with Kodama Yoshio. It is not known just what they were doing, but Fos­ter direct­ly fore­shad­owed the impend­ing (and alleged­ly unan­tic­i­pat­ed) North Kore­an inva­sion in a speech just before the com­mence­ment of hos­til­i­ties.

Kodama recruit­ed thou­sands of yakuza sol­diers and Japan­ese World War II vet­er­ans to fight for South Korea, dressed in Kore­an uni­forms.

Next, we high­light the 1951 “Peace” Treaty between the Allies and Japan, an agree­ment which false­ly main­tained that Japan had not stolen any wealth from the nations it occu­pied dur­ing World War II and that the (already) boom­ing nation was bank­rupt and would not be able to pay repa­ra­tions to the slave labor­ers and “com­fort women” it had pressed into ser­vice dur­ing the con­flict.

Japan was not bank­rupt at all when John Fos­ter Dulles nego­ti­at­ed the Treaty. U.S. bomb­ing left crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture intact, and the infu­sion of war loot helped boost the 1951 Japan­ese econ­o­my above its pre-World War II peak.

Fos­ter Dulles’s role in the 1951 Peace Treaty with Japan, his curi­ous pres­ence in Seoul with Kodama Yoshio on the eve of the out­break of the Kore­an War, his pre­scient fore­shad­ow­ing of the con­flict just before the North Kore­an inva­sion and the role of these events in shap­ing the post World War II glob­al eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal land­scapes may well have been designed to help jump­start the Japan­ese and Ger­man economies.

The Kore­an War did just that. ” . . . . A sub­stan­tial infu­sion of mon­ey into this new Fed­er­al Repub­lic econ­o­my result­ed from the Kore­an War in 1950. The Unit­ed States was not geared to sup­ply­ing all its needs for armies in Korea, so the Pen­ta­gon placed huge orders in West Ger­many and in Japan; from that point on, both nations winged into an era of boom­ing good times. . . .”

Indeed, John Fos­ter Dulles’s world view enun­ci­at­ed a phi­los­o­phy alto­geth­er con­sis­tent with those aims: ” . . . . He churned out mag­a­zine and news­pa­per arti­cles assert­ing that the ‘dynam­ic’ coun­tries of the world–Germany, Italy, and Japan–‘feel with­in them­selves poten­tial­i­ties which are sup­pressed’ . . .”

Those economies, the car­tels that dom­i­nat­ed them and the Dulles broth­ers Cold War strate­gic out­look are dom­i­nant fac­tors in the deep pol­i­tics under­ly­ing the life, and death, of Park Won-soon.

FTR #1139 The Anthrax Attacks, the Invasion of Iraq and Expansion of Biological Warfare Capabilities

As the title indi­cates, this pro­gram presents polit­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal foun­da­tion for the expo­nen­tial expan­sion of Amer­i­can bio­log­i­cal war­fare infra­struc­ture fol­low­ing the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Impor­tant back­ground infor­ma­tion comes from the Whit­ney Webb arti­cle about DARPA spend­ing on bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es.

The Broad­cast­ing Board of Governors–a CIA “derivative”–and The Wash­ing­ton Times (owned by the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church) helped devel­op dis­in­for­ma­tion about SARS CoV‑2 com­ing from a Chi­nese Bio­log­i­cal War­fare lab. Both were instru­men­tal in hyp­ing the anthrax attacks as authored by Sad­dam Hus­sein, as well. The Wash­ing­ton Times also pre­sent­ed infor­ma­tion float­ed by Steven Hat­fill that fore­shad­owed sub­se­quent charges that Sad­dam Hus­sein was devel­op­ing bioweapons and was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks.

In addi­tion, the Project For a New Amer­i­can Cen­tu­ry was advanc­ing an agen­da in which genet­i­cal­ly-engi­neered bio­log­i­cal war­fare tech­nol­o­gy as essen­tial to con­tin­ued Amer­i­can glob­al dom­i­nance.

As will be seen below, a key func­tionary in the PNAC milieu was for­mer Sec­re­tary of Defense Don­ald Rums­feld, for­mer chair­man of the board of Gilead Sci­ences.

In FTR #‘s 1135, 1136 and 1137, we relied heav­i­ly on the Kris New­by’s Bit­ten: The Secret His­to­ry of Lyme Dis­ease and Bio­log­i­cal Weapons. In that book, Ms. New­by net­worked with a group of expe­ri­enced, Cold War bio­log­i­cal war­fare pro­fes­sion­als whom she termed “the Brain Trust.” They were con­vinced that Fort Det­rick sci­en­tist Bruce Ivins–the “lone nut” who con­ve­nient­ly com­mit­ted sui­cide and was fin­gered as the sole per­pe­tra­tor of the 2001 anthrax attacks–was framed. ” . . . . Among oth­er sub­jects, they dis­cussed  . . . tech­ni­cal details on why they believed that their col­league Bruce Ivins had been framed as the anthrax mail­er . . . .”

Much of the pro­gram cen­ters on the 2001 attacks and the sus­pi­cion that focused on Steven Hat­fill as a pos­si­ble per­pe­tra­tor of them. Although exon­er­at­ed in the attacks, Hat­fill was the focal point of con­sid­er­able sus­pi­cion in con­nec­tion with the event. Our sus­pi­cion is that he is an oper­a­tive of one or anoth­er intel­li­gence agency, CIA being the most prob­a­ble.

We sus­pect that the anthrax attacks were a provo­ca­tion aimed at jus­ti­fy­ing the inva­sion of Iraq and spurring devel­op­ment of the U.S. bio­log­i­cal war­fare capa­bil­i­ty.

Of par­tic­u­lar note is the appar­ent “oper­a­tional Teflon” worn by Hat­fill. Although cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence point­ed in his direc­tion, he appeared to be alto­geth­er “off lim­its” to inves­tiga­tive ele­ments of Alpha­bet Soup. Don Fos­ter not­ed the unusu­al treat­ment accord­ed to Hat­fill by the pow­ers that be.

Of sig­nif­i­cance, as well, are the numer­ous exam­ples of fore­shad­ow­ing of the foren­sic cir­cum­stances of the anthrax attacks, as well as oth­er “false alarm” inci­dents that occurred before and after the fatal attacks. It requires lit­tle to see state­ments and arti­cles by nota­bles such as Bill Patrick and the seem­ing­ly ubiq­ui­tous Steven Hat­fill as lay­ing a foun­da­tion of cred­i­bil­i­ty for sub­se­quent events.

Note that the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health have also part­nered with CIA and the Pen­ta­gon, as under­scored by an arti­cle about a BSL‑4 lab at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty.

1.–As the arti­cle notes, as of 2007, the U.S. had “more than a dozen” BSL4 labs–China com­mis­sioned its first as of 2017. a ten­fold increase in fund­ing for BSL4 labs occurred because of the anthrax attacks of 2001. Those attacks might be seen as some­thing of a provo­ca­tion, spurring a dra­mat­ic increase in “dual use” biowar­fare research, under the cov­er of “legit­i­mate” medical/scientific research. In FTR #1128, we hypoth­e­sized about the milieu of Steven Hat­fill and apartheid-linked inter­ests as pos­si­ble authors of a vec­tor­ing of New York City with Sars COV2: ” . . . . Before the anthrax mail­ings of 2001, the Unit­ed States had just two BSL4 labs—both with­in the razor-wire con­fines of gov­ern­ment-owned cam­pus­es. Now, thanks to a ten­fold increase in funding—from $200 mil­lion in 2001 to $2 bil­lion in 2006—more than a dozen such facil­i­ties can be found at uni­ver­si­ties and pri­vate com­pa­nies across the coun­try. . . .”
2.–The Boston Uni­ver­si­ty lab exem­pli­fies the Pen­ta­gon and CIA pres­ence in BSL‑4 facil­i­ty “dual use”: ” . . . . But some sci­en­tists say that argu­ment obscures the true pur­pose of the cur­rent biode­fense boom: to study poten­tial bio­log­i­cal weapons. ‘The uni­ver­si­ty por­trays it as an emerg­ing infec­tious dis­ease lab,’ says David Ozonoff, a Boston Uni­ver­si­ty epi­demi­ol­o­gist whose office is right across the street from the new BSL4 facil­i­ty. ‘But they are talk­ing about study­ing things like small pox and inhala­tion anthrax, which pose no pub­lic health threat oth­er than as bioweapons.’ . . . The orig­i­nal NIH man­date for the lab indi­cat­ed that many groups—including the CIA and Depart­ment of Defense—would be allowed to use the lab for their own research, the nature of which BU might have lit­tle con­trol over. . . .”

As not­ed in past pro­grams, Gilead Sci­ences is very well-con­nect­ed pro­fes­sion­al­ly, with for­mer Sec­re­tary of Defense Don­ald Rums­feld (among oth­er polit­i­cal lumi­nar­ies) serv­ing on its board of direc­tors. Rums­feld was chair­man of the board from 1997 until he left in 2001 to become George W. Bush’s Sec­re­tary of Defense.

Rums­feld was Sec­re­tary of Defense dur­ing the peri­od in which the 2001 anthrax attacks occurred.

Dur­ing the post‑9/11 peri­od of explod­ing gov­ern­ment invest­ments in biode­fense pro­grams, Sec­re­tary of Defense Don­ald Rums­feld was still hold­ing onto mas­sive amounts of Gilead stock, which was increas­ing in val­ue dra­mat­i­cal­ly. What kind of rela­tion­ship did Gilead devel­op with the US biode­fense nation­al secu­ri­ty state dur­ing this peri­od? That seems like a pret­ty impor­tant ques­tion at this point in time.

The U.S. gov­ern­ment was among the cus­tomers whose pur­chas­es drove up the Gilead earn­ings and stock price: ” . . . . What’s more, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is emerg­ing as one of the world’s biggest cus­tomers for Tam­i­flu. In July, the Pen­ta­gon ordered $58 mil­lion worth of the treat­ment for U.S. troops around the world, and Con­gress is con­sid­er­ing a mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar pur­chase. . . .”

Sev­er­al years into his tenure at the Pen­ta­gon, Rums­feld made a killing on the sale of Gilead Sci­ences’ stock, which rose expo­nen­tial­ly in val­ue fol­low­ing its devel­op­ment of Tam­i­flu as a treat­ment for H5N1 avian flu.” . . . . The firm made a loss in 2003, the year before con­cern about bird flu start­ed. Then rev­enues from Tam­i­flu almost quadru­pled, to $44.6m, help­ing put the com­pa­ny well into the black. Sales almost quadru­pled again, to $161.6m last year. Dur­ing this time the share price tre­bled. Mr Rums­feld sold some of his Gilead shares in 2004 reap­ing – accord­ing to the finan­cial dis­clo­sure report he is required to make each year – cap­i­tal gains of more than $5m. The report showed that he still had up to $25m-worth of shares at the end of 2004, and at least one ana­lyst believes his stake has grown well beyond that fig­ure, as the share price has soared. . . .”

Don­ald Rums­feld was a sig­na­to­ry to the 1998 let­ter to Pres­i­dent Clin­ton by the Project for a New Amer­i­can Cen­tu­ry. That let­ter advo­cat­ed a hard­er line against Iraq. ” . . . . Rums­feld has strong ties to the Intel­li­gence Com­mu­ni­ty, as well as to the Atlantic Insti­tute, and is a mem­ber of the Bilder­berg group. He is a finan­cial sup­port­er for the Cen­ter for Secu­ri­ty Pol­i­cy. Rums­feld was one of the sign­ers of the Jan­u­ary 26, 1998, Project for the New Amer­i­can Cen­tu­ry (PNAC) let­ter sent to Pres­i­dent William Jef­fer­son Clin­ton. . . .”

DARPA and the Pen­ta­gon have into the appli­ca­tion of genet­ic engi­neer­ing in order to cre­ate eth­no-spe­cif­ic bio­log­i­cal war­fare weapons, as dis­cussed by the Project for a New Amer­i­can Cen­tu­ry.

In past pro­grams and posts, we have not­ed that DARPA was research­ing  bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es.  One can but won­der to what extent the PNAC doc­trine helped spawn the DARPA research into coro­n­avirus­es and, pos­si­bly, the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic.

FTR #1138 Bio-Psy-Op Apocalypse Now, Part 10: Bad Medicine

Con­tin­u­ing dis­cus­sion about drug treat­ments for, and vac­cines to pre­vent, Covid-19, this pro­gram sets forth infor­ma­tion about the ongo­ing pro­fes­sion­al mas­sag­ing of Gilead Sci­ences’ anti-viral remde­sivir. Only mod­est­ly suc­cess­ful against SARS Cov‑2 (the virus that caus­es Covid-19), remde­sivir has been pro­pelled to the fore­front of treat­ment reg­i­mens for the pan­dem­ic.

Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est are the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the CDC’s clo­sure of the U.S. Army Med­ical Research Insti­tute of Infec­tious Dis­eases. The USAMRIID–located at Ft. Detrick–had host­ed Gilead Sci­ences’ ani­mal tri­als of remde­sivir. Remde­sivir was devel­oped to com­bat Ebo­la, and was a fail­ure in its ini­tial pro­fes­sion­al iter­a­tion.

In March of 2019, rhe­sus macaques were infect­ed with Ebo­la at the USAMRIID as part of a project to allow remde­sivir to be mar­ket­ed as an Ebo­la treat­ment with­out meet­ing the pro­fes­sion­al stan­dards of human test­ing. ” . . . This agree­ment was made pos­si­ble through a 2018 Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Study (NHS) of Ebo­la virus con­duct­ed by USAMRIID in close col­lab­o­ra­tion with Gilead Sci­ences, Inc., the spon­sor of remde­sivir devel­op­ment . . .”

Many of the safe­ty vio­la­tions cit­ed by the CDC in its cri­tique of USAMRIID safe­ty and secu­ri­ty pro­ce­dures con­cerned “non-human pri­mates” infect­ed with one or more “select agents” that were not named. The term “select agent” refers to a pathogen being used in lab­o­ra­to­ry pro­ce­dures. Whether the “select agent” was Ebo­la, and whether the safe­ty laps­es were in con­nec­tion with the remdesivir/rhesus mon­key tri­als was not dis­closed.

” . . . . Sev­er­al of the lab­o­ra­to­ry vio­la­tions the CDC not­ed in 2019 con­cerned ‘non-human pri­mates’ infect­ed with a ‘select agent’, the iden­ti­ty of which is unknown — it was redact­ed in all received doc­u­ments, because dis­clos­ing the iden­ti­ty and loca­tion of the agent would endan­ger pub­lic health or safe­ty, the agency says. In addi­tion to Ebo­la, the lab works with oth­er dead­ly agents like anthrax and small­pox. . . ..”

If, for the sake of argu­ment, SARS-CoV­‑2 research was indeed tak­ing plac­ing there was a very real risk of it escap­ing.

Remde­sivir failed in its human tri­als as a treat­ment for Ebo­la: ” . . . . The antivi­ral drug remde­sivir, made by Gilead, under­per­formed ZMapp. . . .  Remde­sivir and ZMapp have been dropped from the tri­al. . . .”

Fol­low­ing that dis­mal per­for­mance against Ebo­la, Gilead Sci­ences recast remde­sivir as a broad spec­trum antivi­ral, a mar­ket­ing approach that has led to the drug being autho­rized to treat Covid-19.

In that pro­fes­sion­al rein­car­na­tion, it demon­strat­ed alto­geth­er mod­est suc­cess in Covid-19 tri­als that were pro­fes­sion­al­ly crit­i­cized and which were bad­ly skewed from a method­olog­i­cal stand­point. 

After a tight­en­ing of pro­fes­sion­al method­olog­i­cal stan­dards at the USAMRIID, it was dis­closed that most of the insti­tu­tion’s oper­a­tives are pri­vate con­trac­tors! From the stand­point of insti­tu­tion­al secu­ri­ty, the broad use of pri­vate con­trac­tors ren­ders USAMRIID sub­ject to pen­e­tra­tion by any num­ber of poten­tial mis­cre­ants. ” . . . . ‘A major­i­ty of our lab­o­ra­to­ry work­ers are contractors–putting teeth in the con­tracts to ensure they’re fol­low­ing the shalls, wills and musts are things we’ve done in the inter­im,’ said [Brigadier Gen­er­al Mike] Tal­ley. . . .”

As not­ed in past pro­grams, Gilead Sci­ences is very well-con­nect­ed pro­fes­sion­al­ly, with for­mer Sec­re­tary of Defense Don­ald Rums­feld (among oth­er polit­i­cal lumi­nar­ies) serv­ing on its board of direc­tors. Rums­feld was chair­man of the board from 1997 until he left in 2001 to become George W. Bush’s Sec­re­tary of Defense. The fir­m’s stock has been heav­i­ly invest­ed in by hedge funds, includ­ing Robert Mer­cer’s Renais­sance Tech­nolo­gies. Gilead Sci­ences’ stock has been a major dri­ver of the stock mar­ket’s per­for­mance.

Sev­er­al years into his tenure at the Pen­ta­gon, Rums­feld made a killing on the sale of Gilead Sci­ences’ stock, which rose expo­nen­tial­ly in val­ue fol­low­ing its devel­op­ment of Tam­i­flu as a treat­ment for H5N1 avian flu. ” . . . . The firm made a loss in 2003, the year before con­cern about bird flu start­ed. Then rev­enues from Tam­i­flu almost quadru­pled, to $44.6m, help­ing put the com­pa­ny well into the black. Sales almost quadru­pled again, to $161.6m last year. Dur­ing this time the share price tre­bled. Mr Rums­feld sold some of his Gilead shares in 2004 reap­ing – accord­ing to the finan­cial dis­clo­sure report he is required to make each year – cap­i­tal gains of more than $5m. The report showed that he still had up to $25m-worth of shares at the end of 2004, and at least one ana­lyst believes his stake has grown well beyond that fig­ure, as the share price has soared. . . .”

The U.S. gov­ern­ment was among the cus­tomers whose pur­chas­es drove up the Gilead earn­ings and stock price: ” . . . . What’s more, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is emerg­ing as one of the world’s biggest cus­tomers for Tam­i­flu. In July, the Pen­ta­gon ordered $58 mil­lion worth of the treat­ment for U.S. troops around the world, and Con­gress is con­sid­er­ing a mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar pur­chase. . . .”

(Recall that the H5N1 virus is one of the gain-of-func­tion exper­i­ments that was sus­pend­ed in 2014 and then green­light­ed by the Trump admin­is­tra­tion in 2017. Those exper­i­ments engi­neered the virus to infect fer­rets, a maneu­ver that made the virus com­mu­ni­ca­ble by upper res­pi­ra­to­ry activ­i­ty. One can but won­der if those G‑O-F exper­i­ments were con­nect­ed to the recast­ing of remde­sivir as a broad spec­trum antivi­ral.)

Dur­ing the post‑9/11 peri­od of explod­ing gov­ern­ment invest­ments in biode­fense pro­grams, Rums­feld was still hold­ing onto mas­sive amounts of Gilead­’s stock, which was rapid­ly increas­ing in val­ue. What kind of rela­tion­ship did Gilead devel­op with the US biode­fense nation­al secu­ri­ty state dur­ing this peri­od? That seems like an  impor­tant ques­tion at this point in time. 

In FTR #1136, we not­ed that the med­ical and sci­en­tif­ic inter­ests in charge of Lyme Dis­ease treat­ment and diag­no­sis were not only finan­cial ben­e­fi­cia­ries of the ther­a­peu­tic sta­tus quo, but were also tasked with dis­cred­it­ing Lyme patients and physi­cians who chal­lenged that sta­tus quo. In light of the evi­dence that Lyme Dis­ease was the out­growth of bio­log­i­cal war­fare research, the pro­fes­sion­al rela­tion­ship between gov­ern­men­tal insti­tu­tions involved with BW research and biotech­nol­o­gy and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal firms prof­it­ing from the treat­ment of dis­eases those insti­tu­tions devel­op and deploy is worth con­tem­plat­ing! 

Pre­vi­ous broad­casts have doc­u­ment­ed the skewed, pref­er­en­tial treat­ment of remde­sivir by pow­er­ful polit­i­cal and finan­cial play­ers with sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment in the suc­cess of remde­sivir.

The pro­gram con­cludes with three updates of pre­vi­ous lines of inquiry”

1.–Past pro­grams have high­light­ed pos­si­ble vec­tors into Wuhan for the SARS CoV‑2. We note that there was a work­shop held at the Wuhan lab in ear­ly Novem­ber of 2019, fea­tur­ing sci­en­tists and bio-lab pro­fes­sion­als from around the world. This con­fer­ence may have been among the oppor­tu­ni­ties to spread the virus, and/or a co-vec­tor and/or cross-vec­tor. ” . . . . The work­shop is designed for lab­o­ra­to­ry man­agers and direc­tors, research and lab­o­ra­to­ry staffs main­ly from devel­op­ing coun­tries who plan to car­ry out infec­tious dis­ease research in biosafe­ty facil­i­ties. The work­shop will address key aspects of biosafe­ty and pro­vide prac­ti­cal train­ing in high lev­el biosafe­ty lab­o­ra­to­ries (BSL). This work­shop will invite a group of well-known schol­ars and experts from relat­ed fields at home and abroad to pro­vide the the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal cours­es. . . .”
2.–As not­ed in past pro­grams the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy was engaged in bat-borne coro­n­avirus research, which includ­ed the genet­ic mod­i­fi­ca­tion of such organ­isms. That research was a joint U.S./Chinese under­tak­ing, with the U.S. fund­ing com­ing from insti­tu­tions which have front­ed for Amer­i­can intel­li­gence and the Pen­ta­gon. That joint U.S./Chinese under­tak­ing was ter­mi­nat­ed by the Trump admin­is­tra­tion in May! In addi­tion: ” . . . . Many of the sci­en­tists at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy have been trained by the U.S. government’s PREDICT project. . . . USAID’s PREDICT project . . . will end this Sep­tem­ber after 10 years and two six-month exten­sions as USAID launch­es a new project that applies the data PREDICT col­lect­ed. . . .”
3.–Other broad­casts have explored the Wuhan World Mil­i­tary Games–a mil­i­tary sports competition–as a pos­si­ble vec­tor­ing vehi­cle. We update that path of inquiry with dis­cus­sion of the U.S. del­e­ga­tion as a pos­si­ble vec­tor­ing agent for the spread of the dis­ease in the U.S. ” . . . . Con­trary to the Pentagon’s insis­tence, how­ev­er, an inves­ti­ga­tion of COVID-19 cas­es in the mil­i­tary from offi­cial and pub­lic source mate­ri­als shows that a strong cor­re­la­tion exists in COVID-19 cas­es report­ed at U.S. mil­i­tary facil­i­ties that are home bases of mem­bers of the U.S. team that went to Wuhan. Before March 31, when the Pen­ta­gon restrict­ed the release of infor­ma­tion about COVID-19 cas­es at instal­la­tions for secu­ri­ty rea­sons, infec­tions occurred at a min­i­mum of 63 mil­i­tary facil­i­ties where team mem­bers returned after the Wuhan games. Addi­tion­al­ly, the U.S. team used char­tered flights to and from the games via Seat­tle-Taco­ma Inter­na­tion­al Air­port. Wash­ing­ton was one of the ear­li­est states to show a spike in COVID-19. . . .” We also note that the U.S. del­e­ga­tion con­tained: ” . . . . nine pub­lic-affairs offi­cers . . . and two State Depart­ment per­son­nel, accord­ing to DOD doc­u­ments. . . .” “Pub­lic affairs offi­cer” is a com­mon cov­er for CIA per­son­nel.

FTR #1134 Bio-Psy-Op Apocalypse Now, Part 9: Covid-19 Updates

As indi­cat­ed by the title of the pro­gram, this broad­cast updates var­i­ous arti­cles and book excerpts con­cern­ing Covid-19.

A Dai­ly Mail Online [UK] arti­cle sets forth two bogus papers con­tend­ing that the SARS CoV‑2 virus was genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered by the Chi­nese as a bioweapon in a lab­o­ra­to­ry and that it “escaped.” Note the cham­pi­oning of one of the papers by a for­mer head of MI6 and the author­ship of the sec­ond by The Epoch Times, the paper of the Falun Gong cult. Linked to CIA, Steve Ban­non’s anti-Chi­na milieu and the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, the orga­ni­za­tion is a fas­cist mind con­trol cult dis­cussed in numer­ous shows, includ­ing FTR #‘s 1089 and 1090. 

1.–“A for­mer MI6 chief was yes­ter­day accused by Gov­ern­ment offi­cials of ped­dling ‘fan­ci­ful claims’ that coro­n­avirus was acci­den­tal­ly cre­at­ed in a Chi­nese lab­o­ra­to­ry. British secu­ri­ty agen­cies believe Covid-19 is not a man-made virus and is ‘high­ly like­ly’ to have occurred nat­u­ral­ly and spread to humans through ani­mals. And Health Sec­re­tary Matt Han­cock has said there is ‘no evi­dence’ to back up the the­o­ry that it orig­i­nat­ed in a lab­o­ra­to­ry. But Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of the MI6 from 1999 to 2004, cit­ed a recent report claim­ing the dis­ease was acci­den­tal­ly man­u­fac­tured by Chi­nese sci­en­tists.
2.–“ ‘I do think that this start­ed as an acci­dent,’ Sir Richard told The Dai­ly Telegraph’s ‘Plan­et Nor­mal’ pod­cast. ‘It rais­es the issue: if Chi­na ever were to admit respon­si­bil­i­ty, does it pay repa­ra­tions? I think it will make every coun­try in the world rethink how it treats its rela­tion­ship with Chi­na.’ He added: ‘Look at the sto­ries... of attempts by the [Bei­jing] lead­er­ship to lock down any debate about the ori­gins of the pan­dem­ic and the way peo­ple have been arrest­ed or silenced.’ . . . . The paper – co-authored by Pro­fes­sor Angus Dal­gleish, a renowned oncol­o­gist and vac­cine researcher who works at St George’s Hos­pi­tal, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don, and Birg­er Sorensen, a Nor­we­gian virol­o­gist – con­tains none of the stark alle­ga­tions that orig­i­nal­ly stunned its review­ers.
3..–“The ini­tial paper that trig­gered wild rumours failed strin­gent tests of ver­i­fi­ca­tion and is under­stood to have been reject­ed in April by emi­nent inter­na­tion­al jour­nals such as Nature and the Jour­nal of Virol­o­gy. Bio­med­ical experts from the Fran­cis Crick Insti­tute and Impe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don are said to have refut­ed its con­clu­sions. Then one of the paper’s co-authors, Dr John Fredrik Moxnes, chief sci­en­tif­ic advis­er to the Nor­we­gian mil­i­tary, asked for his name to be with­drawn. This week, after numer­ous rewrites, the paper was pub­lished by the Quar­ter­ly Review of Bio­physics Dis­cov­ery. And those orig­i­nal world-shak­ing con­clu­sions have now with­ered to innu­en­do. No accu­sa­tion of Chi­nese manip­u­la­tion appears. . . .”
4.–”. . . . Back in April, a slick­ly pro­duced inves­tiga­tive doc­u­men­tary, Track­ing Down The Ori­gin Of The Wuhan Coro­n­avirus, was released online. It claimed con­clu­sive proof that the Covid-19 virus had been cre­at­ed as a bio­log­i­cal ‘weapon of mass destruc­tion’ in a Chi­nese lab. . . .”
5.–“At first sight, it seemed a shock­ing­ly con­vinc­ing piece of jour­nal­ism. On behalf of this news­pa­per, I cross-checked every claim: The experts it cit­ed and the fac­tu­al evi­dence unearthed. I also researched the back­grounds of its mak­ers. I then approached some of the world’s best inde­pen­dent sci­en­tif­ic author­i­ties to ask their opin­ion. They all agreed – this entic­ing­ly spicy sto­ry just did­n’t stand up.”
6.–“It had been pro­duced by a US based anti-Chi­nese gov­ern­ment media organ­i­sa­tion called the Epoch Times. Its ‘experts’ were vet­er­an hard-Right­ists. Most damn­ing­ly, its sci­en­tif­ic ‘facts’ were twist­ed out of shape.So much, then, for the Chi­nese-man­u­fac­tured coro­n­avirus con­spir­a­cy . . .”

Steve Ban­non is at the epi­cen­ter of the anti-Chi­na effort and–to no one’s surprise–never real­ly left the Trump White House.

When assess­ing Ban­non as a polit­i­cal ani­mal, one should nev­er for­get that among the impor­tant ide­o­log­i­cal influ­ences on him is Julius Evola, an Ital­ian fas­cist who found Mus­soli­ni too mod­er­ate and ulti­mate­ly took his cues from the Nazi SS, who were financ­ing his work by the end of World War II.

” . . . . Don­ald Trump’s light­ning-rod 2016 cam­paign boss and for­mer White House chief strate­gist who was ban­ished from the West Wing in 2017 has qui­et­ly crept back into 1600 Penn­syl­va­nia Ave., reestab­lish­ing ties to staffers, par­tic­u­lar­ly with regard to his pet issues of Chi­na and immi­gra­tion. . . . Anoth­er for­mer admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial told The Post that Ban­non nev­er real­ly left the White House after he was fired, main­tain­ing con­tacts and keep­ing up reg­u­lar chan­nels of com­mu­ni­ca­tions with offi­cials there. . . .”

In addi­tion, as dis­cussed in FTR #‘s 1111 and 1112, Ban­non is part of a net­work that includes J. Kyle Bass and Tom­my Hicks, Jr. This nexus involves asym­met­ri­cal invest­ing with regard to the Hong Kong and Chi­nese economies and the inter-agency gov­ern­men­tal net­works involved in both overt and covert anti-Chi­na poli­cies imple­ment­ed by Team Trump. As will be seen below, they also are net­work­ing with the mis-named “Sci­en­tists to Stop Covid-19.” In that regard, they are also help­ing steer pol­i­cy that con­trols devel­op­ment of treat­ment and vac­cines for Covid-19. The man­age­ment of drug and vac­cine devel­op­ment, in turn, dou­bles back to mar­ket-dri­ving invest­ment dynam­ics.

An inter­est­ing sum­ma­tion of char­ac­ter­is­tics of a “delib­er­ate” epi­dem­ic are eval­u­at­ed against the find­ing that New York City was the epi­cen­ter of the U.S. Covid-19 out­break: 

Bit­ten: The Secret His­to­ry of Lyme Dis­ease and Bio­log­i­cal Weapons by Kris New­by; Harper­Collins [HC]; Copy­right 2019 by Kris New­by; ISBN 9780062896728; p. 185.

Poten­tial epi­demi­o­log­i­cal clues to a delib­er­ate epi­dem­ic:

Clue no. 1–A high­ly unusu­al event with large num­bers of casu­al­ties: Check!

Clue no. 2–Higher mor­bid­i­ty or mor­tal­i­ty than is expect­ed. Check!

Clue no. 3–Uncommon dis­ease. Check!

Clue no. 4–Point-source out­break. Check!

Clue no. 5–Multiple epi­demics. Check! (Glob­al pan­dem­ic)

                      –Z. F. Dem­bek, et al., “Dis­cern­ment Between Delib­er­ate and Nat­ur­al Infec­tious Dis­ease Out­breaks”

The pre­vail­ing view of the Covid-19 out­break con­tends that the Amer­i­can out­break spread out­ward from New York City. The strain of SARS CoV‑2 that appeared in New York came, in turn, from Europe. 

This does­n’t make sense. There were con­firmed cas­es of the virus on the West Coast that did not come from New York. A Euro­pean strain of the virus trans­mit­ted to New York City would have come in via air. In such an event, there would have been a well-doc­u­ment­ed out­break of Covid-19 among flight atten­dants, who oper­ate in close con­tact with pas­sen­gers in cramped cir­cum­stances, as well as expe­ri­enc­ing jet lag, which com­pro­mis­es the immune sys­tem.

Next, we review an aspect of the 2001 anthrax attacks. We high­light­ed the 2001 anthrax attacks in con­nec­tion with the Covid-19 out­break in New York City in FTR #1128.

We note that the Anthrax attacks appear to have oper­at­ed in over­lap­ping con­texts, includ­ing jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the war in Iraq. 

The 2001 anthrax attacks appear to have served as a provo­ca­tion that jus­ti­fied a ten-fold increase in spend­ing for bio­log­i­cal war­fare devel­op­ment. The num­ber of BSL‑4 labs (hav­ing dual civil­ian and mil­i­tary use) increased from two in 2001, to a dozen in 2007.

This increase occurred while Don­ald Rums­feld was George W. Bush’s sec­re­tary of defense. He went to that posi­tion from being Chair­man of the Board of Direc­tors for Gilead Sci­ences, the man­u­fac­tur­er of remde­sivir.

We will delve into the pol­i­tics of the anthrax attacks in the future.

In the con­text of the above arti­cle, note that the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health have also part­nered with CIA and the Pen­ta­gon, as under­scored by an arti­cle about a BSL‑4 lab at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty. Note that Europe and the U.S. have twelve BSL4 labs apiece. Tai­wan has two. Chi­na has one:

1.–As the arti­cle notes, as of 2007, the U.S. had “more than a dozen” BSL4 labs–China com­mis­sioned its first as of 2017. a ten­fold increase in fund­ing for BSL4 labs occurred because of the anthrax attacks of 2001. Those attacks might be seen as some­thing of a provo­ca­tion, spurring a dra­mat­ic increase in “dual use” biowar­fare research, under the cov­er of “legit­i­mate” medical/scientific research. In FTR #1128, we hypoth­e­sized about the milieu of Stephen Hat­fill and apartheid-linked inter­ests as pos­si­ble authors of a vec­tor­ing of New York City with Sars COV2: ” . . . . Before the anthrax mail­ings of 2001, the Unit­ed States had just two BSL4 labs—both with­in the razor-wire con­fines of gov­ern­ment-owned cam­pus­es. Now, thanks to a ten­fold increase in funding—from $200 mil­lion in 2001 to $2 bil­lion in 2006—more than a dozen such facil­i­ties can be found at uni­ver­si­ties and pri­vate com­pa­nies across the coun­try. . . .”
2.–The Boston Uni­ver­si­ty lab exem­pli­fies the Pen­ta­gon and CIA pres­ence in BSL‑4 facil­i­ty “dual use”: ” . . . . But some sci­en­tists say that argu­ment obscures the true pur­pose of the cur­rent biode­fense boom: to study poten­tial bio­log­i­cal weapons. ‘The uni­ver­si­ty por­trays it as an emerg­ing infec­tious dis­ease lab,’ says David Ozonoff, a Boston Uni­ver­si­ty epi­demi­ol­o­gist whose office is right across the street from the new BSL4 facil­i­ty. ‘But they are talk­ing about study­ing things like small pox and inhala­tion anthrax, which pose no pub­lic health threat oth­er than as bioweapons.’ . . . The orig­i­nal NIH man­date for the lab indi­cat­ed that many groups—including the CIA and Depart­ment of Defense—would be allowed to use the lab for their own research, the nature of which BU might have lit­tle con­trol over. . . .”

Piv­ot­ing to dis­cus­sion and review of the polit­i­cal, finan­cial and cor­po­rate con­nec­tions to the devel­op­ment of med­i­c­i­nal treat­ments for, and vac­cines to pre­vent, Covid-19, we recap details rel­e­vant to the extra­or­di­nary tim­ing of a 4/29 announce­ment of favor­able results for a tri­al of remde­sivir. That announce­ment drove equi­ties mar­kets high­er and was ben­e­fi­cial to the stock of Gilead Sci­ences.

We present a Stat News arti­cle on the inter­nal delib­er­a­tions behind the deci­sions to mod­i­fy the NIAID study. Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance is the DSMB delib­er­a­tion. Note the time­line of the DSMB delib­er­a­tion, com­bined with the announce­ment on 4/29 that drove the mar­kets high­er.

1.–The deci­sion was made to cut it short before the ques­tion of remdesivir’s impact on mor­tal­i­ty could be answered: ” . . . .The Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases has described to STAT in new detail how it made its fate­ful deci­sion: to start giv­ing remde­sivir to patients who had been assigned to receive a place­bo in the study, essen­tial­ly lim­it­ing researchers’ abil­i­ty to col­lect more data about whether the drug saves lives — some­thing the study, called ACTT‑1, sug­gests but does not prove. In the tri­al, 8% of the par­tic­i­pants giv­en remde­sivir died, com­pared with 11.6% of the place­bo group, a dif­fer­ence that was not sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant. A top NIAID offi­cial said he had no regrets about the deci­sion. ‘There cer­tain­ly was una­nim­i­ty with­in the insti­tute that this was the right thing to do,’ said H. Clif­ford Lane, NIAID’s clin­i­cal direc­tor. . . .”
2.–In addi­tion, patients sched­uled to receive place­bo received remde­sivir, instead. ” . . . . Steven Nis­sen, a vet­er­an tri­al­ist and car­di­ol­o­gist at the Cleve­land Clin­ic, dis­agreed that giv­ing place­bo patients remde­sivir was the right call. ‘I believe it is in society’s best inter­est to deter­mine whether remde­sivir can reduce mor­tal­i­ty, and with the release of this infor­ma­tion doing a place­bo-con­trolled tri­al to deter­mine if there is a mor­tal­i­ty ben­e­fit will be very dif­fi­cult,’ he said. ‘The ques­tion is: Was there a route, or is there a route, to deter­mine if the drug can pre­vent death?’ The deci­sion is ‘a lost oppor­tu­ni­ty,’ he said. . . .”
3.–Steven Nis­sen was not alone in his crit­i­cism of the NIAID’s deci­sion. ” . . . .Peter Bach, the direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Health Pol­i­cy and Out­comes at Memo­r­i­al Sloan Ket­ter­ing Can­cer Cen­ter, agreed with Nis­sen. ‘The core under­stand­ing of clin­i­cal research par­tic­i­pa­tion and clin­i­cal research con­duct is we run the tri­al rig­or­ous­ly to pro­vide the most accu­rate infor­ma­tion about the right treat­ment,’ he said. And that answer, he argued, should ide­al­ly have deter­mined whether remde­sivir saves lives. The rea­son we have shut our whole soci­ety down, Bach said, is not to pre­vent Covid-19 patients from spend­ing a few more days in the hos­pi­tal. It is to pre­vent patients from dying. ‘Mor­tal­i­ty is the right end­point,’ he said. . . .”
4.–Not only was the admin­is­tra­tion of remde­sivir instead of place­bo pri­or­i­tized, but the NIAID study itself was atten­u­at­ed! ” . . . . But the change in the study’s main goal also changed the way the study would be ana­lyzed. Now, the NIAID decid­ed, the analy­sis would be cal­cu­lat­ed when 400 patients out of the 1,063 patients the study enrolled had recov­ered. If remde­sivir turned out to be much more effec­tive than expect­ed, ‘inter­im’ analy­ses would be con­duct­ed at a third and two-thirds that number.The job of review­ing these analy­ses would fall to a com­mit­tee of out­side experts on what is known as an inde­pen­dent data and safe­ty mon­i­tor­ing board, or DSMB. . . .”
5.–The per­for­mance of the DSMB for the remde­sivir study is note­wor­thy: ” . . . . But the DSMB for the remde­sivir study did not ever meet for an inter­im effi­ca­cy analy­sis, Lane said. All patients had been enrolled by April 20. The data for a DSMB meet­ing was cut off on April 22. The DSMB met and, on April 27, it made a rec­om­men­da­tion to the NIAID. . . .”
The DSMB meet­ing on 4/27 deter­mined the switch from place­bo to remde­sivir. Of para­mount impor­tance is the fact that this was JUST BEFORE the 4/29 announce­ment that drove the mar­kets high­er and the same day on which key Trump aide–and for­mer Gilead Sci­ences lob­by­ist Joe Gro­gan resigned! ” . . . . . That deci­sion, Lane said, led the NIAID to con­clude that patients who had been giv­en place­bo should be offered remde­sivir, some­thing that start­ed hap­pen­ing after April 28. . . .”
6.–Dr. Ethan Weiss gave an accu­rate eval­u­a­tion of the NIAID study: ” . . . . ‘We’ve squan­dered an incred­i­ble oppor­tu­ni­ty to do good sci­ence,’ [Dr. Ethan] Weiss said. ‘If we could ever go back and do some­thing all over, it would be the infra­struc­ture to actu­al­ly learn some­thing. Because we’re not learn­ing enough.’ . . . .”

The remark­able han­dling of the NIAID study, the tim­ing of the announce­ment of the alto­geth­er lim­it­ed suc­cess of the atten­u­at­ed tri­al and the rise in equi­ties as a result of the announce­ment may be best under­stood in the con­text of the role played in Trump pan­dem­ic deci­sion-mak­ing by an elite group of bil­lion­aires and scientists–including con­vict­ed felon Michael Milken (the “junk bond king”).

1.–” . . . . Call­ing them­selves ‘Sci­en­tists to Stop COVID-19,’ the col­lec­tion of top researchers, bil­lion­aires and indus­try cap­tains will act as an ‘ad hoc review board’ for the tor­rent of coro­n­avirus research, ‘weed­ing out’ flawed data before it reach­es pol­i­cy­mak­ers, the Wall Street Jour­nal report­ed on Mon­day. They are also act­ing as a go-between for phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies seek­ing to build a com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel with Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials. The group . . . . has advised Nick Ayers, an aide to Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence, as well as oth­er agency heads, in the past month. Pence is head­ing up the White House coro­n­avirus task force. . . .”
2.–” . . . The brainy bunch is led by Thomas Cahill, a 33-year-old doc­tor who became a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist . . . . Cahill’s clout comes from build­ing con­nec­tions through his invest­ment firm, New­path Part­ners, with Sil­i­con Valley’s Peter Thiel, the founder of Pay­Pal, and bil­lion­aire busi­ness­men Jim Palot­ta and Michael Milken. . . .”

Note that Peter Thiel played a dom­i­nant role in bankrolling New­path Part­ners, and the oth­er finan­cial angel who ele­vat­ed Cahill–Brian Sheth–introduced him to Tom­my Hicks, Jr., the co-chair­man of the RNC. In FTR #‘s 1111 and 1112, we looked at Hicks’ net­work­ing with Steve Ban­non asso­ciate J. Kyle Bass, as well as his role in the inter-agency net­works dri­ving the anti-Chi­na effort.

” . . . . At the helm of the effort: The 33-year-old and very-much-under-the-radar ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Tom Cahill, who leads life sci­ences-focused New­path Part­ners. Cahill com­plet­ed his M.D. and PhD at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty a mere two years ago before land­ing at blue-chip invest­ment firm Rap­tor Group through a friend. He went on to found New­path with some $125 mil­lion after impress­ing well-con­nect­ed names like ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Peter Thiel and Vista Equi­ty Part­ners co-founder Bri­an Sheth. . . . It was through Sheth, for exam­ple, that Sci­en­tists to Stop Covid-19 con­nect­ed with the co-chair­man of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee, Thomas Hicks Jr. . . .”

The fed­er­al gov­ern­men­t’s extreme focus on remde­sivir has been shaped, in large mea­sure, by the influ­ence of “Sci­en­tists to Stop COVID-19”:

1.–“Scientists to Stop Covid-19” is shep­herd­ing remde­sivir: ” . . . . Sci­en­tists to Stop COVID-19 rec­om­mends that in this phase, the U.S. Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion (FDA) should work to coor­di­nate with Gilead phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals to focus on expe­dit­ing the results of clin­i­cal tri­als of remde­sivir, a drug iden­ti­fied as a poten­tial treat­ment for COVID-19. The group also rec­om­mends admin­is­ter­ing dos­es of the drug to patients in an ear­ly stage of infec­tion, and notes remde­sivir will essen­tial­ly be a place­hold­er until a more effec­tive treat­ment is pro­duced.
2.–The group is doing so by atten­u­at­ing the reg­u­la­to­ry process for coro­n­avirus drugs: “Gov­ern­ment enti­ties and agen­cies appear to adhere to the rec­om­men­da­tions out­lined by the group, with the Jour­nal report­ing that the FDA and the Depart­ment of Vet­er­ans Affairs (VA) have imple­ment­ed some of the sug­ges­tions, name­ly relax­ing drug man­u­fac­tur­er reg­u­la­tions and require­ments for poten­tial coro­n­avirus treat­ment drugs. . . .”

We con­clude dis­cus­sion of the remde­sivir machi­na­tions with a piece about the tim­ing of the announce­ment of Grogan’s depar­ture.

” . . . . Gro­gan has served as the direc­tor of the White House Domes­tic Pol­i­cy Coun­cil since Feb­ru­ary 2019, over­see­ing a broad array of pol­i­cy issues includ­ing health care and reg­u­la­tion. . . . Gro­gan was one of the orig­i­nal mem­bers of the White House coro­n­avirus task force launched in late Jan­u­ary. . . . Gro­gan worked as a lob­by­ist for drug com­pa­ny Gilead Sci­ences before join­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. . . .”

The depar­ture was announced in the Wall Street Jour­nal on the morn­ing of Wednes­day, April 29, the same day we got our first pub­lic reports of the NIAID clin­i­cal tri­al of remde­sivir that was pos­i­tive enough to show it short­ened the time to recov­ery and the same day the FDA grant­ed remde­sivir emer­gency use sta­tus. 

Note, again, the tim­ing of the DSM­B’s actions, as well as the influ­ence of “Sci­en­tists to Stop Covid-19.”

In FTR #1130, we not­ed that Mon­cef Slaoui–formerly in charge of prod­uct devel­op­ment for Moderna–was cho­sen to head Trump’s “Oper­a­tion Warp Speed.” He will be work­ing with Four-Star Gen­er­al Gus­tave Per­na, cho­sen by Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen­er­al Mark Mil­ley.

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

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. . . .”
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. . . .”
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. . . .”

Next, we turn to Mod­er­na’s ani­mal tri­al for the mes­sen­ger RNA vac­cine it is devel­op­ing. There are sev­er­al con­sid­er­a­tions to be weighed in con­nec­tion with the Mod­er­na vac­cine.

1.–Again, the chair­man of Trump’s “Warp Speed” vac­cine devel­op­ment program–Moncef Slaoui–was in charge of Mod­er­na’s prod­uct devel­op­ment oper­a­tion.
2.–Moderna’s tri­al with mice was pos­i­tive with regard to gen­er­at­ing anti­body lev­els high enough to pre­vent ADE.
3.–Antibody Depen­dent Enhance­ment (ADE),  is a phe­nom­e­na where low lev­els of inef­fec­tive anti­bod­ies latch onto the virus and exac­er­bate an over­ac­tive immune response that leads to the dead­liest symp­toms likes cytokine-storms. This dan­ger was seen with SARS and attempts to cre­ate a SARS vac­cine so it’s a rea­son­able fear with SARS-CoV­‑2.
4.–The Phase III (human) tri­al is going to be start­ed in July, involv­ing 30,000 peo­ple. Alarm­ing­ly, those 30,000 peo­ple will all be receiv­ing the exact same dosage, 100 micro­grams, and that means the phase III tri­al won’t be test­ing sub-opti­mal dosages. The big Phase III tri­al won’t be test­ing for ADE in humans. 
5.–We may have a night­mare sit­u­a­tion where polit­i­cal pres­sure gives undo weight to ani­mal safe­ty results, leapfrog­ging over the neces­si­ty of test­ing for side effects. 
6.–The ani­mal tri­als have been severe­ly crit­i­cized: ” . . . . ‘This is the barest begin­ning of pre­lim­i­nary infor­ma­tion,’ said Dr. Gre­go­ry Poland, an immu­nol­o­gist and vac­cine researcher at the Mayo Clin­ic who has seen the paper, which has yet to under­go peer-review. Poland said the paper was incom­plete, dis­or­ga­nized and the num­bers of ani­mals test­ed were small. . . . Poland, who was not involved with the research, said the paper leaves out ‘impor­tant para­me­ters’ that could help sci­en­tists judge the work. . . .”
7.–We MIGHT cre­ate a vac­cine that pro­tects those who get a strong immune response while endan­ger­ing those with sub-pro­tec­tive responses–a “eugenic” vac­cine.
8.–The ani­mal tri­als have been severe­ly crit­i­cized: ” . . . . ‘This is the barest begin­ning of pre­lim­i­nary infor­ma­tion,’ said Dr. Gre­go­ry Poland, an immu­nol­o­gist and vac­cine researcher at the Mayo Clin­ic who has seen the paper, which has yet to under­go peer-review. Poland said the paper was incom­plete, dis­or­ga­nized and the num­bers of ani­mals test­ed were small. . . . Poland, who was not involved with the research, said the paper leaves out ‘impor­tant para­me­ters’ that could help sci­en­tists judge the work. . . .”
9.–The phase II clin­i­cal tri­als on humans are still under­way and won’t be com­plet­ed before Novem­ber.  Phase III is going to be get­ting under­way in July. The Human clin­i­cal tri­als are already under­way at the same time the ani­mal safe­ty tri­als have yet to be com­plet­ed.
10.–Side effects can take a while to man­i­fest.

We pro­vid­ed detailed crit­i­cal com­ments on Mod­er­na’s Phase I tri­al in FTR #1132.

We con­clude with a New York Times arti­cle sets forth a “Vac­cine Octo­ber Sur­prise” sce­nario for this fall.

” . . . . In a des­per­ate search for a boost, he could release a coro­n­avirus vac­cine that has not been shown to be safe and effec­tive as an Octo­ber sur­prise. Oct. 23, 2020, 9 a.m., with 10 days before the elec­tion, Fox New releas­es a poll show­ing Pres­i­dent Trump trail­ing Joe Biden by eight per­cent­age points. Oct. 23, 2020, 3 p.m., at a hasti­ly con­vened news con­fer­ence, Pres­i­dent Trump announces that the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion has just issued an Emer­gency Use Autho­riza­tion for a coro­n­avirus vac­cine. Mr. Trump declares vic­to­ry over Covid-19, demands that all busi­ness­es reopen imme­di­ate­ly and pre­dicts a rapid eco­nom­ic recov­ery. Giv­en how this pres­i­dent has behaved, this incred­i­bly dan­ger­ous sce­nario is not far-fetched. In a des­per­ate search for a polit­i­cal boost, he could release a coro­n­avirus vac­cine before it had been thor­ough­ly test­ed and shown to be safe and effec­tive. . . .”

FTR #1132 Bio-Psy-Op Apocalypse Now, Part 8: Remdesivir Uber Alles

This broad­cast details the process of vet­ting the anti-Covid-19 drug remde­sivir, high­light­ing the insti­tu­tion­al short­cuts tak­en in test­ing the prod­uct, as well as the dubi­ous nature of the bil­lion­aires net­work­ing with offi­cials involved in the approval process.

Before ana­lyz­ing remde­sivir, how­ev­er, we update dis­cus­sion about the SARS CoV‑2 virus hav­ing been engi­neered, not­ing joint U.S.-Chinese projects in which bat-borne coro­n­avirus­es were genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered. The process­es used to mod­i­fy the virus­es would not show any overt evi­dence of human manip­u­la­tion.

Most impor­tant­ly, these projects received financ­ing from insti­tu­tions with doc­u­ment­ed links to U.S. intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary inter­ests.

Research into the his­to­ry of GOF (gain-of-func­tion) work on bat coro­n­avirus­es at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy indi­cates mul­ti­ple areas of U.S. intel­li­gence pres­ence in that work. 

It was pub­licly dis­closed in a 2017 paper that the US and Chi­na col­lab­o­rat­ed on “gain-of-func­tion” research on bat coro­n­avirus­es to infect humans and that the work received fund­ing from the Unit­ed States Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Development–a fre­quent cut-out for the CIA.

In addi­tion, the work was also fund­ed in part by the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, which have col­lab­o­rat­ed with both CIA and the Pen­ta­gon in BSL‑4 (Bio-Safe­ty-Lev­el 4) projects. 

The Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy has also part­nered with the USAMRIID since the mid-1980’s.

Impor­tant to note is the fact that it was pub­lic infor­ma­tion that some of this work was done in a biosafe­ty-lev­el 2 lab­o­ra­to­ry, giv­ing an observ­er intent on under­tak­ing a bio­log­i­cal war­fare covert oper­a­tion against Chi­na use­ful field intel­li­gence about the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of WIV for such an “op.”

1.–The inves­ti­ga­tion of infec­tiv­i­ty used unde­tectable meth­ods, negat­ing arti­cles claim­ing the virus could not have been genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered: ” Evi­dence has emerged that researchers at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy (WIV) in Chi­na, work­ing in col­lab­o­ra­tion with sci­en­tists in the USA, have been genet­i­cal­ly engi­neer­ing bat virus­es for the past sev­er­al years to inves­ti­gate infec­tiv­i­ty – using unde­tectable meth­ods. . . . The evi­dence rebuts claims by jour­nal­ists and some sci­en­tists that the SARS-CoV­‑2 virus respon­si­ble for the cur­rent COVID-19 pan­dem­ic could not have been genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered because it lacks the ‘signs’ or ‘sig­na­tures’ that sup­pos­ed­ly would be left behind by genet­ic engi­neer­ing tech­niques. . . .”

2.–Dr. Richard Ebright not­ed that the research was joint­ly fund­ed by the U.S. and Chi­na, that Peter Daszak (about whom we have voiced reser­va­tions in the past) was one of the Amer­i­can col­lab­o­ra­tors. Fur­ther­more, the research was fund­ed in part by USAID, a com­mon U.S. intel­li­gence cut-out. ” . . . . 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. This formed part of their research into what muta­tions were need­ed to allow cer­tain bat coro­n­avirus­es to bind to the human ACE2 recep­tor – a key step in the human infec­tiv­i­ty of SARS-CoV­‑2. . . .”

3.–Furthermore, the researchers used a type of genet­ic engi­neer­ing that leaves no sig­na­ture of human manip­u­la­tion: ” . . . . The WIV sci­en­tists did this, Ebright points out, ‘using ‘seam­less lig­a­tion’ pro­ce­dures that leave no sig­na­tures of human manip­u­la­tion’. This is note­wor­thy because it is a type of genet­ic engi­neer­ing that Ander­sen and his team exclud­ed from their inves­ti­ga­tion into whether SARS-CoV­‑2 could have been engi­neered – and it was in use at the very lab that is the prime sus­pect for a lab escape. . . .”

4.–In addi­tion, Ebright high­lights the 2015 work done by Ralph Bar­ic in col­lab­o­ra­tion with WIV’s Shi Zhengli–a project we have dis­cussed at length in the past: ” . . . . A group of sci­en­tists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na in the USA, with the WIV’s Shi Zhengli as a col­lab­o­ra­tor, pub­lished a study in 2015 describ­ing sim­i­lar exper­i­ments involv­ing chimeric coro­n­avirus­es, which were also cre­at­ed using stan­dard unde­tectable genet­ic engi­neer­ing tech­niques. . . .”

5.–Ebright also cites work done in a bio-safe­ty lev­el 2 lab­o­ra­to­ry. : ” . . . . Ebright points out that the paper states, ‘All work with the infec­tious virus was per­formed under biosafe­ty lev­el 2 con­di­tions’. This lev­el is suit­able for work involv­ing agents of only ‘mod­er­ate poten­tial haz­ard to per­son­nel and the envi­ron­ment’. . . .But they are not at fault in fail­ing to use BSL‑4 for this work, as SARS coro­n­avirus­es are not aerosol-trans­mit­ted. The work does, how­ev­er, fall under biosafe­ty lev­el 3, which is for work involv­ing microbes that can cause seri­ous and poten­tial­ly lethal dis­ease via inhala­tion. . . .”

6.–Dr. Jonathan Lath­am under­scored the reser­va­tions expressed by many con­cern­ing “gain-of-func­tion” exper­i­ments on these kinds of coro­n­avirus­es: ” . . . . The bio­sci­en­tist Dr Jonathan Lath­am crit­i­cised the kind of research on bat coro­n­avirus­es that has been tak­ing place in Wuhan and the USA as ‘pro­vid­ing an evo­lu­tion­ary oppor­tu­ni­ty’ for such virus­es ‘to jump into humans’. Lath­am, who has a doc­tor­ate in virol­o­gy, argues that this kind of work is sim­ply ‘pro­vid­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for con­t­a­m­i­na­tion events and leak­ages from labs, which hap­pen on a rou­tine basis’. . . .”

U.S. Army Med­ical Research Insti­tute of Infec­tious Disease–located at Ft. Det­rick and closed by the CDC for safe­ty vio­la­tions in August, 2019.

Note, again, that the whole world was informed back in 2017 that  dan­ger­ous research involv­ing the cre­ation of bat coro­n­avirus­es to infect humans was being car­ried out in Chi­na.  Note again, that the research was fund­ed in part by the US, includ­ing USAID–a fre­quent U.S. intel­li­gence cut-out; the NIH–which has active­ly col­lab­o­rat­ed with both CIA and Pen­ta­gon. The WIV has also part­nered with the USAMRIID.

Flash for­ward a cou­ple of years and we have a night­mare virus that ini­tial­ly appeared to pop up near­by the WIV, with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion aggres­sive­ly push­ing the idea that it escaped from that lab.

In that con­text, we note the fol­low­ing:

1.–In 2017, Chi­na got approval for its first BSL‑4 lab in Wuhan, the first of sev­er­al planned BSL‑4 labs. “A lab­o­ra­to­ry in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dan­ger­ous pathogens. The move is part of a plan to build between five and sev­en biosafe­ty level‑4 (BSL‑4) labs across the Chi­nese main­land by 2025, and has gen­er­at­ed much excite­ment, as well as some con­cerns. . . . Some sci­en­tists out­side Chi­na wor­ry about pathogens escap­ing, and the addi­tion of a bio­log­i­cal dimen­sion to geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions between Chi­na and oth­er nations. . . .”

2.–As will be seen below, the pro­lif­er­a­tion of BSL‑4 labs has sparked wor­ries about “dual use” tech­nol­o­gy: ” . . . . The expan­sion of BSL-4-lab net­works in the Unit­ed States and Europe over the past 15 years — with more than a dozen now in oper­a­tion or under con­struc­tion in each region — also met with resis­tance, includ­ing ques­tions about the need for so many facil­i­ties. . . .”

3.–The above-men­tioned Richard Ebright notes that the pro­lif­er­a­tion of BSL‑4 labs will spur sus­pi­cion of “dual use” tech­nol­o­gy, in which osten­si­ble med­ical research masks bio­log­i­cal war­fare research: ” . . . . But Ebright is not con­vinced of the need for more than one BSL‑4 lab in main­land Chi­na. He sus­pects that the expan­sion there is a reac­tion to the net­works in the Unit­ed States and Europe, which he says are also unwar­rant­ed. He adds that gov­ern­ments will assume that such excess capac­i­ty is for the poten­tial devel­op­ment of bioweapons. ‘These facil­i­ties are inher­ent­ly dual use,’ he says. . . .”

In the con­text of the above arti­cles, note that the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health have also part­nered with CIA and the Pen­ta­gon, as under­scored by an arti­cle about a BSL‑4 lab at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty. Note that the U.S. and Europe have twelve BSL4 labs apiece, Tai­wan has two, while Chi­na has one:

1.–As the arti­cle notes, as of 2007, the U.S. had “more than a dozen” BSL4 labs–China com­mis­sioned its first as of 2017. a ten­fold increase in fund­ing for BSL4 labs occurred because of the anthrax attacks of 2001. Those attacks might be seen as some­thing of a provo­ca­tion, spurring a dra­mat­ic increase in “dual use” biowar­fare research, under the cov­er of “legit­i­mate” medical/scientific research. In FTR #1128, we hypoth­e­sized about the milieu of Stephen Hat­fill and apartheid-linked inter­ests as pos­si­ble authors of a vec­tor­ing of New York City with Sars COV2: ” . . . . Before the anthrax mail­ings of 2001, the Unit­ed States had just two BSL4 labs—both with­in the razor-wire con­fines of gov­ern­ment-owned cam­pus­es. Now, thanks to a ten­fold increase in funding—from $200 mil­lion in 2001 to $2 bil­lion in 2006—more than a dozen such facil­i­ties can be found at uni­ver­si­ties and pri­vate com­pa­nies across the coun­try. . . .”

2.–The Boston Uni­ver­si­ty lab exem­pli­fies the Pen­ta­gon and CIA pres­ence in BSL‑4 facil­i­ty “dual use”: ” . . . . But some sci­en­tists say that argu­ment obscures the true pur­pose of the cur­rent biode­fense boom: to study poten­tial bio­log­i­cal weapons. ‘The uni­ver­si­ty por­trays it as an emerg­ing infec­tious dis­ease lab,’ says David Ozonoff, a Boston Uni­ver­si­ty epi­demi­ol­o­gist whose office is right across the street from the new BSL4 facil­i­ty. ‘But they are talk­ing about study­ing things like small pox and inhala­tion anthrax, which pose no pub­lic health threat oth­er than as bioweapons.’ . . . The orig­i­nal NIH man­date for the lab indi­cat­ed that many groups—including the CIA and Depart­ment of Defense—would be allowed to use the lab for their own research, the nature of which BU might have lit­tle con­trol over. . . .”

Note, also that:

1.–The WIV has part­nered with the U.S. Army’s Med­ical Research Insti­tute of Infec­tious Dis­eases, locat­ed at Ft. Det­rick.

2.–In ear­ly August of 2019, short­ly before the record­ed start of the out­break in Wuhan, Chi­na, the U.S. Army Med­ical Research Insti­tute of Infec­tious Dis­eases at that facil­i­ty was closed down by the CDC due to mul­ti­ple safe­ty violations.“All research at a Fort Det­rick lab­o­ra­to­ry that han­dles high-lev­el dis­ease-caus­ing mate­r­i­al, such as Ebo­la, is on hold indef­i­nite­ly after the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion found the orga­ni­za­tion failed to meet biosafe­ty stan­dards. . . . The CDC sent a cease and desist order in July. After USAMRIID received the order from the CDC, its reg­is­tra­tion with the Fed­er­al Select Agent Pro­gram, which over­sees dis­ease-caus­ing mate­r­i­al use and pos­ses­sion, was sus­pend­ed. That sus­pen­sion effec­tive­ly halt­ed all bio­log­i­cal select agents and tox­in research at USAMRIID . . . .”

Fol­low­ing the update on the WIV and BSL‑4 lab­o­ra­to­ries, we piv­ot to analy­sis of the ele­va­tion of remde­sivir as the “go-to” treat­ment du jour for Covid-19. Of para­mount impor­tance is the remark­able time­line: The DSMB (data safe­ty and mon­i­tor­ing board) ” . . . . the DSMB for the remde­sivir study did not ever meet for an inter­im effi­ca­cy analy­sis, Lane said. All patients had been enrolled by April 20. The data for a DSMB meet­ing was cut off on April 22. The DSMB met and, on April 27, it made a rec­om­men­da­tion to the NIAID. . . . That deci­sion, Lane said, led the NIAID to con­clude that patients who had been giv­en place­bo should be offered remde­sivir, some­thing that start­ed hap­pen­ing after April 28. . . .” 

As will be seen, it was on 4/29 that Joe Gro­gan resigned. (See below.)

When pos­i­tive news on a NIAID study on the drug remde­sivir were released–on 4/29–it drove broad gains in the stock mar­ket. In FTR #1131, we not­ed that dis­clo­sures con­cern­ing pos­i­tive news about Mod­er­na’s exper­i­men­tal Covid-19 vac­cine also proved to be a sim­i­lar dri­ver of the stock mar­ket, as well as of Mod­er­na’s stock.

Dis­cus­sion of the hard details of sev­er­al remde­sivir tri­als begins with dis­cus­sion of an NIAID tri­al that helped move the mar­kets, as seen above. The tri­al was a mod­est suc­cess, indi­cat­ing that recov­ery for recent­ly infect­ed patients was about 31% faster than for place­bo. There was no sig­nif­i­cant sta­tis­ti­cal dif­fer­ence in mortality–the most impor­tant mea­sure of effec­tive­ness accord­ing to many experts.

” . . . . Dur­ing an appear­ance along­side Pres­i­dent Trump in the Oval Office, Antho­ny Fau­ci, the direc­tor of NIAID, part of the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, said the data are a ‘very impor­tant proof of con­cept’ and that there was rea­son for opti­mism. He cau­tioned the data were not a ‘knock­out.’ At the same time, the study achieved its pri­ma­ry goal, which was to improve the time to recov­ery, which was reduced by four days for patients on remde­sivir. The pre­lim­i­nary data showed that the time to recov­ery was 11 days on remde­sivir com­pared to 15 days for place­bo, a 31% decrease. The mor­tal­i­ty rate for the remde­sivir group was 8%, com­pared to 11.6% for the place­bo group; that mor­tal­i­ty dif­fer­ence was not sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant. . . .”

Next we present a Stat News arti­cle on the inter­nal delib­er­a­tions behind the deci­sions to mod­i­fy the NIAID study. Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance is the DSMB delib­er­a­tion. Note the time­line of the DSMB delib­er­a­tion, com­bined with the announce­ment on 4/29 that drove the mar­kets high­er.

1.–The deci­sion was made to cut it short before the ques­tion of remdesivir’s impact on mor­tal­i­ty could be answered: ” . . . .The Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases has described to STAT in new detail how it made its fate­ful deci­sion: to start giv­ing remde­sivir to patients who had been assigned to receive a place­bo in the study, essen­tial­ly lim­it­ing researchers’ abil­i­ty to col­lect more data about whether the drug saves lives — some­thing the study, called ACTT‑1, sug­gests but does not prove. In the tri­al, 8% of the par­tic­i­pants giv­en remde­sivir died, com­pared with 11.6% of the place­bo group, a dif­fer­ence that was not sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant. A top NIAID offi­cial said he had no regrets about the deci­sion. ‘There cer­tain­ly was una­nim­i­ty with­in the insti­tute that this was the right thing to do,’ said H. Clif­ford Lane, NIAID’s clin­i­cal direc­tor. . . .”

2.–In addi­tion, patients sched­uled to receive place­bo received remde­sivir, instead. ” . . . . Steven Nis­sen, a vet­er­an tri­al­ist and car­di­ol­o­gist at the Cleve­land Clin­ic, dis­agreed that giv­ing place­bo patients remde­sivir was the right call. ‘I believe it is in society’s best inter­est to deter­mine whether remde­sivir can reduce mor­tal­i­ty, and with the release of this infor­ma­tion doing a place­bo-con­trolled tri­al to deter­mine if there is a mor­tal­i­ty ben­e­fit will be very dif­fi­cult,’ he said. ‘The ques­tion is: Was there a route, or is there a route, to deter­mine if the drug can pre­vent death?’ The deci­sion is ‘a lost oppor­tu­ni­ty,’ he said. . . .”

3.–Steven Nis­sen was not alone in his crit­i­cism of the NIAID’s deci­sion. ” . . . .Peter Bach, the direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Health Pol­i­cy and Out­comes at Memo­r­i­al Sloan Ket­ter­ing Can­cer Cen­ter, agreed with Nis­sen. ‘The core under­stand­ing of clin­i­cal research par­tic­i­pa­tion and clin­i­cal research con­duct is we run the tri­al rig­or­ous­ly to pro­vide the most accu­rate infor­ma­tion about the right treat­ment,’ he said. And that answer, he argued, should ide­al­ly have deter­mined whether remde­sivir saves lives. The rea­son we have shut our whole soci­ety down, Bach said, is not to pre­vent Covid-19 patients from spend­ing a few more days in the hos­pi­tal. It is to pre­vent patients from dying. ‘Mor­tal­i­ty is the right end­point,’ he said. . . .”

4.–Not only was the admin­is­tra­tion of remde­sivir instead of place­bo pri­or­i­tized, but the NIAID study itself was atten­u­at­ed! ” . . . . But the change in the study’s main goal also changed the way the study would be ana­lyzed. Now, the NIAID decid­ed, the analy­sis would be cal­cu­lat­ed when 400 patients out of the 1,063 patients the study enrolled had recov­ered. If remde­sivir turned out to be much more effec­tive than expect­ed, ‘inter­im’ analy­ses would be con­duct­ed at a third and two-thirds that number.The job of review­ing these analy­ses would fall to a com­mit­tee of out­side experts on what is known as an inde­pen­dent data and safe­ty mon­i­tor­ing board, or DSMB. . . .”

5.–The per­for­mance of the DSMB for the remde­sivir study is note­wor­thy: ” . . . . But the DSMB for the remde­sivir study did not ever meet for an inter­im effi­ca­cy analy­sis, Lane said. All patients had been enrolled by April 20. The data for a DSMB meet­ing was cut off on April 22. The DSMB met and, on April 27, it made a rec­om­men­da­tion to the NIAID. . . .”

6.–The DSMB meet­ing on 4/27 deter­mined the switch from place­bo to remde­sivir. Of para­mount impor­tance is the fact that this was JUST BEFORE the 4/29 announce­ment that drove the mar­kets high­er and the same day on which key Trump aide–and for­mer Gilead Sci­ences lob­by­ist Joe Gro­gan resigned! ” . . . . . That deci­sion, Lane said, led the NIAID to con­clude that patients who had been giv­en place­bo should be offered remde­sivir, some­thing that start­ed hap­pen­ing after April 28. . . .”

7.–Dr. Ethan Weiss gave an accu­rate eval­u­a­tion of the NIAID study: ” . . . . ‘We’ve squan­dered an incred­i­ble oppor­tu­ni­ty to do good sci­ence,’ [Dr. Ethan] Weiss said. ‘If we could ever go back and do some­thing all over, it would be the infra­struc­ture to actu­al­ly learn some­thing. Because we’re not learn­ing enough.’ . . . .”

Next, we ana­lyze a STAT News excerpt that goes into more of the con­cerns about the Gilead study design.

The Gilead study was designed with­out any con­trol group, so the ques­tion of how much remde­sivir actu­al­ly helps sick patients (or doesn’t help) can’t be defin­i­tive­ly answered by that study.

The arti­cle also gives Gilead’s expla­na­tion for why they left out a con­trol group: due to the lim­it­ed sup­plies of the drug the com­pa­ny decid­ed to pri­or­i­tize on pro­duc­ing more of the drug itself rather than a place­bo con­trol. It’s an expla­na­tion that only makes sense if pro­duc­ing place­bo dos­es was some­how a sig­nif­i­cant tech­ni­cal chal­lenge, which seems dubi­ous.

Due to a lack of a con­trol group, the study instead focus­es on answer­ing the ques­tion of whether or not the recov­ery times for patients dif­fers between groups receiv­ing a 10-day course of the drug vs a 5‑day course. The patients were severe­ly ill but not on ven­ti­la­tors when enrolled in the study (so the patients that need the drug most weren’t test­ed). The pre­lim­i­nary results released Wednes­day sug­gest there is no dif­fer­ence between the recov­ery times for the two groups.

1.–The Gilead study lacked a con­trol group: ” . . . .  But out­side experts in clin­i­cal tri­al design wor­ry that the results, instead of lead­ing to a clear pic­ture of whether the med­i­cine is effec­tive, will instead mud­dy the waters fur­ther. The main con­cern, they say, stems from the fact that the Gilead tri­al expect­ed to read out this week, which was con­duct­ed among patients with severe dis­ease, lacks a con­trol group — that is, patients who are ran­dom­ly assigned to receive the best treat­ment avail­able, but not remde­sivir. As designed, the only ran­dom­iza­tion is the dura­tion of treat­ment: either five days or 10 days of drug. With­out a true con­trol group of patients, many experts say, it will be dif­fi­cult to deter­mine whether remde­sivir is effec­tive. . . .”

2.–The above-men­tioned Steven Nis­sen summed up the use­ful­ness of the Gilead tri­al. ” . . . . ‘The over­all study itself has lit­tle or no sci­en­tif­ic val­ue since all patients are receiv­ing the drug,’ said Steven Nis­sen, the chief aca­d­e­m­ic offi­cer at the Cleve­land Clin­ic and lead inves­ti­ga­tor of many tri­als for heart drugs that have been approved by the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion. ‘The study, as designed, is essen­tial­ly use­less and can­not be used by the FDA for con­sid­er­a­tion of remde­sivir for approval to treat coro­n­avirus,’ Nis­sen said. . . .”

3.–Gilead’s spokesper­son alleged that the com­pa­ny had a lim­it­ed sup­ply of place­bo and remde­sivir. ” . . . . ‘In the ear­ly stages of the pan­dem­ic, we not only had a lim­it­ed sup­ply of remde­sivir but also a lim­it­ed sup­ply of the matched place­bo required for place­bo-con­trolled stud­ies,’ said Amy Flood, a Gilead spokesper­son. ‘We chose to pri­or­i­tize man­u­fac­tur­ing active drug over place­bo, and we pro­vid­ed our sup­ply of place­bo to Chi­na and NIAID for their stud­ies of remde­sivir.’ . . .”

5.–A num­ber of crit­ics shared Steven Nis­sen’s opin­ion about the sci­en­tif­ic val­ue of the study. ” . . . . Crit­ics point to Gilead’s deci­sion to com­pare two groups giv­en remde­sivir for either five days or 10 days. The prob­lem with this strat­e­gy, they say, is that an inef­fec­tive drug that did noth­ing and a very effec­tive drug that con­sis­tent­ly helped patients over­come the virus would look the same in such a study. Only if the 10-day course were more effec­tive, or if it was worse because of side effects, would the study have any clear result. . . .”

6.–Nissen was more opti­mistic about a sec­ond forth­com­ing Gilead tri­al. Sloan Ket­ter­ing’s Peter Bach did not share that opti­mism. ” . . . .Yet anoth­er tri­al in less sick patients, also run by Gilead, does have a con­trol group and may give a clear­er answer. Nis­sen sees ‘a rea­son­able study design.’ But Bach was more crit­i­cal, say­ing that even though that study has a con­trol group, the lack of a place­bo means the study might not be trust­wor­thy. That’s because its main goal, time to improve­ment of symp­toms, could be affect­ed by the per­cep­tions of clin­i­cians and the patients them­selves. Bach said the hos­pi­tals con­duct­ing the study ‘are eas­i­ly capa­ble of wrap­ping syringes in brown paper and blind­ing the whole thing. I don’t under­stand why you would run a tri­al like this.’ . . . .”

Although it was cut short due to the wan­ing of the pan­dem­ic in Chi­na, a WHO-leaked study was not encour­ag­ing with regard to remde­sivir’s effi­ca­cy as a treat­ment for Covid-19.

1.–The Chi­nese study was a ram­dom­ized con­trolled tri­al: ” . . . . Encour­ag­ing data from patients in that study at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go were described by researchers at a vir­tu­al town hall and obtained by STAT last week. How­ev­er, unlike those data, these new results are from a ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­al, the med­ical gold stan­dard. . . .”

2.–The Chi­nese study found that remde­sivir was of no val­ue in pre­vent­ing Covid-19 deaths. As not­ed above, the effect of the drug on mor­tal­i­ty was the main con­sid­er­a­tion. Our soci­ety has not been shut down to afford peo­ple short­er stays in the hos­pi­tal, but to pre­vent death. ” . . . . Accord­ing to the sum­ma­ry of the Chi­na study, remde­sivir was ‘not asso­ci­at­ed with a dif­fer­ence in time to clin­i­cal improve­ment’ com­pared to a stan­dard of care con­trol. After one month, it appeared 13.9% of the remde­sivir patients had died com­pared to 12.8% of patients in the con­trol arm. The dif­fer­ence was not sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant. . . .”

3.–The Chi­nese study pro­duced a grim assess­ment of remde­sivir: ” . . . . ‘In this study of hos­pi­tal­ized adult patients with severe COVID-19 that was ter­mi­nat­ed pre­ma­ture­ly, remde­sivir was not asso­ci­at­ed with clin­i­cal or viro­log­i­cal ben­e­fits,’ the sum­ma­ry states. The study was ter­mi­nat­ed pre­ma­ture­ly because it was dif­fi­cult to enroll patients in Chi­na, where the num­ber of Covid-19 cas­es was decreas­ing. An out­side researcher said that the results mean that any ben­e­fit from remde­sivir is like­ly to be small. ‘If there is no ben­e­fit to remde­sivir in a study this size, this sug­gests that the over­all ben­e­fit of remde­sivir in this pop­u­la­tion with advanced infec­tion is like­ly to be small in the larg­er Gilead tri­al,’ said Andrew Hill, senior vis­it­ing research fel­low at Liv­er­pool Uni­ver­si­ty. . . .”

After dis­cussing a num­ber of prob­lems that Gilead Sci­ences may encounter in the pro­duc­tion of sig­nif­i­cant quan­ti­ties of remde­sivir to be effec­tive, the broad­cast con­cludes with dis­cus­sion of the inap­pro­pri­ate­ly-named “Sci­en­tists to Stop Covid-19.”

The remark­able han­dling of the NIAID study, the tim­ing of the announce­ment of the alto­geth­er lim­it­ed suc­cess of the atten­u­at­ed tri­al, and the rise in equi­ties as a result of the announce­ment may be best under­stood in the con­text of the role played in Trump pan­dem­ic deci­sion-mak­ing by an elite group of bil­lion­aires and scientists–including Peter Thiel and con­vict­ed felon Michael Milken (the “junk bond king”).

1.–” . . . . Call­ing them­selves ‘Sci­en­tists to Stop COVID-19,’ the col­lec­tion of top researchers, bil­lion­aires and indus­try cap­tains will act as an ‘ad hoc review board’ for the tor­rent of coro­n­avirus research, ‘weed­ing out’ flawed data before it reach­es pol­i­cy­mak­ers, the Wall Street Jour­nal report­ed on Mon­day. They are also act­ing as a go-between for phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies seek­ing to build a com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel with Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials. The group . . . . has advised Nick Ayers, an aide to Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence, as well as oth­er agency heads, in the past month. Pence is head­ing up the White House coro­n­avirus task force. . . .”

2.–” . . . The brainy bunch is led by Thomas Cahill, a 33-year-old doc­tor who became a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist . . . . Cahill’s clout comes from build­ing con­nec­tions through his invest­ment firm, New­path Part­ners, with Sil­i­con Valley’s Peter Thiel, the founder of Pay­Pal, and bil­lion­aire busi­ness­men Jim Palot­ta and Michael Milken. . . .”

Note that Thiel played a dom­i­nant role in bankrolling New­path Part­ners, and the oth­er finan­cial angel who ele­vat­ed Cahill–Brian Sheth–introduced him to Tom­my Hicks, Jr., the co-chair­man of the RNC. In FTR #‘s 1111 and 1112, we looked at Hicks’ net­work­ing with Steve Ban­non asso­ciate J. Kyle Bass, as well as his role in the inter-agency net­works dri­ving the anti-Chi­na effort.

1.–” . . . . At the helm of the effort: The 33-year-old and very-much-under-the-radar ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Tom Cahill, who leads life sci­ences-focused New­path Part­ners. Cahill com­plet­ed his M.D. and PhD at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty a mere two years ago before land­ing at blue-chip invest­ment firm Rap­tor Group through a friend. He went on to found New­path with some $125 mil­lion after impress­ing well-con­nect­ed names like ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Peter Thiel and Vista Equi­ty Part­ners co-founder Bri­an Sheth. . . . It was through Sheth, for exam­ple, that Sci­en­tists to Stop Covid-19 con­nect­ed with the co-chair­man of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee, Thomas Hicks Jr. . . .”

The fed­er­al gov­ern­men­t’s extreme focus on remde­sivir has been shaped, in large mea­sure, by the influ­ence of “Sci­en­tists to Stop COVID-19”:

1.–“Scientists to Stop Covid-19” is shep­herd­ing remde­sivir: ” . . . . Sci­en­tists to Stop COVID-19 rec­om­mends that in this phase, the U.S. Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion (FDA) should work to coor­di­nate with Gilead phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals to focus on expe­dit­ing the results of clin­i­cal tri­als of remde­sivir, a drug iden­ti­fied as a poten­tial treat­ment for COVID-19. The group also rec­om­mends admin­is­ter­ing dos­es of the drug to patients in an ear­ly stage of infec­tion, and notes remde­sivir will essen­tial­ly be a place­hold­er until a more effec­tive treat­ment is pro­duced.

2.–The group is doing so by atten­u­at­ing the reg­u­la­to­ry process for coro­n­avirus drugs: “Gov­ern­ment enti­ties and agen­cies appear to adhere to the rec­om­men­da­tions out­lined by the group, with the Jour­nal report­ing that the FDA and the Depart­ment of Vet­er­ans Affairs (VA) have imple­ment­ed some of the sug­ges­tions, name­ly relax­ing drug man­u­fac­tur­er reg­u­la­tions and require­ments for poten­tial coro­n­avirus treat­ment drugs. . . .”

We con­clude with a piece about the announce­ment of Grogan’s depar­ture.

” . . . . Gro­gan has served as the direc­tor of the White House Domes­tic Pol­i­cy Coun­cil since Feb­ru­ary 2019, over­see­ing a broad array of pol­i­cy issues includ­ing health care and reg­u­la­tion. . . . Gro­gan was one of the orig­i­nal mem­bers of the White House coro­n­avirus task force launched in late Jan­u­ary. . . . Gro­gan worked as a lob­by­ist for drug com­pa­ny Gilead Sci­ences before join­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. . . .”

The depar­ture was announced in the Wall Street Jour­nal on the morn­ing of Wednes­day, April 29, the same day we got our first pub­lic reports of the NIAID clin­i­cal tri­al of remde­sivir that was pos­i­tive enough to show it short­ened the time to recov­ery and the same day the FDA grant­ed remde­sivir emer­gency use sta­tus. 

Note, again, the tim­ing of the DSM­B’s actions, as well as the imflu­ence of “Sci­en­tists to Stop Covid-19.”

Repost: The REAL Memorial Day

Due to the shel­ter-in-place restric­tions, it is not pos­si­ble for Mr. Emory to do his annu­al Memo­r­i­al Day marathon pro­gram­ming about the deci­sive con­nec­tions between Amer­i­can indus­try and finance and the Axis pow­ers of World War II. How­ev­er, we re-post the descrip­tion and pro­gram links from last year’s spe­cial for view­ing and use of the listening–and reading–audience: “In the decades since the end of the Sec­ond World War, much has been writ­ten about the war and fas­cism, the dri­ving force behind the aggres­sion that pre­cip­i­tat­ed that con­flict. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, much of what has been said and writ­ten has failed to iden­ti­fy and ana­lyze the caus­es, nature and method­ol­o­gy of fascism—German Nation­al Social­ism or “Nazism” in par­tic­u­lar. A deep­er, more accu­rate analy­sis was pre­sent­ed in pub­lished lit­er­a­ture, par­tic­u­lar­ly vol­umes pub­lished dur­ing, or in the imme­di­ate after­math of, the Sec­ond World War. . . . . Fas­cism (Nazism in par­tic­u­lar) was an out­growth of glob­al­iza­tion and the con­struc­tion of inter­na­tion­al monop­o­lies (car­tels). Key to under­stand­ing this phe­nom­e­non is analy­sis of the Webb-Pomerene act, leg­is­lat­ed near the end of the First World War. A loop­hole in the Anti-trust leg­is­la­tion of 1914, it effec­tive­ly legal­ized the for­ma­tion of cartels—international monopolies—for firms that were barred from domes­tic monop­o­lis­tic prac­tices. Decry­ing what they viewed as exces­sive and restric­tive “reg­u­la­tion” here in the Unit­ed States, U.S.-based transna­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions invest­ed their prof­its from the indus­tri­al boom of the 1920’s abroad, pri­mar­i­ly in Japan and Ger­many. This process might well be viewed as the real begin­ning of what is now known as “glob­al­iza­tion.” This rein­vest­ment of the prof­its of the Amer­i­can indus­tri­al boom of the 1920’s in Japan­ese and Ger­man strate­gic heavy indus­try was the cap­i­tal that drove the engines of con­quest that sub­dued both Europe and Asia dur­ing World War II. On Sun­day, we will high­light the Amer­i­can-Ger­man indus­tri­al axis and its var­i­ous man­i­fes­ta­tions. On Mon­day, we will explore the Amer­i­can-Japan­ese indus­tri­al axis.”

Moderna, The Military, Medicine and Money

In past posts and pro­grams, we have not­ed that Moderna–which has been select­ed to devel­op a Covid-19 vaccine–has been sub­stan­tial­ly under­writ­ten by the Pen­ta­gon (DARPA). The vac­cine they are devel­op­ing is a mRNA (mes­sen­ger RNA) vaccine–a type of vac­cine that has nev­er been admin­is­tered to human sub­jects and is seen as very risky: ” . . . . Both DNA and mRNA vac­cines involve the intro­duc­tion of for­eign and engi­neered genet­ic mate­r­i­al into a person’s cells and past stud­ies have found that such vac­cines ‘pos­sess sig­nif­i­cant unpre­dictabil­i­ty and a num­ber of inher­ent harm­ful poten­tial haz­ards’ and that ‘there is inad­e­quate knowl­edge to define either the prob­a­bil­i­ty of unin­tend­ed events or the con­se­quences of genet­ic mod­i­fi­ca­tions.’ . . .” The head of Trump’s “Oper­a­tion Warp Speed” coro­n­avirus vac­cine pro­gram is Mon­cef Slaoui, for­mer­ly in charge of Mod­er­na’s prod­uct devel­op­ment com­mit­tee. He says that he had ” . . . .‘recent­ly seen ear­ly data from a clin­i­cal tri­al with a coro­n­avirus vac­cine, and these data made me feel even more con­fi­dent that we will be able to deliv­er a few hun­dred mil­lion dos­es of vac­cine’ — enough to inoc­u­late much of the Unit­ed States — ‘by the end of 2020. . . .” This despite the fact that no vac­cine has been approved for human use in less than four years. Slaoui will be assist­ed by Gen­er­al Gus­tave F. Per­na, whose appoint­ment was facil­i­tat­ed by Gen­er­al Mark A. Mil­ley, Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs. Inter­est­ing­ly, Slaoui holds more than $10 mil­lion worth of Mod­er­na stock, which has increased 184% since the begin­ning of the year, due to ” . . . . more than $400 mil­lion from the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to assist tri­als of a coro­n­avirus vac­cine. . . .”