Curious how they suddenly knew this was a killer virus
Deliberate or a mistake?
Whole city in lockdown very quickly
Must have had some inkling of what to test for
When people get flu do doctors usually test what strain of flu they've got?
Tested for it very quickly after it started.
Now a potential global threat
What rubbish that this virus is probably a mutation from a snake - Chinese whispers!
Coronavirus TEST developed INSTANTLY
But errs n the side of caution
How many diagnosed in the west is a misdiagnosis?
3% fatal (but at what ages?)
1 week incubation - fever cough - then
Basic reproduction value around 1.5, between one and two if no intervention
Coronavirus: number infected hits 1,400 worldwide
– today's developments
More than 1,370 infected in China as officials try to stem spread of virus which has reached Europe, the US and Australia.
Today’s news as it happened
Full report: 50m people in China under lockdown
Spread of virus shakes faith in Chinese government
''Coronavirus may have origins in China''s biological warfarelab in Wuhan''
New Delhi, Jan 26 (IANS) Lethal animal virus epidemic coronavirus, which has sent panic waves across the world, may have its origins at the epicentre of the epidemic, Wuhan, in a laboratory which has been linked to China''s covert biological weapons programme.
The Washington Times reported the link with China''s biological weapons quoting an Israeli biological warfare expert.
According to the report, Radio Free Asia this week rebroadcast a local Wuhan television report from 2015 showing China''s most advanced virus research laboratory known as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The laboratory is the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses.
Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese bio warfare, said the institute is linked to Beijing''s covert biological weapons programme.
"Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese (biological weapons), at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment," Shoham told The Washington Times.
Work on biological weapons is conducted as part of a dual civilian-military research and is "definitely covert," he said.
From 1970 to 1991, he was a senior analyst with Israeli military intelligence for biological and chemical warfare in the Middle East and worldwide, holding the rank of lieutenant colonel.
China in the past has denied having any offensive biological weapons. The State Department, in a report last year, said it suspects that China has engaged in covert biological warfare work.
Chinese officials so far have said the origin of coronavirus that has killed many and infected hundreds in central Hubei Province is not known.
Gao Fu, Director of Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told state-controlled media that initial signs as of Thursday indicated that the virus originated from wild animals sold at a seafood market in Wuhan.
As per the Washington Times, one ominous sign, said a US official, is that false rumours since the outbreak began several weeks ago are being circulated on the Chinese internet claiming the virus is part of a US conspiracy to spread germ weapons.
That could indicate that China is preparing propaganda outlets to counter future charges the new virus escaped from one of Wuhan''s civilian or defense research laboratories.
The World Health Organization is calling the microbe novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV. At a meeting in Geneva on Thursday, the organisation stopped short of declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
The virus outbreak causes pneumonia-like symptoms and prompted China to deploy military forces to Wuhan this week in a bid to halt the spread. All travel out of the city of 11 million people was halted.
The Wuhan site has studied coronaviruses in the past, including the strain that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, H5N1 influenza virus, Japanese encephalitis, and dengue. Researchers at the institute also studied the germ that causes anthrax -- a biological agent once developed in Russia.
It is not known if the institute''s array of coronaviruses are specifically included in biological weapons programme but it is possible, Shoham said.
Asked if the new coronavirus may have leaked, Shoham said: "In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn''t evidence or indication for such incident."
The former Israeli military intelligence doctor also said suspicions were raised about the institute when a group of Chinese virologists working in Canada improperly sent samples to China of what he said were some of the deadliest viruses on earth, including the Ebola virus.
In a July article in the journal Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, Shoham said the Wuhan institute was one of four Chinese laboratories engaged in some aspects of the biological weapons development.
He identified the secure Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory at the institute as engaged in research on the Ebola, Nipah, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever viruses.
The Wuhan virology institute is under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. But certain laboratories within it "have linkage with the PLA or BW-related elements within the Chinese defense establishment," he said.
In 1993, China declared a second facility, the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, as one of eight biological warfare research facilities covered by the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) which China joined in 1985.
The Wuhan Institute of Biological Products is a civilian facility but is linked to the Chinese defense establishment, and has been regarded to be involved in the Chinese BW programme, Shoham said.
"The US has compliance concerns with respect to Chinese military medical institutions'' toxin research and development because of the potential dual-use applications and their potential as a biological threat," the report added.
The biosafety lab is located about 20 miles from the Hunan Seaford Market that reports from China say may have been origin point of the virus.
Sat 4 Jan 2020 05.56 GMTLast modified on Tue 7 Jan 2020 00.59 GMT
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Carrie Lam
Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, has urged any travellers who develop respiratory symptoms to wear surgical masks, seek medical attention and let doctors know where they have been. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/AP
Hong Kong authorities have moved to “serious response” level as fears spread about a mysterious infectious disease that may have been brought back by visitors to a mainland Chinese city.
Five possible cases have been reported of a viral pneumonia that has also infected at least 44 people in Wuhan, an inland city west of Shanghai and about 900km north of Hong Kong.
The outbreak, which emerged last month, has revived memories of the 2002-2003 Sars epidemic that started in southern China and killed more than 700 people in the mainland, Hong Kong and elsewhere.
The serious-response level activated on Saturday indicates a moderate impact on Hong Kong’s population of 7.5 million people. It is the second highest in a three-tier system that is part of a new government plan launched Saturday to respond to infectious diseases of unknown cause.
Hong Kong culls 6,000 pigs after African swine fever found
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The city’s health department added an additional thermal imaging system at Hong Kong’s airport on Friday to check the body temperature of arriving passengers. More staff have been assigned for temperature checks at the West Kowloon high-speed rail station that connects Hong Kong to the mainland.
City leader Carrie Lam, on a visit to the train station on Friday to review the health surveillance measures, urged any travellers who develop respiratory symptoms to wear surgical masks, seek medical attention and let doctors know where they have been.
The Wuhan health commission said 11 of the 44 people diagnosed with the pneumonia were in critical condition as of Friday. All were being treated in isolation and 121 others who had been in close contact with them were under observation.
Most of the cases have been traced to the South China Seafood City food market in the suburbs of sprawling Wuhan, where offerings reportedly include wild animals that can carry viruses dangerous to humans. The commission said the market has been disinfected.
The most common symptom had been fever, with shortness of breath and lung infections in a small number of cases, the commission said. There had been no clear indications of human-to-human transmission of the disease.
The latest cases in Hong Kong are two women, aged 12 and 41, who had been to Wuhan in the past 14 days but did not appear to have visited the food market, the Hospital Authority said. They were in stable condition and being treated in isolation at Princess Margaret Hospital.
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Besides Sars, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, Hong Kong has also been hit by bird flu in 1997 and swine flu in 2009.
An Israeli biological warfare expert is linking China’s deadly Wuhan virus to China’s ‘covert biological warfare’ laboratory(s); It’s believed that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is where the disease may have originated.
An Israeli biological warfare expert by the name of Dany Shoham, who is now with the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University in Israel, believes that the deadly Wuhan virus is likely connected to one of China’s covert biological warfare laboratories; in this case, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. While there is a lot of speculation at this point, there are several truths that validate his concern. Shoham stated, “Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese biological weapons, at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment.”
Dany Shoham was a lieutenant colonel and a senior analyst with the Israeli Military Intelligence for biological and chemical warfare, and he unquestionably states that biological tests that are run in these laboratories are ‘covert’. In addition to his suspicions, the US State Department believes that China has been partaking in covert biological warfare operations as well. Though China is denying any rumors of involvement.
The State Department issued a report in 2019 stating that “Information indicates that the People’s Republic of China engaged during the reporting period in biological activities with potential dual-use applications, which raises concerns regarding its compliance with the BWC,” the report said, adding that the United States suspects China failed to eliminate its biological warfare program as required by the treaty. The United States has compliance concerns with respect to Chinese military medical institutions’ toxin research and development because of the potential dual-use applications and their potential as a biological threat.”
By Dilyana Gaytandzhieva 21st Century Wire @dgaytandzhieva
SPECIAL REPORT
The US Army regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria and toxins in direct violation of the UN Convention on the prohibition of Biological Weapons.
As a result, many hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are systematically exposed to dangerous pathogens, and other potentially incurable diseases. This highly classified network of R &D and production facilities includes an array of US government private contracts, which raises additional concerns about privatised chains of command and public accountability.
While much of the mainstream discourse of this subject centres around the asymmetric threat posed by non-state actors procuring and using biological agents in ‘bioterrorism’ attacks, very little if any investigation is done into the very real threat posed by states and private companies who are involved in this highly opaque industry.
Part One: US Overseas Bio-Laboratories Network
Bio warfare scientists using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at Pentagon bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world.
These US bio-laboratories are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program – Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), and are located in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.
PHOTO: The Lugar Center, Republic of Georgia
The US Army has been deployed to Vaziani Military Air Base, 17 km away from the Pentagon bio-laboratory at The Lugar Center.
Georgia is a testing ground for bioweapons
The Lugar Center is the Pentagon bio laboratory in Georgia. It is located just 17 km away from the US Vaziani military airbase in the capital Tbilisi. Tasked with the military program are biologists from the US Army Medical Research Unit-Georgia (USAMRU-G) along with private contractors. The Bio-safety Level 3 Laboratory is accessible only to US citizens with security clearance. They are accorded diplomatic immunity under the 2002 US-Georgia Agreement on defense cooperation.
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The USA-Georgia agreement accords diplomatic status to the US military and civilian personnel (including diplomatic vehicles), working on the Pentagon program in Georgia.
Information obtained from the US federal contracts registry clarifies some of the military activities at The Lugar Center – among them research on bio-agents (anthrax, tularemia) and viral diseases (e.g. Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever), and the collection of biological samples for future experiments.
Pentagon contractors produce bio agents under diplomatic cover
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has outsourced much of the work under the military program to private companies, which are not held accountable to Congress, and which can operate more freely and move around the rule of law. US civilian personnel performing work at The Lugar Center have also been given diplomatic immunity, although they are not diplomats. Hence, private companies can perform work, under diplomatic cover, for the US government without being under the direct control of the host state – in this case the Republic of Georgia. This practice is often used by the CIA to provide cover for its agents.
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Three private American companies work at the US bio-laboratory in Tbilisi – CH2M Hill, Battelle and Metabiota. In addition to the Pentagon, these private contractors perform biological research for the CIA and various other government agencies.
CH2M Hill has been awarded $341.5 million DTRA contracts under the Pentagon’s program for bio-laboratories in Georgia, Uganda, Tanzania, Iraq, Afghanistan, South East Asia. Half of this sum ($161.1 million), being allocated to The Lugar Center, under the Georgian contract.
According to CH2M Hill, the US Company has secured biological agents and employed former bio warfare scientists at The Lugar Center. These are scientists who are working for another American company involved in the military program in Georgia – Battelle Memorial Institute.
Battelle as a $59 million subcontractor at Lugar Center has extensive experience in research on bio-agents, as the company has already worked on the US Bio-weapons Program under 11 previous contracts with the US Army (1952-1966).
Source: US Army Activities in the US, Biological Warfare Programs, vol. II, 1977, p. 82
The private company performs work for the Pentagon’s DTRA bio laboratories in Afghanistan, Armenia, Georgia, Uganda, Tanzania, Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Battelle conducts research, development, testing, and evaluation using both highly toxic chemicals and highly pathogenic biological agents for a wide range of US government agencies. It has been awarded some $2 billion federal contracts in total and ranks 23 on the Top 100 US government contractors list.
The CIA-Battelle Project Clear Vision
Project Clear Vision (1997 and 2000), a joint investigation by the CIA and the Battelle Memorial Institute, under a contract awarded by the Agency, reconstructed and tested a Soviet-era anthrax bomblet in order to test its dissemination characteristics.
The project’s stated goal was to assess bio-agents dissemination characteristics of bomblets. The clandestine CIA-Battelle operation was omitted from the US Biological Weapons Convention declarations submitted to the UN.
Classified Experiments
Battelle has operated a Top Secret Bio laboratory (National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center – NBACC) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, under a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contract for the last decade. The company has been awarded a $344.4 million federal contract (2006 – 2016) and another $17.3 million contract (2015 -2026) by the DHS.
NBACC is officially classified as a US Top Secret facility (Photo Credit: DHS)
Among these classified experiments, performed by Battelle at NBACC, are:
Assessment of powder dissemination technology ; Assessment of hazard posed by aerosolized toxins and Assessment of virulence of B. Pseudomallei (Meliodosis) as a function of aerosol particle in non-human primates.
Melioidosis has the potential to be developed as a biological weapon, hence, it is classed as a category B. Bioterrorism Agent. B. Pseudomallei was studied by the US as a potential bioweapon in the past.
Besides the military experiments at the Lugar Center in Georgia, Battelle has already produced ‘bioterrorism’ agents at the Biosafety Level 4 NBACC Top Secret Laboratory at Fort Detrick in the US.
Scientists engineer pathogens at the NBACC lab (Source: NBACC)
A NBACC presentation lists 16 research priorities for the lab. Amongst them to characterize classical, emerging and genetically engineered pathogens for their BTA (biological threat agent) potential; assess the nature of nontraditional, novel and non-endemic induction of disease from potential BTA and to expand aerosol-challenge testing capacity for non-human primates.
Pentagon biolabs at the epicenter of the Ebola crisis
The US Company Metabiota Inc. has been awarded $18.4 million federal contracts under the Pentagon’s DTRA program in Georgia and Ukraine for scientific and technical consulting services.
Metabiota services include global field-based biological threat research, pathogen discovery, outbreak response and clinical trials.
Metabiota Inc. had been contracted by the Pentagon to perform work for DTRA before and during the Ebola crisis in West Africa and was awarded $3.1 million (2012-2015) for work in Sierra Leone – one of the countries at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak.
IMAGE: Metabiota worked on a Pentagon’s project at the epicenter of the Ebola crisis, where three US biolabs are situated.
A July 17, 2014 report drafted by the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium, accused Metabiota Inc. of failing to abide by an existing agreement on how to report test results and for bypassing the Sierra Leonean scientists working there. The report also raised the possibility that Metabiota was culturing blood cells at the lab, something the report said was dangerous, as well as misdiagnosing healthy patients. All of those allegations were denied by Metabiota.
(Image, Left) In 2011, The Lugar Center, Andrew C. Weber US Assistant Secretary of Defense (2009-2014), US DoD Deputy Coordinator for Ebola Response (2014-2015), is currently a Metabiota ( the US contractor) employee.
Military Experiments on biting insects
Entomological warfare is a type of biological warfare that uses insects to transmit diseases.
The Pentagon has allegedly performed such entomological tests in Georgia and Russia.
Biting Flies in Georgia
In 2014 The Lugar Center was equipped with an insect facility and launched a project “Raising Awareness about Barcoding of Sand Flies in Georgia and Caucasus”. The project covered a larger geographic area outside of Georgia – Caucasus.
In 2014-2015 Phlebotomine sand fly species were collected under another project “Surveillance Work on Acute Febrile Illness” and all (female) sand flies were tested to determine their infectivity rate.
A third project, also including sand flies collection, studied the characteristics of their salivary glands.
Biting flies Georgia
As a result Tbilisi has been infested with biting flies since 2015. These biting insects live indoors, in bathrooms, all year long, which was not the typical behaviour of these species in Georgia previously (normally the Phlebotomine fly season in Georgia is exceptionally short – from June to September). Local people complain of being bitten by these newly appeared flies while naked in their bathrooms. They also have a strong resistance to cold and can survive even in the sub-zero temperatures in the mountains.
Biting Flies in Dagestan, Russia
Since the start of the Pentagon project in 2014 flies similar to those in Georgia have appeared in neighboring Dagestan (Russia). According to local people, they bite and cause rashes. Their breeding habitats are house drains.
Flies in Georgia (on the left). The same fly in Dagestan (on the right)
Flies from the Phlebotomine family carry dangerous parasites in their saliva which they transmit through a bite to humans. The disease, which these flies carry, is of high interest to the Pentagon. In 2003 during the US invasion of Iraq American soldiers were severely bitten by sand flies and contracted Leishmoniasis. The disease is native to Iraq and Afghanistan and if left untreated the acute form of Leishmoniasis can be fatal.
A 1967 US Army report “Arthropods of medical importance in Asia and the European USSR” lists all local insects, their distribution and the diseases that they carry. Biting flies, which live in drains, are also listed in the document. Their natural habitats, though, are the Philippines, not Georgia or Russia.
Source: “Arthropods of medical importance in Asia and the European USSR”, US Army report, 1967
Operation Whitecoat: Infected flies tested to bite humans
In 1970 and 1972, Sand Fly Fever tests were performed on humans according to a declassified US Army report – US Army Activities in the US, Biological Warfare Programs, 1977, vol. II, p. 203. During operation Whitecoat volunteers were exposed to bites by infected sand flies. Operation Whitecoat was a bio-defense medical research program carried out by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland between 1954 and 1973.
Despite the official termination of the US bio-weapons program, in 1982 USAMRIID performed an experiment to see if sand flies and mosquitoes could be vectors of Rift Valley Virus, Dengue, Chikungunya and Eastern Equine Encephalitis – viruses, which the US Army researched for their potential as bio-weapons.
Killer Insects
A. Aegupti Mosquito
The Pentagon has a long history in using insects as vectors for diseases. According to a partially declassified 1981 US Army report, American bio warfare scientists carried out a number of experiments on insects. These operations were part of the US Entomological Warfare under the Program for Biological Weapons of the US.
‘Value for Money’: How to kill 625,000 people for just $0.29 cost per death
A US Army report in 1981 compared two scenarios – 16 simultaneous attacks on a city by A. Aegupti mosquitoes, infected with Yellow Fever, and Tularemia aerosol attack, and assesses their effectiveness in cost and casualties.
‘Operation Big Itch’: Field tests were performed to determine coverage patterns and survivability of the tropical rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis for use as a disease vector in biological warfare.
‘Operation Big Buzz’: 1 million A. Aeugupti mosquitoes were produced, 1/3 were placed in munitions and dropped from aircraft, or dispersed on the ground. The mosquitoes survived the airdrop and actively sought out human blood.
Source: Evaluation of Entomological Warfare as a potential Danger to the US and European NATO nations, US Army, March 1981 Report.
Operation May Day: Aedes Aegupti mosquitoes were dispersed through ground based methods in Georgia, USA, during a US Army operation codenamed “May Day.”
Parts of the 1981 US Army report such as the “Mass production of Aedes Aegypti” have not been declassified, potentially meaning that the project is still ongoing.
Aedes Aegypti, also known as yellow fever mosquito, have been widely used in US military operations. The same species of mosquitoes are alleged to be the vectors of dengue, chikungunya and the Zika virus, which causes genetic malformations in newborns.
Operation Bellweather
The US Army Chemical Research and Development Command, Biological Weapons Branch, studied outdoor mosquito biting activity in a number of field tests at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, in 1960. Virgin female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which had been starved, were tested upon troops out in the open air.
For reference: Outdoor Mosquito Biting Activity Studies, Project Bellweather I, 1960, Technical Report, US Army, Dugway Proving Ground
Military Experiments with Tropical Mosquitoes and Ticks in Georgia
Such species of mosquitoes and fleas (studied in the past under the US Entomological Warfare Program) have also been collected in Georgia and tested at The Lugar Center.
Under the DTRA project “Virus and Other Arboviruses in Georgia” in 2014 the never-before-seen tropical mosquito Aedes albopictus was detected for the first time and after decades (60 years) the existence of Aedes Aegypti mosquito was confirmed in West Georgia.
Aedes Albopictus is a vector of many viral pathogens, Yellow fever virus, Dengue, Chikungunya and Zika. These tropical mosquitoes Aedes Albopictus having never been seen before in Georgia, have also been detected in neighboring Russia (Krasnodar) and Turkey, according to data provided by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Their spread is unusual for this part of the world.
Aedes Aegupti Mosquitoes have been distributed only in Georgia, Southern Russia and Northern Turkey. They were detected for the first time in 2014 after the start of the Pentagon program at The Lugar Center.
Under another DTRA project “Epidemiology and Ecology of Tularemia in Georgia” (2013-2016) 6,148 ground ticks were collected ; 5,871 were collected off the cattle and 1,310 fleas and 731 ticks were caught. In 2016 a further 21 590 ticks were collected and studied at The Lugar Center.
Anthrax Outbreak in Georgia and NATO Human Trials
In 2007 Georgia ended its policy of having compulsory annual livestock anthrax vaccination. As a result, the morbidity rate of the disease reached its peak in 2013. The same year NATO started human based anthrax vaccine tests at The Lugar Center in Georgia.
(Above) In 2007 despite the anthrax outbreak the Georgian government terminated the compulsory vaccination for 7 years, 2013 saw NATO start human trials on a new anthrax vaccine in Georgia.
Pentagon Research on Russian Anthrax
Anthrax is one of the bio agents weaponized by the US Army in the past. Despite the Pentagon’s claims that its program is only defensive, there are facts to the contrary. In 2016 at The Lugar Center American scientists carried out research on the “Genome Sequence of the Soviet/Russian Bacillus anthracis Vaccine Strain 55-VNIIVViM”, which was funded by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s (DTRA) Cooperative Biological Engagement Program in Tbilisi, and administered by Metabiota (the US contractor under the Pentagon program in Georgia). In 2017 the DTRA funded further research – Ten Genome Sequences of Human and Livestock Isolates of Bacillus anthracis from the Country of Georgia, which was performed by USAMRU-G at The Lugar Center.
34 people intentionally infected with Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) in Georgia
Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is caused by infection through a tick-borne virus (Nairovirus). The disease was first characterized in Crimea in 1944 and given the name Crimean hemorrhagic fever. It was then later recognized in 1969 as the cause of illness in Congo, thus resulting in the current name of the disease.
In 2014 34 people became infected (among them a 4-year old child) with CCHF. 3 of which died.
The same year Pentagon biologists studied the virus in Georgia under the DTRA project “Epidemiology of febrile illnesses caused by Dengue viruses and other Arboviruses in Georgia”. The project included tests on patients with fever symptoms and the collection of ticks, as possible vectors of CCHV for laboratory analysis.
33 people became infected with CCHF, 3 of them died in Georgia. Source: NCDC-Georgia
The cause of the CCHF outbreak in Georgia is still unknown. According to the local Veterinary Department report, only one tick from all of the collected species from the infected villages tested positive for the disease. Despite the claims of the local authorities that the virus was transmitted to humans from animals, all animal blood samples were negative too. The lack of infected ticks and animals is inexplicable given the sharp increase of CCHF human cases in 2014, meaning that the outbreak was not natural and the virus was spread intentionally.
IMAGE: Symptoms of CCHF.
In 2016 another 21 590 ticks were collected for DNA database for future studies at The Lugar Center under the Pentagon project “Assessing the Seroprevalence and Genetic Diversity of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Virus (CCHFV) and Hantaviruses in Georgia”.
Military bio-lab blamed for deadly CCHF outbreak in Afghanistan
237 cases of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) have also been reported across Afghanistan, 41 of which were fatal as of December 2017. According to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Health most of the cases have been registered in the capital Kabul where 71 cases have been reported with 13 fatalities, and in the province of Herat near the border with Iran (67 cases).
Afghanistan is one of 25 countries across the world with Pentagon bio-laboratories on their territory. The project in Afghanistan is part of the US bio-defense program – Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), which is funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The DTRA contractors, working at The Lugar Center in Georgia, CH2M Hill and Battelle have also been contracted for the program in Afghanistan. CH2M Hill has been awarded a $10.4 million contract (2013-2017).
The Pentagon contractors in Afghanistan and Georgia are the same and so are the diseases which are spreading among the local population in both countries.
Why the Pentagon collects and studies bats
Bats are allegedly the reservoir hosts to the Ebola Virus , Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and other deadly diseases. However, the precise ways these viruses are transmitted to humans are currently unknown.
Numerous studies have been performed under the DTRA Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) in a search for deadly pathogens of military importance in bats.
221 bats were euthanized at the Lugar Center for research purposes in 2014.
Bats have been blamed for the deadly Ebola outbreak in Africa (2014-2016). However, no conclusive evidence of exactly how the virus “jumped” to humans has ever been provided, which raises suspicions of intentional and not natural infection.
Engineering deadly viruses is legal in the US
MERS-CoV is thought to originate from bats and spread directly to humans and/or camels. However, like Ebola, the precise ways the virus spreads are unknown. 1,980 cases with 699 deaths were reported in 15 countries across the world (as of June 2017) caused by MERS-CoV.
GRAPH: 3 to 4 out of every 10 patients reported with MERS have died (Source: WHO)
MERS-CoV is one of the viruses that have been engineered by the US and studied by the Pentagon, as well as Influenza and SARS. Confirmation of this practice is Obama’s 2014 temporary ban on government funding for such “dual-use” research. The moratorium was lifted in 2017 and experiments have continued. Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens (PPPs) experiments are legal in the US.
Such experiments aim to increase the transmissibility and/or virulence of pathogens.
Tularemia as Bioweapon
Tularemia, also known as Rabbit Fever, is classified as a bioterrorism agent and was developed in the past as such by the US. However, the Pentagon’s research on tularemia continues, as well as on possible vectors of the bacteria such as ticks and rodents which cause the disease. F. Tularensis is a highly infectious bacterium and has the potential to be weaponized for use through aerosol attacks.
F. Tularensis
The DTRA has launched a number of projects on Tularemia along with other especially dangerous pathogens in Georgia. Especially Dangerous Pathogens (EDPs), or select agents, represent a major concern for the public health globally.
These highly pathogenic agents have the potential to be weaponized with proof of their military importance seen through the following Pentagon projects:
Epidemiology and Ecology of Tularemia in Georgia (2013-2016) (60 000 vectors were collected for strain isolates and genome research); Epidemiology of Human Tularemia in Georgia and Human Disease Epidemiology and Surveillance of Especially Dangerous Pathogens in Georgia (study of select agents among patients with undifferentiated fever and hemorrhagic fever/septic shock).
Tularemia is one of the bio-weapons that the US Army developed in the past. Source: 1981 US Army Report
Pentagon bio-laboratories spread diseases in Ukraine
The DoD Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has funded 11 bio-laboratories in the former Soviet Union Country Ukraine, bordering on Russia.
The US military program is sensitive information
Ukraine has no control over the military bio-laboratories on its own territory. According to the 2005 Agreement between the US DoD and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine the Ukrainian government is prohibited from public disclosure of sensitive information about the US program and Ukraine is obliged to transfer to the US Department of Defense (DoD) dangerous pathogens for biological research. The Pentagon has been granted access to certain state secrets of Ukraine in connection with the projects under their agreement.
Biowarfare scientists under diplomatic cover
Among the set of bilateral agreements between the US and Ukraine is the establishment of the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU) – an International organization funded mainly by the US government which has been accorded diplomatic status.
The STCU officially supports projects of scientists previously involved in the Soviet biological weapons program. Over the past 20 years the STCU has invested over $285 million in funding and managing some 1,850 projects of scientists who previously worked on the development of weapons of mass destruction.
The US personnel in Ukraine work under diplomatic cover.
364 Ukrainians died from Swine Flu
One of the Pentagon laboratories is located in Kharkiv, where in January 2016 at least 20 Ukrainian soldiers died from Flu-like virus in just two days with 200 more being hospitalized. The Ukrainian government did not report on the dead Ukrainian soldiers in Kharkiv.
As of March 2016 364 deaths have been reported across Ukraine (81.3 % caused by Swine Flu A (H1N1) pdm09 – the same strain which caused the world pandemic in 2009).
According to DPR intelligence information the US bio lab in Kharkiv leaked the deadly virus (pictured above).
Police investigate infection with incurable disease
A highly suspicious Hepatitis A infection spread rapidly in just few months across South East Ukraine where most of the Pentagon biolabs are located.
37 people have been hospitalized for Hepatitis A in the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv as of January 2018. Local police have launched an investigation into “infection with human immunodeficiency virus and other incurable diseases”.
In addition, three years ago more than 100 people in the same city became infected with Cholera. Both diseases are alleged to have spread through contaminated drinking water.
In the summer of 2017 60 people with Hepatitis A were admitted to hospital in the city of Zaporizhia, the cause of this outbreak is still unknown.
In the Odessa region, 19 children from an orphanage were hospitalized for hepatitis A in June 2017. 29 cases of Hepatitis A were reported in Kharkiv in November 2017. The virus was isolated in contaminated drinking water.
One of the Pentagon bio-labs is located in Kharkiv which was blamed for the deadly Flu outbreak a year ago which claimed the lives of 364 Ukrainians.
Ukraine and Russia hit by new highly virulent cholera infection
In 2011 Ukraine was hit by a cholera outbreak. 33 patients were reportedly hospitalized for severe diarrhea.
A second outbreak struck the country in 2014 when more than 800 people all across Ukraine were reported to have contracted the disease.
In 2015 at least 100 new cases were registered in the city of Mykolaiv alone.
A new highly virulent variant of the cholera agent Vibrio cholera, with a high genetic similarity to the strains reported in Ukraine, hit Moscow in 2014. According to a 2014 Russian Research Anti-Plaque Institute genetic study the cholera strain isolated in Moscow was similar to the bacteria which caused the epidemic in neighboring Ukraine.
Southern Research Institute, one of the US contractors working at the bio-laboratories in Ukraine, has projects on Cholera, as well as on Influenza and Zika – all pathogens of military importance to the Pentagon.
Along with Southern Research Institute, two other private American companies operate military bio-labs in Ukraine – Black&Veatch and Metabiota.
Black & Veatch Special Project Corp. was awarded $198.7 million DTRA contracts to build and operate bio-laboratories in Ukraine (under two 5-year contracts in 2008 and 2012 totaling $128.5 million), as well as in Germany, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Thailand, Ethiopia, Vietnam and Armenia.
Metabiota has been awarded a $18.4 million federal contract under the program in Georgia and Ukraine. This US company was also contracted to perform work for the DTRA before and during the Ebola crisis in West Africa, the company was awarded $3.1 million (2012-2015) for work in Sierra Leone .
Southern Research Institute has been a prime subcontractor under the DTRA program in Ukraine since 2008. The company was also a prime Pentagon contractor in the past under the US Biological Weapons Program for research and development of bio-agents with 16 contracts between 1951 and 1962.
Source: US Army Activities in the US, Biological Warfare Programs, vol. II, 1977, p. 82
Soviet Defector produced anthrax for the Pentagon
Southern Research Institute was also a subcontractor on a Pentagon program for anthrax research in 2001. The prime contractor being Advanced Biosystems, whose president at that time was Ken Alibek (a former Soviet microbiologist and biological warfare expert from Kazakhstan who defected to the US in 1992).
Ken Alibek was the First Deputy Director of Biopreparat, where he oversaw a program for biological weapon facilities and was the Soviet Union’s main expert on anthrax. After his defection to the US, he was engaged on Pentagon research projects.
$250 000 for lobbying Jeff Sessions for “research for US intelligence”
Southern Research Institute lobbied the US Congress and US Department of State hard for “issues related to research and development for US intelligence” and “defense related research and development”. The lobbying activities coincided with the start of the Pentagon projects on bio-labs in Ukraine and other former Soviet states.
The company paid $ 250 000 for lobbying the then Senator Jeff Sessions in 2008-2009 (currently the US Attorney General appointed by Donald Trump), when the institute was awarded a number of federal contracts.
Watson Donald
For a 10-year period (2006-2016) Southern Research Institute paid $1.28 million for lobbying the US Senate, House of Representatives , the State Department and the Department of Defense (DoD). Senator Jeff Sessions’ aide on Capitol Hill – Watson Donald, is now a Senior Director at Southern Research Institute.
Police investigate Botulinum toxin poisoning in Ukraine
115 Botulism cases, with 12 deaths, were reported in Ukraine in 2016. In 2017 the Ukrainian Ministry of Health confirmed a further 90 new cases, with 8 deaths, of botulinum toxin poisoning (one of the most poisonous biological substances known).
According to the local health authorities, the cause of the outbreak was food poisoning into which police launched an investigation . The Pentagon biolaboratories in Ukraine were among the prime suspects, as botulinum toxin is one of the bioterrorism agents which have already been produced at a Pentagon bioweapons facility in the US (see below).
The Ukrainian government stopped supplying antitoxin in 2014 and no botulism vaccines in stock were available during the 2016-2017 outbreak.
Botulism is a rare and extremely dangerous illness caused by a toxin produced by the bacteriumClostridium botulinum.
‘1 gm of the toxin can kill as many as 1 million people’
Botulinum neurotoxin poses a major bio-weapon threat because of its extreme potency, ease of production and transport. It causes muscles paralyses, respiratory failure and ultimately death if not treated immediately. A single gram of crystalline toxin, evenly dispersed and inhaled can kill more than one million people.
Crucially, it could be disseminated via aerosol, or by contamination of water and/ or food supplies.
The Pentagon produces live Viruses, Bacteria & Toxins
Botulinum Toxin was tested as a bio-weapon by the US Army in the past, as well as Anthrax, Brucella and Tularemia. Although the US bio-weapons program was officially terminated in 1969 documents show that the military experiments have never ended. Presently the Pentagon produces and tests live bio- agents at the same military facility as it did in the past – Dugway Proving Ground.
Current Field Tests:
Source: Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test Center
Past Field Tests: Source: 1977 US Army Report, p. 135
Part Two: Home and Away – America’s Network of Bioweapons Factories
The US Army produces and tests bio-agents at a special military facility located at Dugway Proving Ground (West Desert Test Center, Utah), as proven in a 2012 US Army Report. The facility is overseen by the Army Test and Evaluation Command.
The Life Sciences Division (LSD) at Dugway Proving Ground is tasked with the production of bio-agents. According to the Army report, scientists from this division produce and test aerosolized bio-agents at Lothar Saloman Life Sciences Test Facility (LSTF).
Lothar Saloman Life Sciences Test Facility (LSTF) where bio-terrorism agents are produced and aerosolized (Photo Credit: Dugway Proving Ground)
Biological Agents produced by the US Army at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, USA (Source: Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test Center)
The Life Sciences Division consists of an Aerosol Technology branch, a Microbiology Branch , and a Aerosol Technology Branch, develops and aerosolizes biological agents and stimulants. The Microbiology branch produces toxins, bacteria, viruses and agent-like organisms which are used in chamber and field testing.
The fermentation laboratories at the Life Sciences Test Facility grow bacteria in fermentors ranging from a small 2 L to a large 1500 L system. The fermentors are tailored specifically to the requirements of the microorganism that is being engineered – pH, temperature, light, pressure, and nutrient concentrations that give the microorganism optimal growth rates.
IMAGE: A large 1500 L fermentator.
The facility also does post-production in its laboratory, drying and milling test materials. After the bio-agents are produced, the scientists challenge them at containment aerosol chambers.
Technicians disseminate live biological agents for identification sensitivity tests. Photos Credit: Dugway Proving Ground
Aerosol experiments with Botulinum Neurotoxin and Anthrax
Documents prove that the US Army produces, possesses and tests aerosols of the most lethal toxin in the world – Botulinum Neurotoxin. In 2014 the Department of the Army purchased 100 mg of Botulinum Toxin from Metabiologics for tests at Dugway Proving Ground.
The experiments date back to 2007 when an unspecified quantity of the toxin was procured to the Department of the Army by the same company – Metabiologics. According to the 2012 West Desert Test Center Report, the military facility performs tests with Botulinum Neurotoxin Aerosol, as well as with aerosolized Anthrax, Yersinia pestis, and Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus (VEE).
Source: Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test Center
Outdoor field test programs at Dugway Proving Ground
US Army documents and photos show that the Pentagon has developed various dissemination methods for bio-terrorism attacks including by explosives.
Source: Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test Center
Dissemination of contaminants for biological/chemical tests.
Dissemination of stimulants by explosives (Photo Credits: Dugway Proving Ground)
Smoke delivery system for biological agents.
Dissemination on the test grid (Photos Credit: Dugway Proving Ground)
The US Army report lists numerous dissemination techniques including by bio-aerosol sprayers. Such sprayers called Micronair disseminators have already been developed by the US Army and tested at Dugway Proving Ground.
According to the documents, they can be vehicle-mounted, or worn as a backpack, with a pump system which can be fitted to the unit to increase the accuracy of the release. Micronair sprayers can release 50 to 500 mL of bio-liquid simulant per minute from 12 L tanks.
The US stole bacteria from Saddam Hussein’s bio weapons factory
‘B thuringiensis’
Bacillus thuringiensis is an insect pathogen that is widely used as a bio-pesticide. B. Thuringiensis (BT) Al Hakam was collected in Iraq by the UN Special Commission led by the US in 2003. It is named after Al Hakam – Iraq’s bio-weapons production facility.
Apart from Pentagon field tests, this bacterium is also used in the US for the production of GM corn, resistant to pests. Photos posted by the CIA prove that the bacteria was collected by the US in Iraq. According to the CIA, the vials containing bio-pesticide, were recovered from an Al Hakam scientist’s home.
CIA: A total of 97 vials-including those with labels consistent with the al Hakam cover stories of single-cell protein and bio-pesticides, as well as strains that could be used to produce BW agents were recovered from a scientist’s residence in Iraq in 2003 (Photo Credit: CIA)
Information from the US federal contracts registry shows that the Pentagon performs tests using the bacteria stolen from Saddam Hussein’s bio-weapons factory in Iraq.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) federal project for laboratory analysis and field tests with bacteria. Source: govtribe.com
The tests are performed at Kirtland Air Force Base (Kirtland is the home of the Air Force Materiel Command’s Nuclear Weapons Center). Here weapons are being tested, meaning that the field tests with biological simulants (bacteria) also fall into this group.
The DTRA contractor on this project – Lovelace Biomedical and Environmental Research Institute (LBERI), operates an Animal Bio-safety 3 Level (ABSL-3) laboratory which has Select Agent status. The facility is designed to conduct bioaerosol studies.
The company has been awarded a 5-year contract for field tests with biological stimulants at Kirtland Air Force Base (above).
Some of the tests are performed in a wind tunnel (Photo credit: Dugway Proving Ground)
Field tests with Biological Simulants (bacteria)
What the Pentagon is now doing is exactly what it did in the past, meaning that its bio-weapons program was never terminated. The US Army performed 27 field tests with such biological simulants, involving the public domain from 1949 to 1968, when President Nixon officially announced the end of the program.
Source: US Army Activities in the US, Biological Warfare Programs, vol. II, 1977, p. 125-126
Field tests in Chechnya
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which runs the US military program at the Lugar Center in Georgia, is alleged to have already performed field tests with an unknown substance in Chechnya, Russia. In the spring of 2017 local citizens reported on a drone disseminating white powder close to the Russian border with Georgia. Neither the Georgian border police, nor the US personnel operating on the Georgia-Russia border, commented on this information.
$9.2 million US military project on Russia-Georgia border
DTRA has full access to the Russia-Georgia border, granted under a military program called “Georgia Land Border Security Project”. The activities, related to the project have been outsourced to a private American company – Parsons Government Services International.
DTRA has previously contracted Parsons for similar border security projects in Lebanon, Jordan, Libya and Syria. Parsons have been awarded a $9.2 million contract under the Pentagon border security project on the Russia-Georgia border.
Local citizens in Chechnya noticed a UAV sprayer near the Russian border with Georgia in 2017.
US Defense Agency tests GM Insects to transmit GM Viruses
The Pentagon has invested at least $65 million in gene editing. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded 7 research teams to develop tools for genome engineering in insects, rodents and bacteria under DARPA’s Safe Gene program, using a novel CRISPR-Cas9 technology.
Under another military program –Insect Allies, GM insects are engineered to transfer modified genes to plants. The $10.3 million DARPA project includes both gene editing in insects and in the viruses that they transmit. Ecological Niche-preference Engineering is a third ongoing military program for genome engineering in insects. The Pentagon’s stated objective is to engineer GM organisms so that they can resist certain temperatures, change their habitat and food sources.
DARPA Genome Project
Besides gene editing in insects and in the viruses they transmit, the Pentagon is pursuing genetically engineered applications for humans too. DARPA Advanced Tools for Mammalian Genome Engineering Project seeks to create a biological platform inside the human body, using it to deliver new genetic information, and thus altering humans at the DNA level. DARPA wants to insert an additional 47th artificial chromosome into human cells. This chromosome will deliver new genes that will be used for engineering the human body.
SynPloid Biotek LLC has been awarded two contracts under the program totaling $1.1 million (2015-2016 – $ 100,600 for the first phase of the research; 2015-2017 – $ 999,300 for work which is not specified in the federal contracts registry. The company has only two employees and no previous record on bio-research.
Top Secret Research on Synthetic Viruses
Between 2008 and 2014, the United States invested approximately $820 million in synthetic biology research, Defense being a major contributor. Most of the military projects on synthetic biology are classified, among them are a number of classified studies by the secretive JASON group of US military advisors – e.g. Emerging Viruses and Genome Editing for the Pentagon, and Synthetic Viruses for the National Counterterrorism Center.
JASON is an independent scientific advisory group that provides consulting services to the U.S. government on matters of defense science and technology. It was established in 1960 and most of their resulting JASON reports are classified. For administrative purposes, the JASON’s projects are run by the MITRE Corporation, which has contracts with the Defense Department, CIA and the FBI. Since 2014 MITRE has been awarded some $27.4 million in contracts with the DoD.
Although the JASON Reports are classified, another US Air Force study titled Biotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens, sheds some light on what the secretive JASON group has researched – 5 groups of genetically engineered pathogens that can be used as bio-weapons. These are binary biological weapons (a lethal combination of two viruses), host swapping diseases (animal viruses that “jump” to humans, like the Ebola virus), stealth viruses, and designer diseases. Designer diseases can be engineered to target a certain ethnic group, meaning that they can be used as ethnic bio-weapons.
Ethnic Bioweapons
Ethnic biological weapon (biogenetic weapon) is a theoretical weapon that aims to primarily harm people of specific ethnicities, or genotypes.
Although officially the research and development of ethnic bio-weapons have never been publicly confirmed, documents show that the US collects biological material from certain ethnic groups – Russians and Chinese.
The US Air Force has been specifically collecting Russian RNA and synovial tissue samples, raising fears in Moscow of a covert US ethnic bio-weapons program. Source: fbo.gov
Apart from Russians, the US has been collecting biological material from both healthy and cancer patients in China. The National Cancer Institute has collected biological samples from 300 subjects from Linxian, Zhengzhou, and Chengdu in China. While another federal project, titled Serum Metabolic biomarkers discovery study of Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma in China, includes analysis of 349 serum samples which have been collected from Chinese patients.
Chinese biological material has been collected under a series of federal projects including saliva and cancer tissue. Among them, Genotyping DNA Samples from Lymphoma cases and from controls (healthy patients), Breast cancer tissue blocks from breast cancer patients, Saliva samples of 50 families who have 3 or more cases of UGI cancer, Genotype 50 SNP’S for DNA samples from the Cancer Hospital, Beijing, Genotypes from 3000 cases of gastric cancer and 3000 controls (healthy patients) in Beijing.
IMAGE: The US National Cancer Institute has been collecting biological material from patients of the Chinese Cancer Hospital in Beijing.
Tobacco Vaccines: How the Pentagon helped tobacco companies to profit from Ebola
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has invested $100 million in vaccines production from tobacco plants.
The companies, involved in the project, are owned by the biggest American tobacco companies – Mediacago Inc. is co-owned by Philip Morris, and Kentucky BioProcessing is a subsidiary of Reynolds American which is owned by British American Tobacco. Currently they are producing Flu and Ebola vaccines from tobacco plants.
The $100 million program Blue Angel was launched as a response to the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. Medicago being awarded $21 million to produce 10, 000 million doses of an influenza vaccine within one month.
Blue Angel program manager Dr. John Julias explains: “Although there are multiple plant species and other organisms being explored as alternative protein production platforms, the US Government has continued to make an investment in tobacco-based manufacturing.”
The plant-based vaccine production method works by isolating a specific antigen protein that triggers a human immune response from the targeted virus. A gene from the protein is transferred to bacteria, which is used to infect plants. The plants then start producing the protein that will be used for vaccinations.
It is not clear why the Pentagon chose to invest in vaccines produced from tobacco plants amongst all other plant species, which they explored. Medicago, co-owned by Philip Morris, paid $495,000 for lobbying the Department of Defense, the Congress and The Department of Health and Human Services for “funding to advance technology to support public health preparedness applications”. The Pentagon funded tobacco companies to develop new technology and to profit from vaccines.
Biological Experiments are war crimes
Article 8 of The Rome Statute of The International Criminal Court (ICC) defines biological experiments as war crimes. The US, however, is not a state party to the international treaty, and cannot be held accountable for its war crimes.
***
Author Dilyana Gaytandzhieva is a Bulgarian-based investigative journalist, specializing in covering conflicts and terrorism in Middle East and Asian conflicts, and international weapons trafficking operations.
SEE ALSO: US Opens Major Off-Shore Biological Facility in Kazakstan (2015)
READ MORE CHEMICAL WEAPONS NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Chemical Weapons Files
By Bill Gertz - The Washington Times - Friday, January 24, 2020
The deadly animal virus epidemic spreading globally may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory linked to China’s covert biological weapons program, according to an Israeli biological warfare expert.
Radio Free Asia this week rebroadcast a local Wuhan television report from 2015 showing China’s most advanced virus research laboratory known the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Radio Free Asia reported.
The laboratory is the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses.
Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese bio warfare, said the institute is linked to Beijing’s covert biological weapons program.
“Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment,” Mr. Shoham told The Washington Times.
Work on biological weapons is conducted as part of a dual civilian-military research and is “definitely covert,” he said in an email.
Mr. Shoham holds a doctorate in medical microbiology. From 1970 to 1991 he was a senior analyst with Israeli military intelligence for biological and chemical warfare in the Middle East and worldwide, holding the rank of lieutenant colonel.
China in the past has denied having any offensive biological weapons. The State Department, in a report last year, said it suspects China has engaged in covert biological warfare work.
A Chinese Embassy spokesman did not return an email seeking comment.
Chinese authorities so far have said the origin of the coronavirus that has killed scores and infected hundreds in in central Hubei Province is not known.
Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told state-controlled media initial signs as of Thursday indicated the virus originated from wild animals sold at a seafood market in Wuhan.
One ominous sign, said a U.S. official, is the that false rumors since the outbreak began several weeks ago have begun circulating on the Chinese Internet claiming the virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons.
That could indicate China is preparing propaganda outlets to counter future charges the new virus escaped from one of Wuhan’s civilian or defense research laboratories.
The World Health Organization is calling the microbe novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV. At a meeting in Geneva Thursday, the organization stopped short of declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
The virus outbreak causes pneumonia-like symptoms and prompted China to deploy military forces to Wuhan this week in a bid to halt the spread. All travel out of the city of 11 million people was halted.
The Wuhan institute has studied coronaviruses in the past, including the including the strain that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, H5N1 influenza virus, Japanese encephalitis, and dengue. Researchers at the institute also studied the germ that causes anthrax – a biological agent once developed in Russia.
“Coronaviruses (particularly SARS) have been studied in the institute and are probably held therein,” he said. “SARS is included within the Chinese BW program, at large, and is dealt with in several pertinent facilities.”
It is not known if the institute’s array of coronaviruses are specifically included in biological weapons program but it is possible, he said.
Asked if the new coronavirus may have leaked, Mr. Shoham said: “In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident.”
After researchers sequence of the genome of the new coronavirus it might be possible to determine or suggest its origin or source.
Mr. Shoham, now with the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University in Israel, said the virology institute is the only declared site in China known as P4 for Pathogen Level 4, a status indicating it uses the strictest safety standards to prevent the spread of the most dangerous and exotic microbes being studied.
The former Israeli military intelligence doctor also said suspicions were raised about the Wuhan Institute of Virology when a group of Chinese virologists working in Canada improperly sent samples to China of what he said were some of the deadliest viruses on earth, including the Ebola virus.
In a July article in the journal Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, Mr. Shoham said the Wuhan institute was one of four Chinese laboratories engaged in some aspects of the biological weapons development.
He identified the secure Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory at the institute as engaged in research on the Ebola, Nipah, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever viruses.
The Wuhan virology institute is under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. But certain laboratories within it “have linkage with the PLA or BW-related elements within the Chinese defense establishment,” he said.
In 1993, China declared a second facility, the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, as one of eight biological warfare research facilities covered by the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) which China joined in 1985.
The Wuhan Institute of Biological Products is a civilian facility but is linked to the Chinese defense establishment, and has been regarded to be involved in the Chinese BW program, Mr. Shoham said.
China’s vaccine against SARS is probably produced there.
“This means the SARS virus is held and propagated there, but it is not a new coronavirus, unless the wild type has been modified, which is not known and cannot be speculated at the moment,” he said.
The annual State Department report on arms treaty compliance stated last year that China engaged in activities that could support biological warfare.
“Information indicates that the People’s Republic of China engaged during the reporting period in biological activities with potential dual-use applications, which raises concerns regarding its compliance with the BWC,” the report said, adding that the United States suspects China failed to eliminate its biological warfare program as required by the treaty.
“The United States has compliance concerns with respect to Chinese military medical institutions’ toxin research and development because of the potential dual-use applications and their potential as a biological threat,” the report added.
The biosafety lab is located about 20 miles from the Hunan Seaford Market that reports from China say may have been origin point of the virus.
Rutgers University microbiologist Dr. Richard Ebright told London’s Daily Mail that “at this point there’s no reason to harbor suspicions” the lab may be linked to the virus outbreak.
_________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2020 12:06 pm Post subject:
Planted there deliberately just before Chinese new Year Of The Rat (plague?) by the US/Israel/EU/UK military intelligence to expose the lab?
All exposed by an ex-Israeli intelligence colonel on US intelligence outlets like Radio Free Asia
Echoes of Salisbury Skripal scandal with major outbreak next to supposedly banned biowarfare facilities?
Planted just B4 Chinese new 'Year Of The Rat' (plague) by NATO/Israel intelligence 2 expose China WMD? Exposed by ex-Israeli intelligence colonel on CIA media like Radio Free Asia? Like 2018 Salisbury/Skripal major outbreak next to 'banned' biowarfare lab? https://t.co/F9Uydu9bQZ
Funny how ALL the sources exposing corona virus as a bio warfare story are Zionist or CIA (Radio Free Asia) connected...!
Infowars is an Islamaphobic Mossad channel,
Loads of great links in this article - That's their Modus Operandi
Perhaps the seeding of this killer virus in Wuhan is CIA/Israeli work?
Foundation also funded group who owns virus patent and is funding research for a vaccine to stop it from spreading
Kelen McBreen | Infowars.com - JANUARY 24, 2020 134 Comments
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation co-hosted a pandemic exercise in late 2019 that simulated a global coronavirus outbreak.
They also just happen to fund the group who owns the patent to the deadly virus and are working on a vaccine to solve the crisis.
On June 19, 2015, the UK government-funded Pirbright Institute filed an application for a patent for the live coronavirus, which was approved on Nov 20, 2018.
Suspiciously, a Pirbright Institute “primary funder” is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Specifically, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $189,232 to the Pirbright Institute in a 2013 grant looking “to improve our understanding of, and effective use of, current control tools and measures (including vaccines) against peste des petits ruminants and foot and mouth disease, two serious diseases affecting livestock that are widespread in developing countries.”
Then, in November of 2019, the Pirbright Institute’s website published an article focusing on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s funding of “a Livestock Antibody Hub” to the sum of $5.5 million.
“The ambitious programme of work will see extensive collaboration between multiple UK research organisations in order to utilise research outcomes in livestock disease and immunology to support human health as part of the ‘One Health’ agenda,” the Pirbright Institute wrote last November.
Professor John Hammond, the lead researcher on the program, said, “New technology has given us the opportunity to utilise these detailed antibody responses to make the next generation of vaccines and therapies, which will improve animal health and ultimately human health, as well as ensuring the security of our food supply.”
Pirbright Institute Hires Coronavirus Expert To Work With Livestock Antibody Hub
Additionally, at the same time the Pirbright Institute announced the Livestock Antibody Hub program, they posted a job opening for a 4-year Postdoctoral Scientist position on LinkedIn.com.
The advertisement for the job opening explains, “The post-holder will report to the Heads of the Coronavirus Group and the Viral Oncogenesis Group work and will work closely with a multidisciplinary team to advance the aims of the overall Pirbright Livestock Antibody Hub.”
Keep in mind, this all took place prior to the current Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.
Bill And Melinda Gates Behind Global Pandemic Excercise Focusing On Coronavirus
Meanwhile, on Oct. 18, 2019, also before the outbreak, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the World Economic Forum co-hosted an event in NYC where “policymakers, business leaders, and health officials” worked together on a simulated coronavirus outbreak.
Titled the “Event 201” pandemic, the high-level pandemic exercise “dropped participants right in the midst of an uncontrolled coronavirus outbreak that was spreading like wildfire out of South America to wreak worldwide havoc.”
“In the simulation, CAPS (the coronavirus) resulted in a death toll of 65 million people within 18 months,” according to John Hopkins University.
A video highlight reel from the event shows fictional newscasters from “GNN” discuss how the hypothetical immune-resistant virus (nicknamed CAPS) was crippling trade and travel, sending the global economy into freefall.
It just so happens that a professor from Imperial College London recently warned the coronavirus has the same kill rate as the Spanish flu, which claimed the lives of 20-50 million people in 1918.
Event 201 Promotes Globalism As Solution To Pandemic
In the video, Tom Inglesby of the John Hopkins Center For Health Security promoted globalism as a solution, saying, “there are problems emerging that can only be solved by global business and governments working together.”
Further promoting globalism as an antidote to the hypothetical outbreak, participants in Event 201 proposed the following:
1: Governments, international organizations, and businesses should plan now for how essential corporate capabilities will be utilized during a large-scale pandemic.
2: Industry, national governments, and international organizations should work together to enhance internationally held stockpiles of medical countermeasures (MCMs) to enable rapid and equitable distribution during a severe pandemic.
3: Countries, international organizations, and global transportation companies should work together to maintain travel and trade during severe pandemics.
4: Governments should provide more resources and support for the development and surge manufacturing of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics that will be needed during a severe pandemic.
5: Global business should recognize the economic burden of pandemics and fight for stronger preparedness.
6: International organizations should prioritize reducing economic impacts of epidemics and pandemics.
7: Governments and the private sector should assign a greater priority to developing methods to combat mis- and disinformation prior to the next pandemic response.
Once again, remember that all of this took place prior to the first documented report of the illness in late December of 2019.
Outbreak Emanates From Chinese City With Controversial Lab
The deadly virus, called the Wuhan coronavirus based on the Chinese city it emanated from, comes just years after a controversial lab was opened in Wuhan to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens.
As of January 15, the virus made its way to America with a man carrying the illness from Wuhan, China to Washington state.
Now, a report out of Texas on Thursday claims officials at the Brazos County Health District are investigating a suspected case of the coronavirus.
At the time of writing this article, the death total has reached 25 and the estimated number of people infected with coronavirus in Wuhan is around 4,000.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Look To Develop Coronavirus Vaccine
But don’t worry, the same globalists who own the patent to the virus and predicted its rise are “scrambling to develop vaccines for the deadly Wuhan coronavirus.”
According to Business Insider, “A coalition backed by Bill Gates is funding biotechs” who are attempting to develop a coronavirus vaccine.
Is this illness being intentionally spread so governments worldwide can join forces in the name of stopping the virus, or so groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation can step in and become saviors, or is it all just a massive coincidence?
The good news is internet users are wise to the activities of the Gates’ and the global elite’s depopulation agenda as seen in the following Twitter posts:
A case of #CoronavirusOutbreak in Texas
Is it a coincidence that Wuhan was the site of the first “biosafety” lab in China?
Most importantly:#Coronavirus patented by Pirbright
funded by NGO’s & Bill/Melinda Gates Foundation (portrayed as saviors in MSM)https://t.co/NRy7lXoABD
— David Knight (@libertytarian) January 23, 2020
Reddit–“Bill Gates kept telling us a pandemic was coming, in Oct 2019 he ran a simulation of a Coronavirus pandemic, just three months later the real Coronavirus pandemic begins.”https://t.co/UBdHzzVgDt
— Henry Makow (@HenryMakow) January 22, 2020
Why is the coronavirus patented by a company who has funding from the Gates Foundation? https://t.co/y8HVSWNiaB
— Mac Cutchins (@MacCutchins) January 23, 2020
CORONAVIRUS is a Patented Virus: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation One of the Primary Owners. Deep State Released the Virus to create Chaos Since Nothing Stopping Trump? #FactsMatter #JusticeIsComing https://t.co/PsFd5vzkxP
— Ken Jones⭐️⭐️⭐️ (@sxdoc) January 23, 2020
The coronavirus patent is owned by Pirbright Institute.
Their primary funders, according to Devex, is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. #BillGatesiii #MVops pic.twitter.com/GkxfAzZTA3
— 2ndfor1st (@2ndfor1st) January 23, 2020
Weird! Bill and Linda gates have a patent on the vaccine for this new coronavirus outbreak. Look it up for youself. Google patent 10130701https://t.co/38RF0v0XJu
— Indentured servant (@Indenturedserv1) January 23, 2020
CORONA VIRUS, patent filed 2015 – granted 2018
Patent assignee: Pirbright Inst, UK
Pirbright Institute
Major funders: World Health Organization, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
“It’s much stronger than we originally thought”
Who are “We”?
Distribution started 2 months ago pic.twitter.com/ULwobS3aFN
— Paige Zanco (@PaigeZanco) January 23, 2020
More coincidence..
While the creators of the Coronavirus were filing a patent in 2015..
one of the Coronavirus major💰 backer was on stage doing a TedTalk …
Bill Gates TedTalk Link👉🏼 https://t.co/6eOAeMT6lG
Was Bill projecting his “project”
“Disease X” he called it last year pic.twitter.com/pUIZNlWas6
— LukeHanson.Photography🇺🇸🇨🇦 (@Luke4Tech) January 23, 2020
Coronavirus Patent Granted To Bill Gates Funded Institute In 2018 Gives More Credence To The Theory It Might Be A Bioweapon – MSM Colluding On Narrative Hints Something STINKS As China Locks Down Cities pic.twitter.com/o66OgGgb9t
— Ben Golan (@elapoides) January 23, 2020
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CORONAVIRUS: Everything You Need To Know — Plan For Global Governance
Is Coronavirus A Manmade Depopulation Weapon?
What’s Known About The 2019 Novel Coronavirus?
Coronavirus Vaccines Patented As Outbreaks Appear Globally
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WATCH LIVE _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Pandemic simulation exercise spotlights massive preparedness gap
Event 201, hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, envisions a fast-spreading coronavirus with a devastating impact
ByKatie Pearce / Published Nov 6, 2019
https://hub.jhu.edu/2019/11/06/event-201-health-security/
Back in 2001, it was a smallpox outbreak, set off by terrorists in U.S. shopping malls. This fall, it was a SARS-like virus, germinating quietly among pig farms in Brazil before spreading to every country in the world.
With each fictional pandemic Johns Hopkins experts have designed, the takeaway lesson is the same: We are nowhere near prepared.
"Once you're in the midst of a severe pandemic, your options are very limited," says Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University. "The greatest good can happen with pre-planning."
"ONCE YOU'RE IN THE MIDST OF A SEVERE PANDEMIC, YOUR OPTIONS ARE VERY LIMITED. THE GREATEST GOOD CAN HAPPEN WITH PRE-PLANNING."
Eric Toner
Senior scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
That center's latest pandemic simulation, Event 201, dropped participants right in the midst of an uncontrolled coronavirus outbreak that was spreading like wildfire out of South America to wreak worldwide havoc. As fictional newscasters from "GNN" narrated, the immune-resistant virus (nicknamed CAPS) was crippling trade and travel, sending the global economy into freefall. Social media was rampant with rumors and misinformation, governments were collapsing, and citizens were revolting.
For those participating in New York City on Oct. 18—a heavyweight group of policymakers, business leaders, and health officials—Event 201 was a chance to see how much catch-up work is needed to bolster our disaster response systems. Full videos of the discussion are available online.
"It really does shake up assumptions and change thinking about how we can prepare for a global pandemic," says Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security.
VIDEO CREDIT: JOHNS HOPKINS CENTER FOR HEALTH SECURITY
Event 201 is the fourth such exercise hosted by the Johns Hopkins center, which works to prepare communities for biological threats, pandemics, and other disasters. The simulations started with 2001's Dark Winter, which gathered national security experts for its simulated smallpox outbreak. The groundbreaking event turned out to be influential in shaping U.S. efforts around pandemic preparedness—particularly due to its timing, right before 9/11.
"Dark Winter resulted in more than a dozen congressional hearings, was briefed to the White House, and ultimately influenced the decision to stockpile enough smallpox vaccine for all Americans," Inglesby says.
That simulation and its two successors—Atlantic Storm, conducted in 2005, and last summer's Clade X—have also demonstrated lasting value as educational and advocacy tools, with reenactments or modified versions taking place in settings including universities, the CDC, and Capitol Hill, according to Inglesby. "These exercises have a long fuse," he says.
For Event 201, hosted in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the experts added a new layer of realism by reaching beyond government and NGOs to leaders in the private sector and business community. Participants included representatives from NBCUniversal, UPS, and Johnson & Johnson.
"Very few people have included the private sector in pandemic preparedness, but that's where most of the resources are," Toner says.
That's particularly true when it comes to vaccine development. The CAPS virus—which Toner describes as a cousin of SARS, "but slightly more transmissible, like the flu, and slightly more lethal"—was presented as resistant to any existing vaccine, as scientists scrambled to come up with one. Citizens, meanwhile, were rioting over scarce access to the next best thing: a fictional antiviral known to treat some CAPS symptoms.
That scenario, Toner says, is utterly realistic. "We don't have a vaccine for SARS, or MERS, or various avian flu viruses that have come up in the past decade," he notes. "That's because vaccine development is slow and difficult if there isn't an immediate market for it."
In the simulation, CAPS resulted in a death toll of 65 million people within 18 months—surpassing the deadliest pandemic in history, the 1918 Spanish flu.
From the discussions Event 201 inspired, the Center for Health Security plans to release a set of formal recommendations within the coming weeks.
Shortly after the simulation, the center released the Global Health Security Index, the first-ever comprehensive ranking of countries on their pandemic preparedness. All in all, the picture was discouraging: The average score, across 195 countries, was 40 out of a possible 100.
"It's our hope," Inglesby says, "that countries will use this to consider where they are strong and where they are weak."
Posted in Health, Politics+Society
Tagged disaster response, pandemics, center for health security, coronavirus _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 11 Nov 2008 Posts: 558 Location: Lancashire
Posted: Mon Jan 27, 2020 1:53 pm Post subject:
A deeper look at the show :
One family known to be involved in the weaponisation of pharmaceuticals is the Hoffman-La Roche family of Switzerland who are alchemists involved in chemical warfare on society. Roche Applied Science a division of Hoffman-La Roche researches molecular genetics and cell biology which they use for weaponising their pharmaceuticals. Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche was the founder of the company. His grandson who died in 2015 was Luc Hoffman and he was a French Knight of the Legion of Honour and his son Andre Hoffmann is the current head of Hoffmann-La Roche.
The Rocco and Roche families are a military bloodline of France, Switzerland, Italy, and the UK. These clans likely originate from the Petreia gentile clan of ancient Rome which was involved in the military. The Rochefoucauld, Rochechouart, Roche, and Rocco families all have similar origins. The Latin word Petra means rock as Roche is a French word for rock and Rocca is an Italian word for rock and also refers to a fortress. These clans are evil, militant, and stubborn. In France there are the ancient Rochefoucauld and Rochechouart families which are both about a 1000 years old. Both families have been involved with the military and the Holy See. The Rochefoucauld family is very large with various family branches. The House of Rochechouart were involved with the Crusades, Hundred Years War, and the Napoleonic Wars. Marquis Aimery de Rochechouart is a top member of this family and Duke Charles-Emmanuel de Rochechouart the 16th Duke of Mortemart is the head of this nobility.
Passengers who just arrived on a train from Wuhan, China, being screened for coronavirus in Beijing. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Analysis banner
In the early days of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, Chinese officials arrested citizens they accused of spreading rumors about the illness online.
Journalists have also reported being detained and threatened by Chinese authorities while covering the outbreak.
Experts are now faulting the Chinese government for its harsh crackdown on the flow of information about the virus.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
As the Wuhan coronavirus death toll rose to at least 18 on Thursday, the Chinese government is facing questions over its vice grip on the flow of information in the early days of the outbreak.
In early January, the Wuhan police said they had arrested eight people accused of spreading "rumors" about what was then a mysterious pneumonia causing serious complications in patients.
When the coronavirus made national headlines, more and more journalists began to describe being detained or threatened with arrest by Chinese authorities while reporting on the outbreak.
The Wuhan outbreak immediately harked back to the SARS epidemic in the early 2000s, which the Chinese government tried to cover up. The two viruses are in the same family, which also includes the common cold and pneumonia, but Wuhan so far is much milder than SARS.
While the government was almost immediately forthcoming with the international community about this outbreak, its actions in suppressing information at home have left some experts concerned that it made the situation worse than it might have been.
The coronavirus has spread outside China to Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and the US.
Aside from the actions of the Chinese government, Eric Toner, a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins University, says the virus itself still has a lot of unknowns that health officials need to figure out.
"The information that has been coming out of China so far is incomplete," Toner told Business Insider's Aria Bendix. "There's an awful lot we don't yet know."
Wuhan police make arrests as the disease spreads
Chinese officials first reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization on December 31. Early on, officials cracked down on talk about the illness online. Just four days later, the Wuhan police said they had summoned eight people accused of spreading "rumors" about the virus.
According to Poynter, the people who were arrested posted on the social network Weibo or other messaging apps that SARS was back.
Poynter tried to figure out what had happened to the eight people but struggled. It reported that the state-owned Global Times cited an anonymous police source who said the group was not kept in custody or punished.
Journalists are threatened and detained for reporting on the fast-moving virus
There have also been concerning reports of journalists being detained or threatened with arrest while reporting on the coronavirus in Wuhan.
The Hong Kong news outlet TVB reported on January 14 that a group of journalists, including one of its reporters, were detained for hours while covering the outbreak at a Wuhan hospital that has been treating patients.
According to the report, the journalists were at Jinyintan Hospital to get a briefing in the morning when a "group of plainclothes policemen" confronted them and started asking questions.
TVB said its reporter was "then taken to the police room in the hospital for questioning, and asked to delete the materials shot in the hospital."
The Time reporter Charlie Campbell recalled a similar incident while reporting at the seafood market pinpointed as the source of the outbreak. He said he was "repeatedly threatened with arrest while observing the scene from the street."
"A police officer at the market would only confirm they were continuing 'analysis,'" he wrote.
coronavirus reporters
Reporters at a press conference about the coronavirus on Wednesday in Hong Kong. Vernon Yuen/NurPhoto via Getty Images
History repeating itself?
China has been more transparent with the international community with this outbreak than it was with SARS. Then, the government underreported cases until a whistleblower doctor revealed the truth.
But when it comes to giving information to its own people, the message from China has been lacking.
In the early days of the outbreak, officials downplayed the seriousness of the virus, saying it was controlled, according to The New York Times.
Poynter reported that officials initially said the virus came from animals and could not be spread among humans, something that later proved to be incorrect.
Just days before the entire city was quarantined, Wuhan hosted a major banquet involving 40,000 families to try to set a world record, The Times reported.
The virus wasn't even front-page news on the Wuhan Evening News, the city's best-selling newspaper, from January 6 to January 19, according to the Financial Times.
During this time, the city was hosting annual meetings for top municipal and provincial officials (January 7-17). Dali Yang, an expert on Chinese bureaucracy at the University of Chicago, told the Financial Times that this event was most certainly a factor in the toned-down government response.
"This is a major factor that the authorities in Wuhan city sought to project an air of calm and most likely delayed taking action to stop the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus," Yang said.
A public-health expert, who asked not to be named, told the Financial Times: "There is a question of whether the alert [was] in place sufficiently quickly this time."
While the official order is that anyone who hides infections will be "forever nailed to history's pillar of shame," the actions taken by the government so far are telling a different story.
"The authorities are sending a signal, which is that only the government agencies can talk about the epidemic," Yu Ping, a former Southern Metropolis Daily reporter, wrote on his personal blog, according to The New York Times. "All other people should just shut up."
The information crackdown has also led to some discontent among average Chinese citizens talking about the outbreak online.
"Why is the government scared of public discussion?" one Weibo user wrote, according to Time. "They are slow to handle the crisis, but fast to shut people up."
"If the government wants us to trust them, they should be trustworthy, first," another Weibo user said. "If we have lost confidence in them, the government needs to reflect on itself instead of shutting people up." _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2020 10:05 pm Post subject:
Life wrote:
A deeper look at the show :
One family known to be involved in the weaponisation of pharmaceuticals is the Hoffman-La Roche family of Switzerland who are alchemists involved in chemical warfare on society. Roche Applied Science a division of Hoffman-La Roche researches molecular genetics and cell biology which they use for weaponising their pharmaceuticals. Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche was the founder of the company. His grandson who died in 2015 was Luc Hoffman and he was a French Knight of the Legion of Honour and his son Andre Hoffmann is the current head of Hoffmann-La Roche.
The Rocco and Roche families are a military bloodline of France, Switzerland, Italy, and the UK. These clans likely originate from the Petreia gentile clan of ancient Rome which was involved in the military. The Rochefoucauld, Rochechouart, Roche, and Rocco families all have similar origins. The Latin word Petra means rock as Roche is a French word for rock and Rocca is an Italian word for rock and also refers to a fortress. These clans are evil, militant, and stubborn. In France there are the ancient Rochefoucauld and Rochechouart families which are both about a 1000 years old. Both families have been involved with the military and the Holy See. The Rochefoucauld family is very large with various family branches. The House of Rochechouart were involved with the Crusades, Hundred Years War, and the Napoleonic Wars. Marquis Aimery de Rochechouart is a top member of this family and Duke Charles-Emmanuel de Rochechouart the 16th Duke of Mortemart is the head of this nobility.
I had a 'Near Death' experience, tunnel and all, on Romilar made by Roche in Istanbul in 1967 (probabaly January/Februrary). Admittedly I was taking other substances, and admittedly I was taking some 35/40 tablets at a time, taking Romilar, a cough remedy which was supposed to be taken perhaps 1 tab at a time. I had got 'hooked' (totally obliviously) into the 'Hippie Trail' in Salonika whilst on an overland trip to Australia, and I accept the people that got me 'hooked' had my best interests at heart, and certainly I have no rancor towards them.
I'm on my last legs now, and would be very happy to open up communications before I 'meet my maker'. _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
And what d'ya know? It was rehearsed 3 months ago!
'...
I would use the term “escape” loosely, as there is a possibility that this event was created intentionally. The virus itself has certain hallmarks of being engineered (including its long dormant period without visible symptoms) and the current strain is probably derived from the one the Chinese stole a year ago from a lab in Winnipeg, Canada.
But it gets even weirder.
Only three months ago, John Hopkins, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum (a hive of self-professed globalists) ran a “pandemic simulation” called “Event 201” specifically focused on coronavirus. Not Ebola, or Swine Flu or even Avian Flu – but CORONAVIRUS. The simulation features the spread of a coronavirus in South America, blamed on animal-to-human transmission (pigs). The conclusion of the exercise was that national governments were nowhere near ready, scoring 40 out of 100 on their preparedness scale. The simulation projected over 65 million deaths worldwide.
Event 201 played out almost exactly as it has been in China today. Some very disingenuous or perhaps rather stupid people have been arguing that this kind of thing is “normal”, claiming that we are “lucky” that the elites have been running simulations in advance in order to “save us” from a coronavirus outbreak. I assert that Event 201 was not a simulation but a war-game to study the possible outcomes of an event the globalists already knew was coming. Set aside the fact that before almost every major crisis event and terrorist attack for the past few decades authorities were running simulations for that exact event right before it happened; does anyone really believe that Event 201 is pure coincidence?....' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Joined: 11 Nov 2008 Posts: 558 Location: Lancashire
Posted: Thu Jan 30, 2020 4:12 pm Post subject:
I was very involved in the 2009 flu dementia. Perhaps the most sinister of the background manipulations was the changes made to mental health legislation regarding the ability for the Policy-enforcers to kidnap those who refuse the vaccinations under the mental health acts. Since that time the new industry called mental health has created the platform to serve this very unnerving situation.
remedy :
Over the past few days, the mainstream press has vigorously pushed back against a theory about the origins of the coronavirus that has now infected as many as 70,000+ people in Wuhan alone (depending on whom you believe). The theory is that China obtained the coronavirus via a Canadian research program, and started molding it into a bioweapon at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan. Politifact pointed the finger at Zero Hedge, in particular, though the story was widely shared across independent-leaning media.
The theory is that the virus, which was developed by infectious disease experts to function as a bio-weapon, originated in the Wuhan-based lab of Dr. Peng Zhou, China's preeminent researcher of bat immune systems, specifically in how their immune systems adapt to the presence of viruses like coronavirus and other destructive viruses. Somehow, the virus escaped from the lab, and the Hunan fish market where the virus supposedly originated is merely a ruse.
Now, a respected epidemiologist who recently caught flack for claiming in a twitter threat that the virus appeared to be much more contagious than initially believed is pointing out irregularities in the virus's genome that suggests it might have been genetically engineered for the purposes of a weapon, and not just any weapon but the deadliest one of all.
In "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag", Indian researchers are baffled by segments of the virus's RNA that have no relation to other coronaviruses like SARS, and instead appear to be closer to HIV. The virus even responds to treatment by HIV medications.
For those pressed for time, here are the key findings from the paper, which first focuses on the unique nature of 2019-nCoV, and then observe four amino acid sequences in the Wuhan Coronavirus which are homologous to amino acid sequences in HIV1:
Our phylogentic tree of full-length coronaviruses suggests that 2019-nCoV is closely related to SARS CoV [Fig1].
In addition, other recent studies have linked the 2019-nCoV to SARS CoV. We therefore compared the spike glycoprotein sequences of the 2019-nCoV to that of the SARS CoV (NCBI Accession number: AY390556.1). On careful examination of the sequence alignment we found that the 2019- nCoV spike glycoprotein contains 4 insertions [Fig.2]. To further investigate if these inserts are present in any other corona virus, we performed a multiple sequence alignment of the spike glycoprotein amino acid sequences of all available coronaviruses (n=55) [refer Table S.File1] in NCBI refseq (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) this includes one sequence of 2019-nCoV[Fig.S1]. We found that these 4 insertions [inserts 1, 2, 3 and 4] are unique to 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses analyzed. Another group from China had documented three insertions comparing fewer spike glycoprotein sequences of coronaviruses . Another group from China had documented three insertions comparing fewer spike glycoprotein sequences of coronaviruses (Zhou et al., 2020).
We then translated the aligned genome and found that these inserts are present in all Wuhan 2019-nCoV viruses except the 2019-nCoV virus of Bat as a host [Fig.S4]. Intrigued by the 4 highly conserved inserts unique to 2019-nCoV we wanted to understand their origin. For this purpose, we used the 2019-nCoV local alignment with each insert as query against all virus genomes and considered hits with 100% sequence coverage. Surprisingly, each of the four inserts aligned with short segments of the Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) proteins. The amino acid positions of the inserts in 2019-nCoV and the corresponding residues in HIV-1 gp120 and HIV-1 Gag are shown in Table 1.
The first 3 inserts (insert 1,2 and 3) aligned to short segments of amino acid residues in HIV-1 gp120. The insert 4 aligned to HIV-1 Gag. The insert 1 (6 amino acid residues) and insert 2 (6 amino acid residues) in the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV are 100% identical to the residues mapped to HIV-1 gp120. The insert 3 (12 amino acid residues) in 2019- nCoV maps to HIV-1 gp120 with gaps [see Table 1]. The insert 4 (8 amino acid residues) maps to HIV-1 Gag with gaps.
Why do the authors think the virus may be man-made? Because when looking at the above insertions which are not present in any of the closest coronavirus families, "it is quite unlikely for a virus to have acquired such unique insertions naturally in a short duration of time." Instead, they can be found in cell identification and membrane binding proteins located in the HIV genome.
Since the S protein of 2019-nCoV shares closest ancestry with SARS GZ02, the sequence coding for spike proteins of these two viruses were compared using MultiAlin software. We found four new insertions in the protein of 2019-nCoV- “GTNGTKR” (IS1), “HKNNKS” (IS2), “GDSSSG” (IS3) and “QTNSPRRA” (IS4) (Figure 2). To our surprise, these sequence insertions were not only absent in S protein of SARS but were also not observed in any other member of the Coronaviridae family (Supplementary figure). This is startling as it is quite unlikely for a virus to have acquired such unique insertions naturally in a short duration of time.
The insertions were observed to be present in all the genomic sequences of 2019-nCoV virus available from the recent clinical isolates. To know the source of these insertions in 2019-nCoV a local alignment was done with BLASTp using these insertions as query with all virus genome. Unexpectedly, all the insertions got aligned with Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1). Further analysis revealed that aligned sequences of HIV-1 with 2019-nCoV were derived from surface glycoprotein gp120 (amino acid sequence positions: 404-409, 462-467, 136-150) and from Gag protein (366-384 amino acid) (Table 1). Gag protein of HIV is involved in host membrane binding, packaging of the virus and for the formation of virus-like particles. Gp120 plays crucial role in recognizing the host cell by binding to the primary receptor CD4.This binding induces structural rearrangements in GP120, creating a high affinity binding site for a chemokine co-receptor like CXCR4 and/or CCR5.
And some visuals, which lead the paper authors to conclude that "this structural change might have also increased the range of host cells that 2019-nCoV can infect":
3D modelling of the protein structure displayed that these insertions are present at the binding site of 2019-nCoV. Due to the presence of gp120 motifs in 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein at its binding domain, we propose that these motif insertions could have provided an enhanced affinity towards host cell receptors. Further, this structural change might have also increased the range of host cells that 2019-nCoV can infect. To the best of our knowledge, the function of these motifs is still not clear in HIV and need to be explored. The exchange of genetic material among the viruses is well known and such critical exchange highlights the risk and the need to investigate the relations between seemingly unrelated virus families.
A good recap of the findings was provided by Dr. Feigl-Ding, who started his explanatory thread by pointing out that the transmission rate outside China has surpassed the rate inside China.
But the 'smoking gun' in this case are pieces of the virus's genetic code that Indian researchers, led by Prashant Pradhan at the Indian Institute of Technology, found may have been 'embedded' from HIV, which belongs to an entirely different family of viruses.
The punchline:
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To be sure, Dr. Feigl-Ding insists that he's not trying to promote any 'conspiracies' about the virus being a bioweapon developed by the Chinese, although it is difficult to find a proper name for what appears to be an artificial, weaponized virus.
Another doctor chimed in with what he thought was a solid explanation for the virus's irregularities...
...Until he realized something disturbing.
Oh my god. Indian scientists have just found HIV (AIDS) virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov virus that are not found in any other coronavirus. They hint at the possibility that this Chinese virus was designed ["not fortuitous']. Scary if true. https://t.co/h6xPX1gYvj pic.twitter.com/kCpd1I00uE
— Anand Ranganathan (@ARanganathan72) January 31, 2020
"Scary"... but relax, it's just another ridiculous "conspiracy." _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
More than a dozen Britons have been tested for the deadly virus, with the NHS now under orders to question everyone with flu-like symptoms to stop the spread. Health Secretary Matt Hancock has warned of the likelihood that cases of coronavirus will soon be seen in Britain as part of a “rapidly developing” outbreak which has already killed 18 people of the 630 confirmed cases worldwide. Currently known as 2019-nCoV, the virus is understood to be a new strain of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that killed nearly 800 people in the early Noughties.
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The new strain has been found to be at least 70 percent similar in genome sequences to the early-2000 breakout known as SARS-CoV, an animal virus believed to have originated from bats, which first infected humans in the Guangdong province of southern China in 2002.
Two years after the breakout, major research was put forward claiming protease inhibitors, a class of antiviral drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS, could be used to treat SARS.
The study revealed that one of the drugs known as nelfinavir “strongly inhibited relation of the SARS coronavirus,” leading to the decrease of toxins in already infected cells.
It concluded that “nelfinavir could decrease the production of virus from cells".
Expression of viral antigens was much lower in infected cells treated with nelfinavir than in untreated infected cells
2004 study
In 2006, the World Health Organisation (WHO) expert panel on SARS treatment requested a systematic review and comprehensive summary of protease inhibitor treatments used for SARS-infected patients in order to guide future treatment and identify priorities for research.
In the same year, scientists found success in using other protease inhibitors including lopinavir, ritonavir and ribavirin on 41 patients with SARS – the same disease strain found in the new outbreak of coronavirus.
That study found all three treatments produce “significantly lower” negative results, with 2.4 percent having adverse clinical outcomes compared with 28.8 percent without the use.
The study revealed lopinavir and ritonavir were associated with the better outcomes, but since 2004, a variety of different protease inhibitors have been tested, with ribavirin being ruled as "ineffective".
Coronavirus live: UK GPs told to LOCK UP suspected victims as 2,000 could be carriers
The disease is a form of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
The disease is a form of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Image: GETTY)
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Yesterday, Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard School of Public Health, revealed experts in Galveston are using protease inhibitors “somewhat successfully" to tackle coronavirus.
Microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung from the University of Hong Kong has urged citizens in China not to worry and confirmed the use of protease inhibitors will be used to combat the infection.
England’s Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty revealed yesterday that NHS England and Public Health England have issued additional advice to medical staff in the NHS, but did not confirm whether the drugs will be used should an outbreak occur in the UK.
The WHO said it is "too early" to declare an international public health emergency over the outbreak "given its restrictive and binary nature".
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Experts are looking into using protease inhibitors
Experts are looking into using protease inhibitors (Image: GETTY)
Chinese doctors have confirmed success using the drugs
Chinese doctors have confirmed success using the drugs (Image: GETTY)
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Speaking at a press conference, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, said: "Make no mistake, this is an emergency in China.
"But it has not yet become a global health emergency. It may yet become one."
According to the WHO, the new coronavirus causes a fever, fatigue, sore throat and dry cough in the early stages of the disease.
As the illness progresses, patients may experience difficulty breathing.
But these symptoms – similar to many other respiratory diseases – are what make it so difficult to control.
Over the past few days, the mainstream press has vigorously pushed back against a theory about the origins of the coronavirus that has now infected as many as 70,000+ people in Wuhan alone (depending on whom you believe). The theory is that China obtained the coronavirus via a Canadian research program, and started molding it into a bioweapon at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan. Politifact pointed the finger at Zero Hedge, in particular, though the story was widely shared across independent-leaning media.
The theory is that the virus, which was developed by infectious disease experts to function as a bio-weapon, originated in the Wuhan-based lab of Dr. Peng Zhou, China's preeminent researcher of bat immune systems, specifically in how their immune systems adapt to the presence of viruses like coronavirus and other destructive viruses. Somehow, the virus escaped from the lab, and the Hunan fish market where the virus supposedly originated is merely a ruse.
Now, a respected epidemiologist who recently caught flack for claiming in a twitter threat that the virus appeared to be much more contagious than initially believed is pointing out irregularities in the virus's genome that suggests it might have been genetically engineered for the purposes of a weapon, and not just any weapon but the deadliest one of all.
In "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag", Indian researchers are baffled by segments of the virus's RNA that have no relation to other coronaviruses like SARS, and instead appear to be closer to HIV. The virus even responds to treatment by HIV medications.
For those pressed for time, here are the key findings from the paper, which first focuses on the unique nature of 2019-nCoV, and then observe four amino acid sequences in the Wuhan Coronavirus which are homologous to amino acid sequences in HIV1:
Our phylogentic tree of full-length coronaviruses suggests that 2019-nCoV is closely related to SARS CoV [Fig1].
In addition, other recent studies have linked the 2019-nCoV to SARS CoV. We therefore compared the spike glycoprotein sequences of the 2019-nCoV to that of the SARS CoV (NCBI Accession number: AY390556.1). On careful examination of the sequence alignment we found that the 2019- nCoV spike glycoprotein contains 4 insertions [Fig.2]. To further investigate if these inserts are present in any other corona virus, we performed a multiple sequence alignment of the spike glycoprotein amino acid sequences of all available coronaviruses (n=55) [refer Table S.File1] in NCBI refseq (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) this includes one sequence of 2019-nCoV[Fig.S1]. We found that these 4 insertions [inserts 1, 2, 3 and 4] are unique to 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses analyzed. Another group from China had documented three insertions comparing fewer spike glycoprotein sequences of coronaviruses . Another group from China had documented three insertions comparing fewer spike glycoprotein sequences of coronaviruses (Zhou et al., 2020).
We then translated the aligned genome and found that these inserts are present in all Wuhan 2019-nCoV viruses except the 2019-nCoV virus of Bat as a host [Fig.S4]. Intrigued by the 4 highly conserved inserts unique to 2019-nCoV we wanted to understand their origin. For this purpose, we used the 2019-nCoV local alignment with each insert as query against all virus genomes and considered hits with 100% sequence coverage. Surprisingly, each of the four inserts aligned with short segments of the Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) proteins. The amino acid positions of the inserts in 2019-nCoV and the corresponding residues in HIV-1 gp120 and HIV-1 Gag are shown in Table 1.
The first 3 inserts (insert 1,2 and 3) aligned to short segments of amino acid residues in HIV-1 gp120. The insert 4 aligned to HIV-1 Gag. The insert 1 (6 amino acid residues) and insert 2 (6 amino acid residues) in the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV are 100% identical to the residues mapped to HIV-1 gp120. The insert 3 (12 amino acid residues) in 2019- nCoV maps to HIV-1 gp120 with gaps [see Table 1]. The insert 4 (8 amino acid residues) maps to HIV-1 Gag with gaps.
Why do the authors think the virus may be man-made? Because when looking at the above insertions which are not present in any of the closest coronavirus families, "it is quite unlikely for a virus to have acquired such unique insertions naturally in a short duration of time." Instead, they can be found in cell identification and membrane binding proteins located in the HIV genome.
Since the S protein of 2019-nCoV shares closest ancestry with SARS GZ02, the sequence coding for spike proteins of these two viruses were compared using MultiAlin software. We found four new insertions in the protein of 2019-nCoV- “GTNGTKR” (IS1), “HKNNKS” (IS2), “GDSSSG” (IS3) and “QTNSPRRA” (IS4) (Figure 2). To our surprise, these sequence insertions were not only absent in S protein of SARS but were also not observed in any other member of the Coronaviridae family (Supplementary figure). This is startling as it is quite unlikely for a virus to have acquired such unique insertions naturally in a short duration of time.
The insertions were observed to be present in all the genomic sequences of 2019-nCoV virus available from the recent clinical isolates. To know the source of these insertions in 2019-nCoV a local alignment was done with BLASTp using these insertions as query with all virus genome. Unexpectedly, all the insertions got aligned with Human immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1). Further analysis revealed that aligned sequences of HIV-1 with 2019-nCoV were derived from surface glycoprotein gp120 (amino acid sequence positions: 404-409, 462-467, 136-150) and from Gag protein (366-384 amino acid) (Table 1). Gag protein of HIV is involved in host membrane binding, packaging of the virus and for the formation of virus-like particles. Gp120 plays crucial role in recognizing the host cell by binding to the primary receptor CD4.This binding induces structural rearrangements in GP120, creating a high affinity binding site for a chemokine co-receptor like CXCR4 and/or CCR5.
And some visuals, which lead the paper authors to conclude that "this structural change might have also increased the range of host cells that 2019-nCoV can infect":
3D modelling of the protein structure displayed that these insertions are present at the binding site of 2019-nCoV. Due to the presence of gp120 motifs in 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein at its binding domain, we propose that these motif insertions could have provided an enhanced affinity towards host cell receptors. Further, this structural change might have also increased the range of host cells that 2019-nCoV can infect. To the best of our knowledge, the function of these motifs is still not clear in HIV and need to be explored. The exchange of genetic material among the viruses is well known and such critical exchange highlights the risk and the need to investigate the relations between seemingly unrelated virus families.
A good recap of the findings was provided by Dr. Feigl-Ding, who started his explanatory thread by pointing out that the transmission rate outside China has surpassed the rate inside China.
But the 'smoking gun' in this case are pieces of the virus's genetic code that Indian researchers, led by Prashant Pradhan at the Indian Institute of Technology, found may have been 'embedded' from HIV, which belongs to an entirely different family of viruses.
The punchline:
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To be sure, Dr. Feigl-Ding insists that he's not trying to promote any 'conspiracies' about the virus being a bioweapon developed by the Chinese, although it is difficult to find a proper name for what appears to be an artificial, weaponized virus.
Another doctor chimed in with what he thought was a solid explanation for the virus's irregularities...
...Until he realized something disturbing.
Oh my god. Indian scientists have just found HIV (AIDS) virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov virus that are not found in any other coronavirus. They hint at the possibility that this Chinese virus was designed ["not fortuitous']. Scary if true. https://t.co/h6xPX1gYvj pic.twitter.com/kCpd1I00uE
— Anand Ranganathan (@ARanganathan72) January 31, 2020
"Scary"... but relax, it's just another ridiculous "conspiracy."
_________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
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Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 11 Nov 2008 Posts: 558 Location: Lancashire
Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2020 12:16 pm Post subject:
Bit of a red flag going on when it comes to HIV which as a virus has never been isolated. There is no paper at lancet that isolates HIV as real. However over the last ten years there are many papers that mention HIV but still no paper that isolates it.
AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is another game all together and appears to be due to lifestyle or more correctly the remedies carried out by those who take part in sodomy. As a natural consequence those involved over use throat sprays and antibiotics which depletes the immune system creating a deficiency.
Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2020 7:49 pm Post subject: Researching Coronavirus
Recent reports that Bill Gates has helped fund research into this latest strain, has been declared false by the Pirbright Institute. But there is plenty of information of what they have been doing on their website. Also there is a news that Bill Gates has not that long ago made a $5.5 million donation to the institute I understand. More links to follow.
BY WHITNEY WEBB VIA THE LAST AMERICAN VAGABOND
DARPA recently spent millions on research involving bats and coronaviruses, as well as gene editing “bioweapons” prior to the recent coronavirus outbreak. Now, “strategic allies” of the agency have been chosen to develop a genetic material-based vaccine to halt the potential epidemic.
WASHINGTON D.C. – In recent weeks, concern over the emergence of a novel coronavirus in China has grown exponentially as media, experts and government officials around the world have openly worried that this new disease has the potential to develop into a global pandemic.
As concerns about the future of the ongoing outbreak have grown, so too have the number of theories speculating about the outbreak’s origin, many of which blame a variety of state actors and/or controversial billionaires. This has inevitably led to efforts to clamp down on “misinformation” related to the coronavirus outbreak from both mainstream media outlets and major social media platforms.
However, while many of these theories are clearly speculative, there is also verifiable evidence regarding the recent interest of one controversial U.S. government agency in novel coronaviruses, specifically those transmitted from bats to humans. That agency, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), began spending millions on such research in 2018 and some of those Pentagon-funded studies were conducted at known U.S. military bioweapons labs bordering China and resulted in the discovery of dozens of new coronavirus strains as recently as last April. Furthermore, the ties of the Pentagon’s main biodefense lab to a virology institute in Wuhan, China — where the current outbreak is believed to have begun — have been unreported in English language media thus far.
While it remains entirely unknown as to what caused the outbreak, the details of DARPA’s and the Pentagon’s recent experimentation are clearly in the public interest, especially considering that the very companies recently chosen to develop a vaccine to combat the coronavirus outbreak are themselves strategic allies of DARPA. Not only that, but these DARPA-backed companies are developing controversial DNA and mRNA vaccines for this particular coronavirus strain, a category of vaccine that has never previously been approved for human use in the United States.
Yet, as fears of the pandemic potential of coronavirus grow, these vaccines are set to be rushed to market for public use, making it important for the public to be aware of DARPA’s recent experiments on coronaviruses, bats and gene editing technologies and their broader implications.
EXAMINING THE RECENT WUHAN-BIOWEAPON NARRATIVE
As the coronavirus outbreak has come to dominate headlines in recent weeks, several media outlets have promoted claims that the reported epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, China was also the site of laboratories allegedly linked to a Chinese government biowarfare program.
However, upon further examination of the sourcing for this serious claim, these supposed links between the outbreak and an alleged Chinese bioweapons program have come from two highly dubious sources.
For instance, the first outlet to report on this claim was Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-government funded media outlet targeting Asian audiences that used to be run covertly by the CIA and named by the New York Times as a key part in the agency’s “worldwide propaganda network.” Though it is no longer run directly by the CIA, it is now managed by the government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which answers directly to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director immediately prior to his current post at the head of the State Department.
In other words, Radio Free Asia and other BBG-managed media outlets are legal outlets for U.S. government propaganda. Notably, the long-standing ban on the domestic use of U.S. government propaganda on U.S. citizens was lifted in 2013, with the official justification of allowing the government to “effectively communicate in a credible way” and to better combat “al-Qaeda’s and other violent extremists’ influence.”
Returning to the subject at hand, Radio Free Asia’s recent report on the alleged origins of the outbreak being linked to a Chinese state-linked virology center cited only Ren Ruihong, the former head of the medical assistance department at the Chinese Red Cross, for that claim. Ruihong has been cited as an expert in several Radio Free Asia reports on disease outbreaks in China, but has not been cited as an expert by any other English-language media outlet.
Ruihong told Radio Free Asia that:
It’s a new type of mutant coronavirus.They haven’t made public the genetic sequence, because it is highly contagious…Genetic engineering technology has gotten to such a point now, and Wuhan is home to a viral research center that is under the aegis of the China Academy of Sciences, which is the highest level of research facility in China.
Though Ruihong did not directly say that the Chinese government was making a bioweapon at the Wuhan facility, she did imply that genetic experiments at the facility may have resulted in the creation of this new “mutant coronavirus” at the center of the outbreak.
With Radio Free Asia and its single source having speculated about Chinese government links to the creation of the new coronavirus, the Washington Times soon took it much farther in a report titled “Virus-hit Wuhan has two laboratories linked to Chinese bio-warfare program.” That article, much like Radio Free Asia’s earlier report, cites a single source for that claim, former Israeli military intelligence biowarfare specialist Dany Shoham.
Yet, upon reading the article, Shoham does not even directly make the claim cited in the article’s headline, as he only told the Washington Times that: “Certain laboratories in the [Wuhan] institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment (emphasis added).”
While Shoham’s claims are clearly speculative, it is telling that the Washington Times would bother to cite him at all, especially given the key role he played in promoting false claims that the 2001 Anthrax attacks was the work of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Shoham’s assertions about Iraq’s government and weaponized Anthrax, which were used to bolster the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, have since been proven completely false, as Iraq was found to have neither the chemical or biological “weapons of mass destruction” that “experts” like Shoham had claimed.
Beyond Shoham’s own history of making suspect claims, it is also worth noting that Shoham’s previous employer, Israeli military intelligence, has a troubling past with bioweapons. For instance, in the late 1990s, it was reported by several outlets that Israel was in the process of developing a genetic bioweapon that would target Arabs, specifically Iraqis, but leave Israeli Jews unaffected.
Given the dubious past of Shoham and the clearly speculative nature of both his claims and those made in the Radio Free Asia report, one passage in the Washington Times article is particularly telling about why these claims have recently surfaced:
One ominous sign, said a U.S. official, is that the false rumors since the outbreak began several weeks ago have begun circulating on the Chinese Internet claiming the virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons. That could indicate China is preparing propaganda outlets to counter future charges the new virus escaped from one of Wuhan’s civilian or defense research laboratories (emphasis added).
However, as seen in that very article, accusations that the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese-state-linked laboratory is hardly a future charge as both the Washington Times and Radio Free Asia have already been making that claim. Instead, what this passage suggests is that the reports in both Radio Free Asia and the Washington Times were responses to the claims circulating within China that the outbreak is linked to a “U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons.”
Though most English-language media outlets to date have not examined such a possibility, there is considerable supporting evidence that deserves to be examined. For instance, not only was the U.S. military, including its controversial research arm — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), recently funding studies in and near China that discovered new, mutant coronaviruses originating from bats, but the Pentagon also became recently concerned about the potential use of bats as bioweapons.
Coronavirus
BATS AS BIOWEAPONS
As the ongoing coronavirus outbreak centered in China has spread to other countries and been blamed for a growing number of deaths, a consensus has emerged that this particular virus, currently classified as a “novel [i.e. new] coronavirus,” is believed to have originated in bats and was transmitted to humans in Wuhan, China via a seafood market that also traded exotic animals. So-called “wet” markets, like the one in Wuhan, were previously blamed for past deadly coronavirus outbreaks in China, such as the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
In addition, one preliminary study on the coronavirus responsible for the current outbreak found that the receptor, Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), is not only the same as that used by the SARS coronavirus, but that East Asians present a much higher ratio of lung cells that express that receptor than the other ethnicities (Caucasian and African-American) included in the study. However, such findings are preliminary and the sample size is too small to draw any definitive conclusions from that preliminary data.
Two years ago, media reports began discussing the Pentagon’s sudden concern that bats could be used as biological weapons, particularly in spreading coronaviruses and other deadly diseases. The Washington Post asserted that the Pentagon’s interest in investigating the potential use of bats to spread weaponized and deadly diseases was because of alleged Russian efforts to do the same. However, those claims regarding this Russian interest in using bats as bioweapons date back to the 1980s when the Soviet Union engaged in covert research involving the Marburg virus, research that did not even involve bats and which ended with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
Like much of the Pentagon’s controversial research programs, the bats as bioweapons research has been framed as defensive, despite the fact that no imminent threat involving bat-propagated bioweapons has been acknowledged. However, independent scientists have recently accused the Pentagon, particularly its research arm DARPA, of claiming to be engaged in research it says is “defensive” but is actually “offensive.”
The most recent example of this involved DARPA’s “Insect Allies” program, which officially “aims to protect the U.S. agricultural food supply by delivering protective genes to plants via insects, which are responsible for the transmission of most plant viruses” and to ensure “food security in the event of a major threat,” according to both DARPA and media reports.
However, a group of well-respected, independent scientists revealed in a scathing analysis of the program that, far from a “defensive” research project, the Insect Allies program was aimed at creating and delivering “new class of biological weapon.” The scientists, writing in the journal Science and led by Richard Guy Reeves, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany, warned that DARPA’s program — which uses insects as the vehicle for as horizontal environmental genetic alteration agents (HEGAAS) — revealed “an intention to develop a means of delivery of HEGAAs for offensive purposes (emphasis added).”
Whatever the real motivation behind the Pentagon’s sudden and recent concern about bats being used as a vehicle for bioweapons, the U.S. military has spent millions of dollars over the past several years funding research on bats, the deadly viruses they can harbor — including coronaviruses — and how those viruses are transmitted from bats to humans.
For instance, DARPA spent $10 million on one project in 2018 “to unravel the complex causes of bat-borne viruses that have recently made the jump to humans, causing concern among global health officials.” Another research project backed by both DARPA and NIH saw researchers at Colorado State University examine the coronavirus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in bats and camels “to understand the role of these hosts in transmitting disease to humans.” Other U.S. military-funded studies, discussed in detail later in this report, discovered several new strains of novel coronaviruses carried by bats, both within China and in countries bordering China.
Many of these recent research projects are related to DARPA’s Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats, or PREEMPT program, which was officially announced in April 2018. PREEMPT focuses specifically on animal reservoirs of disease, specifically bats, and DARPA even noted in its press release in the program that it “is aware of biosafety and biosecurity sensitivities that could arise” due to the nature of the research.
DARPA’s announcement for PREEMPT came just a few months after the U.S. government decided to controversially end a moratorium on so-called “gain-of-function” studies involving dangerous pathogens. VICE News explained “gain-of-function” studies as follows:
Known as ‘gain-of-function’ studies, this type of research is ostensibly about trying to stay one step ahead of nature. By making super-viruses that are more pathogenic and easily transmissible, scientists are able to study the way these viruses may evolve and how genetic changes affect the way a virus interacts with its host. Using this information, the scientists can try to pre-empt the natural emergence of these traits by developing antiviral medications that are capable of staving off a pandemic (emphasis added).
In addition, while both DARPA’s PREEMPT program and the Pentagon’s open interest in bats as bioweapons were announced in 2018, the U.S. military — specifically the Department of Defense’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program — began funding research involving bats and deadly pathogens, including the coronaviruses MERS and SARS, a year prior in 2017. One of those studies focused on “Bat-Borne Zoonotic Disease Emergence in Western Asia” and involved the Lugar Center in Georgia, identified by former Georgian government officials, the Russian government and independent, investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva as a covert U.S. bioweapons lab.
It is also important to point out the fact that the U.S. military’s key laboratories involving the study of deadly pathogens, including coronaviruses, Ebola and others, was suddenly shut down last July after the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified major “biosafety lapses” at the facility.
The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland — the U.S. military’s lead laboratory for “biological defense” research since the late 1960s — was forced to halt all research it was conducting with a series of deadly pathogens after the CDC found that it lacked “sufficient systems in place to decontaminate wastewater” from its highest-security labs and failure of staff to follow safety procedures, among other lapses. The facility contains both level 3 and level 4 biosafety labs. While it is unknown if experiments involving coronaviruses were ongoing at the time, USAMRIID has recently been involved in research borne out of the Pentagon’s recent concern about the use of bats as bioweapons.
The decision to shut down USAMRIID garnered surprisingly little media coverage, as did the CDC’s surprising decision to allow the troubled facility to “partially resume” research late last November even though the facility was and is still not at “full operational capability.” The USAMRIID’s problematic record of safety at such facilities is of particular concern in light of the recent coronavirus outbreak in China. As this report will soon reveal, this is because USAMRIID has a decades-old and close partnership with the University of Wuhan’s Institute of Medical Virology, which is located in the epicenter of the current outbreak.
THE PENTAGON IN WUHAN?
Beyond the U.S. military’s recent expenditures on and interest in the use of bats of bioweapons, it is also worth examining the recent studies the military has funded regarding bats and “novel coronaviruses,” such as that behind the recent outbreak, that have taken place within or in close proximity to China.
For instance, one study conducted in Southern China in 2018 resulted in the discovery of 89 new “novel bat coronavirus” strains that use the same receptor as the coronavirus known as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). That study was jointly funded by the Chinese government’s Ministry of Science and Technology, USAID — an organization long alleged to be a front for U.S. intelligence, and the U.S. National Institute of Health — which has collaborated with both the CIA and the Pentagon on infectious disease and bioweapons research.
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The authors of the study also sequenced the complete genomes for two of those strains and also noted that existing MERS vaccines would be ineffective in targeting these viruses, leading them to suggest that one should be developed in advance. This did not occur.
Another U.S. government-funded study that discovered still more new strains of “novel bat coronavirus” was published just last year. Titled “Discovery and Characterization of Novel Bat Coronavirus Lineages from Kazakhstan,” focused on “the bat fauna of central Asia, which link China to eastern Europe” and the novel bat coronavirus lineages discovered during the study were found to be “closely related to bat coronaviruses from China, France, Spain, and South Africa, suggesting that co-circulation of coronaviruses is common in multiple bat species with overlapping geographical distributions.” In other words, the coronaviruses discovered in this study were identified in bat populations that migrate between China and Kazakhstan, among other countries, and is closely related to bat coronaviruses in several countries, including China.
The study was entirely funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, specifically the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) as part of a project investigating coronaviruses similar to MERS, such as the aforementioned 2018 study. Yet, beyond the funding of this 2019 study, the institutions involved in conducting this study are also worth noting given their own close ties to the U.S. military and government.
The study’s authors are affiliated with either the Kazakhstan-based Research Institute for Biological Safety Problems and/or Duke University. The Research Institute for Biological Safety Problems, though officially a part of Kazakhstan’s National Center for Biotechnology, has received millions from the U.S. government, most of it coming from the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. It is the Kazakhstan government’s official depository of “highly dangerous animal and bird infections, with a collection of 278 pathogenic strains of 46 infectious diseases.” It is part of a network of Pentagon-funded “bioweapons labs” throughout the Central Asian country, which borders both of the U.S.’ top rival states — China and Russia.
Duke University’s involvement with this study is also interesting given that Duke is a key partner of DARPA’s Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program, which officially aims “to dramatically accelerate discovery, integration, pre-clinical testing, and manufacturing of medical countermeasures against infectious diseases.” The first step of the Duke/DARPA program involves the discovery of potentially threatening viruses and “develop[ing] methods to support viral propagation, so that virus can be used for downstream studies.”
Duke University is also jointly partnered with China’s Wuhan University, which is based in the city where the current coronavirus outbreak began, which resulted in the opening of the China-based Duke Kunshan University (DKU) in 2018. Notably, China’s Wuhan University — in addition to its partnership with Duke — also includes a multi-lab Institute of Medical Virology that has worked closely with the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases since the 1980s, according to its website. As previously noted, the USAMRIID facility in the U.S. was shut down last July for failures to abide by biosafety and proper waste disposal procedures, but was allowed to partially resume some experiments late last November.
THE PENTAGON’S DARK HISTORY OF GERM WARFARE
The U.S. military has a troubling past of having used disease as a weapon during times of war. One example involved the U.S.’ use of germ warfare during the Korean War, when it targeted both North Korea and China by dropping diseased insects and voles carrying a variety of pathogens — including bubonic plague and hemorrhagic fever — from planes in the middle of the night. Despite the mountain of evidence and the testimony of U.S. soldiers involved in that program, the U.S. government and military denied the claims and ordered the destruction of relevant documentation.
In the post World War II era, other examples of U.S. research aimed at developing biological weapons have emerged, some of which have recently received media attention. One such example occurred this past July, when the U.S. House of Representatives demanded information from the U.S. military on its past efforts to weaponize insects and Lyme disease between 1950 and 1975.
The U.S. has claimed that it has not pursued offensive biological weapons since 1969 and this has been further supported by the U.S.’ ratification of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which went into effect in 1975. However, there is extensive evidence that the U.S. has continued to covertly research and develop such weapons in the years since, much of it conducted abroad and outsourced to private companies, yet still funded by the U.S. military. Several investigators, including Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, have documented how the U.S. produces deadly viruses, bacteria and other toxins at facilities outside of the U.S. — many of them in Eastern Europe, Africa and South Asia — in clear violation of the BWC.
Aside from the military’s own research, the controversial neoconservative think tank, the now defunct Project for a New American Century (PNAC), openly promoted the use of a race-specific genetically modified bioweapon as a “politically useful tool.” In what is arguably the think tank’s most controversial document, titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” there are a few passages that openly discuss the utility of bioweapons, including the following sentences:
…combat likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and perhaps the world of microbes…advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.
Though numerous members of PNAC were prominent in the George W. Bush administration, many of its more controversial members have again risen to political prominence in the Trump administration.
Several years after “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” was published, the U.S. Air Force published a document entitled “Biotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens,” which contains the following passage:
The JASON group, composed of academic scientists, served as technical advisers to the U. S. government. Their study generated six broad classes of genetically engineered pathogens that could pose serious threats to society. These include but are not limited to binary biological weapons, designer genes, gene therapy as a weapon, stealth viruses, host-swapping diseases, and designer diseases (emphasis added).
Concerns about Pentagon experiments with biological weapons have garnered renewed media attention, particularly after it was revealed in 2017 that DARPA was the top funder of the controversial “gene drive” technology, which has the power to permanently alter the genetics of entire populations while targeting others for extinction. At least two of DARPA’s studies using this controversial technology were classified and “focused on the potential military application of gene drive technology and use of gene drives in agriculture,” according to media reports.
The revelation came after an organization called the ETC Group obtained over 1,000 emails on the military’s interest in the technology as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Co-director of the ETC Group Jim Thomas said that this technology may be used as a biological weapon:
“Gene drives are a powerful and dangerous new technology and potential biological weapons could have disastrous impacts on peace, food security and the environment, especially if misused, The fact that gene drive development is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises alarming questions about this entire field.”
Though the exact motivation behind the military’s interest in such technology is unknown, the Pentagon has been open about the fact that it is devoting much of its resources towards the containment of what it considers the two greatest threats to U.S. military hegemony: Russia and China. China has been cited as the greatest threat of the two by several Pentagon officials, including John Rood, the Pentagon’s top adviser for defense policy, who described China as the greatest threat to “our way of life in the United States” at the Aspen Security Forum last July.
Since the Pentagon began “redesigning” its policies and research towards a “long war” with Russia and China, the Russian military has accused the U.S. military of harvesting DNA from Russians as part of a covert bioweapon program, a charge that the Pentagon has adamantly denied. Major General Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian military’s radiation, chemical and biological protection unit who made these claims, also asserted that the U.S. was developing such weapons in close proximity to Russian and Chinese borders.
China has also accused the U.S. military of harvesting DNA from Chinese citizens with ill intentions, such as when 200,000 Chinese farmers were used in 12 genetic experiments without informed consent. Those experiments had been conducted by Harvard researchers as part of a U.S. government-funded project.
Coronavirus
DARPA AND ITS PARTNERS CHOSEN TO DEVELOP CORONAVIRUS VACCINE
Last Thursday, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced that it would fund three separate programs in order to promote the development of a vaccine for the new coronavirus responsible for the current outbreak.
CEPI — which describes itself as “a partnership of public, private, philanthropic and civil organizations that will finance and co-ordinate the development of vaccines against high priority public health threats” — was founded in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its massive funding and close connections to public, private and non-profit organizations have positioned it to be able to finance the rapid creation of vaccines and widely distribute them.
CEPI’s recent announcement revealed that it would fund two pharmaceutical companies — Inovio Pharmaceuticals and Moderna Inc. — as well as Australia’s University of Queensland, which became a partner of CEPI early last year. Notably, the two pharmaceutical companies chosen have close ties to and/or strategic partnerships with DARPA and are developing vaccines that controversially involve genetic material and/or gene editing. The University of Queensland also has ties to DARPA, but those ties are not related to the university’s biotechnology research, but instead engineering and missile development.
For instance, the top funders of Inovio Pharmaceuticals include both DARPA and the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the company has received millions in dollars in grants from DARPA, including a $45 million grant to develop a vaccine for Ebola. Inovio specializes in the creation of DNA immunotherapies and DNA vaccines, which contain genetically engineered DNA that causes the cells of the recipient to produce an antigen and can permanently alter a person’s DNA. Inovio previously developed a DNA vaccine for the Zika virus, but — to date — no DNA vaccine has been approved for use in humans in the United States. Inovio was also recently awarded over $8 million from the U.S. military to develop a small, portable intradermal device for delivering DNA vaccines jointly developed by Inovio and USAMRIID.
However, the CEPI grant to combat coronavirus may change that, as it specifically funds Inovio’s efforts to continue developing its DNA vaccine for the coronavirus that causes MERS. Inovio’s MERS vaccine program began in 2018 in partnership with CEPI in a deal worth $56 million. The vaccine currently under development uses “Inovio’s DNA Medicines platform to deliver optimized synthetic antigenic genes into cells, where they are translated into protein antigens that activate an individual’s immune system” and the program is partnered with U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and the NIH, among others. That program is currently undergoing testing in the Middle East.
Inovio’s collaboration with the U.S. military in regards to DNA vaccines is nothing new, as their past efforts to develop a DNA vaccine for both Ebola and Marburg virus were also part of what Inovio’s CEO Dr. Joseph Kim called its “active biodefense program” that has “garnered multiple grants from the Department of Defense, Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and other government agencies.”
CEPI’s interest in increasing its support to this MERS-specific program seems at odds with its claim that doing so will combat the current coronavirus outbreak, since MERS and the novel coronavirus in question are not analogous and treatments for certain coronaviruses have been shown to be ineffective against other strains.
It is also worth noting that Inovio Pharmaceuticals was the only company selected by CEPI with direct access to the Chinese pharmaceutical market through its partnership with China’s ApolloBio Corp., which currently has an exclusive license to sell Inovio-made DNA immunotherapy products to Chinese customers.
The second pharmaceutical company that was selected by CEPI to develop a vaccine for the new coronavirus is Moderna Inc., which will develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus of concern in collaboration with the U.S. NIH and which will be funded entirely by CEPI. The vaccine in question, as opposed to Inovio’s DNA vaccine, will be a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine. Though different than a DNA vaccine, mRNA vaccines still use genetic material “to direct the body’s cells to produce intracellular, membrane or secreted proteins.”
Moderna’s mRNA treatments, including its mRNA vaccines, were largely developed using a $25 million grant from DARPA and it often touts is strategic alliance with DARPA in press releases. Moderna’s past and ongoing research efforts have included developing mRNA vaccines tailored to an individual’s unique DNA as well as an unsuccessful effort to create a mRNA vaccine for the Zika Virus, which was funded by the U.S. government.
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.” Nonetheless, the climate of fear surrounding the coronavirus outbreak could be enough for the public and private sector to develop and distribute such controversial treatments due to fear about the epidemic potential of the current outbreak.
However, the therapies being developed by Inovio, Modern and the University of Queensland are in alignment with DARPA’s objectives regarding gene editing and vaccine technology. For instance, in 2015, DARPA geneticist Col. Daniel Wattendorf described how the agency was investigating a “new method of vaccine production [that] would involve giving the body instructions for making certain antibodies. Because the body would be its own bioreactor, the vaccine could be produced much faster than traditional methods and the result would be a higher level of protection.”
According to media reports on Wattendorf’s statements at the time, the vaccine would be developed as follows:
Scientists would harvest viral antibodies from someone who has recovered from a disease such as flu or Ebola. After testing the antibodies’ ability to neutralize viruses in a petri dish, they would isolate the most effective one, determine the genes needed to make that antibody, and then encode many copies of those genes into a circular snippet of genetic material — either DNA or RNA, that the person’s body would then use as a cookbook to assemble the antibody.
Though Wattendorf asserted that the effects of those vaccines wouldn’t be permanent, DARPA has since been promoting permanent gene modifications as a means of protecting U.S. troops from biological weapons and infectious disease. “Why is DARPA doing this? [To] protect a soldier on the battlefield from chemical weapons and biological weapons by controlling their genome — having the genome produce proteins that would automatically protect the soldier from the inside out,” then-DARPA director Steve Walker (now with Lockheed Martin) said this past September of the project, known as “Safe Genes.”
CONCLUSION
Research conducted by the Pentagon, and DARPA specifically, has continually raised concerns, not just in the field of bioweapons and biotechnology, but also in the fields of nanotechnology, robotics and several others. DARPA, for instance, has been developing a series of unsettling research projects that ranges from microchips that can create and delete memories from the human brain to voting machine software that is rife with problems.
Now, as fear regarding the current coronavirus outbreak begins to peak, companies with direct ties to DARPA have been tasked with developing its vaccine, the long-term human and environmental impacts of which are unknown and will remain unknown by the time the vaccine is expected to go to market in a few weeks time.
Furthermore, DARPA and the Pentagon’s past history with bioweapons and their more recent experiments on genetic alteration and extinction technologies as well as bats and coronaviruses in proximity to China have been largely left out of the narrative, despite the information being publicly available. Also left out of the media narrative have been the direct ties of both the USAMRIID and DARPA-partnered Duke University to the city of Wuhan, including its Institute of Medical Virology.
Though much about the origins of the coronavirus outbreak remains unknown, the U.S. military’s ties to the aforementioned research studies and research institutions are worth detailing as such research — while justified in the name of “national security” — has the frightening potential to result in unintended, yet world-altering consequences. The lack of transparency about this research, such as DARPA’s decision to classify its controversial genetic extinction research and the technology’s use as a weapon of war, compounds these concerns. While it is important to avoid reckless speculation as much as possible, it is the opinion of this author that the information in this report is in the public interest and that readers should use this information to reach their own conclusions about the topics discussed herein.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2020 10:13 pm Post subject:
The emails pour in………. in one way or another the emailers words ask: “are we all going to die of coronavirus infection?” “What do we do?” I can feel the panic and terror in the emails I am receiving.
This time, the viral epidemic is better than any horror movie. One wonders if there will be a hidden parasite in the upcoming coronavirus vaccine that penetrates the blood/brain barrier and zombifies humans – mind control via vaccination. This actually happens in nature among wasps, worms, dogs, and even humans (archived in Matt Simon’s book PLIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD). It’s a modern re-run of the “everybody had better drink their Kool-Aid” event that killed 900 members of a cult in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, X a billion. I’d invest in the casket business now before others think about it. We’d all literally be dying for a cure.
Well, there is no vaccine, which is the real reason for this contrived pandemic, brought to you by the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control, and a committee that planned the whole event in order to gain public funding for a vaccine and to prime the global masses with fear for the first attempt of a worldwide vaccination campaign. Keep the multitudes on edge. Get them clamoring for a cure. Provoke panic. The World Bank is providing funds to financially weather this planned pandemic. A major airline has already cancelled flights to China for a month. Anticipate mandated vaccination in order to fly internationally once a vaccine is approved and available. Maybe vaccination records will become part of a passport.Vitamin C: The Real St...Steve Hickey, Andrew W...Best Price: $8.91Buy New $12.47(as of 10:10 EST - Details)
The urgency: “….We now interrupt this broadcast for an announcement by the World Health Organization declaring this coronavirus outbreak a global health emergency.” Drug makers are said to be “racing against time” to introduce a vaccine.
On cue, the news media hypes a winter viral infection that is less lethal than the 2003-2004 SARS coronavirus outbreak that emerged from Guangdong province in November, 2002 that infected ~8000 and led to ~800 deaths in 29 countries.
China reports 9,692 cases and 213 deaths (2.2% death rate) associated with this virus as of Jan. 30. The SARS (severe acute respiratory distress syndrome) coronavirus epidemic of 2003-2004 was reported to have infected 8360 with 764 deaths (9.1% death rate). That is 4-times less risk for death, so what is all this panic about? The fearmongering is rampant. Public health officials say “better safe than sorry.”
A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association says a novel coronavirus was isolated on January 7, 2020 and states it has spread to numerous countries (but only via airline travel and not person-to-person (except for one lone case as of Jan. 30).
As if by coincidence, on January 30 a major drugmaker announces it is introducing the first 2-hour commercial test for Wuhan coronavirus. The Bloomberg News announcement says the drug company’s “emergency response team of molecular diagnosticians sprang into action a few weeks ago when word of the Wuhan virus spread.” Anticipate emergency approval from the FDA for this test any day now.
A political website states: “Coronaviruses are very unstable, frequently mutate.” Yes, and that is why potentially mortal flu viruses and the coronavirus epidemics peter out fast, morphing into a less virulent strain mid-epidemic.
But in the back of the public’s mind is the question: “But what if?”
There won’t ever be enough vaccines. The masses would be forced to rely on home remedies.
If you are still concerned, the red wine molecule resveratrol, garlic, vitamin D, vitamin C, and supplemental zinc are safe, scientifically-backed remedies at hand.
First it was Facebook, then all of New Zealand; now Twitter has decided to suspend Zero Hedge.
Just as in the prior bans, which were eventually overturned, so in this case it is unclear what prompted Twitter's abrupt censorship: the only notification we received from twitter was the following:
It is news to us that this website has (ever) "engaged in the targeted harassment of someone."
01:10 / 01:32
What appears to have happened is that twitter received a complaint from the website best known for publishing the discredited Steele dossier when no other media outlet would touch it, and making cat slideshows of course, Buzzfeed, in which someone called Ryan Broderick writes that Zero Hedge "has released the personal information of a scientist from Wuhan, China, falsely accusing them of creating the coronavirus as a bioweapon, in a plot it said is the real-life version of the video game Resident Evil."
Ryan Broderick
✔
@broderick
· Jan 31, 2020
Replying to @broderick
At the end of an article that included the scientist's name, photo, email, and a phone number, ZeroHedge told their readers they “should probably pay [the Chinese scientist] a visit.”https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/a-pro-trum p-blog-has-doxed-a-chinese-scientist-it-falsely …
A Pro-Trump Blog Doxed A Chinese Scientist It Falsely Accused Of Creating The Coronavirus As A...
Zero Hedge's Twitter account was permanently suspended Friday, following the publication of the scientist's name.
View image on TwitterView image on Twitter
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11:51 PM - Jan 31, 2020
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A few points: the article referenced by Buzz Feed, "Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?", is as the title implies, a question, and one which considering the huge significance and life or death import of the Coronavirus pandemic, has to be answered, especially since even the establishment's Foreign Policy magazine writes bat soup, which is widely being cited and circulated by the mainstream press as the cause of the coronavirus breakout, is not the cause of the Wuhan virus. The widely read website Health.com also chimes in: "No, Coronavirus Was Not Caused by 'Bat Soup'". Meanwhile, Business Insider writes "Experts think the Wuhan coronavirus jumped from bats to snakes to people. Bats have been the source of at least 4 pandemics."
So considering that Peng Zhou, who currently works at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is the Leader of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunization Group at the Institute, the question certainly is a reasonable one and, in a normal world, would demand an answer from the established media (assuming it wasn't afraid of risking lucrative Chinese funding) instead of leaving it to "fringe" websites.
The impetus to ask the question if the disease originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is especially relevant in light of social media reports such as this one which claims to "have evidence here that the outbreak originated from Wuhan P4 Research Institute. You need to find a truly patriotic journalist to publish it to the public. You can personally trust me to provide a complete chain of evidence. Thank you."
陈秋实（陳秋實）
@chenqiushi404
· Jan 30, 2020
https://youtu.be/iXozpbomAns 最新视频~武汉同济医院的试剂盒、医疗设备短缺，医务人员十分疲惫。有一次看到尸体在走廊里。请传播真相而不是随意猜测。请关注武汉，支持武汉。
21
7:34 AM - Jan 30, 2020
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So did we have a right to ask the question if there is an alternative version for the emergence of the Coronavirus pandemic, especially with hundreds if not thousands of lives at stake? Absolutely.
As for Broderick's statement that Peng was "accused falsely" we wonder how he knows this: did he speak to Peng? Did he get any comments? Did he get an official denial? No, he did not: as he writes, "BuzzFeed News has reached out to the scientist, whom it is declining to name." So, it actually turns out that it is Buzzfeed that is once again presenting a false statement as fact, something Buzzfeed has been accused of doing over and over and over.
Meanwhile, those who wonder if Dr. Zhou has any link to the possible emergence of the Coronavirus following years of experimenting with bats, we urge you to read our full article instead of relying on the hearsay of ideologically biased journalists.
Second, and contrary to the claims presented by Buzzfeed, we did not release any "personal information": Peng Zhou (周鹏) is a public figure, and all the contact information that we presented was pulled from his publicly posted bio found on a website at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which anyone with access to the internet can pull from the following URL: http://sourcedb.whiov.cas.cn/zw/rck/201705/t20170505_4783973.html, which is also the information we used.
So about Buzzfeed's allegation, which was adopted by Twitter, that somehow we incited "targeted abuse", here is what we said:
Something tells us, if anyone wants to find out what really caused the coronavirus pandemic that has infected thousands of people in China and around the globe, they should probably pay Dr. Peng a visit.
To which we then added the information obtained from his own bio page on the Institute's website:
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"Or at least start with an email: Dr Peng can be reached at peng.zhou@wh.iov.cn, and his phone# is 87197311"
Are we then to understand that we have now reached a point the mere gathering of information, which our colleagues in the media may want to eventually do as thousands of people are afflicted daily by the Coronavirus, is now synonymous with "abuse and harassment"? According to Twitter, and certainly our competitors in the media, the answer is yes.
In any case, we have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who incidentally happens to follow zerohedge...
... for the answer. If we get one, we will promptly share it with our readers. We aren't holding our breath, however, as we realize how important it is to today's media giants not to ruffle too many Chinese feathers or lack losing access to the Chinese market. After all, who can forget the following report from the New York Times about another of our media competitors that several years ago was itself engaged in "doxing" us (yet oddly wasn't suspended by Twitter):
The chairman of Bloomberg L.P. said in a speech here on Thursday that the company should have reconsidered articles that deviated from its core of coverage of business news, because they jeopardized the huge sales potential for its products in the Chinese market.
The comments by the chairman, Peter T. Grauer, represented the starkest acknowledgment yet by a senior Bloomberg executive that the ambitions of the news division should be assessed in the context of the business operation, which provides the bulk of the company’s revenue. They also signaled which of those considerations might get priority.
Acknowledging the vast size of the Chinese economy, the world’s second-biggest after that of the United States, Mr. Grauer, said, “We have to be there.”
“We have about 50 journalists in the market, primarily writing stories about the local business and economic environment,” Mr. Grauer said in response to questions after a speech at the Asia Society. “You’re all aware that every once in a while we wander a little bit away from that and write stories that we probably may have kind of rethought — should have rethought.”
Bloomberg, the financial data and news company, relies on sales of its terminals, which are ubiquitous on bankers’ desks around the world, for about 82 percent of its $8.5 billion in revenue. But sales of those terminals in China declined after the company published an article in June 2012 on the family wealth of Xi Jinping, at that time the incoming Communist Party chief. After its publication, officials ordered state enterprises not to subscribe to the service. Mr. Grauer did not specifically mention the article about Mr. Xi or any other articles.
“Being in China is very much a part of our long-term strategy and will continue to be so going forward,” Mr. Grauer said. “It occupies a lot of our thinking — Dan Doctoroff, our C.E.O.; me; Mike; and other members of our senior team.”
Some current and former Bloomberg journalists, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they had hoped the controversy surrounding Bloomberg’s China reporting would prompt the company to reaffirm its support for investigative efforts. Mr. Grauer’s comments were met with dismay, particularly because he is regarded as close to Mr. Bloomberg and would be unlikely to voice views that were not broadly accepted at the top of the company.
In light of growing speculation, most of it within less than official circles, that the official theory for the spread of the Coronavirus epidemic, namely because someone ate bat soup at a Wuhan seafood and animal market...
... is a fabricated farce, and that the real reason behind the viral spread is because a weaponized version of the coronavirus (one which may have originally been obtained from Canada), was released by Wuhan's Institute of Virology (accidentally or not), a top, level-4 biohazard lab which was studying "the world's most dangerous pathogens", perhaps it would be a good idea for the same Wuhan Institute of Virology to remove the following "help wanted" notice, posted on November 18, 2019, according to which the institute is seeking to hire one or two post-doc fellows, who will use "bats to research the molecular mechanism that allows Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses to lie dormant for a long time without causing diseases."
The right candidate will:
Have obtained or is about to obtain a PhD in life science/biomedical related fields;
Have a reliable and rigorous work style, with strong independent scientific research ability and teamwork spirit;
Have strong English communication and writing skills, have research papers published in the international mainstream academic journals
Have a cell biology, immunology, genomics and other relevant background experience is preferred;
The full job posting, which can still be found on the Wuhan Institute of Virology website can be found here (and screengrabbed below as it will be gone within a few hours).
And google translated:
Why is this notable? Because as it turns out, this is a job posting for the lab of Dr. Peng Zhou (周鹏), Ph.D., a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Leader of the Bat Virus Infection and Immunization Group. Some more on Zhou's background from the Institute (google translated):
He received his PhD in Wuhan Virus Research Institute in 2010 and has worked on bat virus and immunology in Australia and Singapore. In 2009 , he took the lead in starting the research on the immune mechanism of bat long-term carrying and transmitting virus in the world. So far, he has published more than 30 SCI articles, including the first and corresponding author's Nature , Cell Host Microbe and PNAS . At present, research on bat virus and immunology is continuing, and it has received support from the National "You Qing" Fund, the pilot project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the major project of the Ministry of Science and Technology.
Below is a list of several recent papers published by Dr. Zhou
Dampened STING-Dependent Interferon Activation in Bats
Fatal swine acute diarrhoea syndrome caused by an HKU2-related coronavirus of bat origin
IFNAR2-dependent gene expression profile induced by IFN-α in Pteropus alecto bat cells and impact of IFNAR2 knockout on virus infection
Immunogenicity of the spike glycoprotein of Bat SARS-like coronavirus
Bat severe acute respiratory syndrome-like coronavirus ORF3b homologues display different interferon antagonist activities
Which brings us to the punchline: courtesy of the Wuhan institute of virology, here is a press release from Dr. Zhou's lab titled "How bats carry viruses without getting sick":
Bats are known to harbor highly pathogenic viruses like Ebola, Marburg, Hendra, Nipah, and SARS-CoV, and yet they do not show clinical signs of disease. In a paper published in the journal Cell Host & Microbe on February 22, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China find that in bats, an antiviral immune pathway called the STING-interferon pathway is dampened, and bats can maintain just enough defense against illness without triggering a heightened immune reaction.
"We believe there is a balance between bats and the pathogens they carry," says senior author Peng Zhou. "This work demonstrated that in order to maintain a balance with viruses, bats may have evolved to dampen certain pathways."
In humans and other mammals, an immune-based over-response to one of these and other pathogenic viruses can trigger severe illness. For example, in humans, an activated STING pathway is linked with severe autoimmune diseases.
"In human history, we have been chasing infectious diseases one after another," says Zhou, "but bats appear to be a 'super-mammal' to these deadly viruses." By identifying a weakened but not defunct STING pathway, researchers have some new insight into how bats fine-tune antiviral defenses to balance an effective, but not an overt, response against viruses.
The authors hypothesize that this defense strategy evolved as part of three interconnected features of bat biology: they are flying mammals, have a long lifespan, and host a large viral reservoir.
"Adaptation to flight likely caused positive selection of multiple bat innate immune and DNA damage repair genes," Zhou says. These adaptations may have shaped certain antiviral pathways (STING, interferon, and others) to make them good viral reservoir hosts and achieve a tolerable balance."
And just in case, here is a google-translated press release from Jan 18, 2019 describing the achievements of Dr. Peng Zhou:
Wuhan has the first person in the global bat immunity research: "I rushed forward with a sword"
Changjiang Daily Financial Media May 4 hearing last month as they tied for first author made a "natural", in recent years, the Chinese Academy of Sciences Wuhan virus after 80 young researchers Zhou Peng has been in the "natural", "American Academy of Sciences ”And other international authoritative magazines published 28 papers, becoming academic stars. In an interview with reporters recently, he introduced that young scientists do not rely on genius to hold, but rely on "super confident".
It is understood that Zhou Peng is the pioneer of global bat immune system research. "Bats carry viruses but do not get sick. They have not been researched by scientists before, and certainly have specificity different from other species, but this is like you know the beginning and Ending without knowing how the story happened. " After more than 10 years of research, Zhou Peng discovered that an antiviral immune channel called "interferon gene-stimulating protein-interferon" in the bat's body was inhibited, so that the bat could just resist the disease without triggering a strong immune response. The results were published in Cells, Hosts and Microorganisms, which aroused the attention of the academic community.
Zhou Peng, a student of undergraduate bioengineering, experienced SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in his junior year, which made him interested in the virus: "A small virus makes the world mess." He was admitted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the postgraduate level, and studied under Shi Zhengli, a bat expert. Focusing on the virus carried by the bat, then I was wondering if the bat's immune system is special. "
After graduating from the PhD, he entered the Australian Animal Health Laboratory and became the first person in the global bat immunity research. "I went through 4 years of trial and error, groped in the dark, and hit the South Wall numerous times. I still remember a 'darkest moment' 'In the local cold winter, I was holding the frostbite knee, sitting at the beach, and asking myself why this was the case.'
He began to learn Australian jokes and inspired himself. In 2016, during postdoctoral studies at Duke University-National University of Singapore Medical School, he was concerned that a certain interferon in bats is always maintained at a high level. This paper became the cover article of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, "Bat Immunity "This door was opened, and more and more people in the world are paying attention to this field." Our generation, when we were in college, watched "The Forrest Gump" and "Redemption of Shawshank" and taught us stupidity and perseverance. I I feel like I am carrying a sword and rushing forward. "
After returning to China in 2016, Zhou Peng returned to his alma mater to become a little-known young researcher. "In the long run, bats carry the virus without getting sick. It is hoped that humans can learn how to fight the virus, but this is still far from industrialization. Far, the road ahead is long, and we must remain 'super confident' and continue to move forward. "(Reporter Li Jia correspondent Chen teased Li Li intern Luo Yameng)
And here is the man, the myth, the bat-god himself: Peng Zhou.
Peng Zhou
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His bio (source):
Peng Zhou, Ph.D., researcher, team leader of bat virus infection and immunity. He successively obtained bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Henan University (2004) and Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2010). During his doctorate, he was sent to the Australian Animal Health Laboratory for study. He then carried out research work at Duke-Nus Medical College in Australia and Singapore. He has long been engaged in the research of new virus epidemiology and bat antiviral immunity, revealing that bats carry SARS, MERS, and Ebola for a long time but do not have their own immune mechanisms.
Currently he is hosting and undertaking 3 projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences Special project and a major national science and technology project - a major project for the prevention and control of infectious diseases. Currently published 28 SCI papers, including Nature, Cell Host Microbe, PNAS and other articles SCI papers, including Nature, Cell Host Microbe, PNAS and other articles published by the first or corresponding author. It is at the forefront of the world in the field of bat and virus research.
So to summarize:
One of China's top virology and immunology experts was and still works at China's top-rated biohazard lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some have affectionately called the real Umbrella Corp.
Since 2009, Peng has been the leading Chinese scientist researching the immune mechanism of bats carrying and transmitting lethal viruses in the world.
His primary field of study is researching how and why bats can be infected with some of the most nightmarish viruses in the world including Ebola, SARS and Coronavirus, and not get sick.
He was genetically engineering various immune pathways (such as the STING pathway in bats) to make the bats more or less susceptible to infection, in the process potentially creating a highly resistant mutant superbug.
As part of his studies, Peng also researched mutant Coronavirus strains that overcame the natural immunity of some bats; these are "superbug" Coronavirus strains, which are not resistant to any natural immune pathway, and now appear to be out in the wild.
As of mid-November, his lab was actively hiring inexperienced post-docs to help conduct his research into super-Coronaviruses and bat infections.
Peng's work on virology and bat immunology has received support from the National "You Qing" Fund, the pilot project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the major project of the Ministry of Science and Technology.
* * *
Something tells us, if anyone wants to find out what really caused the coronavirus pandemic that has infected thousands of people in China and around the globe, they should probably pay Dr. Peng a visit.
Joined: 11 Nov 2008 Posts: 558 Location: Lancashire
Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2020 10:55 pm Post subject:
From a different angle altogether.
It is being reported that Wuhan is the testing ground for the activation of the 5G grid which according to some researchers has the capacity to suppress the immune system of the body. If this turns out to be correct, then it is possible the virus is a cover for the effects of the 5G immunity suppressant being tested in Wuhan.
[url]
https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=W2RR9344H2O5[/url] _________________ KEEP IT REAL
World health officials, back from a visit to Beijing, expressed great concern that a dangerous new virus was spreading between people outside of China, even as the number of illnesses continue to grow dramatically inside that Asian nation.
The new virus has now infected more people in China than were sickened during the 2002-2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak. On Wednesday, the number of cases jumped to 5974, surpassing the 5327 people diagnosed with SARS.
The death toll, which stood at 132 on Wednesday, is lower than the 348 people who died in China from SARS.
Doubts have been raised about the official death toll, however, with claims Chinese authorities have been cremating bodies in secret.
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Chinese-language news outlet Initium interviewed people working at local cremation centres in Wuhan, who said bodies were being sent directly from hospitals without being properly identified and added to the official record.
William Yang
✔
@WilliamYang120
· Jan 29, 2020
Replying to @WilliamYang120
... seriousness of the spread in #China, but also the lack of facilities that can handle the rising number of patients.
William Yang
✔
@WilliamYang120
Also, one thing that #China is hiding is the number of death caused by the virus. Credible Chinese media outlet @initiumnews interviewed people working at local cremation centers, confirming that many dead bodies were sent directly from the hospitals to the cremation centers...
490
8:09 PM - Jan 29, 2020 · Taipei City, Taiwan
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"So there are reasons to remain sceptical about what China has been sharing with the world because while they have been more transparent about certain things related to the virus, they continue to be sketchy and unreliable in other aspects," said DW News East Asia correspondent William Yang.
Scientists say there are still many questions to be answered about the new virus, including just how easily it spreads and how severe it is.
The World Health Organisation's emergencies chief told reporters that China was taking "extraordinary measures in the face of an extraordinary challenge" posed by the outbreak.
Dr Michael Ryan spoke at a news conference after returning from a trip to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior government leaders.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is leading a scientific ‘People’s War’ against the coronavirus
Would Mao Zedong (pictured in background at Tiananmen Gate in Beijing) be happy with China’s attempt to win a ‘People’s War’ on the coronavirus? Photo: Nicolas Asfouri / AFP
President Xi Jinping formally told WHO head Tedros Ghebreyesus, at their meeting in Beijing earlier this week, that the coronavirus epidemic “is a devil and we cannot allow the devil to hide.”
Ghebreyesus for his part could not but praise Beijing for its extremely swift, coordinated response strategy – which includes fast identification of the genome sequence. Chinese scientists have already handed over to Russian counterparts the virus genome, with snap tests able to identify it in a human body within two hours. A Russia-China vaccine is under development.
The devil, of course, is always in the details. In a matter of a few days, at the peak of the most congested travel period of the year, China did manage to quarantine an urban environment of over 56 million people, including megalopolis Wuhan and three nearby cities. This is an absolute first in terms of public health, anytime in history.
Wuhan, with a GDP growth of 8.5% a year, is a significant business center for China. It lies at the strategic crossroads of the Yangtze and Han rivers and at a railway crossroads as well – between the north-south axis linking Guangzhou to Beijing and the east-west axis linking Shanghai to Chengdu.
As premier Li Keqiang was sent to Wuhan, President Xi visited the strategic southern province of Yunnan, where he extolled the immense government apparatus to boost control and sanitary prevention mechanisms to limit propagation of the virus.
Coronavirus catches China at an extremely sensitive juncture – after the (failed) Hybrid War tactics displayed in Hong Kong; an American pro-Taiwan offensive; the trade war far from solved by a mere “phase 1” deal while more sanctions are being plotted against Huawei; and even the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, which ultimately is about targeting the expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Southwest Asia (Iran-Iraq-Syria).
The Big Picture spells out Total Information War and non-stop weaponization of the China “threat” – now even metastasized, with racist overtones, as a bio-threat. So how vulnerable is China?
A people’s war
For almost five years now a maximum-security biolab has been operating in Wuhan dedicated to the study of highly pathogenic micro-organisms – set up in partnership with France after the SARS epidemic. In 2017, Nature magazine was warning about the risks of dispersion of pathogenic agents out of this lab. Yet there’s no evidence this might have happened.
In crisis management terms, President Xi has lived up to the occasion – ensuring that China fights coronavirus with nearly total transparency (after all, the internet wall remains in place). Beijing has warned the whole government apparatus in no uncertain terms not to attempt any cover-ups. A real-time webpage, in English, here, is available to everyone. Whoever is not doing enough will face serious consequences. One can imagine what awaits the party chief in Hubei, Jiang Chaoliang.
A post that went viral all over the mainland this past Sunday states, “We in Wuhan have truly entered the stage of people’s war against the new viral pneumonia”; and many people, “mainly Communist Party members” have been confirmed as “volunteers and observers according to street units.”
Crucially, the government directed everyone to install a “Wuhan Neighbors” applet downloaded from WeChat. That determines “our home’s quarantine address through satellite positioning, and then lock on our affiliated community organization and volunteers. Thenceforth, our social activities and information announcements would be connected to the system.”
Theoretically, this means that “anyone who develops a fever will report their condition through the network as soon as possible. The system will immediately provide an online diagnosis, and locate and register your quarantine address. If you need to see a doctor, your community will arrange a car to send you to the hospital through volunteers. At the same time, the system will track your progress: hospitalization, treatment at home, discharge, death, etc.”
So here we have millions of Chinese citizens totally mobilized in what’s routinely described as a “people’s war” using “high technology to fight against illness.” Millions are also drawing their own conclusions when comparing it with the use of app software to fight against the police in Hong Kong.
The biogenetic puzzle
Apart from crisis management, the speed of the Chinese scientific response has been breathtaking – and obviously not fully appreciated in an environment of Total Information War. Compare the Chinese performance with the American CDC, arguably the top infectious disease research agency in the world, with an $11 billion annual budget and 11,000 employees.
During the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014 – considered a maximum urgency, and facing a virus with a 90% fatality rate – the CDC took no less than two months from getting the first patient sample to identifying the complete genomic sequence. The Chinese did it in a few days.
During the swine flu in the US in 2009 – 55 million infected Americans, 11,000 killed – the CDC took over a month and a half to come up with identification kits.
The Chinese took only one week from the first patient sample to complete, vital identification and sequencing of coronavirus. Right away, they went for publication and deposit in the genomics library for immediate access by the whole planet. Based on this sequence, Chinese biotech companies produced validated essays within a week – also a first.
And we’re not even talking about the now notorious building of a brand new state of the art hospital in Wuhan in record time just to treat victims of coronavirus. No victims will pay for their treatment. Additionally, Healthy China 2030, the reform of the health/development system, will be boosted.
Coronavirus opens a true Pandora’s box on biogenetics. Serious questions remain about experiences in vivo in which the consent of “patients” will not be required – considering the collective psychosis initially developed by Western corporate media and even the WHO around coronavirus. Coronavirus could well become a pretext for genetic experiments via vaccines.
While this coronavirus is indeed serious and is causing deaths, one wonders if the responses, especially in the West, are reaching out of control.
Canada, with a population about the same as Shanghai, has so far this flu season had more than 20,000 confirmed cases, 2,200 hospitalisations, and 85 deaths, roughly the same as all of China with the new corona virus at the same time. But there is no panic in Canada about the flu, and United Airlines isn’t cancelling all flights to Canada.
By the same token for the US in this flu season, there have been 140,000 hospitalisations and about 8,500 deaths.
But the flu barely rates a mention in the US media and the government is not shuttering cities or air travel. Even more, in 2017, the US recorded 61,000 fatalities from the flu with 45 million becoming very ill, yet there was no national emergency cited and life remained normal. (1)
Infection History (December 31, 2019 – January 31, 2019
December 31 – 1
January 03 – 44
January 21 – 225
January 23 – 830
January 24 – 1,295
January 25 – 1,950
January 26 – 2,744 infections, 80 deaths
January 27 – 4,515 infections, 105 deaths
January 28 – 5,974 infections, 132 deaths
January 29 – 7,711 infections, 170 deaths
January 30 – 9,692 infections, 216 deaths
January 31 – 9,800 infections, 216 deaths
Source: Chinese Government and World Health Organization data
See Map Below
scan of NYT map, January 31st
Approximately 150 infections have been recorded outside China in 20-21 countries out of a total of recorded infections of the order of 10,000 (January 31st).
Sofar all recorded deaths are in mainland China. Not a single death has been recorded outside China.
These numbers are low when compared to those pertaining to the common seasonal virus flu outbreak.
According to WHO data, there were 5 million infections and 650,000 deaths Worldwide associated with the common seasonal flu virus. (2017 figures)
In Hong Kong, there are more deaths every two weeks from the regular flu each year (and this year) than occurred with SARS in total, but with only 6 confirmed coronavirus cases, Hong Kong is shutting down most flights and trains between the Mainland and has closed many of its border ports of entry.
In Mainland China, the new virus has now caused more infections than did SARS during 2002-2003, although the death rate is much lower, but 200 or 300 deaths in a population of nearly 1.4 billion is not immediately reminiscent of the plague or the Spanish flu, both of which caused millions of deaths around the world.
And indeed China as well experiences many more deaths from the simple flu each year, yet China has allocated nearly 30 billion RMB (about US$4 billion) to support the battle against this novel coronavirus. The fear and the over-reaction (if indeed it is such) appear to stem simply from the fact that this pathogen is new.
Train travel during this holiday was down by about 75% from the same period last year. China extended the country’s New Year holiday in an attempt to permit citizens to remain isolated at their homes for a longer period, but there will soon be a large wave of travelers returning to their place of residence or work, with the dangers of further infections.
Airlines from numerous countries announced the reduction or full cancellation of all flights to China, and Russia, Mongolia and North Korea blocked all crossings into China until March 1, Russia effectively closing its 4,200 Km border. The US and many other nations have recommended the avoidance of any travel to China. As well, many businesses in China have elected to temporarily close their doors, including Starbucks and McDonald’s, IKEA and others. (2)
The Italian government declared a state of emergency in an effort to “allegedly” prevent the spread of the coronavirus strain after two cases were confirmed in Rome. Italy, Air France, Delta Airlines, Air Canada, British Airways, Lion Air and Seoul Air, Finnair, Cathay Pacific and Jetstar Asia have suspended all flights to and from China. Several other airlines including were reducing the number of flights to the country as demand for travel drops.
Many nations have now evacuated most of their diplomatic staff from China, including the US, France and Japan.
Australia said it would quarantine suspected infections for two weeks on a small island about 1,600 Kms from its mainland, and Singapore has barred all travelers who have visited mainland China during the past two weeks. (3) Elsewhere, more than 6,000 tourists were under lockdown aboard a cruise ship at an Italian port on Thursday after two Chinese passengers from Macao were isolated over fears they could be carrying the coronavirus. (4)
The WHO Declared a Global Emergency
On January 30, the WHO declared the virus outbreak as a global emergency, an “extraordinary event” that constitutes a risk to other countries and requires a coordinated international response. This was prompted by the rapid rise in reported infections, especially having spread to 18 other nations where there were cases of human-to-human transmission. France confirmed that a doctor who was in contact with a patient with the new virus later became infected himself, and medical specialists worry that the spread of new viruses from patients to health workers can signal the virus is becoming adapted to human transmission and thus become much more infectious. (5)
The WHO Director-General said the declaration was not a vote of non-confidence in China, nor what was happening in China, but because of what is happening in other countries, and that “Our greatest concern is the potential for this virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems which are ill-prepared to deal with it.”
Marion Koopmans, an infectious diseases specialist at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands and a member of WHO’s emergency committee wondered if the virus was “more infectious than previously thought or if there was something unusual in those circumstances”. Another virologist suggested the transmission was easier than initially assumed, stating that “If transmission between humans was difficult, then the numbers would have plateaued”. Another medical officer stated that this new virus “has spread at unprecedented scale and speed, with cases passing between people in multiple countries across the world.”
There were Western media reports that Wuhan medical authorities had been arrested for breaking the news about the virus, but those claims were not true. What did happen was that some unrelated individuals circulated online comments that SARS had returned to China and had been detected in Wuhan’s hospitals, which claim rattled a great many people. The police did interview them because spreading unfounded or false rumors that upset public stability is a crime in China. However these 8 individuals were released and later commended because their evidence proved to be essentially correct even though, as the chief epidemiologist at the CCDC stated, they “lacked scientific evidence”. In fact, China’s Supreme Court issued a statement on this, saying “Facts show that, although the novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia was not SARS, information released by the eight people was not entirely fabricated.” (6)
In a surprising move, the mayor of Wuhan, Zhou Xianwang said that the public were initially unsatisfied with the speed of information disclosure, and that the rapid effective lockdown of the city was upsetting to many people. He said,
“I hope the public can understand that it’s an infectious disease, and . . . It’s unprecedented to lockdown a city with more than 10 million people. However, faced with the current situation, we’ve closed the city gate and possibly besieged the virus within the city. We might leave a bad name in history.”
He then stated “But if it’s conducive to the control of the virus and the protection of the safety of the people”, both he and the party chief in Wuhan would resign if that would appease any existing indignation. (7) Typically, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (an anti-Mainland publication) twisted the story to read “Wuhan mayor under pressure to resign over response to virus”, when in fact there was no outside pressure. (
It was heartwarming that privately-owned Chinese hotels in Wuhan voluntarily provided free rooms for medical staff needing rest. Xiao Yaxing, the private owner of a four-star hotel in the city, opened a discussion group on Chinese social media platform WeChat where he appealed to his peers from more than 40 hotels to offer rooms for doctors and nurses who were working day and night to save lives. He said that since nearly all transportation had ceased in the large city, it was difficult for the medical staff to get to hospitals from home and needed rest places as well. Xiao said “Many hotels in Wuhan are shut down for travelers, leaving a lot of empty rooms that we can offer for free.” (9)
China’s state-owned enterprises also mobilised their resources to combat the outbreak of pneumonia caused by the novel coronavirus. The nation’s major telecom operators initiated emergency responses to ensure effective communications in Hubei Province, and SOE pharma companies have made extreme efforts to accelerate production of test kits and medical appliances, as well as working around the clock to develop vaccines against the virus. (10)
And of course, every silver lining has a cloud. Retail giants Carrefour and Wal-Mart are being fined millions of RMB for illegal price-gouging, profiteering frauds, and “otherwise cheating” their customers during this crisis, both having apparently been warned in advance only a few days prior by the authorities and both firms ignoring the warnings. It must be said that both Carrefour and especially Wal-Mart have a long history in China of various kinds of fraudulent practices. A few years ago, all the Wal-Mart stores in Chongqing Province were shuttered and six top executives arrested for a massive public fraud, with the company receiving a heavy fine. (11)
As an example in this instance, one branch alone of Carrefour in Shanghai had taken advantage of the public anxiety to mark up their regular vegetable prices from (for example) 2.5 RMB to 19.8, from 3.87 to 19.55, and from 4.26 to 18.33, while their procurement costs had remained stable. The authorities discovered that both Carrefour and Wal-Mart had been further cheating customers with false prices or misleading tags but charging 30% to 50% more at the check-out. These price frauds occurred in many stores in many provinces by both firms. (12)
China’s New Coronavirus: An Examination of the Facts
Carrefour China apologized for any pricing irregularities and said the company would establish “a special control group to conduct internal price quality inspections”. Wal-Mart for its part also issued a statement saying it would “strengthen efforts on price inspections and treat any problems extremely seriously”. However, these are the same statements these two companies make each time they are caught and fined for fraudulent practices. (13)
Some Troubling Background
Each of these items below, and indeed all of them together, might be dismissed as mere coincidences. It is too early to form conclusions, but these facts and events have startled and alarmed some people from their topical relevance and their correspondence in terms of time.
Part of the unsettling nature of these events is that many tragedies in the world in recent times have had ‘trial runs’, with the authorities conducting simulated events that uncannily resembled the real event which took place shortly afterward. The Boston Marathon bombing in the US a few years ago was one such event, where hundreds of citizens testified that what appeared to be FBI agents carried out precisely such a simulation only days before the actual bombing took place. There are many such, and all well-documented, though the mass media avoided all discussion of them.
Chinese officials initially believed the virus originated at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, but say it now appears now that there were multiple sources of the infection. Huang Chaolin, a Chinese pulmonary disease specialist, vice director of Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, revealed some early findings on the clinical data of the first 41 novel coronavirus cases. In a new published paper in the Lancet, he said that four of the first five cases had no contact with the seafood market and that only 27 of the first 41 cases had such exposure. “Judging from the whole situation, the seafood market may not be the only source. The origin of the novel coronavirus might be multi-source.” (14)
While a few Caucasians and other Asians have been infected to date, the virus so far appears to still be tightly focused to Chinese. In my previous article on this virus, I referred to a thesis on Biological Weapons by Leonard Horowitz and Zygmunt Dembek who stated that clear signs of a genetically-engineered bio-warfare agent were (1) a disease caused by an uncommon (unusual, rare, or unique) agent, with (2) lack of an epidemiological explanation, i.e. no clear idea of source; (3) An “unusual manifestation and/or geographic distribution”, such as race-specificity; and (4) “multiple sources” of infection. This case now has all four. (15)
There is another matter involving racial susceptibility to this 2019-nCov infection disease. A group of Chinese virologists discovered that at least some Chinese have an extremely large number of a particular kind of cell in their lungs, which relate to regulating both viral reproduction and transmission. They claimed this as the appropriate “biological background for the epidemic investigation of the 2019-nCov.” (16) (17)
Another strange occurrence was around two years ago when the US Air Force placed a listing on the Federal Business Opportunities website asking for at least 12 RNA samples from Russian people of a European ancestry, as well as 27 samples of Russian synovial fluid. The contract stated that all samples must be “collected from Russia and must be Caucasian. The Government will not consider tissue samples from Ukraine”. (1
Igor Nikulin, a former member of the UN commission on biological weapons, noted that the RNA samples can be used to develop viruses.
“New types of biological weapons are being developed. There’s nothing else that could possibly interest the military department. Most likely, they are weaponised viruses. The US is trying to develop various types of biological weapons specifically for specific carriers of this gene pool, and Caucasoids are needed since they constitute the majority of the population of our country. This is the same focus group for which they are trying to find the samples. It’s necessary for the viruses to act selectively on one or another ethnic group.”
Wuhan was holding the World Military Games just a few weeks prior to the outbreak of the virus, with a huge foreign contingent present. 300 US military personnel arrived in Wuhan for these Games which lasted into November, not long before the infections began. There is no proven link between these two, but merely questions which arise from the timing. (19) (20)
In October of 2019, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation co-hosted a pandemic exercise with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in conjunction with the UK’s Pirbright Institute, using precisely such a novel corona virus outbreak. It was called “Event 201”, and was a simulation exercise that envisioned a fast-spreading coronavirus with a devastating impact. In their simulation, the coronavirus resulted in a death toll of 65 million people within 18 months – surpassing the deadliest pandemic in history, the 1918 Spanish flu. (21)
Screenshot Event 201
The organisers were saying,
“Efforts to prevent such consequences or respond to them as they unfold will require unprecedented levels of collaboration between governments, international organizations, and the private sector.”
In their narrative,
“the immune-resistant virus was crippling trade and travel, sending the global economy into freefall. Social media was rampant with rumors and misinformation, governments were collapsing, and citizens were revolting.” They claimed this scenario was “utterly realistic”.
Aside from the coincidence with a virtually identical breakout in China, perhaps the most revealing part was the group’s focus on the necessity of “deep coordination with the ‘private’ sector” because, in their words, “vaccine development is slow and difficult if there isn’t an immediate market for it.” Comments of this kind unfortunately raise immediate questions.
Another serious matter is the Pirbright Institute itself which assisted in the above simulation. The Pirbright Institute is one of the UK’s two major bio-weapons labs, the other being Porton Down. It was from Pirbright that foot and mouth disease viruses “escaped” twice in recent years, devastating the small farmers by killing all the cattle and that resulted in UK farming suddenly being taken over by big agra.
This so-called institute has what must surely be the worst record of safety, of ethics, and of story-telling ability among the entire world’s Level 4 biolabs. For background, a Level 4 lab is perhaps the most secure place on earth. No unauthorised person can even approach, much less enter, and an exit requires, among other things, stripping naked for decontamination. Nothing, no materials can be removed from the site, for obvious reasons, without a police or military escort. However, when the foot and mouth disease ravaged England and the source was definitively traced to Pirbright, their response was that “animal activists” had entered the lab and stolen some vials of pathogens and released them. The great majority of English, unfamiliar with the technical features of biolabs, probably believed the story which was pure fantasy.
A related issue is that Pirbright’s presence at the simulation was no doubt due to the fact that they have created and patented several (five, I believe) coronaviruses, one of which was used in the simulation – US Patent # 10,130,701 issued November 20, 2018. It is curious that Pirbright is partially funded by the Gates Foundation (a “primary funder”), leading one to wonder why Bill Gates would be financing a UK bioweapons lab. We are told the interest is in vaccines, but a biolab that creates and patents lethal pathogens could avoid the cost of vaccine research by not creating the pathogens in the first instance. Pirbright own the patents for five different new kinds of corona viruses, but have also created and patented a wide range of other pathogens, including (with funding from Gates) “engineered Mosquito Genes” (weaponising insects, in fact), which some believe was the original source of Oxytech’s mosquitoes that released the Zika virus. (22) (23)
Then in late January, Netflix released a new documentary called ‘Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak’, which alarmed many people with the coincidence of it being released just as the coronavirus is spreading worldwide.
Some dismissed this as an elaborate publicity stunt, but its contents are too detailed and too linked to China’s coronavirus to be an accident. The series examines the worldwide healthcare system, discussed possible sources of viruses that could cause a worldwide pandemic, and examines humanity’s ability to cope. Given that the documentary required some time for production, many worried citizens on the Internet are asking if Netflix had prior knowledge. It is an alarmist documentary, encouraging the public to be “most scared of influenza and respiratory (corona) viruses, with phrases like “Pandemic Is Now”, “Seek Don’t Hide”, “Prayers Might Work”. It too focuses on the ‘private sector’ as the world’s savior with privately-produced (and for-profit) vaccines. (24) (25) (26)
In another disparaging article, CNN claims, “historically a mass quarantine is an aggressive response that’s far from perfect. In the past it has led to political, financial and social consequences.”
Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University and director of the WHO’s Center on Global Health Law, said the move was “unprecedented,” and, he thought, “very unwise.” “Nothing on this scale has ever been tried,” he told CNN. “There’s very little evidence of its effectiveness. And I think there’s good reason to think that it could backfire, from a public health, social, human rights perspective.”
CNN claims they can lead to “logistical issues”, that merely the word “quarantine” will cause panic and hysteria. Apparently there are also “human rights implications”, one US expert stating, “I don’t think you can enforce a mass quarantine of 30 million people without violating human rights.” The same expert claimed it could easily spur public violence and a distrust of health authorities, and that there will be broad “financial and social consequences” and will “hinder local economic activity”. Gostin then claimed that “Getting the buy-in from the people you’re protecting is essential,” he said, “and always better than ordering people to do stuff.”
It would seem that, for China, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. (27)
Other media and internet posters regularly insinuate or claim that the new coronavirus “leaked from the Wuhan bio-weapons lab”, yet another example of writers making claims while lacking any close personal acquaintance with the facts. The University of Wuhan contains The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is one of the country’s premier biosafety laboratories which works with the WHO and other international groups as part of a large network studying pathogens from all over the world, as do all other such institutes. I have seen many insinuations or accusations of the Institute being a bio-weapons lab, but those are claims made with no supporting evidence. I am generally aware of the Institute, and it is purely a civilian operation. It has never been associated with biological military or combat research.
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2020 2:38 pm Post subject:
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The article below China’s New Coronavirus: An Examination of the Facts is well written and offers important points we ALL need to consider. I advise ALL to research the history of the US and its allies concocting biological weapons--right here in the US. See excerpt 4 below.
EXCERPTS FROM THE ARTICLE:
1. The Western media have already staked out their claim to the fundamentals, all media sources claiming the virus was transferred to humans from animals or seafood. .... though the actual origin has not been determined nor stated by the authorities, and is still an open question perhaps primarily since viruses seldom jump species barriers without human assistance.
2. Almost immediately upon receiving the genome sequence, several Russian scientists suggested a link between SARS and biowarfare. Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, said the propagation of the SARS virus might well have been caused by leaking a combat virus grown in bacteriological weapons labs. According to a number of news reports, Kolesnikov claimed that the virus of atypical pneumonia (SARS) was a synthesis of two viruses (of measles and infectious parotiditis or mumps), the natural compound of which was impossible, that this mix could never appear in nature, stating, “This can be done only in a laboratory.” (5) And Nikolai Filatov, the head of Moscow’s epidemiological services, was quoted in the Gazeta daily as stating he believed SARS was man-made because “there is no vaccine for this virus, its make-up is unclear, it has not been very widespread and the population is not immune to it.” (6) (7)
3. We might in other circumstances pass this off as an unfortunate coincidence but for some major circumstantial events that serve to alter our focus. One of these is the history of American universities and NGOs having come into China in recent years to conduct biological experiments that were so illegal as to leave the Chinese authorities enraged. This was particularly true when it became known that Harvard University had surreptitiously proceeded with experiments in China that had been forbidden by the authorities years earlier, where they collected many hundreds of thousands of Chinese DNA samples and then left the country. ( (9) (10) (11) (12)
4. Recent disease outbreaks that would seem to possibly qualify as potential bio-warfare agents are AIDS, SARS, MERS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Hantavirus, Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, Ebola, Polio (Syria), Foot and Mouth Disease, the Gulf War Syndrome and ZIKA. And in fact thousands of prominent scientists, physicians, virologists and epidemiologists on many continents have concurred that all these viruses were lab-created and their release deliberate. The recent swine flu epidemic in China has the hallmarks as well, with circumstantial evidence of the outbreak raising only questions.
5. It wasn’t widely reported, but it seems the final conclusion of the Chinese biochemists was the same, that the SARS virus was man-made.
The Western mass media have discussed the new corona virus that began in the city of Wuhan in Central China but, apart from repetitive small details and the inevitable China-bashing, not much light has been shed on the circumstances. My initial commentary here is composed from a medley of nearly 100 Western news reports, primarily ABC, CBS, CNN, AFP, and from some Chinese media. Officially called the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), the contagion is a respiratory illness, a new type of viral pneumonia, in the same family of infections as SARS and MERS.
At the time of writing, Chinese health authorities announced 830 confirmed cases caused by this virus in 29 provincial-level regions in the country, resulting so far in 25 deaths primarily among the elderly who had been suffering serious prior medical conditions and were perhaps in weakened physical states. A few cases have been reported in other countries, Thailand, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, the US, Japan, all of which involved ethnic Chinese who had traveled to Wuhan. The virus initially showed no signs of spreading between humans, but then may have mutated with 15 medical workers in Wuhan apparently contracting the pathogen from other victims. It still remains unclear how easy it is to contract it from another infected individual.
The initial symptoms were mild, which permitted many people to travel before stronger symptoms were detected. The first occurrences in December thus appeared to be of minor concern. The incubation period has not been definitively stated but, once infections began, the spread was surprisingly rapid after the first case was confirmed on December 31: on January 3, 44 cases; January 21, 225 cases, January 24, 830 cases. Local medical authorities have said the true extent of the Wuhan coronavirus is unclear, and the early official figures may have been an underestimation since the mild symptoms and delayed onset meant infections may have been undetected.
All the evidence suggests the Chinese authorities acted effectively as soon as they realised the danger they might be facing. Medical authorities immediately declared the outbreak, and within a week they had identified the pathogen and also determined and shared the genome sequence with the WHO and other parties, a sufficiently speedy response that earned praise from the WHO and scientists around the world.
Remembering the SARS troubles, they did much more. In most large centers in the country, all sports venues, theaters, museums, tourist attractions, all locations that attract crowds, have been closed, as have all schools. All group tours have been cancelled. Not only the city of Wuhan but virtually the entire province of Hubei has been locked down, with all trains, aircraft, buses, subways, ferries, grounded and all major highways and toll booths closed. Thousands of flights and train trips have been cancelled until further notice. Some cities like Shanghai and Beijing are conducting temperature tests on all roadways leading into the cities. In addition, Wuhan is building (in five days) a portable hospital of 25,000 square meters to deal with the infected patients. As well, Wuhan has asked citizens to neither leave nor enter the city without a compelling reason, and all are wearing face masks.
The scale of the challenge of implementing such a blockade is immense, comparable to closing down all transport links for a city 5 times the size of Toronto or Chicago, two days before Christmas. These decisions are unprecedented, but testify to the determination of the authorities to limit the spread and damage of this new pathogen. They not only address the gravity of the situation but also the seriousness of consideration for the public health, unfortunate and difficult decisions since the holiday is being destroyed for hundreds of millions of people. Most public entertainment has been cancelled, as have tours, and many weddings as well. The damage to the economy during this most festive of all periods, will also be enormous. Hong Kong will suffer severely in addition to all its other troubles, since visits from Mainland Chinese typically support much of its retail economy during this period.
The Chinese New Year is the most important festival for Chinese. Saturday, January 25, is the first day of the Lunar New Year, a festive period that typically sees the largest mass-movement of people on the planet as Chinese flock back to their hometowns to be with relatives. No health authority has ever tackled the challenge currently faced by China, as the country grapples with a new coronavirus just as hundreds of millions prepare to travel.
And of course the Western media had a field day of schadenfreude. CNN published a report – a bit too gleefully, I thought – on the potential damage to China’s economy: (1)
“China’s economy is slumping and the country is still suffering the effects of the trade war with America. An outbreak of a new and deadly virus is the last thing it needs. The Wuhan coronavirus has already roiled Chinese markets and thrown plans for the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday into chaos for millions of people. The world’s second biggest economy grew at its slowest pace in nearly three decades last year as it contended with rising debt, cooling domestic demand and US tariffs, many of which remain in place despite a recent truce. Beijing is worried about unemployment, too, and has announced a wave of stimulus measures in recent weeks aimed at preventing mass layoffs. . . The Wuhan coronavirus outbreak could spark widespread fear and spur people to hunker down and avoid going outside. That kind of behavior would deal a huge blow to the service sector, which now accounts for about 52% of the Chinese economy.” [And so on . . .]
The Western media have already staked out their claim to the fundamentals, all media sources claiming the virus was transferred to humans from animals or seafood. The media have added fuel to the fire by claiming the virus emerged from “illegally traded wildlife” in a market “where offerings reportedly include wild animals that can carry viruses dangerous to humans”, and that this virus “jumped into the human population from an infected animal”. Chinese officials stated that the virus appears to have originated at a seafood market in Wuhan, though the actual origin has not been determined nor stated by the authorities, and is still an open question perhaps primarily since viruses seldom jump species barriers without human assistance.
While there is no evidence of biowarfare, a virus outbreak in the city of Wuhan immediately prior to the Chinese New Year migration could potentially have dramatic social and economic repercussions. Wuhan, with a population of about 12 million, is a major transport hub in Central China, particularly for the high-speed train network, and with more than 60 air routes with direct flights to most of the world’s major cities, as well as more than 100 internal flights to major Chinese cities. When we add this to the Spring Festival travel rush during which many hundreds of millions of people travel across the country to be with their families, the potential consequences for the entire country are far-reaching.
Comparison with SARS
This is a novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), an entirely new strain related to the MERS (MERS-CoV) and the SARS (SARS-CoV) viruses, though early evidence suggests it is not as dangerous.
SARS was proven to be caused by a strain of the coronavirus, a large family of mostly harmless viruses also responsible for the common cold, but SARS exhibited characteristics never before observed in any animal or human virus, did not by any means fully match the animal viruses mentioned above, and contained genetic material that still remains unidentified – similar to this new corona virus in 2019.
Virologist Dr. Alan Cantwell wrote at the time that “the mysterious SARS virus is a new virus never before seen by virologists. This is an entirely new illness with devastating effects on the immune system, and there is no known treatment.” Dr. Cantwell also noted that the genetic engineering of coronaviruses has been occurring in both medical and military labs for decades. He wrote that when he searched in PubMed for the phrase “coronavirus genetic engineering”, he was referred to 107 scientific experiments dating back to 1987. To quote Dr. Cantwell:
“I quickly confirmed scientists have been genetically engineering animal and human coronaviruses to make disease-producing mutant and recombinant viruses for over a decade. No wonder WHO scientists identified the SARS/coronavirus so quickly. Never emphasised by medical news writers is the fact that for over forty years scientists have been “jumping species” with all sorts of animal and human viruses and creating chimera viruses (viruses composed from viruses of two different species). This unsupervised research produces dangerous man-made viruses, many of which have potential as bioweapons. Certainly SARS has the hallmarks of a bioweapon. After all, aren’t new biological warfare agents designed to produce a new disease with a new infectious agent? As in prior military experiments, all it might take … to spread SARS is an aerosol can . . .” (2) (3) (4)
Almost immediately upon receiving the genome sequence, several Russian scientists suggested a link between SARS and biowarfare. Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, said the propagation of the SARS virus might well have been caused by leaking a combat virus grown in bacteriological weapons labs. According to a number of news reports, Kolesnikov claimed that the virus of atypical pneumonia (SARS) was a synthesis of two viruses (of measles and infectious parotiditis or mumps), the natural compound of which was impossible, that this mix could never appear in nature, stating, “This can be done only in a laboratory.” (5) And Nikolai Filatov, the head of Moscow’s epidemiological services, was quoted in the Gazeta daily as stating he believed SARS was man-made because “there is no vaccine for this virus, its make-up is unclear, it has not been very widespread and the population is not immune to it.” (6) (7)
It wasn’t widely reported, but it seems the final conclusion of the Chinese biochemists was the same, that the SARS virus was man-made. This conclusion wasn’t a secret, but neither was it promoted to the international media since they would simply have used the claim to heap scorn on China, dismissing this as a paranoid conspiracy theory. The Western media totally ignored this aspect, except for ABC news who reported that the SARS “Mystery Virus” was possibly “a Chinese bio-weapon that accidentally escaped the laboratory”. Nice of ABC to notice, but their story, if true, would be the first example of a nation creating and releasing a race-specific biological weapon designed to attack exclusively itself.
Notable is that while SARS spread to about 40 countries, the infections in most countries were few and deaths almost zero, and it was exclusively (or almost exclusively) Chinese who were infected, those in Hong Kong most seriously, with Mainland China suffering little by comparison.
This appears to be precisely the case with this new virus, in that most of the infected persons (sofar) are Chinese. News reports speak of infections appearing in Thailand or the US, but those (at least to date of writing) were all Chinese who had been to Wuhan. There have been no cases so far of infected Caucasians.
As with SARS, this new virus appears to be tightly-focused to Chinese. At this stage it is too early to draw specific conclusions.
We might in other circumstances pass this off as an unfortunate coincidence but for some major circumstantial events that serve to alter our focus. One of these is the history of American universities and NGOs having come into China in recent years to conduct biological experiments that were so illegal as to leave the Chinese authorities enraged. This was particularly true when it became known that Harvard University had surreptitiously proceeded with experiments in China that had been forbidden by the authorities years earlier, where they collected many hundreds of thousands of Chinese DNA samples and then left the country. ( (9) (10) (11) (12)
The Chinese were furious to learn that Americans were collecting Chinese DNA. The government intervened and prohibited the further export of any of the data. The conclusion at the time was that the ‘research’ had been commissioned by the US military with the DNA samples destined for race-specific bio-weapons research.
In a thesis on Biological Weapons, Leonard Horowitz and Zygmunt Dembek stated that one clear sign of a genetically-engineered bio-warfare agent was a disease caused by an uncommon (unusual, rare, or unique) agent, with lack of an epidemiological explanation. I.e. no clear idea of source. They also mentioned an “unusual manifestation and/or geographic distribution”, of which race-specificity would be one. (13)
Recent disease outbreaks that would seem to possibly qualify as potential bio-warfare agents are AIDS, SARS, MERS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Hantavirus, Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, Ebola, Polio (Syria), Foot and Mouth Disease, the Gulf War Syndrome and ZIKA. And in fact thousands of prominent scientists, physicians, virologists and epidemiologists on many continents have concurred that all these viruses were lab-created and their release deliberate. The recent swine flu epidemic in China has the hallmarks as well, with circumstantial evidence of the outbreak raising only questions.
There was another curiosity in this case, in that additional to the usual criticisms of China being inactive or secretive, several US media replicated accusations from “a senior US State Department official” claiming Washington was “still concerned” about transparency in the Chinese government on the Wuhan coronavirus. Other articles claimed the US CDC was “concerned that Chinese health officials have still not released basic epidemiological data about the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, making it more difficult to contain the outbreak.” There is no substantial reason that officials at any level of the US State Department should concern themselves with a virus outbreak in a foreign country.
Their criticisms were surprisingly detailed, demanding specifics on the number of infections directly from contact with the Wuhan market, the number of person-to-person infections, the precise incubation period from exposure to the onset of symptoms, the point at which persons become contagious. The questions were presented in benevolent terms of helping the Chinese medical authorities deal with the virus, though it was already self-evident China had no need to be lectured on such basics.
As of the date of writing, details are still too scarce to form definitive conclusions but, in every such case, once the smoke clears there are many unanswered questions that challenge the official Western narrative, but it’s old news and the media have already staked out their ground so the matter dies in the Western public mind, but not in China.
*
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(1) The Wuhan virus is the last thing China’s economy needs …
( The Harvard case of Xu Xiping: exploitation of the people, scientific advance, or genetic theft?
Margaret Sleeboom; Amsterdam School of Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam and International Institute for Asian Studies, University of Leiden, The Netherlands
Routlege; Taylor & Francis group; New Genetics and Society, Vol. 24, No. 1, April 2005
Chinese President Xi Jinping is leading a scientific ‘People’s War’ against the coronavirus
Would Mao Zedong (pictured in background at Tiananmen Gate in Beijing) be happy with China’s attempt to win a ‘People’s War’ on the coronavirus? Photo: Nicolas Asfouri / AFP
President Xi Jinping formally told WHO head Tedros Ghebreyesus, at their meeting in Beijing earlier this week, that the coronavirus epidemic “is a devil and we cannot allow the devil to hide.”
Ghebreyesus for his part could not but praise Beijing for its extremely swift, coordinated response strategy – which includes fast identification of the genome sequence. Chinese scientists have already handed over to Russian counterparts the virus genome, with snap tests able to identify it in a human body within two hours. A Russia-China vaccine is under development.
The devil, of course, is always in the details. In a matter of a few days, at the peak of the most congested travel period of the year, China did manage to quarantine an urban environment of over 56 million people, including megalopolis Wuhan and three nearby cities. This is an absolute first in terms of public health, anytime in history.
Wuhan, with a GDP growth of 8.5% a year, is a significant business center for China. It lies at the strategic crossroads of the Yangtze and Han rivers and at a railway crossroads as well – between the north-south axis linking Guangzhou to Beijing and the east-west axis linking Shanghai to Chengdu.
As premier Li Keqiang was sent to Wuhan, President Xi visited the strategic southern province of Yunnan, where he extolled the immense government apparatus to boost control and sanitary prevention mechanisms to limit propagation of the virus.
Coronavirus catches China at an extremely sensitive juncture – after the (failed) Hybrid War tactics displayed in Hong Kong; an American pro-Taiwan offensive; the trade war far from solved by a mere “phase 1” deal while more sanctions are being plotted against Huawei; and even the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, which ultimately is about targeting the expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Southwest Asia (Iran-Iraq-Syria).
The Big Picture spells out Total Information War and non-stop weaponization of the China “threat” – now even metastasized, with racist overtones, as a bio-threat. So how vulnerable is China?
A people’s war
For almost five years now a maximum-security biolab has been operating in Wuhan dedicated to the study of highly pathogenic micro-organisms – set up in partnership with France after the SARS epidemic. In 2017, Nature magazine was warning about the risks of dispersion of pathogenic agents out of this lab. Yet there’s no evidence this might have happened.
In crisis management terms, President Xi has lived up to the occasion – ensuring that China fights coronavirus with nearly total transparency (after all, the internet wall remains in place). Beijing has warned the whole government apparatus in no uncertain terms not to attempt any cover-ups. A real-time webpage, in English, here, is available to everyone. Whoever is not doing enough will face serious consequences. One can imagine what awaits the party chief in Hubei, Jiang Chaoliang.
A post that went viral all over the mainland this past Sunday states, “We in Wuhan have truly entered the stage of people’s war against the new viral pneumonia”; and many people, “mainly Communist Party members” have been confirmed as “volunteers and observers according to street units.”
Crucially, the government directed everyone to install a “Wuhan Neighbors” applet downloaded from WeChat. That determines “our home’s quarantine address through satellite positioning, and then lock on our affiliated community organization and volunteers. Thenceforth, our social activities and information announcements would be connected to the system.”
Theoretically, this means that “anyone who develops a fever will report their condition through the network as soon as possible. The system will immediately provide an online diagnosis, and locate and register your quarantine address. If you need to see a doctor, your community will arrange a car to send you to the hospital through volunteers. At the same time, the system will track your progress: hospitalization, treatment at home, discharge, death, etc.”
So here we have millions of Chinese citizens totally mobilized in what’s routinely described as a “people’s war” using “high technology to fight against illness.” Millions are also drawing their own conclusions when comparing it with the use of app software to fight against the police in Hong Kong.
The biogenetic puzzle
Apart from crisis management, the speed of the Chinese scientific response has been breathtaking – and obviously not fully appreciated in an environment of Total Information War. Compare the Chinese performance with the American CDC, arguably the top infectious disease research agency in the world, with an $11 billion annual budget and 11,000 employees.
During the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014 – considered a maximum urgency, and facing a virus with a 90% fatality rate – the CDC took no less than two months from getting the first patient sample to identifying the complete genomic sequence. The Chinese did it in a few days.
During the swine flu in the US in 2009 – 55 million infected Americans, 11,000 killed – the CDC took over a month and a half to come up with identification kits.
The Chinese took only one week from the first patient sample to complete, vital identification and sequencing of coronavirus. Right away, they went for publication and deposit in the genomics library for immediate access by the whole planet. Based on this sequence, Chinese biotech companies produced validated essays within a week – also a first.
And we’re not even talking about the now notorious building of a brand new state of the art hospital in Wuhan in record time just to treat victims of coronavirus. No victims will pay for their treatment. Additionally, Healthy China 2030, the reform of the health/development system, will be boosted.
Coronavirus opens a true Pandora’s box on biogenetics. Serious questions remain about experiences in vivo in which the consent of “patients” will not be required – considering the collective psychosis initially developed by Western corporate media and even the WHO around coronavirus. Coronavirus could well become a pretext for genetic experiments via vaccines.
Meanwhile, it’s always enlightening to remember Great Helmsman Mao Zedong. For Mao, the top two political variables were “independence” and “development.” That implies full sovereignty. As Xi seems determined to prove a sovereign civilization-state is able to win a scientific “people’s war,” that does not exactly spell out “vulnerability.”
Source: YouTube
Published by INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfunded journalism platform for people and planet
Written largely by the most prestigious British scientist of his day, this official report, containing hundreds of pages of evidence about the use of US biological weapons during the Korean War, was effectively suppressed upon its original release in 1952.
Courtesy of researcher Jeffrey Kaye, INSURGE now publishes the report in text-searchable format for the first time for the general public, with an exclusive, in-depth analysis of its damning findings and implications.
The report provides compelling evidence of systematic violation of the laws of war against North Korea through the deployment of biological weapons — a critical context that is essential for anyone to understand the dynamics of current regional tensions, and what might be done about them.
(If you don’t see any embed above, download the full report here)
Back in the early 1950s, the U.S. conducted a furious bombing campaign during the Korean War, dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of ordnance, much of it napalm, on North Korea. The bombardment, worse than any country had received up to that point, excepting the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiped out nearly every city in North Korea, contributing to well over a million civilian deaths. Because of the relentless bombing, the people were reduced to living in tunnels. Even the normally bellicose Gen. MacArthur claimed to find the devastation wreaked by the U.S. to be sickening.[1]
Most controversially, both North Korea and China alleged that by early 1952, the U.S. was using biological or germ warfare weapons against both North Korea and China. The U.S. government has strenuously denied this.
Nevertheless, captured U.S. flyers told their North Korean and Chinese captors about the use of such weapons. Later, after the prisoners were returned to U.S. custody, counterintelligence experts and psychiatrists interrogated them. They were told under the threat of court martial to renounce their confessions about germ warfare. They all did so.
The Army Criminal Investigative Division officer in charge of interrogating returning prisoners, including airmen who confessed to use of biological weaponry on North Korea and China, was Army counter-intelligence specialist, Col. Boris Pash. Pash had previously been in charge of security for the most sensitive classified operations of the U.S. government in World War II. He was in charge of security at the Manhattan Project’s Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. (The Manhattan Project was the U.S. crash program to develop the atomic bomb.)
In the immediate aftermath of the war, military intelligence officer Pash led the Alsos Mission, which searched for Nazi and Italian nuclear scientists and fissionable materials, as well as gathering “intelligence about any enemy scientific research applicable to his military effort,” including biological and chemical weapons. Later, Pash worked for the CIA, and in the 1970s was called before Congressional investigators concerning his alleged participation in Agency assassinations.[2]
To convince the world of the truth of their claim the U.S. had dropped biological weapons on their countries, and after turning down the suggestion that the International Red Cross look into the charges, the North Koreans and Chinese sponsored an investigating commission. Using the auspices of the World Peace Council, they gathered together a number of scientists from around the world, most of whom were sympathetic to either the Left or the peace movement. Most surprisingly, this commission, which came to be known as the International Scientific Commission, or ISC, was headed by one of the foremost British scientists of his time, Joseph Needham.
The ISC included scientists from a number of countries, including Sweden, France, Italy, and Brazil. The Soviet Union representative, Dr. N. N. Zhukov-Verezhnikov had been the chief medical expert at the Khabarovsk Trial of the Unit 731 Japanese officers accused of participating in bacteriological (aka biological, or germ) warfare before and during World War II, as well as conducting hideous experiments on prisoners to further that aim. Zhukov-Verezhnikov went on to write scientific articles through the 1970s.
Needham himself, though pilloried in the Western press for his opinions on the controversy of U.S. use of biological weapons during the Korean War, remained a highly lauded scientist for years after the ISC report. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1971. In 1992, the Queen conferred on him the Companionship of Honour.[3]
The ISC travelled to China and North Korea in the summer of 1952 and by September produced the “Report of International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China,” which corroborated the Chinese and North Korean claims that the U.S. had used biological weapons in an experimental fashion on civilian populations.
The summary report was only some 60 pages long, but the ISC included over 600 pages of documentary material comprising statements from witnesses, including airmen involved in dropping the weaponry, as well as captured enemy agents; reports from doctors; journal articles from the United States; autopsy reports and lab tests; and photos and other materials. Most of this documentary material has been all but inaccessible for decades, with only a handful of copies of the ISC report in a few scattered libraries in the United States.
From ISC Report, pg. 403
The report concluded that the U.S. had used a number of biological weapons, including use of anthrax, plague, and cholera, disseminated by over a dozen of different devices or methods, including spraying, porcelain bombs, self-destroying paper containers with a paper parachute, and leaflet bombs, among others.
This article is not meant to examine the full range of opinions or evidence about whether or not the U.S. used biological weapons in the Korean War. It is instead an attempt to publish essential documentation of such claims, documentation that has effectively been withheld from the American people, and the West in general, for decades.
Controversies
The charges of U.S. use of biological warfare during the Korean War have long been the subject of intense controversy. The reliance, in part, on testimony from U.S. prisoners of war led to U.S. charges of “brainwashing.” These charges later became the basis of a cover story for covert CIA experimentation into use of use of drugs and other forms of coercive interrogation and torture that became the basis for its 1963 KUBARK manual on interrogation, and much later, a powerful influence on the CIA’s post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program.
Establishment Cold War scholars have been quick to debunk the ISC report. The most notable attempts in recent years included the publication of purported letters written by officials of the Soviet Union discussing the lack of evidence of U.S. biological warfare, and the decision to manufacture such evidence to fool the West.[4] Subsequently, a 1997 memoir by Wu Zhili, the former director of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army Health Division, was published declaring the purported U.S. use of bacteriological agents in the Korean War was really “a false alarm.” [5]
As two Canadian scholars who spent years researching the Chinese-North Korean claims of biological warfare have noted, if these documents were to be true, then it would go against the bulk of archival evidence, including interviews with pertinent witnesses in both the United States and China.[6] Some of this archival evidence is quite recent, including the CIA declassification of a good deal of formerly top secret daily signal intelligence cables from the Korean War.[7]
The cables dealing with North Korean claims of biological warfare, which claims were dismissed by U.S. officials, prove that the North Koreans were serious about the belief they were being attacked by germ weapons, and that they were concerned that reports from the field not be falsified by assiduous if uninformed people sending in reports from the field. There is no evidence that North Korean officials or personnel ever engaged in falsification of evidence of biological warfare.
There also is plenty of archival evidence to be found in the suppressed Needham report materials. For instance, the Wu Zhili document claims, “‘for the entire year [1952–1953] no sick patient or deceased person was found to have anything to do with bacteriological warfare.”
From the ISC report, pg. 470
But the ISC report documents a number of such deaths, including deaths from inhalational anthrax, a very rare disease almost completely unknown in China at that time. Appendix AA of the report, “Report on the Occurrence of Respiratory Anthrax and Haemorrhagic Anthrax Meningitis following the Intrusion of U.S. Military Planes over Northeast China” details the presence of anthrax by autopsy and laboratory examination in five deaths during March-April 1952. According to U.S. experts who have looked at the details of this report, the conclusions regarding death from inhalational anthrax could not have been faked[8].
Until recently, there has been no effort to make the original Needham materials available for other scholars or the public to assess for themselves the truth or falsity of their analysis. Last year, scholar Milton Leitenberg uploaded a copy of the ISC report to Scribd, but it is a very rough scan, and not searchable, or easy to use for the public. The release was not advertised and the public in particular remains ignorant of its findings.
The version of the ISC report published here utilized state-of-the-art book scanning equipment and is text searchable.
Censorship of Unit 731-U.S. Collaboration on Biological Warfare Data
One important part of the ISC report guaranteed its suppression in the United States after its initial publication. The report discussed the activities of Imperial Japan’s biological warfare detachment, Unit 731, and the U.S. interest in its activities.
Back in 1952, collaboration between the U.S. and Japanese war criminals using biological weapons was top secret, and totally denied by the U.S.
But today, even U.S. historians accept that a deal was made between the U.S. and members of Unit 731 and associated portions of the Japanese military that had in fact been experimenting on the use of biological weapons since the mid-1930s, experimentation that included use of human vivisection and barbaric torture of thousands of human beings, most of whom were disposed of in crematoria. In addition, as described in the book chapter by Bernd Martin noted in the bibliography, there was collaboration between the Japanese and the Nazi regime on these issues.
The U.S. collaboration with Japanese war criminals of Unit 731 was formally admitted in 1999 by the U.S. government, though the documentation for this confession wasn’t published until nearly 20 years later.[9]
It is a matter of historical record now that the U.S. government granted amnesty to Japan’s chief at Unit 731, doctor/General Shiro Ishii and his accomplices. The amnesty was kept top secret for decades, until revealed by journalist John Powell in a landmark article for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in October 1981.
What came to be known as the Needham report, due to the fact the ISC was headed by the prestigious British scientist, came under immediate fire upon release. The report still remains a flashpoint for scholars. A 2001 article by the UK’s Historical Association detailed how UN and UK government officials collaborated in attempts to debunk the ISC findings. The UK Foreign Office released memoranda saying that claims of Japanese bacteriological warfare, going back to 1941, were “officially ‘not proven.’” (See article by Tom Buchanan in Bibliography.)
The sensitivity of the material uncovered by the ISC touched two areas of covert US government research. First was the US government’s own plans to research and possibly implement germ warfare. The second issue concerned the confessions of U.S. flyers as to how they were briefed and implemented trial runs of biological warfare during the Korean War.
China published the confessions of 19 U.S. airmen, but those confessions are also notoriously difficult to obtain. The ISC report published herein does include some of those “confessions,” and the public can be allowed to decide for themselves how authentic or genuine they are.
From testimony of Lt. J. Quinn, ISC report, pg. 614 (PDF)
The U.S. claimed that the flyers were tortured, and the CIA promoted the idea they were “brainwashed” by diabolical methods, causing a scare about “commie” mind control programs and “menticide,” which they used to justify the expenditure of millions of dollars for U.S. mind control programs during the 1950s-1970s.
The programs, codenamed Bluebird, Artichoke, and MKULTRA, among others, used experiments on unwitting civilians, as well as soldiers undergoing supposed anti-torture training at the military’s SERE schools. I have shown via public records that CIA scientists continued to use experiments on “stress” at SERE schools after 9/11, and believe such research included experiments on CIA and/or DoD held detainees. That such research did take place can be inferred from the release in November 2011 of a new set of guidelines concerning DoD research. This newest version of a standard instruction (DoD Directive 3216.02) contained for the first time a specific prohibition against research done on detainees. (See section 7c.)
I believe a strong case can be made that while coercive methods, primarily isolation, was used on the U.S. prisoners of war who later confessed, that their confessions were primarily true. The idea that only false confessions result from torture is in fact false itself. While false confessions can result from torture (as well as less onerous methods, such as the Reid Technique, used by police departments throughout the United States today), actual confessions can also sometimes occur. I have first-hand experience working with torture survivors to know that is true.
Even so, it is a fact that all the POWs who confessed use of germ warfare later recanted that upon return to the United States. But the terms of their recantations are suspect. The recantations were made under threat of courts-martial, and after interrogations by U.S. counterintelligence agents and psychiatrists. The archival evidence of the flyers debriefings have been destroyed or lost due to fire (according to the government). Meanwhile at least one scientist working at Ft. Detrick at the time admitted to German documentary investigators before he died that the U.S. had indeed been involved in germ warfare in Korea. (See the documentary video, “Code Name: Artichoke.”[10])
An “actual investigation… could do us psychological as well as military damage”
The charges of U.S. use of biological weapons during the Korean War are even more incendiary than the now-proven claims the U.S. amnestied Japanese military doctors and others working on biological weapons who experimented on human subjects, and ultimately killed thousands in operational uses of those weapons against China during the Sino-Japanese portion of World War Two. The amnesty was the price paid for U.S. military and intelligence researchers to get access to the trove of research, much of it via fatal human experiments, the Japanese had developed over years of studying and developing weapons for biological warfare.
During the Korean War, the U.S. strenuously denied charges of use of germ weapons and demanded an international investigation through the United Nations. The Chinese and North Koreans derided such offers, as it was United Nations-sanctioned forces that were opposing them in war and bombing their cities. But behind the scenes, the U.S. government initiated a campaign to impugn the ISC report, something they found difficult, as it turned out, according to a CIA-released document I revealed in December 2013. The document also showed the U.S. considered the call for a UN investigation to be mere propaganda.[11]
At a high-level meeting of intelligence and government officials on July 6, 1953, U.S. authorities admitted behind closed doors that the U.S. was not serious about conducting any investigation into such charges, despite what the government said publicly.
According to this document, the reason the U.S. didn’t want any investigation was because an “actual investigation” would reveal military operations, “which, if revealed, could do us psychological as well as military damage.” A “memorandum from the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) detailing this meeting specifically stated as an example of what could be revealed “8th Army preparations or operations (e.g. chemical warfare).”[12]
Charges of chemical warfare by the Americans during the Korean War were part of a report by a Communist-influenced attorneys’ organization visiting Korea, and their findings were dismissed as propaganda by U.S. authorities and commentators. But the PSB memo suggests perhaps they were right.
Not long after I published the PSB document and accompanying article, scholar Stephen Endicott wrote to remind me that he and his associate Edward Hagerman, co-authors of the 1998 book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (see bibliography), had found material themselves that indicated U.S. calls for “international inspection to counter the Chinese and North Korean charges… was less than candid.”
Endicott and Hagerman found that U.S. Far East Commander, Gen. Matthew Ridgway, had “secretly given permission to deny potential Red Cross inspectors ‘access to any specific sources of information.’” In addition, they documented a State Department memo dated June 27, 1952 wherein the Department of Defense notified that it was “impossible” for the UN ambassador at the time to state that the U.S. did not intend to use “bacteriological warfare — even in Korea.” (p.192, Endicott and Hagerman)
The Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial
The ISC report also references the December 1949 war crimes trial held by the USSR in Khabarovsk, not far from the Chinese border. The trial of Japanese war criminals associated with Units 731, 100 and other biological warfare divisions followed upon a near black-out of such issues at the larger Toyko war crimes trials held by the Allies a few years before.
At the time of the Khabarovsk trial, U.S. media and government officials either ignored the proceedings, or denounced them as yet another Soviet “show trial.” The Soviets for their part published the proceedings and distributed them widely, including in English. Copies of this report are easier to find for purchase used, though expensive, on the Internet. Additionally, in the last few years Google made a copy of the former Soviet volume available online (see Bibliography). But no scholarly edition has ever been published.
Even so, U.S. historians have been forced over the years to accept the findings of the Khabarovsk court, though the general population and media accounts remain mostly ignorant such a trial ever took place. The fact the Soviets also documented the use of Japanese biological experiments on U.S. POWs was highly controversial, denied by the U.S. for decades, was a quite contentious issue in the 1980s-1990s. While a National Archives-linked historian has quietly determined such experiments did in fact take place, the issue has quietly fallen off the country’s radar. (See L. G. Goetz in bibliography.)
The relevancy of these issues is of course the ongoing propaganda war between the United States and North Korea, as well as Pentagon reallocation of resources to the Asian theater for a possible future war against China. But it is the clear threat of a nuclear exchange between North Korea and the United States that calls for clarity around the issues that have led to the mistrust between the two countries. Such clarity demands the release of all information that would help the U.S. populace understand the North Korean point of view. Such understanding, and acting upon such knowledge, may be all that separates us from a catastrophic war that could potentially kill millions of people.
The history behind the Korean War, and U.S. military and covert actions concerning China, Japan, and Korea, are a matter of near-total ignorance in the U.S. population. The charges of “brainwashing” of U.S. POWs, in an ongoing effort to hide evidence of U.S. biological warfare experiments and trials, also has become entwined in the propaganda used to explain the U.S. post-9/11 torture and interrogation program, and alibi past crimes by the CIA and Department of Defense for years of illegal mind control programs practiced as part of MKULTRA, MKSEARCH, ARTICHOKE, and other programs.
I hope that readers will feel free to disseminate this article without any copyright reservations, as well as the ISC report itself, an orphaned document from the Cold War.
Jeffrey Kaye is a retired psychologist who has worked professionally with torture victims and asylum applicants. Active in the anti-torture movement since 2006, he has his own blog, Invictus, previously wrote regularly for Firedoglake’s The Dissenter, as well as at The Guardian, Truthout, Alternet, and The Public Record. He is the author of Cover-Up at Guantanamo, a new book examining declassified files on treatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo detention camp.
If you appreciated this story, please support INSURGE’s efforts to break investigative stories on the world’s most pressing challenges that no one else will cover for as little as $1 a month.
Bibliography
Daniel Barenblatt, A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan’s Germ Warfare Operation, HarperPerennial, 2005
Tom Buchanan, “The Courage of Galileo: Joseph Needham and the ‘Germ Warfare’ Allegations in the Korean War,” The Historical Association, Blackwell Publishers, 2001
Dave Chaddock, This Must Be the Place: How the U.S. Waged Germ Warfare in the Korean War and Denied It Ever Since, Bennett and Hastings Publishers, 2013
Stephen Endicott & Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea, Indiana University Press, 1998
Stephen Endicott & Edward Hagerman, “Twelve Newly Released Soviet-era `Documents’ and allegations of U. S. germ warfare during the Korean War,” online publication, 1998, URL: http://www.yorku.ca/sendicot/12SovietDocuments.htm
Stephen Endicott & Edward Hagerman, “False Alarm? ‘The Bacteriological War of 1952’: Comment on Director Wu Zhili’s Essay,” online publication, June 1, 2016, URL: http://www.yorku.ca/sendicot/On%20WuZhili-false-alarm.pdf [accessed May 14, 2017]
Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American Cover-up, rev. ed., Routledge Press, 2002
Linda Goetz Holmes, Guests of the Emperor: The Secret History of Japan’s Mukden POW Camp, Naval Institute Press, June 2010.
Jeffrey Kaye, “CIA Document Suggests U.S. Lied About Biological, Chemical Weapon Use in the Korean War,” Shadowproof, Dec. 10, 2013, URL: https://shadowproof.com/2013/12/10/cia-document-suggests-u-s-lied-abou t-biological-chemical-weapon-use-in-the-korean-war/ (accessed February 21, 2018)
Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged With Manufacturing Bacteriological Weapons [Testimony and Exhibits from the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial], Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1950, published as free e-book at Google Books, URL: https://books.google.com/books?id=ARojAAAAMAAJ [accessed May 14, 2017]
Milton Leitenberg, “New Russian Evidence on the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations: Background and Analysis,” Cold War International History Project, Bulletin 11, 1998
Milton Leitenberg, “China’s False Allegations of the Use of Biological Weapons by the United States during the Korean War,” CWIHP Working Paper #78
March 2016, URL: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/chinas-false-allegations-the- use-biological-weapons-the-united-states-during-the-korean [accessed May 14, 2017]
Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War, Oxford Univ. Press, 2010
Bernd Martin, “Japanese-German collaboration in the development of bacteriological and chemical weapons and the war in China,” in Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945: War, Diplomacy and Public Opinion (Christian W. Spang, Rolf-Harald Wippich, eds.), Routledge, 2006
John Powell, “A Hidden Chapter in History,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 1981
Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731: The Japanese Army’s Secret of Secrets, Hodder & Stoughton, 1989 [Note: The U.S. version of this book, published by Free Press, does not include Chapter 17 on the Korean War, which is only available in the British Hodder & Stoughton version.]
Footnotes
[1] Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography, 2013, Belknap Press, pg. 100.
[2] “Boris Pash and Science and Technology Intelligence,” Masters of the Intelligence Art series, U.S. Army Intelligence Center, Ft. Huachuca, undated. URL: http://huachuca-www.army.mil/files/History_MPASH.PDF (retrieved 1/20/2018)
In regards to Pash’s association with the CIA, we don’t know when his involvement with the Agency began, but it appears to have been quite early. Watergate defendant E. Howard Hunt told Congressional investigators in 1976 Pash was involved in assassination activities for the CIA during the 1960s. See “Executive Session, Saturday, January 10, 1976, United States Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Washington, D.C.” URL: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/1976-Executi ve-Session-Hunt-testimony-on-Pash.pdf (retrieved 1/20/2018)
[3] See URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Needham (retrieved 1/20/1. The article drew the information from Winchester, Simon (2008), The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. New York: HarperCollins.
[4] Leitenberg, Milton. (1998). Resolution of the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations. Critical reviews in microbiology. 24. 169–94. 10.1080/10408419891294271.
[5] “Wu Zhili, ‘The Bacteriological War of 1952 is a False Alarm’,” September, 1997, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Yanhuang chunqiu no. 11 (2013): 36–39. Translated by Drew Casey. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/123080
[6] “False Alarm? The Bacteriological War of 1952 — Comment on Director WuZhili’s Essay” by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, Department of History, York University (ret.), June 2016, http://www.yorku.ca/sendicot/On%20WuZhili-false-alarm.pdf
[7]“Baptism By Fire: CIA Analysis of the Korean War Overview,” URL: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/baptism-fire-cia-an alysis-korean-war-overview
[8] For a full discussion, see “Updated: The Suppressed Report on 1952 U.S. Korean War Anthrax Attack,” https://valtinsblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/revealed-suppressed-report-on -1952-us.html
[9] Jeffrey S. Kaye, “Department of Justice Official Releases Letter Admitting U.S. Amnesty of Japan’s Unit 731 War Criminals,” Medium.com, May 14, 2017, URL: https://medium.com/@jeff_kaye/department-of-justice-official-releases- letter-admitting-u-s-amnesty-of-unit-731-war-criminals-9b7da41d8982
[10] URL: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/code-name-artichoke/
[11] Jeffrey Kaye, “CIA Document Suggests U.S. Lied About Biological, Chemical Weapon Use in the Korean War,” Shadowproof, Dec. 10, 2013, URL: https://shadowproof.com/2013/12/10/cia-document-suggests-u-s-lied-abou t-biological-chemical-weapon-use-in-the-korean-war/# (accessed May 14, 2017)
[12] For the actual memorandum document, see URL: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01731R003300190 004-6.pdf _________________ www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org www.rethink911.org www.patriotsquestion911.com www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org www.mediafor911truth.org www.pilotsfor911truth.org www.mp911truth.org www.ae911truth.org www.rl911truth.org www.stj911.org www.v911t.org www.thisweek.org.uk www.abolishwar.org.uk www.elementary.org.uk www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149 http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
A week ago, we published details that raised questions about the source of the Wuhan novel coronavirus, specifically questioning the official theory for the spread of the Coronavirus epidemic, namely because someone ate bat soup at a Wuhan seafood and animal market as a fabricated farce.
The real reason behind the viral spread, we suggested, was that a weaponized version of the coronavirus (one which may have originally been obtained from Canada), was released by Wuhan's Institute of Virology (presumably accidentally ), China's only top, level-4 biohazard lab, which was studying "the world's most dangerous pathogens."
At the time we summarized the series of dots and asked "real reporters" to connect them:
One of China's top virology and immunology experts was and still works at China's top-rated biohazard lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some have affectionately called the real Umbrella Corp.
Since 2009, Peng has been the leading Chinese scientist researching the immune mechanism of bats carrying and transmitting lethal viruses in the world.
His primary field of study is researching how and why bats can be infected with some of the most nightmarish viruses in the world including Ebola, SARS and Coronavirus, and not get sick.
He was genetically engineering various immune pathways (such as the STING pathway in bats) to make the bats more or less susceptible to infection, in the process potentially creating a highly resistant mutant superbug.
As part of his studies, Peng also researched mutant Coronavirus strains that overcame the natural immunity of some bats; these are "superbug" Coronavirus strains, which are resistant to any natural immune pathway, and now appear to be out in the wild.
As of mid-November, his lab was actively hiring inexperienced post-docs to help conduct his research into super-Coronaviruses and bat infections.
Peng's work on virology and bat immunology has received support from the National "You Qing" Fund, the pilot project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the major project of the Ministry of Science and Technology.
Of course, that is all ancient history and Zero Hedge was permanently banned from Twitter for raising such a conspiracy theory about a publicly-searchable person working a publicly-searchable place.
But, bygones being bygones, we moved on... until today when no lesser entity than The White House began asking questions about the origin of the deadly coronavirus.
As ABC News reports, the director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in a letter to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, requested that scientific experts "rapidly" look into the origins of the virus in order to address both the current spread and "to inform future outbreak preparation and better understand animal/human and environmental transmission aspects of coronaviruses."
Specifically, ABC News' Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton asked the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease about concerns that stem from misinformation online that the novel coronavirus could have been engineered or deliberately released.
"There's always that concern," Dr. Anthony Fauci said.
"And one of the things that people are doing right now is very carefully looking at sequences to see if there's even any possibility much less likelihood that that's going on. And you could ultimately determine that. So people are looking at it, but right now, the focus is on what are we going to do about what we have."
The White House has good reason to question the official story as evolutionary biologist Dr. James Lyons-Weiler of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, showed and explained how the coronavirus' genetic sequence - which has been publicly released by China - contains a unique "middle fragment" encoding a SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) spike protein that appears, according to his genomic analysis, to have been inserted into the 2019-nCoV virus using "pShuttle" technology. This technique can only be done in a lab, as it has never occurred naturally in nature.
“This isn't a 'conspiracy theory', it is a scientific, medical theory,” says Del Bigtree, the Emmy-winning producer and founder of non-profit Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN).
“Its foundation is based on sound science, logic, and research, and the mainstream media needs to be asked whether it is going to pursue this link to SARS instead of trying to censor anyone who is trying to pursue truth via scientific fact.”
One additional, major reason we suspect this line of logical reasoning could be correct - as conspiratorial as it may seem - is that Chinese authorities have launched a full-scale crusade to disprove the fact that this deadly virus was man-made.
"Conspiracy theorists don't believe in science. I hope that the national professional department will investigate and give us an innocence," Shi Zhengli, a director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology - the only P4 level biosafety laboratory in China - responded to Caixin on February 4.
Faced with external doubts and accusations, on February 2nd, Shi Zhengli responded angrily in the WeChat circle of friends:
"The new coronavirus in 2019 is a punishment for uncivilized living habits of human beings by nature. It doesn't matter. I advise those who believe and spread rumours of bad media, believe in the so-called academic analysis that Indian scholars do not rely on, and close your mouth. "
Additionally, as The Washington Times reports, one ominous sign, said a U.S. official, is the that false rumors since the outbreak began several weeks ago have begun circulating on the Chinese Internet claiming the virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons.
That could indicate China is preparing propaganda outlets to counter future charges the new virus escaped from one of Wuhan’s civilian or defense research laboratories.
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As a reminder, it was discovered that Shi Zhengli had participated in a study published in Natural Medicine on November 9, 2015, about a disease that can be caused by a SARS-like coronavirus (SHC014-CoV) found in Chinese horseshoe bats.
The researchers used the SARS reverse genetics system to generate and identify a chimeric virus. In simple terms, this chimeric virus consists of the surface protein of SHC014 and the backbone of the SARS virus. The chimeric virus can infect human respiratory cells, demonstrating that the surface protein of SHC014 has the necessary structure to bind to key receptors on cells and infect cells. Chimeras can cause disease in mice, but they are not lethal. Studies have shown that viruses currently circulating in bat populations could potentially trigger the potential risk of SARS-CoV (SARS virus) outbreaks.
We are sure this is all just a coincidence - Wuhan epicenter... Only P4 facility in China... A lab investigating bats infected with genetically engineered Coronavirus... Coronavirus infected Bats... Chimeric bio-engineered viruses.... and that is probably why The White House is now asking authorities to investigate the source of the disease.
Of course, when Zero Hedge suggested the same thing, highlighting key personnel in the Wuhan lab that were publicly acknowledged as responsible for that research, we were immediately banned by Twitter. We look forward to reading Buzzfeed's article decrying The White House for daring to ask questions about the origin of this deadly pandemic.
* * *
Correction: After publishing this article, we were contacted by Dr. Lyons-Weiler who requested that we strike through the terms expert virologist. He also would like to emphasize that he stated a hypothesis, has not stated 100% certainty about the origin of this virus and that analyses are ongoing. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
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