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Tag Archives: biological weapons
corona marginalia: origin unknown #2
Dr. Anthony Fauci, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and other health officials testified before the US Senate on May 11th 2021. They answered questions on ongoing Covid-19 prevention measures and guidance, however, Fauci was also directly challenged by Senator Rand Paul about the origins of the virus and specifically his part in gain-of-function research on SARS viruses and with regards to collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV):
When asked by Paul, "Do you fund Dr. Baric's gain-of-function research?" Fauci made the following admission (italics are mine), "Dr. Baric does not do gain-of-function research, and if it is, it's according to the guidelines and it is being conducted in North Carolina, not in China." [from 2:10 mins]
The full exchange between Paul and Fauci is reprinted below. A complete transcript of the Senate hearing is available here: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/dr-fauci-cdc-director-testify-before-senate-on-covid-19-guidelines-transcript
Sen. Rand Paul:
Dr. Fauci, We don't know whether the pandemic started in a lab in Wuhan or evolved naturally, but we should want to know. Three million people have died from this pandemic, and that should cause us to explore all possibilities. Instead, government authorities, self-interested in continuing gain-of-function research say there's nothing to see here. Gain-of-function research, as you know, is juicing up naturally occurring animal viruses to infect humans. To arrive at the truth, the US government should admit that the Wuhan Virology Institute was experimenting to enhance the coronavirus' ability to infect humans.
Juicing up super-viruses is not new. Scientists in the US have long known how to mutate animal viruses to infect humans. For years, Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist in the US, has been collaborating with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to create super-viruses. This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH. The collaboration between the US and the Wuhan Virology Institute continues. Doctors Baric and Shi worked together to insert bat virus spike protein into the backbone of the deadly SARS virus and then use this man-made super-virus to infect human airway cells.
Think about that for a moment. The SARS virus had a 15% mortality. We're fighting a pandemic that has about a 1% mortality. Can you imagine if a SARS virus that's been juiced up and had viral proteins added to it, to the spike protein, if that were released accidentally?
Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?
Dr. Anthony Fauci: [1:50 mins]
Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Sen. Rand Paul: [2:05 mins]
Do they fund Dr. Baric?
We do not fund gain-
Do you fund Dr. Baric's gain-of-function research?
Dr. Baric does not do gain-of-function research, and if it is, it's according to the guidelines and it is being conducted in North Carolina, not in China.
You don't think concerning a bat virus spike protein that he got from the Wuhan Institute into the SARS virus is gain of function?
Dr. Anthony Fauci:
That is not…
You would be in the minority because at least 200 scientists have signed a statement from the Cambridge Working Group saying that it is gain-of-function.
Well, it is not. If you look at the grant and you look at the progress reports, it is not gain-of-function, despite the fact that people tweet that, they write about it-
Do you support sending money to the Wuhan Virology Institute?
We do not send money now to the Wuhan Virology Institute.
Do you support sending money? We did under your tutelage. We were sending it through EcoHealth. It was a sub-agency and a sub-grant. Do you support that the money from NIH that was going to the Wuhan Institute.
Let me explain to you why that was done. The SARS-CoV-1 originated in bats in China. It would have been irresponsible of us if we did not investigate the bat viruses and the serology to see who might have been infected in China.
Or perhaps it would be irresponsible to send it to the Chinese government that we may not be able to trust with this knowledge and with this incredibly dangerous viruses.
Government scientists like yourself who favour gain-of-function research maintain the disease arose naturally.
I don't favour gain-of-function research in China. You are saying things that are not correct.
Government defenders of gain-of-function, such as yourself, say that COVID-19 mutations were random and not designed by man. But interestingly, the technique that Dr. Baric developed forces mutations by serial passage through cell culture that the mutations appear to be natural. In fact, Dr. Baric named the technique the "No See 'em" technique, because the mutations appear naturally. Nicholas Baker in the New York Magazine said, "Nobody would know if the virus had been fabricated in a laboratory or grown in nature." Government authorities in the US, including yourself, unequivocally deny that COVID-19 could have escaped a lab, but even Dr. Shi in Wuhan wasn't so sure. According to Nicholas Baker, Dr. Shi wondered could this new virus have come from her own laboratory. She checked her records frantically and found no matches. "That really took a load off my mind," she said. "I had not slept for days."
The director of the gain-of-function research in Wuhan couldn't sleep because she was terrified that it might be in her lab. Dr. Baric, an advocate of gain-of-function research admits the main problem that the Institute of Virology has is the outbreak occurred in close proximity. What are the odds? Baric responded, "Could you rule out a laboratory escape? The answer in this case is probably not."
Will you in front of this group, categorically say that the COVID-19 could not have occurred through serial passage in a laboratory.
I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I'm fully in favour of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But you do support it in the US. We have 11 labs doing it, and you have allowed it here. We have a committee to do it, but the committee is granted every exemption. You're fooling with Mother Nature here. You're allowing super-viruses to be created with a 15% mortality. It's very dangerous. I think it was a huge mistake to share this with China. It's a huge mistake to allow this to continue in the United States. We should be very careful to investigate where this virus came from.
I fully agree that you should investigate where the virus came from. But again, we have not funded gain-of-function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. No matter how many times you say it, it didn't happen.
You're parsing words. You're parsing words. There was research done with Dr. Shi and Dr. Baric. They have collaborated on gain-of-function research where they enhance the SARS virus to infect human airway cells. They did it by merging a new spike protein on it. That is gain-of-function. That was joint research between the Wuhan Institute and Dr. Baric. You can't deny it.
No research has yet turned up any evidence of an intermediate host for Covid-19 and this leads many scientists to question official claims of zoonotic origins of the virus. On Thursday [Aug 5th], a very detailed and referenced summary of the latest findings was published as an extended article by Counterpunch. The conclusions of authors Jonathan Latham, editor of Independent Science News and Allison Wilson, Science Director at The Bioscience Resource Project, are as follows:
To date, both the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) in New York have refused requests by Congress and others, to allow public access to their existing coronavirus samples and their viral databases. These may hold answers to all the origin questions. But if publicly-funded virologists will not share the samples they already have, and are apparently unwilling to face the conclusions public access might entail, why should anyone reward them to collect more? Indeed, how can research into the origins of COVID-19 meaningfully proceed if virologists will neither share their data nor follow where it leads when they do?
The abject failure of the WHO and also of established science, in China and elsewhere, to genuinely investigate the origin question can thus be explained. The problem is not lack of data. As this article and the creative approaches of members of DRASTIC, and others, have shown, there is plenty of valuable data waiting to be brought forth. Rather, the obstacle is simply a deep and broad fear on the part of the scientific establishment that the trail might lead to a lab leak.
The lack of outrage, or even concern, among the rank and file of the scientific community at the flagrant obstructionism of the WIV and the EHA demonstrates the extent of this fear as clearly as could be wished.
The underlying problem is that academic science is enmeshed in a wider transnational Pandemic Virus Industrial Complex (PVIC) that has sought to suppress lab origin theories and within which the WIV and the EHA are just minor cogs.
The important consequence of this is that outbreak origin investigations are always challenging. They require people who are expert but are either not conflicted or who have demonstrated their independence. Consequently, the best data and analysis on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 will continue to come, we predict, mainly from individuals acting independently of established institutions.
Click here to read the full article entitled "Phylogeographic Mapping of Newly Discovered Coronaviruses Pinpoints the Direct Progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 Originating in Mojiang, China", published by Counterpunch on August 5th.
Filed under China, USA
Tagged as Allison Wilson, Anthony Fauci, biological weapons, coronavirus, Covid-19, EcoHealth Alliance, Jonathan Latham, Ralph Baric, Rand Paul, Shi Zhengli, WHO, Wuhan Institute of Virology
Whitney Webb's Dark Winter's tale of smallpox, Amerithrax and Covid-19
Is the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 a naturally occurring variant or was it deliberately engineered? The question is straightforward and finally there can only be one answer. However, governments in the West and the media seem determined to have it both ways. On the one hand they have repeatedly denounced reports that Covid-19 may be a bioweapon as "fake news", discrediting sources as "conspiracy theorists", while on the other hand, they are slowly planting the idea that the virus may indeed have escaped from a top level biosafety (BSL-4) lab in Wuhan.
As far back as April 7th, Sky News Australia was already muddying the waters with a news story entitled "Evidence mounts COVID-19 came from a lab in Wuhan". The evidence it presents is scant to say the least and the supposed "revelation" that "bat was never a food source in Wuhan" was not a revelation at all, but an established fact. Host of the show, Andrew Bolt, leaps from here, however, to the conclusion that "'a nearby laboratory just 300 metres from the market' was more likely responsible for the outbreak." While "another nearby lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, bragged about discovering and identifying 'a large number of new bat and rodent viruses'"
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps… But it's not only Sky News Australia that can change their tune and legitimise the bioweapon theory of Covid-19, although only ever to point an accusing finger at China. Here is a report from yesterday's BBC news:
This is disturbing. When two accounts of a single event are mutually contradictory, the alternating dissemination of both involves the audience in an act of doublethink. As Orwell, who coined the term, understood perfectly well: doublethink is a corrosive process of indoctrination that attacks and undermines one's own memories and sense of reality. In short, it is a powerful method for mind control.
Background: foreknowledge and the war of words
In a report from April, investigative journalist Pepe Escobar asks, "what U.S. intel really knew then about what would later be identified as Sars-Cov-2"?
He continues:
The gold standard remains the ABC News report according to which intel collected in November 2019 by the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), a subsidiary of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was already warning about a new virulent contagion getting out of hand in Wuhan, based on "detailed analysis of intercepted communications and satellite imagery".
An unnamed source told ABC, "analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event", adding the intel was "briefed multiple times" to the DIA, the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even the White House.
The Pentagon then issued a retraction of sorts which you can read in Escobar's article and as a footnote below 1. However, the original story is substantiated in another way, as Escobar explains:
[V]alidating the ABC News report, Israel steps in. Israeli intel confirms U.S. intel did in fact warn them in November about a potentially catastrophic pandemic in Wuhan (once again: how could they possibly know that on the second week of November, so early in the game?) And NATO allies were warned – in November – as well. 2
Click here to read Pepe Escobar's full article entitled "What Did U.S. Intel Really Know About the 'Chinese' Virus?"
Beijing is carefully, incrementally shaping the narrative that, from the beginning of the coronovirus attack, the leadership knew it was under a hybrid war attack. Xi's terminology is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a "people's war" had to be launched.
Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means "white devils" or "foreign devils": guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code.
When Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, voiced in an incandescent tweet the possibility that "it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan" – the first blast to this effect to come from a top official – Beijing was sending up a trial balloon signalling that the gloves were finally off. 3
Click here to read more from an earlier piece by Pepe Escobar entitled "China locked in hybrid war with US"
In the same article Escobar goes on the discuss how Chinese media are now openly asking questions about a remarkable chain of coincidences involving the World Military Games attended by 300 US military personnel that took place in late October in Wuhan on the eve of the coronavirus outbreak. This includes "the shutting down in August last year of the 'unsafe' military bioweapon lab at Fort Detrick" and the prefigured modelling of a worldwide pandemic that took place the very day of the opening of the Wuhan military games during Event 201 held in New York on October 18th (more below).
On March 26th, 'Moderate Rebels', Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton spoke with independent geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar about the new US cold war with China; potential origins of the Covid-19 virus; anti-China corporate media narratives; putting all this in the context of Beijing's strategy to build a new silk road:
The leaders of two controversial pandemic simulations that took place just months before the Coronavirus crisis – Event 201 and Crimson Contagion – share a common history, the 2001 biowarfare simulation Dark Winter. Dark Winter not only predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks, but some of its participants had clear foreknowledge of those attacks.
Writes independent journalist Whitney Webb in the lead paragraph of the first of her latest series of investigative reports entitled "Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex".
Webb continues:
During the presidency of George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s, something disturbing unfolded at the U.S.' top biological warfare research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Specimens of highly contagious and deadly pathogens – anthrax and ebola among them – had disappeared from the lab, at a time when lab workers and rival scientists had been accused of targeted sexual and ethnic harassment and several disgruntled researchers had left as a result.
In addition to missing samples of anthrax, ebola, hanta virus and a variant of AIDS, two of the missing specimens had been labelled "unknown" – "an Army euphemism for classified research whose subject was secret," according to reports. The vast majority of the specimens lost were never found and an Army spokesperson would later claim that it was "likely some were simply thrown out with the trash."
An internal Army inquiry in 1992 would reveal that one employee, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, had been caught on camera secretly entering the lab to conduct "unauthorized research, apparently involving anthrax," the Hartford Courant would later report. Despite this, Zack would continue to do infectious disease research for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and would collaborate with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) throughout the 1990s.
The Courant had also noted that: "A numerical counter on a piece of lab equipment had been rolled back to hide work done by the mystery researcher [later revealed to be Zack], who left the misspelled label 'antrax' in the machine's electronic memory." The Courant's report further detailed the extremely lax security controls and chaotic disorganization that then characterized the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) lab in Fort Detrick.
This same lab would, a decade later, be officially labeled as the source of the anthrax spores responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks, attacks which are also officially said to have been the work of a "deranged" USAMRIID researcher, despite initially having been blamed on Saddam Hussein and Iraq by top government officials and mainstream media. Those attacks killed 5 Americans and sickened 17.
Yet, as the investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks unfolded, accusations from major U.S. newspapers soon emerged that the FBI was deliberately sabotaging the probe to protect the Anthrax attacker and that the CIA and U.S. military intelligence had refused to cooperate with the investigation. The FBI did not officially close their investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks, nicknamed "Amerithrax," until 2010 and aspects of that investigation still remain classified.
To learn more about how "the FBI was deliberately sabotaging the probe to protect the Anthrax attacker" you must read Whitney Webb's articles in full, and I very strongly encourage readers to follow the link to her website Unlimited Hangout. The evidence of a cover up is absolutely compelling and Webb documents all of that evidence meticulously.
My aim here is to provide a summary that helps to usefully condense Webb's assiduous research in order to get to the heart of what she describes as the "common history" that runs through the three aforementioned simulations: Operation Dark Winter (June 2001); the very recent 'Event 201' (mid-Oct 2019) "a high-level pandemic exercise" led by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that simulated the worldwide spread of a novel coronavirus; and the lesser known multi-part series of pandemic simulations, called 'Crimson Contagion', which ran between January to August 2019 and tested the capacity of the US federal government and 12 states – including New York state – to respond to a severe influenza pandemic originating in China.
Returning to Whitney Webb's outstanding series of articles (and continuing with Part I):
Upon further investigation, key leaders of both Event 201 and Crimson Contagion, not only have deep and longstanding ties to U.S. Intelligence and the U.S. Department of Defense, they were all previously involved in that same June 2001 exercise, Dark Winter. Some of these same individuals would also play a role in the FBI's "sabotaged" investigation into the subsequent Anthrax attacks and are now handling major aspects of the U.S. government's response to the Covid-19 crisis. One of those individuals, Robert Kadlec, was recently put in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) entire Covid-19 response efforts, despite the fact that he was recently and directly responsible for actions that needlessly infected Americans with Covid-19.
I shall return to the career of Robert Kadlec and other notable participants in the Dark Winter exercise in fuller detail in the indicated sections below.
Operation Dark Winter
Webb launches her own investigation on the basis of events that unfolded shortly after the 9/11 attacks with the targeted release of anthrax spores to Senators Tom Daschle, Russ Feingold and Patrick Leahy:
all of whom were – at the time – preventing the US Patriot Act from quickly passing through the Senate and who were resisting administration attempts to ram the legislation through with little to no debate.
Webb also reminds us:
Several of the letters included the date "9-11-01" and the phrases "Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is great" in neatly-printed block letters.
She continues:
Soon after, a suspicious letter was found in the office of then-Congressman and current Vice President Mike Pence. Media Roots noted the following about Pence's subsequent press conference in a 2018 podcast that examined the timeline of the 2001 anthrax attacks:
"…Mike Pence, who once hosted an AM talk show describing himself as 'Rush Limbaugh on decaf,' conducts a press conference outside the Capitol proclaiming revenge and biblical style justice to whoever conducted the anthrax attacks. His family–with news cameras in tow–gets tested for anthrax at the hospital after it is allegedly found in his office.
No news outlets questioned his grandstanding or odd performance of going to the hospital with his family, and unlike Senators Daschle and Leahy in their press appearances, Mike Pence alluded to the anthrax letters being connected to the larger 'war on terror.'"
As public panic swelled, more letters continued to be found, not just in the United States but around the world, with anthrax and/or hoax letters being found in Japan, Kenya, Israel, China and Australia, among others. Simultaneously, efforts to link the anthrax attacks to Saddam Hussein and Iraq began to emerge and quickly grew in intensity and number.
The media push to link the attacks to Iraq began first with The Guardian and then was followed by U.S. media outlets like The Wall Street Journal. Those early reports cited unnamed "American investigators" and defense officials and largely centered on the false claim that alleged 9/11 mastermind Mohammad Atta had met with an Iraqi diplomat in Prague in late 2000 as well as similarly false allegations that members of Al Qaeda had recently obtained vials of anthrax in the Czech Republic.
Webb begins her piece, however, outlining the details to a high-level bio-attack simulation known as Operation Dark Winter that took place in June 2001 and foreshadowed the anthrax letters, placing Dark Winter in the context of contemporaneous geopolitical concerns with Pentagon crosshairs already hovering over Iraq. Three months later and in the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent 'Amerithrax' attacks, many in the cast of the Dark Winter exercise were performing similar parts in real life.
The Dark Winter exercise began with a briefing on the geopolitical context of the exercise, which included intelligence suggesting that China had intentionally introduced Foot and Mouth disease in Taiwan for economic and political advantage; that Al-Qaeda was seeking to purchase biological pathogens once weaponized by the Soviet Union; and that Saddam Hussein of Iraq had recruited former biowarfare specialists from the Soviet Union and was importing materials to create biological weapons. It further notes that a majority of Americans had opposed a planned deployment of U.S. soldiers to the Middle East, which was also opposed by Iraq, China and Russia. The script also asserts that the soldiers were being deployed to counter and potentially engage the Iraqi military. Later, as the exercise unfolds, many of those Americans once skeptical about this troop deployment soon begin calling for "revenge."
Amid this backdrop, news suddenly breaks that smallpox, a disease long eradicated in the U.S. and globally, appears to have broken out in the state of Oklahoma. The participants in Dark Winter, representing the National Security Council, quickly deduce that smallpox has been deliberately introduced and that this is the result of a "bioterrorist attack on the United States." The assumption is made that the attack is "related to decisions we may make to deploy troops to the Mid-East."
Not unlike what is unfolding currently with the Covid-19 crisis, in Dark Winter, there is no means of rapid diagnosis for smallpox, no treatments available and no surge capacity in the healthcare system. The outbreak quickly spreads to numerous other U.S. states and throughout the world. Hospitals in the U.S. soon face "desperate situations" as "tens of thousands of ill or anxious persons seek care." This is compounded by "grossly inadequate supplies" and "insufficient isolation rooms," among other complications.
Since this exercise occurred in June 2001, the heavy hinting that Saddam Hussein-led Iraq and Al Qaeda are the main suspects is notable. Indeed, at one point in one of the fictional news reports used in the exercise, the reporter states that "Iraq might have provided the technology behind the attacks to terrorist groups based in Afghanistan." Such claims that Iraq's government was linked to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan would re-emerge months later in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and would be heavily promoted by several Dark Winter participants such as former CIA Director James Woolsey, who would later swear under oath that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. It would, of course, later emerge that Iraq's connections to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks were nonexistent as well as the fact that Iraq did not possess biological weapons or other "weapons of mass destruction."
A summary of Operation Dark Winter based around information gathered from current Wikipedia entries including an overview and partial list of participants can be found in Appendix A.
As a lead member as well as the de facto spokesman of Trump's White House Coronavirus Task Force, Dr Anthony Fauci has recently become a household name in America. However Fauci first came into the public spotlight during the AIDS crisis as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a post he has held since 1984.
It was also under Fauci's leadership and in response to the post-9/11 'Amerithrax' attacks, that NIAID "markedly expanded, intensified and accelerated its ongoing research programs in biodefense". A new initiative that Fauci personally outlined during his address to delegates at the 12th annual Joseph B. Brennan Lecture at Georgetown University in October 2002:
"Events of 2001 have had an impact not only on the nation but on the biomedical field which is now concerned with emerging diseases and defense… Eighteen cases and five deaths associated with anthrax has led to a total transformation in what the biomedical community would have to deal with. The anthrax scare has resulted in a situation unprecedented… and would be a new challenge for American medicine."
In echoes of the Dark Winter scenario, Fauci also "discussed the possible threat of a resurgence of the smallpox disease" indicating "that smallpox is a possible weapon that could be used against the U. S. in the event of bioterrorism, which means that the vaccine may be needed again." More controversially, he also "asked how the government would decide to make it mandatory if not enough people decided to get the vaccine voluntarily." 4
Shortly afterward this address in November, the Canadian Medical Association Journal responded to these plans with a piece entitled "Bioterrorism becoming too dominant on public health agenda?"
The bioterrorism threat has led the US to commit $1.5 billion in new funding for research in this area in 2003. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described the spending as "quite unprecedented," calling it the "largest single increase of any discipline in any institute in the history of the [National Institutes of Health]." His institute must now decide how to spend US$1.75 billion next year on vaccines and treatments for problems such as smallpox.
Several people questioned the size of such budgets, arguing that the medical community is being unduly influenced by fears of terrorism. The remote chance of a bioterrorist attack means that there is little profit motive for private companies to invest in this kind of research. Fauci agreed that this poses a difficult challenge.
The discussion about how to convince companies to invest has already been marred by controversy. The US Department of Health and Human Services was recently criticized for holding closed-door meetings with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America Emergency Preparedness Task Force. Sidney Wolfe of US Public Citizen, a legislative watchdog group, said that having pharmaceutical executives at the table was an inherent conflict of interest and that these executives have "powerful economic self-interests in shaping government policy on this topic." 5
A few months on and Fauci was bolstering the same calls with a piece published in the esteemed journal Nature detailing his proposals for putting "Biodefence on the research agenda". The levels of funding were already ballooning:
The US government is investing an unprecedented amount of money — $5.9 billion planned for fiscal year 2003 — to counter the threat of bioterrorism. Of that sum, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the lead government agency in biomedical research, will receive nearly $1.75 billion, almost eight times the fiscal year 2002 budget for biodefence research, and the largest single increase in resources for any initiative in the history of the NIH. With this largesse come enormous responsibilities. 6
Of course, words can sometimes be used to disguise the truth, and never more so than in the case of "defence": the weaponisation of language is part and parcel of its armoury. For "biodefence research" then it is advisable to read instead "bioweapons research". In short, Fauci was hereby announcing a vast transfer of public money away from healthcare and into the already overflowing coffers of the arms industry. And this was just the start:
The American legal authority who in 1989 drafted the law Congress enacted to comply with the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention says the U.S. today [October 11, 2015] is in flagrant violation of that Convention.
So begins an article based on an interview with Dr Francis Boyle, a human rights lawyer and Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois who drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989. (A fact that is still listed although tucked away beneath the generic heading "Background and legal work" in the middle of his current Wikipedia entry.)
"Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have spent somewhere in the area of $100 billion" on offensive biological warfare, charges Professor Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, Champaign.
Boyle said an estimated 13,000 "death scientists" in 400 laboratories in the U.S. and abroad, are employed making new strains of offensive killer germs that will be resistant to vaccines.
For example, Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka's group at the University of Wisconsin has found a way to increase the toxicity of the flu virus by 200 times! Boyle says Kawaoka is "the same death scientist who resurrected the genocidal Spanish Flu virus for the Pentagon for offensive biowarfare purposes."
As for fighting flu, the National Institutes of Health in 2006, a typical year, got only $120 million from Congress to fight flu, which kills an estimated 36,000 Americans annually. By contrast, Congress gave NIH $1.76 billion for "biodefense," even though the anthrax outbreak in 2001 killed just five persons.
"These distorted budgetary allocations," (spending 15 times as much for germ warfare as for fighting flu) "demonstrate that the priority here is not the promotion of the public health of American citizens but rather to further develop the U.S. offensive biowarfare industry that will someday 'blowback' upon the American people with a catastrophic pandemic," Boyle said. 7
This story becomes more extraordinary, once we learn that some of this public money was "just last year" transferred via NIAID, the organization led by Dr. Fauci, to "fund[ed] scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
The same Newsweek piece I have quoted above continues:
In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.
Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.
The article then details the two phases of the NIH research project, and continues:
The project was run by EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit research group, under the direction of President Peter Daszak, an expert on disease ecology. NIH canceled the project just this past Friday, April 24th, Politico reported. Daszak did not immediately respond to Newsweek requests for comment.
The project proposal states: "We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential."
In layman's terms, "spillover potential" refers to the ability of a virus to jump from animals to humans, which requires that the virus be able to attach to receptors in the cells of humans. SARS-CoV-2, for instance, is adept at binding to the ACE2 receptor in human lungs and other organs.
According to Richard Ebright, an infectious disease expert at Rutgers University, the project description refers to experiments that would enhance the ability of bat coronavirus to infect human cells and laboratory animals using techniques of genetic engineering. In the wake of the pandemic, that is a noteworthy detail.
Adding:
A decade ago, during a controversy over gain-of-function research on bird-flu viruses, Dr. Fauci played an important role in promoting the work. He argued that the research was worth the risk it entailed because it enables scientists to make preparations, such as investigating possible anti-viral medications, that could be useful if and when a pandemic occurred.
The work in question was a type of gain-of-function research that involved taking wild viruses and passing them through live animals until they mutate into a form that could pose a pandemic threat. Scientists used it to take a virus that was poorly transmitted among humans and make it into one that was highly transmissible—a hallmark of a pandemic virus. This work was done by infecting a series of ferrets, allowing the virus to mutate until a ferret that hadn't been deliberately infected contracted the disease.
The work entailed risks that worried even seasoned researchers. More than 200 scientists called for the work to be halted. The problem, they said, is that it increased the likelihood that a pandemic would occur through a laboratory accident. 8
Click here to read the full article entitled "Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab with U.S. Dollars for Risky Coronavirus Research"
"Anthrax War" (2009) is investigative documentary by filmmaker Roberto Coen and Executive Producer Eric Nadler that examines the 2001 Anthrax Attacks and offers a frightening glimpse into today's secret and dangerous world of germ weapons. Broadcast internationally, it was nominated for the 2009 Prix Europa for Outstanding Current Affairs Broadcast. DEAD SILENCE is the accompanying book that fills out the story of the global investigation that the documentary could only outline:
Click here to read more background on the official website. *
Robert Kadlec
"If several kilograms of an agent like anthrax were disseminated in New York City today, conservative estimates put the number [of] deaths occurring in the first few days at 400,000. Thousands of others would be at risk of dying within several days if proper antibiotics and vaccination were not started immediately. Millions of others would be fearful of being exposed and seek or demand medical care as well. Beyond the immediate health implications of such an act, the potential panic and civil unrest would create an equally large response."
— Robert Kadlec as quoted in a 1998 article from the Vancouver Sun.
The name of Robert Kadlec fails is notable by its absence from the current Wikipedia entry on Operation Dark Winter since as Whitney Webb reveals:
The name for the exercise derives from a statement made by Robert Kadlec, who participated in the script created for the exercise, when he states that the lack of smallpox vaccines for the U.S. populace means that "it could be a very dark winter for America." Kadlec, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration and a former lobbyist for military intelligence/intelligence contractors, is now leading HHS' Covid-19 response and led the Trump administration's 2019 "Crimson Contagion" exercises, which simulated a crippling pandemic influenza outbreak in the U.S. that had first originated in China.
We also learn how Kadlec "who became an adviser on biological warfare to the Rumsfeld-led Pentagon in the days after 9/11" states in his official biography that he "contributed to the FBI investigation of the anthrax letter attacks", although, as Webb writes:
[I]t's unclear exactly what those contributions were, beyond having met at least once with scientists at Fort Detrick in November 2001. Whatever his contributions were, Kadlec has long been an emphatic supporter of the official narrative regarding Bruce Ivins, who he has referred to as a "deranged scientist" and the sole culprit behind the attacks. Kadlec has also used the official narrative about Ivins to assert that bioweapons have been "democratized," which he argues means that weaponized pathogens can be wielded by essentially anyone with "a few thousand dollars" and enough time on their hands.
More recently, Robert Kadlec has been put in charge of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) entire Covid-19 response efforts, and he is not alone:
Notably, Kadlec isn't the only key figure in the current U.S. government response to Covid-19 to have ties to the botched FBI investigation as current HHS Secretary Alex Azar was also involved in the FBI investigation. In addition, Azar stated at a White House press briefing in 2018 that he had been "personally involved in much of managing the response [to the anthrax attacks]" as then-General counsel to HHS.
Yet, given that the FBI investigation into the anthrax attacks and the government response to them were so disastrous and heavily criticized by independent and mainstream media alike, it is surprising that Azar and Kadlec would so proudly tout their involvement in that fiasco, especially considering that the scientific analyses used in that investigation were fatally flawed and, by all indications, led to the death of an innocent man.
[Bruce Ivins "apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published report." 9]
In the final instalment of her investigative trilogy "Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex ", Webb returns to "head of the hydra", Robert Kadlec.
She writes:
Thanks to a long and deliberate process to introduce biodefense policy, driven by Robert Kadlec and his sponsors, $7 billion dollars-worth of federally-owned vaccines, antidotes and medicines – held in strategically arranged repositories across the country in case of a health emergency – are now in the hands of one single individual. Those repositories, which compose the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), are the exclusive domain of HHS' ASPR, a post created under Kadlec's watchful eye and tailored over the years to meet his very specific requirements.
From this perch, Robert Kadlec has final say on where the stockpile's contents are sourced, as well as how, when and where they are deployed. He is the sole source procurer of medical material and pharmaceuticals, making him the best friend of Big Pharma and other healthcare industry giants who have been in his ear every step of the way.
Kadlec assures us, however, that the fact that he now holds the very office he worked so long to create is merely a coincidence. "My participation in the ASPR project began at that time when I was working for the chairman of the Subcommittee on Bioterrorism and Public Health Preparedness…The bill was made law and the ASPR was created. It just was a coincidence that, 12 or 14 years later, I was asked to become the ASPR," Kadlec stated in 2018.
It was all a random twist of fate, Kadlec asserts, that saw him occupy ASPR at this crucial moment in U.S. history. Indeed, with the country now in the middle of a WHO-declared coronavirus pandemic, Kadlec now has full control over the far-reaching "emergency" powers of that very office, bestowed upon him by the very law that he had written.
Webb also retraces the rise of Kadlec who "describes himself as having been an "accidental tourist" regarding his introduction to biological warfare", which "began when he was assigned to be a special assistant for Chemical and Biological Warfare to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), advising then-head of Special Operations Command Maj. Gen. Wayne Downing, on the eve of the first Gulf War":
Kadlec would later state that he had witnessed firsthand how the military, immediately prior to the Gulf War, had "lacked the necessary protective equipment, detectors, and medical countermeasures including vaccines and antibiotics against the immediate threats posed by Iraq," allegedly prompting him to want to better U.S. biodefense efforts.
While holding this post at JSOC, Kadlec was privy to the advice of William C. Patrick III, a veteran of the U.S.' bioweapons program who had developed the U.S.' method for weaponizing anthrax and held no less than five classified patents related to the toxin's use in warfare. Patrick, who had left government service in 1986 to become a consultant, advised the Pentagon — then headed by Dick Cheney — that the risk of a biological weapons attack by Iraq, particularly anthrax, was high. Patrick's warning prompted the U.S. military to vaccinate tens of thousands of its troops using the controversial anthrax vaccine "anthrax vaccine adsorbed (AVA)." Kadlec would personally inject AVA into around 800 members of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Note that: anthrax vaccine adsorbed (AVA) is still the only FDA-licensed human anthrax vaccine licensed for use in the United States. Today it is produced under the trade name BioThrax by the Emergent BioDefense Corporation (formerly known as BioPort Corporation) in Lansing, Michigan. I return to BioThrax and BioPort below. †
The award-winning documentary 'Direct Order' (2003) is embedded below. Directed by Scott Miller and narrated by Michael Douglas, it tells the story of American military personnel who were ordered sometimes against their will to take the anthrax vaccine and who subsequently developed Gulf War Syndrome:
Kadlec would later note in Congressional testimony that no definitive proof of an alleged Iraqi biological weapons program was found during the war or afterwards, but nevertheless claimed elsewhere that "the Iraqis later admitted they had procured large quantities of a biological agents-anthrax and botulism toxin," suggesting that Patrick's warnings had had some basis in reality.
However, Kadlec failed to point out that these anthrax and botulism samples had been sold, with the U.S. government's full approval, to Iraq's Ministry of Education by a U.S. private non-profit called the American Type Culture Collection. Donald Rumsfeld, who was then an envoy for the Reagan administration and running a pharmaceutical company later sold to Monsanto, would also be involved in the shipment of these samples to Iraq.
Following the war, American microbiologist Joshua Lederberg was tasked by the Pentagon to head the investigation into "Gulf War Syndrome," a phenomenon that studies later linked to the adverse effects of the anthrax vaccine. Lederberg's task force argued that evidence regarding an association between the symptomology and the anthrax vaccine was insufficient. However, he would later come under fire after it was reported that he sat on the board of the American Type Culture Collection, the very company that had shipped anthrax to Iraq's government between 1985 and 1989 with the U.S. government's blessing. Lederberg later admitted that the investigation he led had not spent enough "time and effort digging out the details". The taskforce's findings were later harshly criticized by the Government Accountability Office.
Over the past several years, the United States has embarked on a program of secret research on biological weapons that, some officials say, tests the limits of the global treaty banning such weapons.
So begins an article co-authored by New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, who, appropriately enough, had performed the part of a reporter working for the NYT in the simulation Dark Winter. The article entitled "U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits" appeared in early September about a week prior to the 9/11 attacks and little more than two months since her role in the June exercise.
A few paragraphs down, she continues:
Earlier this year, administration officials said, the Pentagon drew up plans to engineer genetically a potentially more potent variant of the bacterium that causes anthrax, a deadly disease ideal for germ warfare.
The experiment has been devised to assess whether the vaccine now being given to millions of American soldiers is effective against such a superbug, which was first created by Russian scientists. A Bush administration official said the National Security Council is expected to give the final go-ahead later this month. 10
Webb picks up the story and writes:
The New York Times noted specifically that the genetically-modified anthrax experiments being performed by Battelle's West Jefferson facility were a "significant reason" behind the Bush administration's decision to reject the draft agreement and the U.S. government had argued at the time that "unlimited visits to pharmaceutical or defense installations by foreign inspectors could be used to gather strategic or commercial intelligence." Of course, one of those "pharmaceutical or defense installations" was ultimately the source of the anthrax used in the [post-9/11 'Amerithrax'] attacks.
In a tribute (her word) to William C Patrick III, Miller describes her first meeting with "the government's 'go-to guy' on biological weapons", fondly reminiscing:
Then this seemingly cheerful father of two led us downstairs to his basement office, as he had legions of other students of the black bio-arts, to give us a PowerPoint tutorial on how germ weapons were made, stored, and distributed. He patiently answered our questions about how bacteria, viruses, and other deadly pathogens could be used as weapons of mass destruction. Near the end of our session, he pulled a garden sprayer out of a green duffel bag and vigorously pumped it several times, producing a large cloud of fine particles that hung in the air like fog. If this were anthrax, he told us, we would all soon be dead. Offering me a memento of our class, he put a vial of the simulated anthrax in my purse and scribbled his home number on the stationery of his one-man consulting firm, Biothreats Assessment. It was topped with an image of the Grim Reaper. A skull and crossbones were engraved on the business card he handed me. Call any time, he said merrily.
The year was 1997 and Miller's momentary shock at being sprayed like a greenfly was really nothing; certainly when compared to the horror she must have felt just a handful of years later upon seeing an unknown white powder spilling from an envelope addressed to her.
Her own account continues:
And call we did. On countless occasions, Bill Patrick was an invaluable source of biological history, analysis, folklore, and wisdom. When I received a letter filled with powder during the anthrax letter attack after 9/11, Bill was on the phone to calm me down, assuring me that the powder that had tumbled out of the envelope onto my clothes and my desk, given my description of it, was most likely a hoax, not some of the real anthrax which wound up killing five and infecting 17. And when the FBI began to suspect him as a potential culprit in its hapless "Amerithrax" investigation of the anthrax attacks—a travesty that the Bureau eventually undid by naming another Fort Detrick veteran, Bruce Ivins, as the likely perpetrator—I tried comforting him as he had me. 11
Judith Miller would go on to ruin her reputation by promoting false intelligence claims about Iraq's WMD programme both before and after the 2003 invasion. In her own self-defence, she afterwards confessed the unspeakable truth of so much so-called journalism:
"My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." 12
Senator Sam Nunn and Margaret Hamburg
Created by media mogul Ted Turner and former Senator Sam Nunn in January 2001, NTI [Nuclear Threat Initiative] aimed not only to "reduce the threat" posed by nuclear weapons, but also chemical and biological weapons.
In announcing NTI's formation on CNN, the network Turner had founded, Nunn stated that while "nuclear weapons pose the gigantic danger, but biological and chemical weapons are the most likely to be used. And there are thousands of scientists in the former Soviet Union that know how to make these weapons, including chemical, biological and nuclear, but don't know how to feed their families." Nunn continued, stating that NTI hoped "to begin to help, some hope for gainful employment for people that we don't want to end up making chemical and biological and nuclear weapons in other parts of the world." NTI's mission in this regard likely came as welcome news to Joshua Lederberg, who had long advocated that the U.S. offer employment to bioweapons researchers from the former Soviet Union to prevent their employ by "rogue regimes."
Alongside Nunn and Turner on NTI's board was William Perry, a former Secretary of Defense; former Senator Dick Lugar, for whom the alleged U.S. bioweapons lab in Georgia is named; and Margaret Hamburg, who was NTI's Vice President overseeing its work on biological weapons. Margaret Hamburg's father, David Hamburg, a long-time president of the Carnegie Corporation, was also an advisor and "distinguished fellow" at NTI. David Hamburg was a longtime close advisor, associate, and friend of Joshua Lederberg.
Both Sam Nunn and Margaret Hamburg of NTI, as well as top officials from ANSER [aka Analytic Services, Inc.], would come together in June 2001 to participate in an exercise simulating a bioweapons attack called "Dark Winter." Nunn would play the role of president in the exercise and Hamburg played the head of HHS in the fictional scenario. Jerome Hauer, then-managing director of the intelligence-linked outfit Kroll Inc. and a Vice President at the military-intelligence contractor Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC), played the head of FEMA.
Jerome Hauer
In Part I of her series which is subtitled "All Roads Lead to Dark Winter"; Webb introduces us to Jerome Hauer, another one of the key participants of the Operation Dark Winter.
Webb tells us "[Hauer] had previously served for nearly 8 years at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC), which oversees the USAMRIID lab at Fort Detrick." The same USAMRIID lab in Fort Detrick where the anthrax used in the Amerithrax attacks was allegedly produced and stolen from.
In Part I, we also learn that:
[Jerome] Hauer, on September 11, 2001, was the managing director of Kroll Inc., a private intelligence and security company informally known as the "CIA of Wall Street," a company that French intelligence had accused of acting as a front for the actual CIA. Kroll Inc., at the time of the attacks was responsible for security at the World Trade Center complex, yet Hauer was conveniently not present at his World Trade Center office on the day of the attacks, instead appearing on cable news.
And there is a great deal more to Hauer's "curious past", as Webb reveals in Part II of the series entitled "A Killer Enterprise: How One of Big Pharma's Most Corrupt Companies Plans to Corner the Covid-19 Cure Market". Picking up where she left off, she writes:
As BioPort secured its control over the only licensed anthrax vaccine producer in the country in 1998, New York's emergency crisis manager and bioterrorism expert, Jerome Hauer, was busy working and making doomsday contingency plans from his "bunker" on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building 7.
Put on the job by then-NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 1996, Hauer had previously managed worldwide emergency response for technology giant IBM. He also was an adviser to the Justice Department, had briefed President Clinton on bioterror threats and was known to "consult regularly with Scotland Yard and the Israeli military." It was reportedly Hauer's idea to locate the city's emergency management office at Building 7, even though placing it there was considered controversial at the time due to the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, bombings that were later revealed to have disturbing links to the FBI.
In 1999, the New York Times would describe Hauer's job as "sitting around all day thinking up horrifying ways for things to be destroyed and people to die." It would also note that Hauer described his expertise regarding specific emergency situations as follows: "helicopter crash, subway fire, water main break, ice storm, heat wave, blackout, building collapse, building collapse, building collapse." His obsession with building collapses even led him to house "trophies" of the building collapses he had overseen and responded to. How odd then that Hauer's multi-million dollar "bunker" itself would later fall victim to building collapse, falling into its own footprint in 7 seconds on September 11, 2001.
The back-story to the rescue of biopharmaceutical company BioPort which had depended upon the timely occurrence of the 2001 anthrax attacks is detailed at great length in the article. For the purposes of this synopsis the part that you need to understand is that although Hauer was also a national security adviser to then-head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Tommy Thompson, he soon became "one of their biggest proponents of expanding BioPort's contracts":
As the anthrax attacks unfolded, Hauer advised Secretary Thompson to establish a new office at HHS, the Office of Public Health Preparedness (OPHP), whose first acting director was Dr. D.A. Henderson, a former official with the World Health Organization and the original founder of the Johns Hopkins Working Group on Civilian Biodefense, which had sponsored Dark Winter and included Jerome Hauer as well as Dark Winter co-authors Tara O'Toole and Thomas Inglesby. In early 2002, Hauer himself would replace Henderson as head of the newly created OPHP.
In May 2002, Hauer — while leading OPHP — co-authored a report with members of the Johns Hopkins Working Group, including O'Toole and Inglesby. In that paper, published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Hauer, O'Toole, Inglesby and their co-authors argued that greater production and purchase of anthrax vaccine was necessary in light of the 2001 anthrax attacks and that government funding was also needed to research a new anthrax vaccine. They also asserted that the vaccine did not cause any significant adverse effects.
Notably, just months prior, O'Toole and Inglesby had come under scrutiny in their attempts to link the anthrax attacks to Al Qaeda, several months after that possibility had been ruled out completely by federal investigators and other independent scientists.
The paper authored by the Johns Hopkins Working Group would also come under scrutiny, particularly their recommendation that the government acquire more BioThrax. This was largely because the evidence from the attacks showed that antibiotics were much more effective and less expensive in responding to anthrax attacks, with subsequent studies claiming that calls for stockpiling more BioThrax "defy medical evidence and expert recommendations" based on lessons learned during the anthrax attacks.
Moreover:
Hauer would, months later, be appointed to a newly created position at HHS, one which oversaw the new biodefense stockpile from which BioPort would be a major beneficiary.
BioPort would be then renamed and repackaged as Emergent Biosolutions in 2004. It would then hire even more well-connected lobbyists and add several big names from government and the private sector to its board. One of these "big names" was none other than Jerome Hauer, who was added to Emergent's board soon after leaving HHS. Hauer still remains a company director and sits on three of its corporate governance committees.
Returning to the immediate events surrounding the 9/11 attack, we also discover that:
[O]n the day of 9/11, Hauer had told top Bush administration officials to start taking the antibiotic Cipro to prevent infection via anthrax and Hauer would subsequently make public hints via mass media that foreign terrorists were working with Saddam Hussein to unleash an anthrax attack on the American public. All of this took place well before the first anthrax attack victim, photojournalist Robert Stevens, would even show symptoms.
Hauer had prepared for a scenario just like the anthrax attacks as part of the Dark Winter biowarfare simulation, which occurred just months prior and at a time when Hauer was a member of the Johns Hopkins Working Group on Civilian BioDefense, part of what is now the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, then led by Dark Winter co-author Tara O'Toole.
Webb adds:
Also of note is the fact that, while working for Kroll Inc. Hauer was also working for the Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a defense and intelligence contractor. There he became a co-worker of Stephen Hatfill, who Hauer had actually met years prior. At SAIC, Hatfill worked on developing protocols for handling "anthrax hoax letters," a phenomenon present in Dark Winter and later during the actual 2001 anthrax attacks. Hatfill would later be accused of having committed those very attacks, but was later cleared of suspicion, winning a hefty multi-million dollar settlement from the government. 13
Click here to read Whitney Webb's full article.
John Rendon (knows too much)
Very few who read this story will know who John Rendon is. Back during the time of Nixon and Watergate, Rendon was one of the people working for George McGovern in his quest for the White House. Later, after cutting his teeth doing PR and propaganda for Washington's top dogs dethroning enemy despots like Manuel Noreiga, and other CIA targets. In the early 2000s, Rendon would be referred to as "The man who sold the war," because of a story by investigative journalist James Bamford. His report revealed how the Rendon Group PR firm fed journalists, like disgraced New York Times writer Judith Miller, stories to sell Bush's "War on Terror" to the public. It was Rendon who was involved with the contrivance where a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah told the world about the babies in incubators Saadam Hussein's soldiers left to die. America went to war and killed hundreds of thousands, because of such lies.
Today, John Rendon proves how "involved" he is in current affairs. Invisible in the news cycle, Rendon's activities can only be observed (ironically) by his Twitter feed, and through his Empower Peace platform and organizations like the Women2Women international leadership program. Not unlike billionaire George Soros, who uses the Open Society Foundation to "teach" doctrine and action to the world's next leaders, Rendon operates at the grassroots level as well as the operations level. Brainwashing is the easy term for what Rendon Group is up to.
The extract above is drawn from a short piece entitled "Manufactured Perception and the COVID-19 Pandora's Box" published by New Eastern Outlook on June 10th.
Political analyst Phil Butler continues:
Rendon's talent, if you will, comes from an understanding of how digital/social media works. In the old days of public relations, clients expected PR firms to change the worldview via a series of press releases or televised interviews with American officials. Rendon and operators like him, understand that effective propaganda requires the gradual cultivation and propagation of an alternative worldview, which is the way the CIA practiced during the Cold War.
As intelligent (or lucky), and intuitive as John Rendon is, like most people he slips up in the slipstream of social media. His Twitter feed may not be revealing to the causal "Tweep" but set against a comparative timeline, Rendon just knows too much too soon. The tweet below is part 1 of 5 he shared January 31st, weeks before most people even understood what COVID-19 was.
"What should be known about contagions, is first, the psychological size of the contagion will be at least 5x greater than the contagion itself, thus timely, truthful and transparent reporting is essential-which is a challenge for Boys in #Beijing"
(#Coronavirus 1 of 5) What should be known about contagions, is first, the psychological size of the contagion will be at least 5x greater than the contagion itself, thus timely, truthful and transparent reporting is essential-which is a challenge for Boys in #Beijing;
— John Rendon (@JohnWRendon) January 31, 2020
The second tweet in the series foretold of collapsing medical infrastructure and the need for the military to step in. Third, Rendon uses his crystal ball to predict travel stoppage, infrastructure, and supply chain breakdown. Next, he predicts economic recovery will be 2x to 3x longer than when the contagion danger has passed. Finally, the PR spook nails exactly what has happened in the international response to the pandemic.
In my view, John Rendon is either a direct descendant of the soothsayer "Carnac the Magnificent" made famous by the late Johnny Carson, or he's some knowledge of pre-planning and contingencies for this pandemic. The news cycle the average American sees contained no such in-depth analysis in the timeframe January 1st through 31st. Put another way, the New York Times was in reaction mode in January, and there was no mention of wide-reaching economic impacts like Rendon prophesied. 14
Phil Butler doesn't reprint the contents of tweets #2–#5 in detail but they are still available and so I have included them in Appendix B.
Click here to read Phil Butler's full article.
"Using DNA genetic engineering, U.S. death scientists are concocting new strains of lethal microbes for which there are no cures. Bacteria, for example, can be made resistant to vaccines, made more virulent, easier to spread, and harder to eradicate. Right now U.S. death scientists are scouring the biosphere around the world to locate any bioagent in nature that they can exploit and pervert into offensive biowarfare purposes."
— Dr Francis Boyle. 15
Whitney Webb's latest investigative trilogy does a great deal to unravel the incestuous ties between US federal agencies, bioweapons establishments such as Fort Detrick, and sectors of the pharmaceutical industry. However, by shining a spotlight directly on the network of authors and participants involved in Operation Dark Winter that foreshadowed the Amerithrax attacks, she also achieves more than this. Webb shows us that careers were advanced and how many of the same actors have profited financially too. Did any of them have insider knowledge of what was about to be unleashed from Fort Detrick? She believes the circumstantial evidence overwhelming, although without a fully independent inquiry, it will always be impossible to divorce conspiracy from coincidence.
Today the world is locked down following the outbreak of a very different type of disease. Unlike Amerithrax, we do not as yet know the origins of Covid-19. The official view is that this new variant of coronavirus is of zoonotic origin: that is, an earlier form was spread from animals; specifically, from horseshoe bats to some as yet unknown intermediary creature, mutating in the process and finally becoming transmissible from human to human. Precisely when and where this happened is uncertain, although the earliest recorded cases in China indicate that patients were first infected in mid to late November.
The Trump administration has since told the world that it believes the virus "escaped a P4 Wuhan virology research center", and asserts that "China hid its knowledge of a potential escape by using its time before notifying the world of the outbreak to vacuum up medical safety gear from Brazil, and elsewhere." 16
Having made these accusations, Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, afterwards reiterated the claim that the US had evidence, if not certainty, that the virus had emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology:
"Every one of those statements is entirely consistent," he said. "We are all trying to figure out the right answer. We are all trying to get the clarity." 17
Not that Pompeo is isolated in his belief that the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan lab. As Forbes magazine reported in the wake of US government insinuations:
The new SARS mystery is entering its ACT III, and in this act, the U.S., Australia, and the United Kingdom all lash out at China for its lackluster biosafety features at one of its most secure virology labs. 18
Francis Boyle has made similar claims (see below), although here we must be careful to acknowledge the distinction that Boyle, unlike Pompeo, is in no way attempting to scapegoat the Chinese. For one thing, Boyle understands that the research carried out at the Wuhan lab was very much a joint venture involving the Americans (you can see him discussing this in a video embedded below).
Alarmingly, at the same time, all debate over the possibility that this virus was indeed manufactured in a Wuhan lab – a hypothesis that in fact cannot be ruled out on the basis of current knowledge and one that has been entertained by researchers and experts in the field of biowarfare other than Boyle (see Appendices C and D below) – is immediately discredited on the grounds that it is just another "conspiracy theory", albeit one that not only the Trump administration, but their Australian and UK counterparts are all engaged in perpetuating. To accept both views absolutely demands doublethink.
However, there is a third possibility too. If the "Wuhan Flu" as Trump likes to call it, was produced in a lab then it might just as easily have been manufactured in America as in China. As Pepe Escobar discusses at the beginning of this piece, whether we like it or not, this would seem to be the prevailing view in China from the street all the way up to the Politburo. Covid-19 therefore represents an act of war, and all the false accusations combined with the ramping up of sanctions are secondary attacks.
If we admit this as a possible scenario then we must wonder why America would unleash an attack that was bound to blowback with devastating consequences for our own economies. As we are seeing, of course, a crisis of this magnitude provides a tremendous opportunity not only for a power grab but for looting – behind the scenes of smashed shop windows and kids running off with a pair of new trainers and a flat-screen TV, there has already been a transfer of trillions of dollars from the public purse into corporate coffers that is scarcely reported on. The same happened during the last financial crash of 2008, and to a lesser extent in the wake of 9/11 and the Amerithrax attacks. Moreover, the financial system was so fragile that the second crash was imminent and unstoppable (read this earlier post).
Which brings us back to Whitney Webb's research, and the remarkable timing of the recent 'Event 201' (mid-Oct 2019) "a high-level pandemic exercise" led by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security that simulated the worldwide spread of a novel coronavirus; and the lesser known multi-part series of pandemic simulations, called 'Crimson Contagion', which ran between January to August 2019 and tested the capacity of the US federal government and 12 states – including New York state – to respond to a severe influenza pandemic originating in China. Coincidence or conspiracy?
Whitney Webb wisely avoids addressing the question head on. For one thing she lacks having sufficient expertise in the relevant fields of virology, genetics, or epidemiology; as I do. Likewise, I merely present the evidence for others to judge.
Additional: on the origins of Covid-19
The following extract is drawn from an earlier post published on March 16th entitled "in search of the truth about this new coronavirus, Covid-19".
The world has been given to believe that this novel form of coronavirus Covid-19 is an entirely accidental mutation. To begin with, at least in the West, we were also expected to swallow the unsubstantiated but widely publicised assertions that its occurrence was due to the bizarre eating habits of the Chinese and cross-contamination from a wet market. Unsettling images of ghastly bowls of bat soup were featured across the newsstands – pictures almost certainly not taken in China but never mind.
Beneath the frankly xenophobic headlines, there is another side to the story that has received considerably less attention: just how strikingly novel the new virus really is. This is from an article entitled "Why COVID-19 is more insidious than other coronaviruses" published by Salon magazine in late February:
While there are many known viruses in the same class of coronavirus as COVID-19, some of its peculiarities — including its infectivity — are perplexing researchers. Now, a recent research paper viewable on the Chinese research site Chinaxiv.org and previously reported on by the South China Morning Post notes that the new coronavirus has an "HIV-like mutation" that gives it novel properties.
"Because of this mutation, the packing mechanism of the 2019-nCoV may be changed to being more similar to those of MHV, HIV, Ebola virus (EBoV) and some avian influenza viruses," the English abstract of the paper states.
The same article continues:
Though the paper is yet to be peer-reviewed, the scientists involved hail from Nankai University in Tianjin, one of the top universities in the world's most populous nation.
The paper adds to the crucial body of research around COVID-19, which still includes more unknowns than knowns. Currently, scientists still do not know COVID-19's origin, though suspect it is zoonotic, meaning it likely started in an animal before spreading to humans. As the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) note on their website, COVID-19 is an "emerging disease," and much of what we do know is "based on what is known about similar coronaviruses." 19
Keeping this in mind, I recommend listening to a short interview with esteemed human rights lawyer and Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois, Francis Boyle.
Boyle is adamant that Covid-19 is a leaked bioweapons agent and given his standing, one might imagine that informed opinion of this kind with the submission of supporting evidence deserves a more public platform. Instead, as he says, no mainstream journalists have come forward to speak with him. I do not, of course, leap to the conclusion that his account is the correct one; only find it curious that most journalists, who for their part invariably have little to no expertise in this field, are so eager to either ignore him altogether or undermine his authority in hit-pieces that consistently dismiss Boyle merely as "a lawyer".
Furthermore, there is an additional piece of evidence that appears to be in favour of Boyle's claims. It appeared in an article published by the highly respected scientific journal Nature back in November 2015. Entitled "Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research", the piece begins:
An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus — one related to the virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) — has triggered renewed debate over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks. 20
For the record, the bats in question were Chinese horseshoe bats.
I shall not reproduce a larger extract because there is an ominous 'rights & permissions' caution, and so for the purposes of fair use I will also reprint in full the editors' cautionary note prefacing the article:
Editors' note, March 2020: We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.
Click here to read the full Nature article.
And here and here to read articles published in 2013 about attempts by scientists based in The Netherlands to weaponise bird flu.
There are a great many articles dedicated to the claim that SARS-Cov-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) could not have been manufactured in a lab. I recently followed a link to one published by Science News magazine and it is a very interesting and informative piece, however, in spite of its emphatic title "No, the coronavirus wasn't made in a lab. A genetic analysis show it's from nature", we find that this headline claim is in fact qualified throughout the piece, and a rather inconclusive refutation in the final summary reads:
Similarity of SARS-CoV-2 to bat and pangolin viruses is some of the best evidence that the virus is natural, [Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland] says. "This was just another animal spillover into humans," she says. "It's really the most simple explanation for what we see." Researchers still aren't sure exactly which animal was the source.
Moreover, another contributing expert, Kristian Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, highlights peculiarities with the virus that are hard to explain:
A couple of unexpected features of the virus caught the researchers' eyes, Andersen says. In particular, the gene encoding the coronavirus's spike protein has 12 extra RNA building blocks, or nucleotides, stuck in it.
This spike protein protrudes from the virus' surface and allows the virus to latch onto and enter human cells. That insertion of RNA building blocks adds four amino acids to the spike protein, and creates a site in the protein for an enzyme called furin to cut. Furin is made in human cells, and cleaves proteins only at spots where a particular combination of amino acids is found, like the one created by the insertion. SARS and other SARS-like viruses don't have those cutting sites.
Finding the furin cutting site was a surprise: "That was an aha moment and an uh-oh moment," [Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in New Orleans] says. When bird influenza viruses acquire the ability to be cut by furin, the viruses often become more easily transmissible. The insertion also created places where sugar molecules could be fastened to the spike protein, creating a shield to protect the virus from the immune system.
The COVID-19 virus' spike protein also binds more tightly to a protein on human cells called ACE2 than SARS does (SN: 3/10/20). Tighter binding may allow SARS-CoV-2 to more easily infect cells. Together, those features may account for why COVID-19 is so contagious (SN: 3/13/20).
"It's very peculiar, these two features," Andersen says. "How do we explain how this came about? I've got to be honest. I was skeptical [that it was natural]. This could have happened in tissue culture" in a lab, where viruses may acquire mutations as they replicate many times in lab dishes. In nature, viruses carrying some of those mutations might be weeded out by natural selection but might persist in lab dishes where even feeble viruses don't have to fight hard for survival.
In fact this article is solely based upon a supporting paper published by Kristian Andersen et al in the journal Nature Medicine and entitled "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2". The abstract to this paper makes the emphatic claim that:
"Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus."
But, once again, its conclusion is somewhat more equivocal:
The genomic features described here may explain in part the infectiousness and transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.
[bold emphasis added]
What puzzles me about the Science News article (and countless articles on this subject) is its laboured use of the distorting and highly charged pejorative "conspiracy theory" that is inserted merely to distract attention from the validity of all claims (including those made by experts) that the virus may indeed have man-made origins. After all, we know that there are dozens if not hundreds of labs dotted across the world where scientists are busily working on the perfection of germs in today's bioweapons complex. A network of what Francis Boyle aptly calls "death factories" is not a theory but a conspiracy fact. Indeed, the New Science article even openly admits:
Accidental releases of viruses, including SARS, have happened from other labs in the past. So "this is not something you can just dismiss out of hand," Andersen says. "That would be foolish." 21
This singular admission of possibility hidden away in the midst of otherwise outright dismissal is again indicative of a process of doublethink (already discussed at the top of the post); a disturbing feature of so much of today's journalism.
The Cambridge phylogenetic study
Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, originated from bats. It has been found to share 96 per cent identical genes with a coronavirus isolated by Chinese scientists from bat droppings in the southwestern province of Yunnan in 2013.
But there were hundreds of mutations between Sars-CoV-2 and the one in Yunnan, and a coronavirus usually acquires one mutation per month. Some scientists have therefore suspected the virus may have been spreading quietly in host animals and humans for years to gradually evolve to a highly adaptive form that could infect humans.
The first outbreak could be a recent event involving the last few mutations that completed the leap from harmless strain to deadly pathogen, according to the Cambridge team.
This is according to a team led by geneticist Peter Forster who presented new findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [PNAS]:
The team analysed the strains using a phylogenetic network – a mathematical algorithm that can map the global movement of organisms through the mutation of their genes.
They were still trying to pinpoint the location of patient zero, and were hoping for help from scientists in China, but some early signs were prompting them to look into areas to the south of Wuhan, where coronavirus infections were first reported in December.
Peter Forster and the team at Cambridge identified three distinct strains of COVID-19 and traced the origins of the epidemic. They found that the strain in Wuhan (designated B) mutated from an earlier version A:
Arguably, the most intriguing finding is briefly discussed in the concluding paragraphs of the SCMP article:
The Cambridge study also raised some new questions. The first strain isolated and reported by Chinese scientists was actually younger than the original type that caused the outbreak. Why the US had more strains genetically closer to a bat virus than Wuhan has prompted heated debates in the research community.
One explanation, according to Forster, was that the original strain may have first emerged in China but was more adaptive to the American population and environment. 22
Click here to read more from this very recent article entitled "Coronavirus outbreak may have started in September, say British scientists" published by South China Morning Post.
The same article includes this embedded Youtube video to support some of the claims as well as to add additional information:
The important caveat in the scientific paper "The Proximal Origin of SARS-Cov-2" is again quoted in the upload although in a significantly altered form.
Where the current version reads (see above): "Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here."
The old version read: "Although genomic evidence does not support the idea that SARS-CoV-2 is a laboratory construct, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin." [at 2:15 mins]
China's Ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui has also weighed into the debate, pointing to additional evidence based on genetic sequencing drawn from "a global database covering 12 countries on four continents" that reveals an ancestry for the virus dating back two more generations:
"The research revealed that the earliest 'ancestor' of the virus is mv1, which evolved into haplotypes H13 and H38, and they, in turn, led to emergence of the second-generation haplotype — H3, which evolved into H1."
For clarity, the ambassador used family ties to trace the virus's development. Thus, the mv1 haplotype is "the grand-grandfather," while H13 and H38 are "the grandma and grandpa," H3 — is "the father" and H1 is "the child."
"The virus that was discovered at Wuhan's seafood market was of the H1 variety," he continued. "Only the H3 haplotype was discovered in Wuhan earlier, but it had nothing to do with the seafood market."
The previous gene sequences, H13 and H38, were never discovered in Wuhan.
"This suggests that the H1 specimen was brought to the seafood market by some infected person, which sparked the epidemic. The gene sequence cannot lie," Zhang Hanhui asserted. 23
Click here to read the full report from Russian news agency TASS entitled "Ambassador says coronavirus imported to China, points to genetic sequence as proof"
Appendix A: Operation Dark Winter
The following extracts are all taken from Wikipedia entries at the time of publishing with original footnotes retained:
Operation Dark Winter was the code name for a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted from June 22–23, 2001.[1][2][3] It was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States. Tara O'Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) / Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic Services were the principal designers, authors, and controllers of the Dark Winter project.
Dark Winter was focused on evaluating the inadequacies of a national emergency response during the use of a biological weapon against the American populace. The exercise was solely intended to establish preventive measures and response strategies by increasing governmental and public awareness of the magnitude and potential of such a threat posed by biological weapons.
Dark Winter's simulated scenario involved an initial localized smallpox attack on Oklahoma City, Oklahoma with additional smallpox attack cases in Georgia and Pennsylvania. The simulation was then designed to spiral out of control. This would create a contingency in which the National Security Council struggles to determine both the origin of the attack as well as deal with containing the spreading virus. By not being able to keep pace with the disease's rate of spread, a new catastrophic contingency emerges in which massive civilian casualties would overwhelm America's emergency response capabilities.
The disastrous contingencies that would result in the massive loss of civilian life were used to exploit the weaknesses of the U.S. health care infrastructure and its inability to handle such a threat. The contingencies were also meant to address the widespread panic that would emerge and which would result in mass social breakdown and mob violence. Exploits would also include the many difficulties that the media would face when providing American citizens with the necessary information regarding safety procedures.
Some of the key participants (complete list available on Wikipedia):
Samuel Augustus Nunn Jr.
Former Senator from Georgia (1972 – 1997), Sam Nunn is a member of the Democratic Party. Nunn played the part of the President in the Dark Winter exercise.
After leaving Congress, Nunn co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a charitable organization working to prevent catastrophic attacks with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, for which he was the co-chairman. His political experience and credentials on national defence reportedly earned him consideration as a potential running mate for presidential candidates John Kerry (2004) and Barack Obama (2008) after they became their party's nominees.
James Woolsey, Jr
Former head of the CIA (1993–95) James Woolsey played the part of Director of Central Intelligence. In real life, Woolsey appeared on CNN on the morning after the September 11th attack to falsely lay the blame with Iraq and Saddam Hussein:
"I very much hope the Bush administration, unlike Clinton administration, will not set aside this possibility and assume that everything is just a terrorist group, even a terrorist group as major as bin Laden's. It really needs to look carefully at the possibility there may be state sponsorship here, and I think the most likely, certainly not the only possibility is Iraq." 24
Frank Wisner
Frank Wisner headed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a clandestine intelligence unit, from 1948 to 1950. In 1950, the OPC was placed under the CIA and renamed the Directorate of Plans. Wisner became Deputy Director of Plans (DDP) in 1951 when Dulles was named Director of Central Intelligence. Wisner remained as DDP until September 1958, playing an important role in the early history of the CIA.
Jerome M. Hauer
Jerome Hauer is the chief executive officer of a consulting firm, The Hauer Group LLC. He was formerly the director of New York City's Office of Emergency Management under mayor Rudy Giuliani from 1996 to 2000. Additionally, he was previously an employee of Kroll Inc. which studied biological terrorism attacks.
Judith Miller (born January 2, 1948) is an American journalist and commentator known for her coverage of Iraq's WMD programme both before and after the 2003 invasion, which was later discovered to have been based on inaccurate information from the intelligence community. She co-wrote a book Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, which became a top New York Times best seller shortly after she became a victim of a hoax anthrax letter at the time of the 2001 anthrax attacks.
Margaret Ann Hamburg
Margaret Hamburg is an American physician and public health administrator, who is currently serving as the Chair of the Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In March 2009, she had been nominated by President Obama to become Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, was unanimously confirmed in May 2009, and served as the 21st Commissioner until April 2015.
Hamburg currently sits on a number of Boards, including for the GAVI Alliance, Commonwealth Fund, She is also a member of the Harvard University Global Advisory Council and the Global Health Scientific Advisory Committee for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She formerly served on the Boards of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller University.
She is married to Peter Fitzhugh Brown, a computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert. Brown is the chief executive officer of Renaissance Technologies. Renaissance Technologies was the top donor to President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and the third largest donor to Hillary Clinton, giving $15.5 million and $16.5 million respectively.
A few of the findings (fuller summary available on Wikipedia):
There is no surge capability in the U.S. healthcare and public health systems,[5] or in the pharmaceutical and vaccine industries.[4]
The exercise was designed to simulate a sudden and unexpected biowarfare event for which the United States healthcare system was unprepared. In the absence of sufficient preparation, Dark Winter revealed that the lack of sufficient vaccine or drugs to prevent the spread of disease severely limited management options.[5] Due to the institutionally limited "surge capacity" of the American healthcare system, hospitals quickly became overwhelmed and rendered effectively inoperable by the sudden and continued influx of new cases, exacerbated by patients with common illnesses who feared they might have smallpox,[5] and people who were otherwise healthy, but concerned about their possible exposure.[5]
Dealing with the media will be a major immediate challenge for all levels of government.[4]
Dark Winter revealed that information management and communication (e.g., dealing with the press effectively, communication with citizens, maintaining the information flows necessary for command and control at all institutional levels) will be a critical element in crisis/consequence management. For example, participants worried that it would not be possible to forcibly impose vaccination or travel restrictions on large groups of the population without their general cooperation.[5]
Should a contagious bioweapon pathogen be used, containing the spread of disease will present significant ethical, political, cultural, operational, and legal challenges.[4]
In Dark Winter, some members advised the imposition of geographic quarantines around affected areas, but the implications of these measures (e.g., interruption of the normal flow of medicines, food and energy supplies, and other critical needs) were not clearly understood at first.[5] In the end, it is not clear whether such draconian measures would have led to a more effective interruption of disease spread.[5] What's more allocation of scarce resources necessitated some degree of rationing,[5] creating conflict and significant debate between participants representing competing interests.
Appendix B: John Rendon's tweets on January 31st
"What should be known about contagions, is first, the psychological size of the contagion will be at least 5x greater than the contagion itself, thus timely, truthful and transparent reporting is essential – which is a challenge for Boys in #Beijing"
"Second, to the extent there is a functioning health care system in the country, it will collapse and military medical units will have to be activated, either from the country's existing force structure or from the military of aligned partners;"
(#Coronavirus 2 of 5) Second, to the extent there is a functioning health care system in the country, it will collapse and military medical units will have to be activated, either from the country's existing force structure or from the military of aligned partners;
"Third, people stop traveling to and from the country of contagion, thus impacting the availability of food and other supplies and material necessary for economic sustainment;"
(#Coronavirus 3 of 5) Third, people stop traveling to and from the country of contagion, thus impacting the availability of food and other supplies and material necessary for economic sustainment;
"Fourth, and equally significant the economic recovery may be between 2X and 3X longer than the existence of the very contagion."
(#Coronavirus 4 of 5) Fourth, and equally significant the economic recovery may be between 2X and 3X longer than the existence of the very contagion.
"COUNTRIES: begin procedures now, even if you don't have signs, construct a mass contagion plan, modeled after a mass casualty event; conduct exercises immediately; then share what you learn with your neighbors whether one likes them or not."
(#Coronavirus 5 of 5) COUNTRIES: begin procedures now, even if you don't have signs, construct a mass contagion plan, modeled after a mass casualty event; conduct exercises immediately; then share what you learn with your neighbors whether one likes them or not.
Appendix C: Research paper by Indian scientists on coronavirus fuels bioweapon theories
The following article reprinted below was published by Indian new magazine The Week on February 1st. Note that a strapline to the article reads: "The research paper by IIT Delhi, DU scientists was uploaded on January 31 on bioRxiv"
Zero Hedge, a popular US news blog focussing on the capital markets, was suspended by Twitter on Friday shortly after it tweeted a post about an article on the novel coronavirus outbreak in China. The post alleged that the coronavirus was obtained by China and was being modified into a 'bioweapon'.
Interestingly, the post also cited a research paper on the coronavirus by a group of Indian scientists from the school of biological sciences at IIT Delhi and Acharya Narendra Dev College of University of Delhi.
Earlier, Zero Hedge had uploaded contact details of a Chinese scientist, who it effectively held as being responsible for being behind the coronavirus outbreak. The revelation of personal details violates Twitter's policies.
The research paper was uploaded on January 31 on bioRxiv, an open source initiative containing resources on biological research. The research paper claims the spike protein in novel coronavirus contained four "insertions" that "are not present in other coronaviruses". The research paper notes, "amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag". HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.
The scientists argue that similarity in amino acid identity was "not a random fortuitous finding", hinting that it could have been engineered. However, the paper does not delve deeper into the possibility of virus being engineered deliberately.
However, the study by the Indian scientists has attracted some scepticism already. Dr Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist who has been associated with Harvard and Johns Hopkins, said the research work had not been peer reviewed in order for it to be verified or refuted.
Earlier this week, an Indian news portal, GreatGameIndia, claimed the origin of the coronavirus can be traced to Canada and two Chinese biological warfare program agents who smuggled it into China.
Click here to read the same article as it appears in The Week magazine
Appendix D: Alternative hypothesis for the manufacture of a bioweapon like Covi-19
The following article is republished from the official website of Meryl Nass who identified Zimbabwe's 1978 anthrax epidemic as an episode of biological warfare (1992) amongst other achievements. You can find her full CV here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P-qoaVgEfmWiQDx8PbWrwBL0dbXD2DwUjf9l4o5uHJs/edit?usp=sharing
Why are some of the US' top scientists making a specious argument about the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2?
I know about biological warfare/biodefense. I am the first person in the world (according to publicly available literature) to have analyzed an epidemic and demonstrated that the epidemic was due to biological warfare. (1992 study of the 1978-81 Rhodesian anthrax outbreak).
https://www.ippnw.org/pdf/mgs/psr-2-4-nass.pdf
Prior to genetic engineering techniques being developed (1973) and widely used (since late 1970s), more 'primitive' means of causing mutations, with the intention of developing biological weapons, were employed. Such methods were used by the Japanese beginning in the 1930s, by the US beginning in the 1940s, and by a number of other countries. They resulted in biological weapons that were tested, well-described, and in some cases, used. Such methods were also used subsequent to the 1970s.
These methods can result in biowarfare agents that lack the identifiable signature of a microbial agent constructed in a lab from known RNA or DNA sequences. In fact, it would be desirable to produce such agents, since it would be difficult to prove they were deliberately constructed in a lab. Here are just a few possibilities for how one might create new, virulent mutants:
a) exposing microorganisms to chemical or radiological agents that cause high mutation rates and selecting for desired characteristics
b) passaging virus through a number of lab animals or tissue cultures
c) mixing viruses together and seeking recombinants with a new mix of virulence factors
Top scientists circled their wagons to protest against "conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," in a statement published in the Lancet March 7. (It was published earlier online.) Their reported aim was to "stand with" public health professionals and scientists in China. Many who signed the statement have worked in biodefense. Signers include Rita Colwell, former director of the National Science Foundation, and James Hughes, former director of CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases and former assistant Surgeon General.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext
Five additional scientists soon provided the "scientific evidence" to back up the natural origin claim. These 5 scientists have been affiliated with signers of the statement above, they too have worked in biodefense, and their article was published in Nature Medicine (in the print version) on March 17, 2020.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
These scientists set up a straw man to knock down: they claimed that had the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 is the official name of the virus) been created in a lab: "if genetic manipulation had been performed," then a known coronavirus backbone would have been used. But because no known backbone forms part of SARS-CoV-2, "the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus."
As USA Today summarized this:
"If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness," the report said. "But the scientists found that the SARS-CoV-2 backbone differed substantially from those of already known coronaviruses and mostly resembled related viruses found in bats and pangolins."
Their work was then discussed by Francis Collins, the current director of the NIH.
https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/03/26/genomic-research-points-to-natural-origin-of-covid-19/
Dr. Collins says,
"Some folks are even making outrageous claims that the new coronavirus causing the pandemic was engineered in a lab and deliberately released to make people sick. A new study debunks such claims by providing scientific evidence that this novel coronavirus arose naturally…
this study leaves little room to refute a natural origin for COVID-19…
Finally, next time you come across something about COVID-19 online that disturbs or puzzles you, I suggest going to FEMA's new Coronavirus Rumor Control web site…"
I know that the groups of scientists who wrote these pieces in the Lancet and Nature Medicine, as well as NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, know that you don't need genetic engineering methods to create a bioweapon. Like me, they are old, they recall a world before genetic engineering, they know the history of biowarfare, and they know the score. Why then are they participating in this charade?
The following information including contact details are available on Meryl Nass' website:
Most-cited papers include one investigating Zimbabwe's major anthrax epidemic and a review of anthrax vaccine's usefulness in biological warfare. A November, 2001 Congressional testimony in response to the anthrax letters may also be of interest. She can be contacted at merylnass@gmail.com or 207 412-0004.
No wonder the Pentagon was forced to issue the proverbial denial – in Pentagonese, via one Col. R. Shane Day, the director of the DIA's NCMI: "In the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists."
Well, if such "product" existed, Pentagon head and former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper would be very much in the loop. He was duly questioned about it by ABC's George Stephanopoulos.
Question: "Did the Pentagon receive an intelligence assessment on COVID in China last November from the National Center for Medical Intelligence of DIA?"
Esper: "Oh, I can't recall, George," (…) "But, we have many people who watch this closely."
Question: "This assessment was done in November, and it was briefed to the NSC in early December to assess the impact on military readiness, which, of course, would make it important to you, and the possible spread in the United States. So, you would have known if there was a brief to the National Security Council in December, wouldn't you?"
Esper: "Yes (…) "I'm not aware of that."
So "no such product exists" then? Is it a fake? Is it a Deep State/CIA concoction to trap Trump? Or are the usual suspects lying, trademark CIA style?
2 From an article entitled "What did U.S. Intel Really Know About the 'Chinese' Virus?" written by Pepe Escobar, published in Strategic Culture Foundation on April 21, 2020. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/04/21/what-did-us-intel-really-know-about-chinese-virus/
3 From an article entitled "China locked in hybrid war with US" written by Pepe Escobar, published in the Asia Times on March 17, 2020. https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/china-locked-in-hybrid-war-with-us/
4 From a report entitled "Fauci Addresses Bioterrorism Threats" written by Tom Wigg attributed to The Hoya (Georgetown University newspaper), republished on UCLA Dept of Epidemiology on October 18, 2002. http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/fauciaddbioterrorism.html
5 From an article entitled "Bioterrorism becoming too dominant on public health agenda?" written by Alan Cassels, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) on November 26, 2002. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC134156/
6 From an article entitled "Biodefence on the research agenda" written by Anthony S. Fauci, published in Nature on February 15, 2003. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01480
7 From an article entitled "U.S. Biowarfare Programs Have 13,000 Death Scientists Hard At Work" written by Sherwood Ross, published by Scoop on February 26, 2020. https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2002/S00184/us-biowarfare-programs-have-13000-death-scientists-hard-at-work.htm
8 From an article entitled entitled "Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab with U.S. Dollars for Risky Coronavirus Research" written by Fred Guterl, published in Newsweek magazine on April 28, 2020. https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741
* Warning:
The film explores the horrific legacy of human experimentation, spanning decades and continents, in which germ weapons have been tested on unwitting members of armed forces and civilians alike.
Also probed are the mysterious deaths in recent years of several leading scientists working in this field. Bruce Ivins, David Kelly, Vladimir Pasechnik, Larry Ford and Frank Olson each died in violent or suspicious circumstances and have been linked to one of germ warfare's darkest secrets, state programs developing new strains of anthrax.
The film reveals:
Troubling questions about the FBI's "solving" of the 2001 Anthrax Attacks. Many scientific experts are questioning the evidence presented that pins the blame on U.S. Army scientist Bruce Ivins who committed suicide.
The FBI is withholding key information from the public about the attacks on national security grounds.
New details about the suspicious deaths of five leading bio-weapons scientists, all working with anthrax.
Links between secret programs in the U.S., U.K, the former Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa.
Evidence that Doctor Death, who headed South Africa's apartheid-era secret germ war program that developed agents for assassination and worked on a vaccine to sterilize blacks without their knowledge, received assistance from the U.S. and U.K. germ war establishments.
The anthrax attacks have ushered a massive buildup of 'bio-defense' efforts worth more than $50 billion in U.S. Government contracts alone, much of which is flowing to politically connected bio-tech corporations.
Hundreds of private labs and thousands of scientists are now handling the most dangerous pathogens with little effective oversight.
The U.S. Government has put in place contingency plans to conduct biological warfare and that we may have entered a new dangerous biological arms race.
The filmmaker tracks down those directly involved: germ war experts, scientists, spies and assassins – to uncover one of the most frightening and untold stories of our time
A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published report.
The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked for the past 18 years at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Md., had been told about the impending prosecution, the Los Angeles Times reported for Friday editions. The laboratory has been at the center of the FBI's investigation of the anthrax attacks, which killed five people.
Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. The Times, quoting an unidentified colleague, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.
From an Associated Press report entitled "ANTHRAX SCIENTIST a SUICIDE! FBI Was Moving On Fort Detrick Md., Researcher" written by Lara Jakes Jordan & David Dishneau, published on August 1, 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20090913055147/http://www.omgili.com/newsgroups/sci/chem/7d281128-fa90-43e6-8af9-11e6916f0f5df63g2000hsfgooglegroupscom.html%26q%3DJake%2Bin%2BProgress
On the morning of July 27, 2008, Ivins was found unconscious at his home. He was taken to Frederick Memorial Hospital and died on July 29 from what was then called an overdose of Tylenol with codeine,[5][52] an apparent suicide. No autopsy was ordered following his death because, according to an officer in the local police department, the state medical examiner 'determined that an autopsy wouldn't be necessary' based on laboratory test results of blood taken from the body.[53] A summary of the police report of his death, released in 2009, lists the cause of death as liver and kidney failure, citing his purchase of two bottles of Tylenol PM (containing diphenhydramine), contradicting earlier reports of Tylenol with codeine.[54]
From the current Wikipedia entry with all links preserved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Edwards_Ivins#Death
The Michigan Biologic Products Institute (MBPI) had been founded in 1926 by the State to serve the vaccination needs of its largely rural population, many of whom worked on farms and required inoculation against naturally occurring anthrax spores and rabies. By the 1980s, the Institute stood alone as the only anthrax vaccine manufacturer in the U.S. after 1970s-era regulations had driven most private vaccine manufacturers out of business. MBPI's anthrax vaccine was known as Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed (AVA) or BioThrax. […]
In September 1998, BioPort acquired the MBPI facility through a $25 million package of loans, cash and promises to pay Michigan state more for the company in the future, promises that were later broken.
From an article entitled "A Killer Enterprise: How One of Big Pharma's Most Corrupt Companies Plans to Corner the Covid-19 Cure Market" written by Whitney Webb, published in Unlimited Hangout on April 9, 2020. https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/04/09/a-killer-enterprise-how-one-of-big-pharmas-most-corrupt-companies-plans-to-corner-the-covid-19-cure-market/
10 From an article entitled "U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits" written by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg & William J. Broad, published in The New York Times on September 4, 2001. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/world/us-germ-warfare-research-pushes-treaty-limits.html
11 From an article entitled "Mr Bio-Defence, William C. Patrick III: A Tribute" written by Judith Miller published in City Journal on October 5, 2010. https://www.city-journal.org/html/mr-bio-defense-10766.html
12 When the Press Fails. University of Chicago Press. 2008. p. 37.
13 From an article entitled "A Killer Enterprise: How One of Big Pharma's Most Corrupt Companies Plans to Corner the COVID-19 Cure Market" written by Whitney Webb published in Unlimited Hangout on April 9, 2020. https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/04/09/a-killer-enterprise-how-one-of-big-pharmas-most-corrupt-companies-plans-to-corner-the-covid-19-cure-market/
14 From an article entitled entitled "Manufactured Perception and the COVID-19 Pandora's Box" written by Phil Butler, published by New Eastern Outlook on June 10, 2020. https://journal-neo.org/2020/06/10/manufactured-perception-and-the-covid-19-pandora-s-box/
15 From an article entitled "U.S. Biowarfare Programs Have 13,000 Death Scientists Hard At Work" written by Sherwood Ross, published by Scoop on February 26, 2020. https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2002/S00184/us-biowarfare-programs-have-13000-death-scientists-hard-at-work.htm
16 From a report entitled "Pompeo blames China for hundreds of thousands of virus deaths, denies inconsistency" written by Humeyra Pamek & David Brunnstrom, published by Reuters on May 6, 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-pompeo/pompeo-blames-china-for-hundreds-of-thousands-of-virus-deaths-denies-inconsistency-idUSKBN22I27K
18 From an article entitled "'Cover Up' In Wuhan Mount As Pompeo Blames Cina For Pandemic" written by Kenneth Rapoza, published in Forbes magazine on May 4, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2020/05/04/cover-up-in-wuhan-mounts-as-pompeo-blames-china-for-pandemic/
19 From an article entitled "Why COVID-19 is more insidious than other coronaviruses" written by Nicole Karlis, published by Salon magazine on February 28, 2020. https://www.salon.com/2020/02/27/why-covid-19-is-more-insidious-than-other-coronaviruses/
20 From an article entitled "Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research" written by Declan Butler, published in Nature on November 12, 2015. https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debate-over-risky-research-1.18787
21 From an article entitled "No, coronavirus wasn't made in a lab. A genetic analysis shows it's from nature" written by Tina Hesman Saey, published in Science News magazine on March 26, 2020. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-19-not-human-made-lab-genetic-analysis-nature
22 From an article entitled "Coronavirus outbreak may have started in September, say British Scientists" written by Stephen Chen, published in the South China Morning Post on April 17, 2020. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3080380/coronavirus-outbreak-may-have-started-september-say-british
23 From an article entitled "Ambassador says coronavirus imported to China, points to genetic sequence as proof" published by TASS on April 17, 2020. https://tass.com/world/1146127
24 http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/12/ltm.13.html
Filed under analysis & opinion, China, did you see?, September 11th, USA, Zimbabwe
Tagged as "Crimson Contagion", "Direct Order", Anthony Fauci, anthrax, 'Amerithrax' attacks, "Anthrax War", BBC, biological weapons, BioThrax, coronavirus, Covid-19, EcoHealth Alliance, Emergent BioDefense, Event 201, FBI, Fort Detrick, Francis Boyle, Gulf War Syndrome, Jerome Hauer, John Rendon, Judith Miller, Meryl Nass, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Operation Dark Winter, Pepe Escobar, Peter Daszak, Robert Kadlec, Sky News Australia, US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Whitney Webb, William C. Patrick III, Wuhan, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Zhao Lijian
in search of the truth about this new coronavirus, Covid-19
Like most people, when it comes to coronavirus Covid-19, I'm no expert on the relevant scientific fields of microbiology, infectious diseases or epidemiology. Complete absence of knowledge in such a highly technical issue can seem like a good reason not to enter into the debate at all and why, until now, I have chosen to avoid writing on this subject. The change of heart happens because, like you too, I have a serious, since vested interest, not only in trying to determine the truth, but also in sharing the fruits of my own investigations.
Before I come to the science or discuss the UK government's response, I wish to make clear that although I believe the government has acted recklessly by playing down the seriousness of SARS-CoV-2 (the technical name for the virus itself), parts of the media have been reckless in a different way: rushing around like a clucking flock of Chicken-lickens (dare I add) with their heads cut off, all clamouring in that ostentatious 24/7 rolling news coverage way of theirs to reinforce the opinion that "the sky is falling in". Some of this febrile media panic has become so bad that other more reserved news reports have actually confirmed that a mass hysteria is being irresponsibly (if fortunately to great extent ineffectively) whipped up:
University of California, Irvine associate professor E. Alison Holman, who has published research on media exposure to mass-trauma events, said the toilet paper scare appeared to have originated with articles about stocking up before the virus' spread.
"A week ago, there were a handful of articles in major newspapers saying, here's what you should do to prepare for the coronavirus. And one of the top things that was listed on at least two or three websites — major media outlets — was: Buy toilet paper," Ms. Holman said. "I think some of the freak-out about getting toilet paper has to do with that."
She described the media-fueled worry as "a little overblown," while others have gone so far as to accuse the press of sensationalizing the virus to juice ratings. 1
Liberally mixed into this whole confusion is the swirling uncertainty of an aggregate of internet information, misinformation and disinformation (or 'fake news' if you must – as if propaganda is only the product of our internet age). It ought to go without saying really that you shouldn't automatically trust anything you read, with the original source of the story key to understanding any subsequent interpretation of it – a caveat that in no way excludes the articles on my own blog, but also applies to mainstream broadcasters and newspapers.
I try to take great care with the inclusion of references wherever relevant, always doing my best to navigate a course to avoid any deliberate lies and well-intentioned misunderstandings and errors. Sometimes this puts me at odds with the stance taken by other researchers, journalists and bloggers whose views I ordinarily subscribe to. Right now, there are many who justifiably are alerting their own audiences to the danger that measures rolled out to contain this disease ranging from increased surveillance and the introduction of cashless exchange 2 to lockdowns, curfews, and arrest and detainment, which may be difficult or impossible to rollback. In the notorious words of Rahm Emanuel: "Never let a crisis go to waste". Not wishing to downplay this very real alternative danger, I therefore encourage readers to follow the work of investigative reporter Whitney Webb who explains in her latest article:
The decision to classify government coronavirus preparations in mid-January, followed by the decision to coordinate the domestic response with the military and with intelligence deserves considerable scrutiny, particularly given that at least one federal agency, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), will be given broad, sweeping powers and will work closely with unspecified intelligence "partners" as part of its response to a pandemics like COVID-19.
The CBP's pandemic response document, obtained by The Nation, reveals that the CBP's pandemic directive "allows the agency to actively surveil and detain individuals suspected of carrying the illness indefinitely." The Nation further notes that the plan was drafted during the George W. Bush administration, but is the agency's most recent pandemic response plan and remains in effect.
Though only CBP's pandemic response plan has now been made public, those of other agencies are likely to be similar, particularly on their emphasis on surveillance, given past precedent following the September 11 attacks and other times of national panic. Notably, several recent media reports have likened coronavirus to 9/11 and broached the possibility of a "9/11-like" response to coronavirus, suggestions that should concern critics of the post-9/11 "Patriot Act" and other controversial laws, executive orders and policies that followed. 3
Click here to read the full article entitled "US Intel Agencies Played Unsettling Role in Classified and '9/11-like' Coronavirus Response Plan" published by Mint Press News.
I would also point you to the research of John Whitehead who writes of the current crisis:
Don't go underestimating the government's ability to lock the nation down if the coronavirus turns into a pandemic, however. After all, the government has been planning and preparing for such a crisis for years now.
The building blocks are already in place for such an eventuality: the surveillance networks, fusion centers and government contractors that already share information in real time; the government's massive biometric databases that can identify individuals based on genetic and biological markers; the militarized police, working in conjunction with federal agencies, ready and able to coordinate with the federal government when it's time to round up the targeted individuals; the courts that will sanction the government's methods, no matter how unlawful, as long as it's done in the name of national security; and the detention facilities, whether private prisons or FEMA internment camps, that have been built and are waiting to be filled.
Now all of this may sound far-fetched to you now, but we've already arrived at the dystopian futures prophesised by George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Philip K. Dick's Minority Report. 4
Click here to read the full article entitled "Coronavirus vs. Mass Surveillance State: Which Poses the Greater Threat?" published in Counterpunch.
It is wise to be cautious. The remedy can often be worse than the disease; however, this is no excuse whatsoever to downplay the threat once we understand that the threat is real.
Science, what science?
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, said Europe – where the virus is present in all 27 EU states and has infected 25,000 people – had become the centre of the epidemic, with more reported cases and deaths than the rest of the world combined apart from China. […]
Tedros stressed that countries should take a comprehensive approach. "Not testing alone," he said. "Not contact tracing alone. Not quarantine alone. Not social distancing alone. Do it all. Find, isolate, test and treat every case, to break the chains of transmission… do not just let this fire burn." 5
[bold highlight added]
Click here to read the full Guardian report published on Friday entitled "'Do not let this fire burn': WHO warns Europe over Covid-19".
Having completed what Boris Johnson and the UK government have comically, bordering on the self-satirical, described as the "containment" phase – a period in which countless people who arrived in Britain from infected areas were permitted entry without quarantine and never tested or traced – we have now reached the "delay" phase, which will, they say, "flatten the curve" to slow up the rate of hospital admissions, whilst permitting the development of herd immunity.
On paper, such a lassez-faire approach might have merits. In the long run, it will certainly mean the population becomes resistant to this particular strain of virus, lessening concerns of another outbreak once the current one has passed. Meanwhile, any slowing down of transmission of the virus will save lives. In fact, this approach would be commendable for an outbreak of flu, but unfortunately what we are dealing with isn't flu. It isn't even the same virus; this is a SARS-like virus and comparisons to flu are misleading for many reasons (pictures sometimes tell a better story than words):
A powerful video.
At the heart of Italy's Coronavirus outbreak, Giovanni Locatelli compares the obituaries page of local daily newspaper @webEcodiBergamo on February 9 and March 13. pic.twitter.com/DrnShYtrOF
— Naomi O'Leary (@NaomiOhReally) March 14, 2020
Now for some figures: as of March 9th, South Korea had tested 190,000 people, with 7,478 confirmed cases and 51 deaths. 6 That equates to a 0.7% mortality rate, which matches what has also been reported outside of Wuhan in China. This is the best estimate of the mortality rate we currently have – for comparison, the rate is around 0.1% for seasonal flu. That represents a hugely significant difference. Of course, the death rates and hospitalisation rates can only be based on confirmed cases, which means that the recorded figures can be high because there is insufficient testing of non-serious cases. The positive here is quite obvious, but there is also a negative to consider: that the spread of this disease is already far more widespread than any current data indicates.
On top of this, Covid-19 is highly transmissible. Best estimates indicate that is may be 3-4 times more infectious. As the spread is exponential and this is the base multiplier, the rise in the number of cases can be expected to far exceed a typical rise in cases of flu, putting an enormous extra strain on any health service. It accounts for why China has locked down a city, constructed new hospitals and flown in some 50,000 extra medics. It also explains how the situation in Italy has become so desperate.
Indeed, if transmission in the UK or elsewhere is not sufficiently slowed, then we can expect to see scenes like those in Italy where the health system has been overwhelmed with so many serious cases requiring intensive care. So what measures have we taken that Italy did not? Or Spain (which is also beginning to see a dramatic spike in cases)?
Richard Horton is the Editor of 'The Lancet'. This is just one of many tweets he has recently put out highly critical of government inaction:
The UK government—Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson—claim they are following the science. But that is not true. The evidence is clear. We need urgent implementation of social distancing and closure policies. The government is playing roulette with the public. This is a major error.
— richard horton (@richardhorton1) March 10, 2020
There are two further points about the threat posed by this new coronavirus that really need clearing up. Firstly, it continues to be intimated that just the elderly and those with underlying conditions should be concerned about contracting the disease, which is true up to a point. Thankfully, children and very young adults seem to be hardly affected at all. Although again this presents another risk since these asymptomatic groups can also be carriers, spreading the disease within communities. It should also be stressed however that the median age of fatality is 65 years old (this seems to be confirmed across all regions). Median means that half of the cases are below 65, with many of the victims sadly in their 50's and younger. For some as yet unknown reason, they are also disproportionately male.
Secondly, although the mortality rate is below 1% (high nonetheless), what we are slowly learning is that about 10% of cases suffer a very severe form of pneumonia which can leave serious and long-term damage. To reiterate: this is not flu. I have included interviews with medics working on the frontline in Italy in an addendum below.
The government's official stance is very obviously contrary to the stringent measures that were enforced by China and more humanely in Singapore and South Korea, where coronavirus epidemics have been quite rapidly contained; it is also in outright defiance to current World Health Organisation guidelines, as summarised above. The fact that there is no testing of anyone who doesn't present symptoms and no contact tracing whatsoever means we cannot accurately keep track of the disease, and in the words of Tedros, "you can't fight the virus if you don't know where it is".
In the same briefing statement given on March 12th, Tedros also said this: "To save lives we must reduce transmission. That means finding and isolating as many cases as possible, and quarantining their closest contacts. Even if you cannot stop transmission, you can slow it down and protect health facilities, old age homes and other vital areas – but only if you test all suspected cases." 7
And here again, the UK government is completely remiss. As of now, the government is making no efforts to find and isolate anyone at all. From one perspective, this also looks like it is being deliberately allowed to spread, or rather more generously and less conspiratorially, that it is a clear dereliction of duty to protect its citizens.
The bewildering aspect of this clear failure to comply with WHO guidelines is that Johnson insists he is just following 'the science'. Well, if Johnson's advisors disagree with WHO then surely it is incumbent on them to acknowledge and justify their variance, rather than simply ignoring it.
On BBC's Question Time broadcast on March 12th, Professor John Ashton, former Director of Public Health, was also highly critical of the government's response to the COVID-19 outbreak which he described as "paternalistic, old-fashioned and top-down":
Moreover, and despite how Boris Johnson and the UK government have chosen to present and justify their current strategy, as always flanked by medical and scientific experts, there is far more to address here than simply 'the science' (as if the definite article somehow makes it more scientific). Thankfully, we do not as yet live in a technocracy, and potential crises like the one we may now face provide another good reason to avoid ever becoming one. Why? Because the approach we adopt to tackle any public health issue, and especially one that is urgent and potentially serious, is inherently political – it is immediately informed by what government and to a lesser degree our society values most, which are seldom the same given that our governments are beholden more to special interests than the electorate. There is no single scientific answer; no technocratic short-cut. Do we care more about people or profits? It is a question the government ought to be asked more often.
Here is Health Secretary, Matt Hancock speaking yesterday on BBC's 'The Andrew Marr Show' appearing to be completely out of his depth and making no real sense:
Remarkably the upload has been removed already (within 24 hours!) – but you can still watch the whole interview on BBC iplayer here.
There is no question the banksters and the rest of the vulture capitalist class are rubbing their hands at the prospect of fire sales and super-charged deregulation – that is the nature of disaster capitalism. And more immediately, public hand out for emergency contracts that always pay above the odds. I also see every reason to be suspicious that two of the countries most affected right now are China and Iran – the origins of this disease remain a mystery. It is also the case that the media is hyping this. Why the hell do people panic buy in the first place, except when they start seeing images of empty shelves? On top of all that, there is every reason to be suspicious of a UN body like the WHO.
Embedded below is a powerful investigative documentary entitled 'trustWHO' (available on Vimeo for a small rental fee) made by filmmaker Lilian Franck, who went on a quest to discover what lies behind the altruistic façade of the world's largest public health body. What she uncovers is an alarming picture of corruption and opacity. She also covers the recent change to the classification of what a pandemic is and when the WHO should announce a pandemic, an announcement that triggers a world wide pandemic response by nation states, the kind of which we have been seeing in recent days since the WHO finally announced it:
Assuredly Covid-19 is not as virulent as the Spanish Flu which I believe had an estimated death rate of about 20% (there is an interesting article on how Wikipedia recently altered their entry to reduce this figure). It is now evident, however, that it is far more deadly than regular flu. It should also be noted that many more people are made seriously ill than this death rate. Lastly, the infectiousness of Covd-19 is also much higher than flu – possibly as much as 3-4 times higher. For all these reasons it is entirely misleading to compare Covid-19 to flu.
The NHS here in Britain barely copes with the annual winter flu rise. To be honest, although originally I dismissed this as merely media hype, I am now anticipating that Britain will be hit by a crisis the NHS is unprepared to deal with: a situation at least as dire or possibly worse than the one happening in Italy. My hunch is that this will likely happen within the next fortnight (we shall see – fingers crossed that I'm wrong). I would also be concerned about the same situation subsequently happening in America – not because Covid-19 is as deadly as Spanish Flu but because it is bad enough, spreads astonishing rapidly and none of our terribly under-funded public health systems are ready for it. Of course, I really hope this turns out to be wrong and yes, the vultures are already circling whatever happens.
Giacomo Grasselli, a senior Italian government health official who is coordinating the network of intensive care units in Lombardy, spoke about the "critical" situation in Italy on C4 News broadcast March 10th:
Infectious disease specialist Dr. Giovanni Guaraldi discusses lessons being learned by Italian doctors about the new virus on CTV News broadcast on March 4th:
On March 14th Sky News interviewed anaesthetist Marco Vergano who works in Turin, Italy:
Additional: What are the origins of Covid-19?
Though the paper is yet to be peer-reviewed, the scientists involved hail from Nankai Unviersity in Tianjin, one of the top universities in the world's most populous nation.
The paper adds to the crucial body of research around COVID-19, which still includes more unknowns than knowns. Currently, scientists still do not know COVID-19's origin, though suspect it is zoonotic, meaning it likely started in an animal before spreading to humans. As the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) note on their website, COVID-19 is an "emerging disease," and much of what we do know is "based on what is known about similar coronaviruses." 8
Keeping this in mind, I recommend listening to a short interview with esteemed human rights lawyer and Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois, Francis Boyle. It is important to understand that Boyle has significant expertise in this field having drafted legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.
Boyle is adamant that Covid-19 is a leaked bioweapons agent and given his standing, one might imagine that informed opinion of this kind with the submission of supporting evidence, deserves a more public platform. Instead, as he says, no mainstream journalists have come forward to speak with him. I do not, of course, leap to the conclusion that his account is the correct one; only find it curious that most journalists, who for their part invariably have little to no expertise in this field, are so eager to either ignore him altogether or undermine his authority in hit-pieces that consistently dismiss Boyle merely as "a lawyer".
An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus — one related to the virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) — has triggered renewed debate over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks. 9
Having no expertise in this field, I merely present evidence for others to judge.
In the original version of this article I incorrectly stated that SARS-CoV-2 was "the technical name for the disease itself". It is instead the name of the virus whereas Covid-19 is the name of the disease; just as HIV is the name for the virus that causes the disease AIDS.
1 From an article entitled "'Inducing panic': Media under fire for driving coronavirus hype to epidemic levels" written by Valerie Richardson, published in The Washington Times on March 11, 2020. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/11/media-fueling-coronavirus-panic-under-fire/
2 Arguably this is purely for hygienic reasons right now and not intended as a long term plan – a measure to protect workers on the frontline such as those needed on supermarket checkout. Obviously they do not need coronavirus to enact such regulation.
3 From an article entitled "US Intel Agencies Played Unsettling Role in Classified "9/11-like" Coronavirus Response Plan" written by Whitney Webb, published in Mint Press News on March 13, 2020. https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-intelligence-unsettling-role-classified-9-11-like-coronavirus-response/265687/
4 From an article entitled "Coronavirusvs, the Mass Surveillance State: Which Poses the Greater Threat" written by John W. Whitehead, published in Counterpunch on March 12, 2020. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/12/coronavirus-vs-the-mass-surveillance-state-which-poses-the-greater-threat/
5 From an article entitled "'Do not let this fire burn': WHO warns Europe over Covid-19" written by Jon Henley and Sam Jones, published in the Guardian on March 13, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/european-countries-take-radical-steps-to-combat-coronavirus
6 Based on figures reported in an article by New Scientist entitled "Why is it so hard to calculate how many people will die from Covid-19?" written by Michael Le Page, published in New Scientist on March 11, 2020. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24532733-700-why-is-it-so-hard-to-calculate-how-many-people-will-die-from-covid-19/ Here is a fuller extract of the piece:
Last month, a study estimated that the fatality rate when infected people without symptoms are included in the case count is around 1 per cent, and this is still thought to be in the right ball park.
It is clear that some countries, including the US and Iran, are missing cases as so few people are being tested. South Korea, by contrast, had tested 190,000 people as of 9 March, with 7478 confirmed cases and 51 deaths.
This means 0.7 per cent of reported cases in South Korea have died so far, which matches what we have seen in China outside of Wuhan. If these places are detecting most cases, the fatality rate will not be much lower than this, though it could be higher if many recently infected people die.
The fatality rate for covid-19 isn't fixed, and will vary based on many factors. Age is one, with the rate rising from around age 50 and reaching 15 per cent in over-80s, according to data from China. Countries like Niger, with many younger people, may fare better than Japan, where more than a quarter are aged over 65.
7 https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-mission-briefing-on-covid-19—12-march-2020
8 From an article entitled "Why COVID-19 is more insidious than other coronaviruses" written by Nicole Karlis, published by Salon magazine on February 28, 2020. https://www.salon.com/2020/02/27/why-covid-19-is-more-insidious-than-other-coronaviruses/
9 From an article entitled "Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research" written by Declan Butler, published in Nature on November 12, 2015. https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debate-over-risky-research-1.18787
Filed under analysis & opinion, Britain, China, Italy, police state
Tagged as "trustWHO", biological weapons, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, Covid-19, Francis Boyle, John Ashton, John Whitehead, Lilian Franck, Matt Hancock, Richard Horton, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Whitney Webb, WHO, wikipedia, Wuhan
Dutch scientists to resume weaponising bird flu — but why?
Little more than a year ago I posted an article entitled "Dutch scientists have weaponised bird flu — but why?"
And then, one week later, the research project was abruptly halted:
Scientists who created a potentially more deadly bird flu strain have temporarily stopped their research amid fears it could be used by terrorists.
In a letter published in Science and Nature, the teams call for an "international forum" to debate the risks and value of the studies.1
One of the concerns then being highlighted was the intention of the Erasmus Medical Center, the group behind the research, to make their findings public:
The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) recommended key details be omitted from publication of the research, which sparked international furore.
"I would have preferred if this hadn't caused so much controversy, but it has happened and we can't change that," Ron Fouchier, a researcher from Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, told Science Insider.
"So I think it's the right step to make."
So now apparently we had two controversies. A more academic one concerning the rights and wrongs of censoring scientific publications, and the other one about whether creating "a potentially more deadly bird flu strain" is a good idea in the first instance. In any case, concerns about the research had effectively forced a voluntary 60-day moratorium:
But some said the 60-day pause on research was not enough.
One critic of the studies, Richard Ebright, a biologist at Rutgers University, told Science Insider that the letter "includes flatly false statements" making assurances about the safety of H1N1 research labs.
Reports say that a meeting debating the research and steps forward could come during a World Health Organization meeting in February.
Click here to read the full article on the BBC news website.
With research on hold, "publication was [also] delayed for several months after a US agency expressed concern that it might be useful to bioterrorists". That delay lasted until May:
[Eventually] the US government and the journals Science and Nature agreed that the papers from teams in Rotterdam and Wisconsin [the other institute involved] should be published in full.
And so they were:
Last month Nature published its H5N1 research and now that's been followed by a series of papers in the journal Science.
Together they set out the potential threat of an H5N1 pandemic and how to prepare for it.
My colleague Pallab Ghosh has a summary of the Science research which you can read here.2
[In fact, you probably can't read that particular summary because the link seems to have failed.]
These extracts are taken from a BBC news report by Fergus Walsh, someone who seems intent on playing down the worries about the research itself and keener to emphasise the likely prospects of a future flu pandemic:
The potential for a pandemic of avian flu is considered by the World Health Organisation as one of the greatest potential threats to global health.
So is the world a safer or a more dangerous place now that these papers have been published?
The journals involved argue this data will allow scientists to monitor the threat from avian flu and work on preparations for a potential pandemic. That view is widely shared among scientists.
And on the same day, BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh wrote a companion piece also highlighting dangers of a bird flu pandemic:
The H5N1 bird flu virus could change into a form able to spread rapidly between humans, scientists have warned.
Researchers have identified five genetic changes that could allow the virus to start a deadly pandemic.
Writing in the journal Science, they say it would be theoretically possible for these changes to occur in nature.3
Which has always remained the justification given by those scientists undertaking the research: that the study will help them and others to "learn which viruses can cause pandemics and by knowing that we might be able to prevent them by enforcing strict eradication programmes". But should we not be concerned that as a direct consequence of their research such a strain has now been artificially mutated and so presumably already exists.
In the next part of Pallab Ghosh's article, we come to what many (myself included) see as the most troubling part of the whole exercise – it appears as a bold subheading that instantly puts the research back into more chilling context:
It is the first time it has been shown that it is possible for bird flu to become airborne, but the research team was unable to determine precisely how likely this was to happen.
Prof Derek Smith, who led the analysis, said more information was needed.
He said researchers required a better understanding of how flu viruses were transmitted between people in order to develop a clearer idea of the likelihood of the emergence of an airborne strain of bird flu.
"These are difficult things to find out," Prof Smith told BBC News.
"What this work enables us to do is to prioritise particular experiments to obtain this information".
And yet the very next statement in the same article then immediately raises more questions about the supposed value of the research whilst simultaneously coming as a great relief:
It is clear though that the emergence of an airborne mutation of H5N1 is unlikely. Were it not it would have emerged already.
I have highlighted this in bold because, to my admittedly untrained eye, it already contains a rather significant answer to the question they are supposed to be trying to answer — that any naturally occurring variant is unlikely to be a highly dangerous "airborne mutation". So what is the point of the research, again…? Back to Ghosh's article:
But researchers want to be able to calculate the risk of such a virus emerging more precisely in order to help public health officials in their contingency planning.
Is this really a good enough reason?
Click here to read the full article by Pallab Ghosh.
All of which brings me to the latest BBC news report, which was published yesterday [Jan 23rd] and entitled "Controversial bird flu work resumes". Apparently, the moratorium, which had initially been set at 60-days, and then was later extended to a year, is finally over:
Controversial research into making bird flu easier to spread in people is to resume after a year-long pause.
Some argue the research is essential for understanding how viruses spread and could be used to prevent deadly pandemics killing millions of people.
Research was stopped amid fierce debate including concerns about modified viruses escaping the laboratory or being used for terrorism.
The moratorium gave authorities time to fully assess the safety of the studies.4
Click here to read the full BBC news report.
So is it regarded as safe to continue the research then? What do most experts think now, and following a year's consideration? Back to the article:
[Other] scientists said the risk of the virus spreading was too great for such research to take place and described it as a folly.
That sounds like the same opinion as before – yet surely if the research is about to be resumed there must now be a consensus in favour…?
"This research is urgent, while we are having this pause bird flu virus continues to evolve in nature and we need to continue this research.
"We cannot wait for another year or two years."
And who says so?
"One of the leading proponents of the research Prof Ron Fouchier, from the Erasmus Medical Centre"
But do other leading experts, and in light of whatever debate has taken place during the year long moratorium, now concur with the assessment of Professor Fouchier?
Prof Robert May, from the University of Oxford and a former president of The Royal Society, said: "These are not bad people, they are good people with good intentions, but they look through rose-coloured glasses at the security of the laboratories."
He said past history suggests "it will get out" as there had been more than a thousand cases of people being infected in labs with the highest standards and the 1977 outbreak of flu may have been connected to a Russian facility.
"That's why I feel the world is a safer place if we maintain this moratorium."
So no then…
1 From an article entitled "Bioterror fears halt research on mutant bird flu" published by BBC news on January 20, 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16662346
2 From an article entitled "Five genetic changes that could allow bird flu pandemic" written by Fergus Walsh, published by BBC news on June 21, 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/18541433
3 From an article entitled "Bird flu 'could mutate to cause deadly human pandemic'" written by Pallab Ghosh, published by BBC news on June 21, 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18534676
4 From an article entitled "Controversial bird flu work resumes" written by James Gallagher, published by BBC news on January 23, 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21165288
Filed under Europe, Netherlands, Uncategorized
Tagged as biological weapons, bird flu
Dutch scientists have weaponised bird flu — but why?
Scientists have long worried that an influenza virus that has ravaged poultry and wild birds in Asia might evolve to pose a threat to humans. Now scientists financed by the National Institutes of Health have shown in a laboratory how that could happen. In the process they created a virus that could kill tens or hundreds of millions of people if it escaped confinement or was stolen by terrorists.
So begins a disturbing editorial entitled "An Engineered Doomsday" published in Monday's edition [Jan 8th] of the New York Times1. It continues:
The most frightening research was done by scientists at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, who sought to discover how likely it is that the "bird flu" virus, designated A(H5N1), might mutate from a form that seldom infects or spreads among humans into a form highly transmissible by coughing or sneezing. Thus far the virus has infected close to 600 humans and killed more than half of them, a fatality rate that far exceeds the 2 percent rate in the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed as many as 100 million people.
Unless the scientific community and health officials can provide more persuasive justifications than they have so far, the new virus, which is in the Netherlands, ought to be destroyed.
Yes, kill it – and quickly!
Barring that, it should be put in a few government-controlled laboratories with the highest containment rating, known as biosafety level 4. That is how the United States and Russia contain samples of smallpox, which poses nowhere near the same danger of global devastation.
Put it in storage, why? What possible use can it have? In fact, what was the point of making it in the first place?
We [the New York Times] cannot say there would be no benefits at all from studying the virus. We respect the researchers' desire to protect public health [an earlier NYT article offers further 'reasons' for the research]. But the consequences, should the virus escape, are too devastating to risk.
To make matters worse (perhaps) the research is also about to be published. Click here to read a report [from Dec 20th 2011] from Erasmus Medical Centre.
1 From an article entitled "An Engineered Doomsday" published by the New York Times on January 8, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/an-engineered-doomsday.html
January 9, 2012 · 10:30 pm
the last days of Obama might yet be the worst
About five years ago, away on a teaching course in Athens, I met up with some very friendly Danes. During the week, we discussed all sorts of subjects, and often politics. My new Danish friends were interested to hear what I thought about Tony Blair and so I explained to them how his policies had, in just about every respect, been atrocious, if not, ruinous. They were dumbstruck by what I told them, having been given to believe that Blair was not only very popular, but also that his government was a largely progressive one. In return, I was equally amazed by their high opinion of a British Prime Minister already so reviled at home. Blair's PR was better than I'd supposed.
Going further back, to 1997, I had helped vote in Tony Blair's original New Labour government. For this I am sorry. It wasn't even that I wanted what Tony Blair was offering, but like many other dupes, I'd been convinced (or convinced myself) to believe that he might only be disguising himself as a Tory, and then, once in office, and whatever Blair's true colours, he would probably be kept honest by the Labour Party members and the trade unions. In fairness to myself, it didn't take long to change my mind on this, and I certainly didn't vote Blair back into power in either of his two re-elections. Indeed, I've not voted for Labour since 1997, but been fooled instead into supporting the weaselly Lib Dems and, in their last campaign, the dishonourable and toadying Nick Clegg. Apologies once more. So my record of voting in recent elections has not been good, but then in fairness again, what were the choices? None were available.
Already by the mid-nineties, I had become one of an ever-growing minority who were completely disenfranchised by our essentially two-party "first past the post" electoral system. So last time around, the slim hope was that if the Lib Dems got any sniff of power, then, and aside from moderating the thoroughly anti-liberal and right-wing agendas of either New Labour or the Conservatives, they would also press hard for electoral reform. A result that might then open the backdoor for a longer term revival of a genuinely left-leaning, liberal and anti-imperialist alternative. And the Lib Dems really had nothing to lose. They might never get a second chance to demand overhaul of our clearly unfair voting system, but, as it transpired, suddenly holding balance of power, but then playing their hand so badly, they blew even that limited opportunity. Indeed, having settled for a damp squib referendum that had nothing to do with the kinds of proportional representation system they have traditionally called for, the whole argument about electoral reform seems to be dead, and, in consequence, it's even harder to understand if the Lib Dems actually stand for anything at all. Who gets my vote next time is anybody's guess. I loathe them all, as do a huge portion of the British public.
With Britain lost, it's tempting to seek glimmers of hope abroad, but hard to find any. The race for the Republican nomination in this year's US Presidential election is an interesting case in point. As with previous years, it looks like a catwalk for the nasty, the glib and the downright stupid. Obama vs Gingrich. Obama vs Romney. Obama vs Santorum. In other words, at best it's Obama vs Obama, and at worst…. well, I'd rather not go there.
There is, of course, still an outside bet: Obama vs Paul. Ron Paul appearing in many respects to be a genuine alternative to Obama et al; and outstanding among his Republican rivals in that he promises to end the wars, roll back the unconstitutional Patriot Acts, and take on the private Federal Reserve. Pledges that if kept would be a blessing for all of us. Sadly, however, Paul's economic plans (aside from his call to heel of the Federal Reserve) are truly dreadful. Full scale neo-liberalism. As if the people haven't suffered enough 'austerity' already. What is worse, however, is that Obama, who in common Blair, is far more popular abroad than with actual US voters, nonetheless remains unopposed by any serious challenge within the Democratic Party. The question then, why is there no opposition to Obama coming from the left?
After all, Obama has been such a wretched President. He has been to Bush, what Blair was to Thatcher. Superficially he appears different – marginally more human, basically – but everything he does is simply more of the same. Continued clampdown on civil liberties and human rights, continued protection of the financial criminals on Wall Street, continued tax breaks for the big corporations and the ruling elite, and last but not least, continued expansion of the preposterous and often illegal "war on terror".
Not only has Obama expanded Bush's "war on terror" into Pakistan, but more surreptitiously into other regions. He has achieved this whilst replacing conventional forces with 'contractors' (i.e., mercenaries) and also by dramatically escalating the use of drones, which are now launched from bases not only in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but from Turkey, the Arabian Peninsula, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and even The Seychelles. Click here to view a map published by the Washington Post in late December1. Using private armies and killer robots (i.e., drones), the new preferred weapon of choice, he has opened up the possibility for what he promotes as a 'leaner' military, unveiling, as the BBC news reported on Thursday [Jan 5th], "a far-reaching defence review under which thousands of troops are expected to be axed." Although, as the same article concedes:
No specific cuts to troop numbers or weapons programmes were announced on Thursday – those are to be presented as part of the federal budget next month.
Whilst confirming our suspicions:
Anticipating criticism from his Republican rivals in an election year, the president stressed that the defence budget would still grow, but at a slower pace.2 [my highlight]
The nub of it is that Obama is as addicted to war as Bush was; the difference being that Obama always tells us how he's trying to quit.
Behind the scenes, right now, US troops are being moved into Israel, as further evidence that a build-up to a war against Iran seems almost unstoppable:
Under the Austere Challenge 12 drill scheduled for an undisclosed time during the next few weeks, the Israeli military will together with America host the largest-ever joint missile drill by the two countries. Following the installation of American troops near Iran's neighboring Strait of Hormuz and the reinforcing of nearby nations with US weapons, Tehran authorities are considering this not a test but the start of something much bigger. […]
Israeli military officials say that the testing was planned before recent episodes involving the US and Iran. Of concern, however, is how the drill will require the deployment of thousands of American troops into Israel. The Jerusalem Post quotes US Commander Lt.-Gen Frank Gorenc as saying the drill is not just an "exercise" but also a "deployment" that will involve "several thousand American soldiers" heading to Israel. Additionally, new command posts will be established by American forces in Israel and that country's own IDF army will begin working from a base in Germany.3
Click here to read full article on Russia Today and here to read a follow-up story the following day [Fri 6th Jan].
The Washington Post [Thu 5th Jan] also reported on the "Austere Challenge 12" drill saying it "is designed to improve defense systems and cooperation between the U.S. and Israeli forces" and that "It follows a 10-day Iranian naval exercise near the strategic Strait of Hormuz":
The Israeli military spokesman did not give a date for the drill Thursday, but a senior military official said it would be in the next few weeks. He said it would be the biggest missile defense drill ever held. He was speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.4
Click here to read the full article in the Washington Post.
Meanwhile, in his recent "far-reaching defence review", as the BBC described it, which is ominously entitled "Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities For 21st Century Defense", Obama writes:
"As we end today's wars and reshape our Armed Forces, we ensure that our military is agile, flexible, and ready for the full range of contingencies. In particular, we will continue to invest in the capabilities critical to future success, including intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaisance; counterterrorism; countering weapons of mass destruction; operating in anti-access environments; and prevailing in all domains, including cyber."
Reading those final points (especially the part I've highlighted in bold) reminded me very much of a document produced more than a decade earlier. It was published by a right-wing "think-tank" called The Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
PNAC had been founded in the spring of 1997 as an initiative of the New Citizenship Project, and was co-chaired by William Krystol and Robert Kagan. Ringing any bells? Here is one of its Statement of Principles to give you a flavour: "We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership."5 It's worth bearing in mind that Obama's defence review is called "Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership".
The PNAC commission was endorsed by such notables as Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, as well as by famous postmodern historian Francis Fukuyama. So this wasn't just any old think-tank, but rather the plans for a new world laid out in advance as aims for the incoming US neo-con administration.
In September 2000, the PNAC think-tank brought out a new report entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century." It is a report that has since become notorious (at least in some circles). Here was PNAC's vision for the twenty-first century:
"At present the United States faces no global rival. America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible."6
However, to achieve such a grand objective meant the need of substantial increases in defence expenditure, because to attain their goal of a glorious Pax Americana (which was how PNAC promoted their plans of world dominion) required nothing short of "full spectrum dominance"7:
"Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and "combat" likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, "cyber-space," and perhaps the world of microbes."
More alarming still, and a just little further down the same page, the authors make the following recommendation:
"And advanced forms of biological warfare that can "target" specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."8
This talk of targeting "specific genotypes", which is nothing short of proposing some form of genocide, is available as a publicly accessible document, published and endorsed by a group integrally connected to the highest echelons of the previous US administration. But there's more, and here we reach the sentence of greatest notoriety:
"Further, the process of transformation [towards a Pax Americana], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."9
Please remember that this extract is taken from a document that was released just one year prior to the most "catastrophic and catalyzing event" in modern history.
By contrast Obama's latest defence review includes the following statement:
"In order to credibly deter potential adversaries and to prevent them from achieving their objectives, the United States must maintain the ability to project power in areas in which our access and freedom to operate are challenged." (bottom p.4)
The highlight is mine again. So PNAC had called very bluntly for 'world dominance' and 'global hegemony', whereas Obama's report talks up America's 'global responsibilities', but both are actually pushing towards the same ends: "to project power in areas in which our access and freedom to operate are challenged" being ultimately tantamount to the 'full-spectrum dominance' dreamt of by the PNAC crew. But as the empire grows, where are America's 'potential adversaries' now? – well, read on:
"States such as China and Iran will continue to pursue asymmetric means to counter our power projection capabilities, while the proliferation of sophisticated weapons and technology will extend to non-state actors too."
All of which ratchets a little more tension on Iran [who were also the main target of PNAC] and on China, whilst also hinting at more nebulous enemies for the public at home to fear:
"Terrorist access to even simple nuclear devices poses the prospect of devastating consequences for the United States." (bottom p.3)
If I were an American, however, the part of the report I would find most alarming goes as follows:
"U.S. Forces will continue to defend U.S. Territory from direct attack by state and non-state actors. We will also come to the assistance of domestic civil authorities in the event such defense fails or in the case of natural disasters, potentially in response to a very significant or even catastrophic event."
With the NDAA 2012 act (see my previous post) now permitting the indefinite military detention of anyone (civilians included) 'suspected' of any 'association' with terrorists, just signed into law by Obama, following on here, only a week later, is a statement justifying deployment of the military on the streets. All that is absent is some catastrophic and catalyzing event – as the PNAC bullyboys would have put it.
The intent is all too clear, whereas the timetable is less so. The domestic clampdown might simply continue with the already steady erosion of civil liberties, or, and given the ideal 'catalyzing event', could happen almost overnight. Just think about it — that's exactly what the latest NDAA 'indefinite detention' bill provides for. The nets are ready to haul you in.
Meanwhile, an attack against Iran might be launched next month, next year, or might never happen. But this last option will surely depend upon real political change in America. Could Ron Paul deliver such a change? How would I know — given my current track record I am loathe to endorse any candidates for any election ever again, and it's not my country anyway. I feel unqualified to judge. It is reasonable to suppose, in any case, that it will take more than a single election (however important) to turn America around. All I can do is cheer from the sidelines. Come on the people of America — right now, we're all really counting on you!
Today's Democracy Now! asked William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, about Obama's new strategy, which leaves military spending at levels equal to the Bush administration. The accompanying report also compares foreign policy and military spending pledges made by the current Republican Presidential candidates:
Click here to read full transcript, or to watch the report on the Democracy Now! website.
1http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/under-obama-an-emerging-global-apparatus-for-drone-killing/2011/12/13/gIQANPdILP_story.html to read related article entitled "Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing", written by Greg Miller, published in the Washington Post on December 28, 2011.
2 From an article entitled "Obama unveils new strategy for 'leaner' US military, published by BBC news on January 5, 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16430405
3 From an article entitled "Thousands of US troops deploying to Israel" published by Russia Today on January 5, 2012. http://rt.com/usa/news/us-troops-israel-iran-257/
4 From an article entitled "Israel and US troops gear up for major missile defense drill after Iran maneuvers" by Associated Press, published in the Washington Post on January 5, 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/israeli-and-us-troops-gear-up-for-major-missile-defense-drill-after-iran-maneuvers/2012/01/05/gIQAE0QqcP_story.html
5 These statements were released on June 3rd 1997, just a few months after the foundation of PNAC.
6 Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. p.1
7 Although this precise term is not found in the document in question, it has become the key term in subsequent report entitled Joint Vision 2020, which offers the latest blueprint for the US Department of Defence.
8 ibid: p.60
Filed under analysis & opinion, Britain, China, drones, Iran, Israel, Uncategorized, USA
Tagged as Barack Obama, biological weapons, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, PNAC, Ron Paul, Tony Blair