Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently stated that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a biosafety level 4 lab in Wuhan, China
According to
Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of
Illinois College of Law, who drafted the Biological Weapons
Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, BSL 3 and 4 labs must be banned to prevent a
catastrophe
Serious safety breaches have been identified at laboratories working with the most lethal and dangerous pathogens in the world
In October
2014, a U.S. moratorium on experiments on coronaviruses that might make
the viruses more pathogenic and/or easy to spread among humans took
effect. The moratorium was lifted at the end of December 2017
Despite the
U.S. moratorium, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the NIAID, allowed
coronavirus gain-of-function experiments to continue because they had
begun before the moratorium was put in place. The Biological Weapons
Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 calls for fines and/or up to life in prison
for anyone involved in the creation of a bioweapon
The idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a bioweapons laboratory is gaining traction. May 3, 2020, The New York Times reported1
that during an ABC "This Week" interview Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
had stated "the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan." Pompeo also
accused China of covering up the leak.
"Mr. Pompeo, the former C.I.A. chief and one of the
senior administration officials who is most hawkish on dealing with
China, said that 'there's enormous evidence' that the coronavirus came
from the lab, though he agreed with the intelligence assessment that
there was no indication that the virus was man-made or genetically
modified," The New York Times writes.2
Now, if you've been following this newsletter, you've likely seen my interviews with bioweapons expert Francis Boyle and molecular biologist Judy Mikovits,
both of whom have cited evidence that strongly points toward
SARS-CoV-2 being a laboratory creation. So, the assessment that there's
"no indication" that the virus has been modified seems dubious at
best. Most likely, we're not just dealing with scientific
interpretations here, but with political games as well.
Bioweapon Labs Must Be Shut Down and Scientists Prosecuted
As noted by Boyle — professor of international law at the
University of Illinois College of Law and author of the book,
"Biowarfare and Terrorism,"3 who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 — what's needed is a ban on biosafety level (BSL) 3 and 4 labs.
Time and again, serious safety breaches have been identified at
laboratories working with the most lethal and dangerous pathogens in
the world.4,5,6,7,8,9,10
For example, in 2014, six glass vials of smallpox virus were
accidentally found in a storeroom in the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration's lab at the National Institutes of Health.11
It was the second time in one month mishandling of potential deadly
infectious agents was exposed. One month before this shocking
discovery, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention12 realized as many as 84, and possibly 86, of its scientists had been exposed to live anthrax.13,14
The live pathogen had been sent from another, higher-security
facility, which failed to follow biosafety protocols. The anthrax
sample was supposed to have been inactivated prior to transfer, but for
a variety of reasons it wasn't dead on arrival.
The next year, in 2015, the Pentagon realized a Dugway Proving
Ground laboratory had been sending incompletely inactivated anthrax
(meaning it was still live) to 200 laboratories around the world for
the past 12 years. According to a Government Accountability Office
(GAO) report15 issued in August 2016, incompletely inactivated anthrax was sent out on at least 21 occasions between 2003 and 2015.
Asia Times16 lists several other examples as well, as does a May 28, 2015, article in USA Today17 and an April 11, 2014, article in Slate magazine.18
In 2017, the BSL 4 lab on Galveston Island was hit by a massive storm
and severe flooding, raising questions about what might happen were
some of the pathogens kept there to get out.19 As recently as 2019, the BSL 4 lab in Fort Detrick was temporarily shut down after several protocol violations were noted.20
In October 2014, a U.S. moratorium on experiments on coronaviruses
that might make the viruses more pathogenic and/or easy to spread among
humans took effect.21
The ban came on the heels of "high-profile lab mishaps" at the CDC
and "extremely controversial flu experiments" in which the bird flu
virus was engineered to become more lethal and contagious between
ferrets. The goal was to see if it could mutate and become more lethal
and contagious between humans, causing future pandemics. However, the
federal moratorium on lethal virus experiments in the U.S. was lifted
at the end of December 2017.22
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Fauci Backed Dangerous Coronavirus Research
In 2015, researchers announced that in their labs they had created a
hybrid coronavirus similar to that of SARS that was capable of
infecting both human airway cells and mice.
The NIH had allowed the controversial research to proceed, despite
the moratorium, because it had begun before the moratorium was put in
place — a decision criticized by Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at
Pasteur Institute in Paris, who pointed out that "If the [new] virus
escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory."23
Others, such as Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and
biodefence expert at Rutgers University, agreed, saying "The only
impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural
risk."24
In 2017, Tim Trevan, a Maryland biosafety consultant, expressed
concern about viral threats potentially escaping the Wuhan National
Biosafety Laboratory.25 As reported by The Washington Post26 and Business Insider,27 diplomatic cables sent in 2018 also warned about "possible safety breaches at a lab in Wuhan."
Backing dangerous coronavirus research was none other than Dr.
Anthony Fauci, who now leads the White House pandemic response team. As
reported by Newsweek, April 28, 2020:28
"Just last year, the National Institute for Allergy and
Infectious Diseases [NIAID], the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded
scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for
work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
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."
NIAID Funded Coronavirus Gain-of-Function Research
According to Newsweek,29 the NIAID research in question was conducted in two parts. The first, which began in 2014 and ended in 2019,30 focused on "understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence." Initial findings31 were published in Nature Medicine in 2015.
The program, which had a budget of $3.7 million, was led by Wuhan
virologist Shi Zheng-Li and sought to catalogue wild bat coronaviruses.
As noted by Boyle in our interview, it also involved U.S. scientists
from the University of North Carolina and Harvard.32
The second phase began in 2019 and included additional surveillance
of coronaviruses along with gain-of-function research to investigate
how bat coronaviruses might mutate to affect humans. This second phase
"was run by EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research group, under the
direction of president Peter Daszak, an expert on disease ecology. NIH
canceled the project Friday, April 24, 2020" Newsweek reports, adding:33
"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."
Fauci Defended Gain-of-Function Research on Bird Flu
Fauci also defended and promoted gain-of-function research on bird flu viruses a decade ago, saying such research was worth the risk because it allows scientists to prepare for pandemics.34 In reality, this kind of research does not appear to have improved governments' pandemic responses.
If anything, it's a curious coincidence that the very viruses
undergoing gain-of-function research are the ones causing pandemics. As
noted in an interesting April 24, 2020, Salon article35
written by independent journalist and analyst for the Institute for
Public Accuracy Sam Husseini, dangerous pathogens are made even more so
in laboratories around the world, and the COVID-19 pandemic really
"exposes the threat of a biowarfare arms race."
"Regardless of the source of this pandemic, there is
considerable documentation that a global biological arms race going on
outside of public view could produce even more deadly pandemics in the
future," Husseini writes, adding:36
"Governments that participate in such biological weapon research
generally distinguish between 'biowarfare' and 'biodefense,' as if to
paint such 'defense' programs as necessary. But this is rhetorical
sleight-of-hand; the two concepts are largely indistinguishable.
'Biodefense' implies tacit biowarfare, breeding more dangerous
pathogens for the alleged purpose of finding a way to fight them. While
this work appears to have succeeded in creating deadly and infectious
agents, including deadlier flu strains, such 'defense' research is
impotent in its ability to defend us from this pandemic."
'Natural Leap' Explanation Is Weak at Best
Husseini goes on to discuss a widely-cited study37 published March 17, 2020, which claims to disprove a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2. He writes:38
"That journal article,39
titled 'The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,' stated unequivocally: 'Our
analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a
purposefully manipulated virus.'
This is a subtly misleading sentence. While the scientists state
that there is no known laboratory 'signature' in the SARS-Cov-2 RNA,
their argument fails to take account of other lab methods that could
have created coronavirus mutations without leaving such a signature."
One way to manipulate viruses without genetically engineering them
per se is by growing them in a series of animal tissues. This is a
process used in vaccine development to speed up evolution of the virus.
As explained by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in our recent interview,
the way they accelerate evolution of bat coronaviruses is by taking it
from the anus of the bat and replicating it in animal tissue such as
pangolin kidney tissue.
Next, the grown viruses are placed on feral monkey kidney cells,
followed by mouse brain tissue. Each time you transfer the virus to
another animal tissue, you increase the risk of zoonotic animal virus
contamination in addition to mutations. According to Kennedy, six years
of evolution can be accomplished in a matter of days using this
accelerated evolution process. Through this process, extremely viral
forms of the virus can be rapidly created. Husseini also points out
that:
"… there is also the question of conflict of interest in the
Nature Medicine article. Some of the authors of that article, as well
as a February 2020 Lancet letter40
condemning 'conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have
a natural origin' … have troubling ties to the biodefense complex, as
well as to the U.S. government.
Notably, neither of these articles makes clear that a virus can
have a natural origin and then be captured and studied in a controlled
laboratory setting before being let loose, either intentionally or
accidentally — which is clearly a possibility in the case of the
coronavirus."
Mainstream media are now trying to squash conversations about the
possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was man-made by insisting scientists
wouldn't have chosen a harmless coronavirus to work with. Live Science,
for example, tried debunking the man-made virus theory, saying:
"Scientists have studied how SARS-CoV differs from SARS-CoV-2 —
with several key letter changes in the genetic code. Yet in computer
simulations, the mutations in SARS-CoV-2 don't seem to work very well
at helping the virus bind to human cells.
If scientists had deliberately engineered this virus, they
wouldn't have chosen mutations that computer models suggest won't work.
But it turns out, nature is smarter than scientists, and the novel
coronavirus found a way to mutate that was better — and completely
different— from anything scientists could have created …"
Similarly, a Scripps Research press release41
states that, "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."
'Natural Leap' Theory Is Not Believable in Face of Evidence
Meanwhile, a recent article42
in the Great Game India Journal of Geopolitics & International
Relations points out that Radiotelevisione Italiana exposed China's
coronavirus work in a November 2015 broadcast, raising serious
questions about the ethics involved. An English transcription of the
Italian broadcast reads, in part:43
"Chinese scientists have created a pulmonary super virus from
bats and mice … It is a group of Chinese researchers attaching a
protein taken from bats to the SARS virus, Acute Pneumonia, derived from
mice. The output is a super coronavirus that could affect man.
It remains closed in laboratories and it is only for study
purposes, but is it worth the risk — creating such a great threat only
for examination purposes? …
Here is an experiment in China, in which a group of scientists
has managed to develop a chimera — an organism modified by attaching
the surface protein of a coronavirus found in bats of the common
species called the Great Horseshoe Bat, to a virus that causes SARS in
mice, although in a non-fatal form.
It was suspected that the protein could make the chimeric hybrid
organism suitable for affecting humans, and the experiment confirmed
it.
It is precisely this molecule, called SHCO14, that allows the
coronavirus to attach itself to our respiratory cells and to trigger
the syndrome. According to researchers, the two organisms, the original
and even more so the engineered one, can infect humans directly from
bats, without going through an intermediate species like the mouse …"
In Great Game India's "COVID-19 Files,"44
you can find data exploring the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from five
different angles, including epidemiological investigations, virus gene
comparisons, cross-species infection research, intermediate hosts and
findings from the Wuhan lab.
Dr. Meryl Nass — who in 1992 published a paper45
in which she identified the 1978-1980 Zimbabwe anthrax outbreak as a
case of biological warfare — also isn't buying the all-natural
argument. In an April 2, 2020, blog post, she wrote:46
"Why are some of the U.S.' top scientists making a specious
argument about the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2? … 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 …
They resulted in biological weapons that were tested,
well-described, and in some cases, used … 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:
Exposing microorganisms to chemical or radiological agents that
cause high mutation rates and selecting for desired characteristics
Passaging virus through a number of lab animals or tissue cultures
Mixing viruses together and seeking recombinants with a new mix of virulence factors"
Tracking Down Origin of SARS-CoV-2 Is Crucial
As noted by the National Review,47
getting to the bottom of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is indeed important
if we want to prevent a similar pandemic to erupt in the future.
"If it originated from a person eating bat or pangolin at a wet
market, then we need to take steps to ensure that bat and pangolin
consumption and trade stops …" the National Review writes.
"Bat guano is used as fertilizer in many countries, and that
guano can be full of viruses … If this is the source of the virus, we
need to get people to stop going into caves and using the guano as
fertilizer …
In a strange way, the 'lab accident' scenario is one of the most
reassuring explanations. It means that if we want to ensure we never
experience this again, we simply need to get every lab in the world
working on contagious viruses to ensure 100 percent compliance with
safety protocols, all the time."
Do You Live Near a Bioweapons Lab?
Many are unaware of just how many BSL 3 and 4 labs there are in the world. According to the National Review,48
BSL 4 laboratories are found in the U.S., China, Argentina, Australia,
Brazil, Canada, The Czech Republic, France, Gabon, Germany, Hungary,
India, Italy, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and the
United Kingdom.
In testimony49
about high-containment biosafety laboratories presented to the
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in October 2007, Keith
Rhodes, chief technologist at the Center for Technology and
Engineering, points out that BSL4 labs in the U.S. increased from five
to 15 between 2001 and 2007 alone, and that no one is actually
responsible for tracking the proliferation of BSL 3 and 4 labs in the
U.S. or determining the risks associated with them.
On top of that there are dozens more BSL 3 laboratories. The map below was published in the journal Science50 in 2007 and reprinted in Asia Times51
April 6, 2020, showing the proliferation of high-containment labs in
the U.S. A USA Today investigation published in 2015 put the number of
BSL 3 and 4 labs in the U.S. around 200,52 and Boyle estimates there are about 400 worldwide.53
The Danger Outweighs Any Potential Benefit
As long as we are creating the risk, the benefit will always be
secondary. By taking dangerous pathogens and making them even more
lethal through gain-of-function research, scientists and those who fund
them are playing a high-risk game of Russian Roulette.54
Any scientific or medical gains made from such research pales in
comparison to the incredible risks involved. This sentiment has been
echoed by others in a variety of scientific publications.55,56,57,58
Considering the potential for a massively lethal pandemic, I believe
it's safe to say that BSL 3 and 4 laboratories pose a very real and
serious existential threat to humanity. U.S. biowarfare programs employ
some 13,000 scientists,59
all of whom are hard at work creating ever-deadlier pathogens, while
the public is simply told to trust that these pathogens will never be
released, either involuntarily or voluntarily.
Historical facts tell us accidental exposures and releases have
already happened, and we only have our lucky stars to thank that none
have turned into pandemics taking the lives of millions. Considering
safety breaches at these labs number in the hundreds, it's only a
matter of time before something really nasty gets out. Consider the
ramifications if a souped-up Ebola or Spanish flu were to get out, for
example.
Regardless of the exact method behind its creation, it seems clear
to me that SARS-CoV-2 has been modified and that its origin is being
covered up by responsible parties. Why the cover-up? In short, to avoid
life behind bars. The Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989
states:60
"Whoever knowingly develops, produces, stockpiles, transfers,
acquires, retains, or possesses any biological agent, toxin, or delivery
system for use as a weapon, or knowingly assists a foreign state or any
organization to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned
for life or any term of years, or both. There is
extraterritorial Federal jurisdiction over an offense under this section
committed by or against a national of the United States."
With sufficient evidence, many researchers and public health
authorities stand to spend the rest of their lives behind bars, which
is the penalty that the Anti-Terrorism Act calls for. This is why it is
vital that we initiate immediate actions to start closing BSL 3 and 4
laboratories that are working with the most lethal pathogens known to
man and prosecuting those involved in biowarfare-related research.
If we fail to start this process soon, and simply wait until something worse escapes, the COVID-19 pandemic
will seem like a walk in the park and we could approach death rates
more similar to the Spanish flu of 1918 or even the bubonic plague that
wiped out 60% of Europe.
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