While the world awaits Twitter’s release of the much anticipated “Fauci Files”, both the FBI and the Department of Energy have now acknowledged that SARS-COV-2 was likely leaked from a laboratory, although discrepancies as to exactly which one it may have originated from remain.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House received a classified intelligence report addressing the probable lab leak. Days later, FBI director Chris Wray went on Fox News stating that the virus origins were “most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.” The latest turn of events beg the question: After nearly three years of claiming that the newest coronavirus evolved naturally, why the sudden shift in narrative?
Jacob Creech, who goes by Clandestine on Twitter, wrote a series of Substacks pointing to Ukraine as another potential origin of the pandemic. In one particular Substack, Clandestine reveals information cited by General Igor Kirillov, where Russia openly accuses the US of creating Covid as a human-engineered pathogen. In light of Russia’s allegations of US involvement, why are China and Ukraine the only countries being examined as possible ground zero sites of lab leak origins?
As the world remains silent on the United States being the potential root of the leak, let us examine laboratory activity here in our own backyard.
According to the CDC, only two Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratories were in existence in the US before 1989; one in Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the other in Atlanta, Georgia. BSL-4 laboratories necessitate the highest safety standards due to housing dangerous and highly contagious diseases for which no known vaccine or cure exists. In 1998, 3 more were added. By 2008, the US had opened 10 additional BSL-4 labs.
In the weeks following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, anthrax-laced letters sent through the US postal service killed five Americans and sickened 17. Initially blamed on Al Queada, the FBI finally concluded in 2010 that the anthrax attacks originated from a BSL-4 lab at Fort Detrick, MD. Mounting fears over bioweapon threats as a result of the 2001 anthrax attacks spurred a rapid increase in BSL-4 labs across the county. During a 2007 Select Committee Oversight Hearing on Proliferation of Bio-Laboratories in the US, Representative Bart Stupak noted that the government had already spent over $1B on construction alone of the high-containment biological research laboratories (BSL-3 and BSL-4) after the passage of the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, with approximately $50B in additional government funding allocated to combatting bioterrorism. Even at that time, there was apprehension that no one really knew how many of these labs there were in the US, “much less what research they are doing or whether they are safe and secure.” Today, a total of 14 BSL-4 laboratories are in operation in the United States, with an unknown number of BSL-3 labs, as there is no singular federal agency responsible for their tracking.
Concerns arising from the scientific community related to gain-of-function (GOF) research, a process that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease, led to a 2014 moratorium on GOF studies by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The pause in funding only applied to certain GOF studies, specifically those meeting criteria involving SARS, MERS, and Influenza viruses. Moreover, exceptions to the moratorium allowed for research that was “urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security,” as outlined in the DHHS Frequently Asked Questions. The limited ban on GOF funding was lifted in 2017.
Examples of GOF or directed evolution government-funded research can be found at Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT), a reporting system for all National Institutes of Health (NIH)-supported grants, contracts, and award recipients. One such example is a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) project that utilized GOF experiments in HIV-1 viral budding research. Dr. Anthony Fauci was the director of the NIAID overseeing these projects from 1984 until his recent retirement at the end of 2022.
In 2015, during the same period the White House GOF moratorium was in effect, the Department of Defense (DoD) Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) posted a government grant for $500 million for “Fundamental Research to Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)” (See Image 1). The grant is open through 2024.
The original DTRA Broad Agency Announcement, HDTRA1-14-24-FRCWMD-BAA, from March 2015, outlines several specific Thrust Area topics. Thrust Area 6 focuses on Cooperative Counter WMD Research with Global Partners, to include a Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), a component of the DoD Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which seeks to address the risk of outbreaks of dangerous infectious diseases. One of the listed goals of CBEP international research partnerships is to promote the One Health Initiative that emphasizes “the nexus of human health, animal health, and the environment, and seeks to further understand the mechanisms and factors involved in disease transmission.” CBEP engagements aim to have partner countries “comply with World Health Organization (WHO), International Health Regulations (IHR), and World Organization for Animal Health (OIE)/U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reporting guidelines” and “promote the One Health Concept.” The directive states that CBEP has a particular interest in collaborative research engagements with foreign partners including countries of the Former Soviet Union (specifically, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine).
Embedded in the grant package are several areas of concern, including research on the role of host pathways in Viral Hemorrhagic Fever virus pathogenesis, which closed to applicants in June 2021. Then, on February 14, 2023, the WHO held an emergency meeting of the Marburg virus vaccine consortium to discuss a recent outbreak of hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola in Equatorial Guinea.
Rocky Mountain Labs (RML) in Hamilton, Montana is a BSL-4 laboratory in the US that conducts research on various pathogens including hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola. In 2004, Dr. Marshall E. Bloom, the Associate Director for Science Management for RML, directed the group’s attention to pathogenesis of tickborne flaviviruses. Dr. Dylan Paul Flather is listed on the NIH site as a member of the Bloom Research Group. Dr. Flather’s research focus is tick-borne flaviviruses and betacoronaviruses. Covid-19 is a betacoronavirus.
In an interview with Montana Public Radio (MPR), Dr. Bloom describes how RML began running experiments on the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) before the first case was ever confirmed in the US on January 20, 2020: “There is staff here at Rocky Mountain labs poised to go after that problem,” he said. “And that’s what happened in the instance of the new coronavirus.”
The first reported cases in China were not announced until December 31, 2019. How was RML, a laboratory that specializes in vector-borne viruses, already conducting experiments on the Covid-19 virus in the US in the less than three week span before its confirmed arrival? Perhaps oversight investigations led by the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic will reveal answers to these glaring questions.
Additionally, in March of last year, U.S. News reported of Heartland virus spreading across the country; a new, potentially deadly tick-borne virus native to the US. Given the latest reports from the FBI and the Department of Energy on the possible lab origins of Covid-19, known GOF research, and vector-borne viral experiments being conducted on US soil, it wouldn’t be a far leap for Americans to surmise that this latest tick-borne virus could also be the result of a lab release. After Project Veritas revealed footage of Pfizer’s Director of Research and Development, Jordan Trishton Walker, describing the company’s plans to engage in directed evolution research, Americans are understandably beginning to question whether any number of pathogenic outbreaks could be the product of government agency or non-government organization experimentation operating with little to no oversight.
More concerning yet is the transition of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) to the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) in Manhattan, Kansas. Chosen in 2008 by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the site of the new facility, Manhattan, Kansas, lies in the heart of cattle country. The new BSL-4 facility, completed in May 2022 with a price tag of over $1.25B, will research deadly zoonotic diseases, that is infectious diseases that are transmitted between animals and humans. NBAF will also conduct research on dangerous livestock diseases like foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). With an infection rate of nearly 100% upon exposure, FMD is a highly infectious disease that affects cloven-footed animals like pigs and cattle. In the 1970’s, FMD leaked from the Plum Island facility and was carried through the air off of the island, fortunately in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean. Because of its serious transmissibility, FMD research had previously been restricted to off-continent islands. The 2008 Farm Bill approved by Congress authorized, at DHS’s request, FMD to be brought onto the mainland into PIADC’s successor facility in Kansas. A 2010 report by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded that the site had a high probability of FMD release occurring from the NBAF site within 50 years due to human error.
Written at the onset of the Covid pandemic, an article from The New Yorker details the inevitability of human error when dealing with deadly pathogens. A number of additional incidents such as the Pennsylvania crash involving 100 possibly infected test monkeys and the purportedly mislabeled smallpox vials found by a lab worker inside a Merck facility have occurred since the article’s publication.
NAS further asserted in their 2010 report that the U.S. cattle industry could suffer an economic impact of $9-50 billion if a FMD release occurred. That amount would be significantly higher still if an event took place today. DHS adamantly rejected NAS’s claims and revised their report to reflect a much lesser, more palatable estimation. According to DHS, NBAF is set to become operational in 2023. Again, obvious questions emerge for House oversight investigators: Why would the federal government promote such an irresponsible risk to our nation’s food security by housing an extremely dangerous livestock virus, previously not allowed on the mainland, right in the middle of cattle country? Given the recent toxic train scandal in East Palestine, Ohio, is it possible that the government is intentionally setting up potential scenarios that could destroy our own infrastructure?
DailyMail.com claims that “more than 40 facilities certified as biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) or BSL-4 have either been built or have gone into construction since 2020.” Undoubtedly, government officials and public observers alike must be wondering if the latest worldwide rush to build these new high-containment labs is this century’s new arms race.
These recent developments run contrary to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1975. According to the United Nations’ BWC page, the convention “effectively prohibits the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological and toxin weapons”. Today nearly every nation in the world is a signatory to that convention, including China, Ukraine, and the US. The unsettling trend of increased bio-lab development suggests that not only has the BWC long since been abandoned, but that world powers may have no intention of ever returning to compliance with the agreement.
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