THE biodefense mafia don’t really care whether zoonosis (a disease passed from animals to humans) or a lab leak was to blame for the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. They just want you to believe there was a pandemic and restrict causation to one of those two options. It’s a false binary. Either explanation is a win for them because what they’re really doing is setting an elephant trap. The objective is to perpetuate the ‘War on Microbes’, a taxpayer-subsidised pharma racket in which finding or inventing viruses in order pre-emptively to invent countermeasure vaccines can continue ad infinitum. Either excuse serves their purpose.
On December 4, 2024, the House of Representatives sub-committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a 557-page report, ‘After-Action Review on the Covid-19 Pandemic: Lessons Learned and a Path Forward’. Its finding? ‘A lab leak is the most likely origin scenario, that the Chinese Communist Party was conducting dangerous research, and this type of dangerous research was notionally supported by the NIH [US National Institutes of Health],’ said Chairman Brad Wenstrup.
The conclusion was perhaps no surprise as Wenstrup, a podiatrist and US Army reservist who served in Iraq in 2005, was in 2021 amongst the first outside Dr Robert Kadlec’s biodefense clique to push for a lab leak investigation. What the US now euphemistically calls ‘gain of function’ work used to be called bioweapons research. Kadlec invoked the right for the US to do it in 2003, justifying it as defensive threat detection work. However for the countermeasure part to be legal under international law, it needs an illegal act by another state to respond to, so someone else needs to be doing it too. Funding Chinese government research into zoonotic viruses is perhaps a second elephant trap as it sets up future scapegoats. For the pharma companies it’s a win-win too. The US War on Microbes business model calls for outsourcing of vaccine development projects to private companies whose development costs are completely underwritten by the government, whose own researchers get a small kickback in the form of royalty payments while Pharma gets to keep most of the profits from the commercialised product. It’s a merger of state and corporate interests. Left to a free enterprise model, we wouldn’t be where we are because there is no viable commercial market for these War on Microbes vaccines.
News coverage on the committee report has largely focused on speculation that perjury charges could be brought against former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) chief Dr Anthony Fauci and some of his subordinates who the Committee believed gave misleading testimony. Dr Peter Daszak, the Chief Executive of EcoHealth Alliance, who were the conduit for US funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for the bat coronavirus research the committee believes caused the pandemic, was accused of obstructing the committee’s work. It wants them barred from receiving any future US government funding.
Charges against Daszak and Fauci would be popular as there is an appetite for bringing someone to account. The prospect of perjury investigations and criminal charges or government funding bans stirs up waters already muddied by Dr Kadlec himself through his Senate Investigation. It doesn’t matter if aerosolised bioweapons really work or if biodefense spending is necessary, all that our very own Colonel Jack D Ripper wants is for there to be a widespread belief that human bodily fluids can be polluted by viruses so that the firehose of Manhattan Project for Biodefense funding to his corporate chums continues without interruption.
The biodefense mafia are playing chess while everyone else plays checkers. So to anyone wise to the elephant trap, the House sub-committee report which affirms the need to ‘Predict, Prepare, Protect, Prevent’ makes depressing reading. It’s a prescription for more of the same. Wenstrup and his committee believe that pandemics will continue to be recurring events, that Covid-19 was ‘novel’, that it emerged from a Chinese lab and killed millions, that Operation Warp Speed to develop and distribute vaccines was a tremendous success which should be repeated in the future and finally that there was a cover-up which involved Chinese and American officials.
First of all, at least five years of planning went into bringing us the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, or rather the Manhattan Project for Biodefense. It began outside government as a response to the October 2014 US government funding pause on gain-of-function research on SARS and MERS coronaviruses and influenza viruses. Dr Kadlec, the architect of 21st century US biodefense policy, was the key driver of this plan. In a 2009 interview published in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism he explained his preoccupation with stopping exotic pandemics, saying: ‘The view I have is deeply rooted in the military, but medical in nature.’
Within a month of the gain-of-function research moratorium which was an existential threat to Kadlec’s threat detection-based rationale for funding gain-of function research and vaccine countermeasure development projects, Kadlec organised a biodefense study breakfast in Washington DC. By December 8 he had set up his Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense whose report was the basis for President Trump’s 2018 Biodefense Policy.
Kadlec was also chair of the National Academies Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness to Catastrophic Events, organisers of a March 2015 workshop on Enabling Rapid Response and Sustained Capability Countermeasures to Mitigate Risk of Emerging Infectious Diseases. It was chaired by his old friend Dr Richard Hatchett, the Chief Medical Officer at BARDA (the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority). The keynote speaker was Dr Jeremy Farrar, then the newly installed director of the Wellcome Trust. Dr Daszak was there too, on a panel discussing Challenges and Opportunities in Responding to Coronaviruses; Past and Present. The opportunity to be exploited was that coronaviruses cause the common cold, but could be made to be sound frightening enough that people might take a vaccine if one were to exist. The report published after the workshop records an unnamed person suggesting a ‘Manhattan Project for Biodefense’ was needed.
By mid-2015 Farrar drafted the proposal for what was to become the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the vehicle used as a hedge against any future US domestic gain-of-function moratorium and which offshores US government biodefense vaccine projects to commercial partners. CEPI is now led by Dr Hatchett. Dr Barney Graham of the National Institute of Health and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Vaccine Research Centre, who had been researching the similarities between RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) and SARS coronavirus since 2006, proposed the prototype pathogen approach under which research into vaccines for one virus could be rapidly repurposed into vaccines for a similar virus. SARS and MERS vaccine development research in the US went underground and under the radar as RSV vaccine research. Graham’s RSV patent was licensed to developers of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in 2020.
On January 10, 2020, when the genome sequence for the Wuhan coronavirus was released, Dr Vincent Munster, the Chief of the National Institutes of Health’s Virus Ecology Unit, sent Dr Ralph Baric an email about the ‘novel’ coronavirus saying, ‘Perfect! Right between your favourite viruses :-)’ It was no surprise: it landed where he put it when he wrote the gain-of-function section of the EcoHealth Alliance’s now-notorious Defuse Proposal which the pandemic sub-committee said had been split up and funded by Fauci after DARPA declined to do so in 2018. Far safer for it to have been civilian rather than military funded. Of course the NIAID knew about the Manhattan Project for Biodefense – it issued Dr Baric with a task order (HHSN272201700036I) on September 15, 2019 to assess the efficacy of candidate coronavirus vaccines and therapeutic monoclonal antibodies in mouse models. That’s how it happened that Dr Baric was sent the Moderna NIAID jointly-owned mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates on December 16, 2019 before anyone was aware of a Wuhan flu. No one on the sub-committee questioned him about this.
Dr Kadlec, the Assistant Secretary of Response (ASPR) who ran the US response to SARS-CoV-2, activated the US government disaster leadership group on January 3, 2020 (source Paul Mango’s book Operation Warp Speed), a mere three days after China notified the WHO that it had 17 cases of an unknown pneumonia. No one had died yet. DARPA then notified the research teams participating in their four-year Pandemic Prevention Project which began in February 2018 that the ‘novel’ coronavirus was the next test (see last page). And Kadlec said his office spent 18 months planning a joint exercise with the Japanese Ministry of Health on how to repatriate Americans from Japan in the event of a disaster or emergency. It just happened to have been scheduled for March 2020 but was brought forward a month to evacuate the Diamond Princess. How fortuitous, or more likely, how convenient.
The Committee report also ignores the important but overlooked reasons why there was such an emphasis on the SARS-CoV-2 virus being ‘novel’. The original SARS first emerged in 2002 during Gro Harlem Brundtland’s tenure as Director General of the World Health Organization. The hyperbolic press release claimed it still threatened the world but had been contained in five months. The Centers for Disease Control held a patent on it. Ten years later, the purportedly deadlier Middle East Respiratory System (MERS) coronavirus emerged in Saudi Arabia. Between 2013 and 2015 there were ten failed attempts to have the WHO declare a PHEIC (public health emergency of international concern) over MERS. A conflict of interest declaration for the WHO Emergency Committee says that researchers from Erasmus University in the Netherlands filed a patent on MERS coronavirus. Intellectual property rights is the first reason the 2020 virus needed to be novel. The second is to avoid the WHO Emergencies Committee declining to issue a PHEIC for an 11th time. Even so, in January 2020 WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had to ask three times before the committee obliged.
Wasn’t it lucky that, as Dr Munster pointed out, a novel coronavirus that fell between a bat coronavirus and the SARS virus the CDC held a patent on emerged out of China ‘just in time’ for the mystery virus phase of DARPA’s P3 project, when ‘just in case’ coronavirus vaccines that licensed US government patents were being cooked up?
