In an exclusive interview with Mary Holland, President of Children’s Health Defense, Robert F Kennedy Jr. explains what motivated him to write his newly published book The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race, which traces the origins of risky gain-of-function research and spells out why it should be banned. You can view the full interview on CHD.TV here. A resumé of the interview follows below.
Kennedy traces the history of the US bioweapons programme from its origins, when the US brought in Nazi and Japanese scientists after World War II, to today’s biodefence research conducted under the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). And how Dr Anthony Fauci, who led the NIAID for 39 years until he retired last year, later offshored some of that research to China.
Suggesting SARS-CoV-2 likely originated from gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China – research funded in part by the U.S. government – Kennedy calls for an end to the risky research to prevent future lab leaks. He says there should be transparency among nations conducting such research, and that it should be criminalised.
Kennedy tells Holland he sees ‘pandemic preparedness’ as a driver of authoritarian government control that threatens civil liberties, and hopes that The Wuhan Cover-Up can help us understand the failures that brought us to this point so we can protect our fundamental rights in the future.
By 1969, US bioweapons programmes, he says, had achieved ‘nuclear equivalence’.
The idea for The Wuhan Cover-Up emerged as Kennedy was finishing his previous book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Kennedy says he was overwhelmed with the volume of information coming forth on gain-of-function research and the origins of Covid-19.
That information pointed to the CIA, which Kennedy says ‘was deeply involved in it from the beginning’, going back to its first mission, Operation Paperclip in 1947. That project involved smuggling into the US more than 1,600 Nazi scientists who had worked on developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and missile systems.
‘A lot of them ended up in Fort Detrick [or] down in Galveston or one of the Navy labs,’ he tells Holland, ‘and that was the beginning of the United States bioweapons programme’.
But during World War II, Japan did ‘more than anybody to develop bioweapons,’ Kennedy says, describing how Japanese scientists performed horrific experiments, including live vivisections, mostly on Chinese citizens after giving them various diseases.
Because the US intelligence agencies and the military wanted to start their own bioweapons programmes, Kennedy says, ‘they exonerated those groups and they brought them over to the United States’ where we ‘inherited not just the cultures and the techniques, but also the kind of moral bankruptcy of the Nazi and Japanese scientists’.
By 1969, the US had achieved ‘nuclear equivalence’ with its bioweapons programmes, Kennedy says, meaning ‘we could kill people with bioweapons as effectively as we could with nuclear weapons’.ER NOW
In 1969, President Richard Nixon surprised everyone by unilaterally terminating the US bioweapons programmes and later pushing through the global Biological Weapons Convention to stop all research, stockpiling and use of bioweapons, Kennedy tells Holland.
That decision left many in the intelligence agencies, military and private industry ‘seething for many years’, he says – until the anthrax attacks in 2001, a week after 9/11, led to ‘the very hasty passage of the Patriot Act’. The USA Patriot Act, which shielded bioweapons researchers from prosecution, ‘effectively relaunched the bioweapons arms race’.
Because the Pentagon was reluctant openly to conduct bioweapons research – which had been a hanging offence under the Geneva Conventions, Kennedy points out – ‘they sent the research over to Anthony Fauci’s shop, to NIAID’.
When Holland asks how bioweapons research ended up at a health agency, Kennedy says: ‘Because bioweapons research is always done coterminously with vaccine research. Every offensive bioweapon programme requires a vaccine. So vaccines are actually part of offensive bioweapons.’
Unlike chemical weapons, Kennedy says the use of bioweapons always includes ‘blowback, 100 per cent of the time’. He explains that any effort to infect an enemy with a bioweapon will invariably infect one’s own troops, ‘and so you cannot launch a bioweapon unless you first have the antidote’ and have ‘inoculated all of your group’.
Under the bioweapons treaty, vaccine development was legal, but bioweapons research was not, Kennedy said.
Vaccine development then became the rationale for developing ‘more pathogenic, more virulent, more deadly’ viruses – ‘classic gain-of-function research’, says Kennedy. The military tapped Fauci for the job and gave him a 68 per cent pay rise, he says.
In 2014, after several US bioweapons labs experienced leaks of pathogens, 300 scientists issued a statement calling for gain-of-function research to be ‘curtailed until there has been a quantitative, objective and credible assessment of the risks, potential benefits, and opportunities for risk mitigation’, warning that the research could start a global pandemic.
After Obama issued a moratorium on the research, Fauci ‘moved the research offshore where he would be out of the oversight of these troublesome scientists’ and White House oversight, Kennedy says.
The sites included Ukraine, the former Soviet state of Georgia and the lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, run by the Chinese military.
Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina developed two key techniques which were taught to scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, says Kennedy: a technique for cloning the furin cleavage site to dock more effectively to the ACE-2 receptors in the human lung and thus ‘make the virus more deadly’, and the ‘seamless ligation’ or ‘no-see-um’ technique that would make ‘the evidence of human tampering invisible’.
Kennedy suggests these techniques, designed to make viruses more dangerous, point to the Wuhan research being intended for bioweapons rather than beneficial public health outcomes.
After the outbreak of SARS in China in the early 2000s, which the Chinese suspected was a US-made bioweapon, Kennedy says, the Chinese were extremely interested in pursuing gain-of-function research.
As China ramped up its research, U.S. intelligence agencies and the US Department of Defense ‘were deeply interested in having eyeballs in China’, Kennedy says, which led to the CIA, the Pentagon, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies funding research at the Wuhan lab.
Kennedy and Holland cover the development of SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon, the emergence of totalitarian government actions during the pandemic, the loss of civil liberties, the new ‘forever war’ of ‘pandemic preparedness and response’, the creeping authority of the World Health Organization, censorship and surveillance, and steps Kennedy recommends for ending bioweapons research globally.
Reproduced with their kind permission, this interview summary was first published on Children’s Health Defense.
The Wuhan Cover-Up can be ordered from the publisher, Skyhorse Publishing, or from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other booksellers.
You can read Paula Jardine’s extensive research into these matters in her eight-part series for TCW here.