Paula Schmitt | The labyrinth of ideas and spurious connections

the english newspaper Sunday Times published on Sunday (11.jun.2023) a long investigation that came to the conclusion, or almost, that there was genetic manipulation of the covid virus to make the pathogen more contagious and lethal. Aided by anonymous testimony, classified documents, interviews with US State Department officials, and material released under freedom of information laws, the story was met with a certain amount of fanfare, as if it were something new and eye-opening.

For me, a journalist vilified by minor colleagues for considering the unauthorized hypothesis that SarsCov2 had been genetically modified, the article caused a certain satisfaction – it is pleasant to be corroborated again, even more so when it is a subject indexed as heresy, whose mere debate was forbidden by the most tyrannical consensus, and covered up by the most cowardly journalism. But after 3 seconds of jubilation, the feeling that remains is one of disappointment, because the Sunday Times it has 2 basic problems: the 1st is its lack of novelty – almost everything it “reveals” I have been telling since the 1st year of the pandemic.

Here, in April 2020, I am talking about the same Ralph Baric quoted by the newspaper and his experiment with humanized mice, used to “improve” a respiratory virus and make it more deadly in humans. In this other text, in February 2021, I speak of the theory of Richard Ebright, quoted by Sunday Times. Here, I am talking about the consortium between the US, UK and Canada for the production of biological weapons.

But the biggest problem with the Sunday Times is that it presents itself as essentially scientific while its objective is covertly political. Indeed, the most revealing part of the report is exactly what it omits. Today’s article will try to give the context of biological weapons production, and discuss the hypothesis that the US government may be as much to blame in this story as China.

The most important claims of the Sunday Times are basically the following:

• genetic experiments to increase the virulence of SarsCov were carried out with the participation and funding of the Chinese army;
• the Chinese government hid the experiments and deaths possibly related to the modified virus, one of the first of which was in November 2019;
• gain-of-function experiments are dangerous for mankind. Gain-of-function is the euphemism used to describe the “improvement” of viruses turned into biological weapons;
• the experiments conducted in the laboratory in Wuhan were partially funded with money from the US government, through the NGO EcoHealth Alliance, but its main executive, scientist Peter Daszak, was possibly deceived, poor thing, and was unaware of the most sordid details of the secret experiment .

This report from Poder360 gives a good summary of what was said by the Sunday Times, and I prefer not to repeat what has already been said there. I want to dwell on political and historical aspects omitted by the centenary English newspaper (which since the 1980s has been part of Rupert Murdoch’s monopoly), and show that well-informed people have every reason to suspect that SarsCov may have been deliberately used as a weapon. More than that, this weapon may not have been designed by China alone, or by the US alone, but by an alliance between the two.

In this hypothesis, the “NGO” EcoHealth Alliance, from New York, would have served as a kind of orange, a front intermediary used by the USA to escape the government restrictions on the production of biological weapons. In 2014, the government of Barack Obama decreed a suspension of genetic engineering experiments that increased the contagion or lethality of viruses. But the NGO, hired many years before, would have another equally important function: it would be part of a political-administrative engineering to blur the chain of command and immunize the US government against future condemnations. The Chinese dictatorship obviously does not need this kind of ruse to protect itself from internal control.

One of the major omissions in the text of the Sunday Times it is Fort Detrick, the laboratory of the US Armed Forces that until 1969 was home to the so-called “US biological weapons program”. Today, it no longer does that, no sir: today it hosts the “US biological defense program”. Did you notice the difference? This is like calling the Ministry of Defense an institution that was previously more honestly called the Ministry of War. But the name is irrelevant when the facts are known.

Since 2018, Fort Detrick has been under suspicion of having contaminated the public sewage system with more than 7,000 liters of waste containing pathogens such as the Ebola virus and the anthrax bacteria, both of which are lethal. This would have occurred after a flood at the site, according to the book by investigative journalist Alison Young, published this year: Pandora’s Gamble – Leaking Labs, Pandemics, and a World at Risk.

Fort Detrick also came to minds of well-informed people when, in July 2019, the year before the pandemic, a nursing home with 263 residents had 54 of them infected with a mysterious respiratory illness. The asylum is located in Springfield, Virginia – approximately 86km from Frederick, where Fort Detrick is located.

Many don’t know, but Japan produced biological weapons in World War II – more specifically spirochetes, a species of bacteria that can escape detection and penicillin due to its spiral shape, without a cell wall. The book “Japan’s Secret Weapons”, from 1944, tells a little about the history of biological weapons made in the country. It was written by Barclay Newman, a science journalist and malaria expert in the US Navy.

The US captured Japanese scientists in World War II, but many of them, instead of being arrested, were recruited to conduct scientific experiments. The US also did this to Nazi scientists. This “repurposing” of scientists from Nazi Germany is known as Operation PaperClip. Lyme disease, which causes autoimmune weakness, is also caused by a spirochete. The disease first appeared in the town of Lyme, Connecticut, which is 30km from Plum Island, the island where the US has carried out genetic experiments to create pathogens or increase the virulence of already existing microbes. Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a disease that killed at least 3 people in Brazil this week, is also transmitted by a tick, but the bacteria is different.

Speaking of ticks, and speaking of those 3 people who died in Campinas from a disease transmitted by ticks, the company Oxitec –which has already spread genetically modified mosquitoes in other parts of Brazil– is now producing what it calls “Tick for Good”, another intervention in nature – the same one, which took billions of years to evolve and adapt and be adapted to man and the environment. Oxitec Brasil is headquartered in Campinas, as its website shows.

In the book “House of Bush, House of Saud”, investigative journalist Craig Unger tells that in 1984, the US Centers for Disease Control sent lethal biological material to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – including viruses, retroviruses, bacteria, fungi and even tissue infected with the bubonic plague, as I recount in this article. article here. Among the material sent were several types of West Nile virus and mouse skin contaminated with the plague. The West Nile virus, practically unknown in Brazil, was detected for the first time in 2022 in Minas Gerais, according to this publication of the G1and was later confirmed in Piauí and São Paulo, based on positive samples “collected from horses that fell ill from 2018 to 2020.”

On April 26th, the BBC published an article about alleged attacks “by rebels” on a laboratory in Sudan that works with live samples of polio, cholera and measles pathogens. The laboratory also “stores high-risk complete genomic sequences of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which was isolated from a Sudanese patient.” This bacteria is resistant to several antibiotics and causes respiratory illnesses, especially nosocomial ones – those acquired in hospitals, usually spread by mechanical respirators.

It was also in Sudan where another laboratory was attacked in 1998, but this time the attacks came from US missiles. Who commanded the attack was the then President Bill Clinton, days after his affair with Monica Lewinsky have come to light. Clinton claimed to have attacked Al-Shifa Pharmaceuticals because it was producing chemical weapons, specifically VX poison, but this story has been rebutted. According to Brookins, the VX was used to kill the half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un. VX was invented in a laboratory far away from Africa, more specifically in the UK, in Porton Down. The Porton Down laboratory was involved in one of the most nefarious things I have ever seen: experiments conducted in South Africa under the racist government of PW Botha that used black citizens as guinea pigs. I tell a little about these experiments here. Several foreign governments were aware of the existence of this program, and some used local laboratories to outsource what they could not do at home.

In June 2020, the CBC, Canada’s public media network, published an interesting story, which obviously went unnoticed by journalists paid to not notice. The newspaper claims that, through a court order, it obtained classified information about how the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada sent a shipment of deadly pathogens to China in 2019, including Ebola and Henipah viruses. Guess where they were sent: it starts with “Wu” and ends with “han”.

The story of how governments have been producing pathogens and fomenting biological warfare is one of the darkest subjects, consistently hidden by the sanctioned press, the stenographer of power. In a world where all extra knowledge is cheaply dismissed as “conspiracy theory”, it is crucial that we are aware of the atrocities done in our name, and funded with our money.

There are people, including scientists, who mistake their ignorance for skepticism, and refuse to consider plausible hypotheses for sheer lack of knowledge. Herefor example, a biogeneticist on Twitter not only dismissed the possibility of genetic engineering of SarsCov2, but condemned the mere discussion of the subject: “For the love of god, take more responsibility. The more they feed the radical hypothesis of genetic engineering of the virus, the more ammunition they give to pseudo-disguised progressive wipers who want to match this hypothesis with the much more plausible that the virus is natural and escaped from the laboratory”.