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Pages From The Auschwitz Death Registry Volumes

Long-Hidden Death Certificates Discredit Extermination Claims

By Mark Weber – The Journal of Historical Review – Fall 1992

Over the years, Holocaust historians and standard Holocaust studies have consistently maintained that Jewish prisoners who arrived at Auschwitz between the spring of 1942 and the fall of 1944, and who were not able to work, were immediately put to death. Consistent with the alleged German program to exterminate Europe’s Jews, only able-bodied Jews who could be “worked to death” were temporarily spared from the gas chambers. Holocaust historians also agree that no records were kept of the deaths of the Jews who were summarily killed in the camp’s gas chambers because they were too old, too young or otherwise unable to work. [1]

However, Auschwitz camp death records — which were hidden away for more than 40 years in the Soviet Union — cast grave doubt on these widely accepted claims.

Inmate deaths at Auschwitz were carefully recorded by the camp authorities on certificates that were bound in dozens of death registry volumes. Each “death book” (Sterbebuch) contains hundreds of death certificates. Each certificate meticulously records numerous revealing details, including the deceased person’s full name, profession and religion, date and place of birth, pre-Auschwitz residence, parents’ names, time of death, and cause of death as determined by a camp physician.

These death registry volumes are designated as “secondary books” (Zweitbücher), suggesting the existence of a still-inaccessible set of “primary books.”

The death registry volumes fell into Soviet hands in January 1945 when Red Army forces captured Auschwitz. They remained inaccessible in Soviet archives until 1989, when officials in Moscow announced that they held 46 of the volumes, recording the deaths of 69,000 Auschwitz inmates.

These 46 volumes partially cover the years 1941, 1942 and 1943. There are just two or three volumes for the year 1941, and none at all for the years 1944 or 1945. [2] It is not clear why so many volumes are still missing. According to informed International Red Cross officials, the most likely explanation is that they were misplaced by the Soviets, and might therefore turn up later. (There is no indication that Auschwitz camp authorities made any effort to destroy any of the volumes.) [3]

“No one seems to know yet what become of the numerous missing volumes,” the journal Red Cross, Red Crescent has reported. “Are they still gathering dust in one of the numerous archives throughout the [former] USSR? Anything is possible, but this last hypothesis seems most likely. The mere thought that there are more than 3,250 archival centers in the USSR is enough make anyone’s head spin.” [4]

Russian officials have permitted an agency of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) — the International Tracing Service in Arolsen, Germany — to make copies of the 69,000 death certificates. Microfilm copies of the documents have reportedly also been given to the American Red Cross, and the original volumes have been turned over to the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland.

Although archive officials have not permitted independent researchers to freely examine and evaluate the death registry volumes, the IHR recently obtained copies of 127 of the death certificates from German journalist and researcher Wolfgang Kempkens, who obtained copies of more than 800 of them from sources in Poland and Russia.

Published here — to our knowledge for the first time anywhere — are facsimile reproductions of 30 of these certificates. (Because of the Journal’s page size, the documents reproduced here are reduced to 55 percent of original size.)

In selecting which certificates to reproduce here, preference has been given to those recording the deaths of Jewish prisoners who were indisputably too old to have been able to work.

Consistent with the Sterbebuch records, other German wartime documents show that a very high percentage of the Jewish inmates at Auschwitz were not able to work, and were nevertheless not killed. [5]

For example, an internal German telex message dated September 4, 1943, from the chief of the Labor Allocation department of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA), reported that of 25,000 Jewish inmates in Auschwitz, only 3,581 were able to work. All of the remaining Jewish inmates — some 21,500, or about 86 percent — were unable to work. [6]

This is also confirmed in a secret report dated April 5, 1944, on “security measures in Auschwitz” by Oswald Pohl, head of the WVHA agency responsible for the concentration camp system, to SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Pohl reported that there was a total of 67,000 inmates in the Auschwitz camp complex, of whom 18,000 were hospitalized or disabled. In the Auschwitz II camp (Birkenau), supposedly the main extermination center, there were 36,000 inmates, mostly female, of whom “approximately 15,000 are unable to work.” [7]

The evidence shows that Auschwitz-Birkenau was, in fact, established primarily as a camp for Jews who were not able to work, including the sick and elderly, as well as for others temporarily awaiting assignment to other camps. [8]

Along with the two documents above, the long-hidden certificates reproduced on the following pages discredit a central pillar of the Holocaust extermination story. As revealing as these documents are, though, there is little doubt that a careful examination of all of the many thousands of documents in the Auschwitz death books — as well as other, still-inaccessible wartime records — would bring us much closer to finding definitive answers to the central questions of Germany’s wartime Jewish policy. It is high time for archival officials in Poland, Germany, Russia and Israel to open all their records to independent scholars.

Notes

1. Probably the most often cited “evidence” for extermination at Auschwitz are the “confessions” and “affidavits” of former camp commandant Rudolf Höss. See, for example, Höss affidavit of April 5, 1946 (Nuremberg document 3868-PS), and: Rudolf Höss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, Steven Paskuly, ed. (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1992), pp. 27, 31, 32, 34, 157, 159.; As Prof. Robert Faurisson has explained, the Höss “confessions” are error-ridden statements obtained by torture. See: R. Faurisson, “How the British Obtained the Confessions of Rudolf Höss,” The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87, pp. 389-403.; Other often-cited “eyewitness accounts” confirming the alleged Auschwitz extermination program include: Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account (Fawcett Crest pb. edition, 1985?), pp. 23-24.; Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys (Granada, pb., 1981), pp. 83.

2. Jean-Louis Amar, “Death Camps: The Archives Open,” Red Cross, Red Crescent, January-April 1990, pp. 24-26. This journal is apparently an official publication of the Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

3. E. Schulten, “Endlich Glasnost …,” Waldeckische Landeszeitung, Nov. 2, 1989.

4. J.-L. Amar, “Death Camps: The Archives Open,” Red Cross, Red Crescent, January-April 1990, p. 26.

5. This has recently been obliquely confirmed by Auschwitz State Museum official Franciszek Piper. See: F. Piper, “Estimating the Number of Deportees to and Victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp,” Yad Vashem Studies (Jerusalem: 1991), Vol. 21, pp. 70-71.

6. Helmut Eschwege, ed., Kennzeichen J (Berlin: 1966), p. 264. Source cited: Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw. German document No. 128.

7. Nuremberg document NO-021. Published in: Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals (Washington, DC: 1949-1953), Vol. 5, pp. 384-385. (This is also known as the NMT “green series.”)

8. This is also the considered view of Dr. Arthur Butz. See: A. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (IHR, 1983), p. 124.

Captions

The cover of an Auschwitz death registry volume (Sterbebuch) containing 1,500 certificates from July and August 1943.

This Auschwitz camp death certificate reports that prisoner Josef Buck, a Jewish teacher from Kattowitz, was 65 years old when he died on August 1, 1941. “Weakness of old age” is given as the cause of death.

Josek [sic] Nisenkorn, a Jewish laborer, was 71 years old when he died in Auschwitz on August 11, 1941. “Weakness of old age” is given as the cause of death by camp physician Dr. Siegfried Schwela, who himself later died of typhus.

Chaim Richter, a Jewish salesman, was 81 years old when he died in Auschwitz on March 1, 1942, of “weakness of old age.”

Samuel Mandel, a Jewish tailor, was 74 years old when he died in Auschwitz on March 26, 1942. Physician Dr. Entress reported the cause of death as “influenza with heart failure.”

Ernestine Hochfelder, a Jewish inmate who had been deported to the camp from Slovakia, was 70 years old when she died in Auschwitz on June 4, 1942. “Physical weakness and old age” is cited as the cause of death.

Josef Hoffmann, a Jewish butcher, was 89 years old when he died of “old age” on June 22, 1942.

Abraham Stieber, a Jewish salesman from Slovakia, was 79 years old when he died on July 2, 1942, of “old age.”

David Reichman, a Jewish farmer, was 70 years old when he died on July 22, 1942, of “old age.”

Tibor Pollak, a Jewish secondary school student from Slovakia, was 14 years old when he died on July 26, 1942. Camp physician Dr. Meyer recorded “heart and circulatory failure” as the cause of death.

Albert Janos, a Jewish cook born in Russia, was deported to Auschwitz from Bordeaux, France. He was 48 years old when he died on August 10, 1942. Camp physician Dr. Entress recorded the cause of death as sepsis with inflammation of tissues.

Gerszon Wajsbort [sic], a Jewish merchant deported to Auschwitz from Paris, was 40 years old when he died on August 10, 1942. Camp physician Dr. Meyer recorded the cause of death as accumulation of fluid in the lungs and heart failure.

Armin Horn, a Jewish salesman deported to the camp from Slovakia, died on August 19, 1942, at the age of 70. Camp physician Dr. Thilo recorded the cause of death as “accumulation of fluid in the intestine and weakness of old age.”

Tadeusz Jaworski, a Catholic Pole from Krakow, had just turned 19 years old when he succumbed to typhus on August 22, 1942.

Abraham Trijtel, a Jewish student from the Netherlands, was 14 years old when he died on September 4, 1942, of “acute inflammation of the stomach intestine.”

Jettchen Fuld, a Jewish inmate, was 67 when she died on October 10, 1942. Old age and physical weakness is given as the cause of death.

Salomon Serlui, a Jewish laborer from the Netherlands, was 67 when he died in Auschwitz on October 16, 1942. Camp physician Dr. Kremer reported a stomach ulcer as the cause of death.

Renö Hirschfeld, a Jewish tailor born in Berlin in 1878, was 64 when he died on November 2, 1942. Camp physician Dr. Kitt reported “weakness of old age” as the cause of death.

Freide [sic] Littmann, a Jewish inmate from Leipzig, Germany, was 70 when she died of “old age”on January 11, 1943.

Wolf Eisenhöndler, a Jewish student from Berlin, was 14 when he died on January 13, 1943. “Sepsis with pneumonia” is reported as the cause of death.

Josephine Kohn, a Jewish inmate born in Hungary who had been living in Leipzig, was 69 years old when she died on February 10, 1943. Auschwitz camp physician Dr. Kitt reported “weakness of old age” as the cause of death.

Emil Kaufmann, a Jewish attorney deported from Germany, was 78 years old when he died of “old age” on February 15, 1943. “Weakness of old age” is given as the cause of death.

Julius Sonnenberg, a salesman from Germany, was 65 when he died on February 27, 1943, of “angina pectoris.” His religion is cited as “non-believing, formerly Jewish.”

Abraham Blok, a Jewish butcher from the Netherlands, was 70 years old when he died of “old age” on March 6, 1943.

Franz Waitz, a Catholic laborer, was 67 years old when he succumbed to typhus on June 21, 1943. His death was certified by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz camp physician who was sensationally stigmatized after the war as the “angel of death.”

Josef Daniel, a Catholic laborer from rural Moravia, was 18 years old when he ed his life on June 21, 1943, by “suicide by high-voltage electrical current.”

Max Lichtenstaedt, a Jewish salesman from Berlin, was 73 years old when he died in Auschwitz on July 21, 1943. “Uraemia” is given as the cause of death.

Peter Diessenberg, a baby, was just one year old when he died in Auschwitz on December 27, 1943.

Johanna Seiner, a Jewish inmate who had been deported to Auschwitz from the Theresienstadt ghetto-camp in Bohemia, was 72 years old when she died of “old age” on December 27, 1943.

Zeli Gieclik, a Jewish tailor, was 34 when he died on December 12, 1943. Camp physician Dr. Fischer reported “sudden heart failure” as the cause of death. This is the last certificate in death registry volume 25, which is the final volume for the year 1943.

From The Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1992 (Vol. 12, No. 3), pages 265-298.

April 24, 2020 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | | 2 Comments

The bipartisan “small business” swindle: Billions for banks and corporations, pennies for workers and shopkeepers

By Barry Grey  | WSWS | April 23, 2020

Scores of multi-million- and billion-dollar corporations are receiving free handouts from the government under the “small business” relief fund grotesquely misnamed the “Paycheck Protection Program” (PPP). The program was launched last month as part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, with $349 billion in taxpayer funds.

Billed as a lifeline to small businesses and their employees, the program has been exposed as a cynical fraud. Multiple reports have emerged showing that it is first and foremost a cash cow for large businesses and the Wall Street banks. It is yet another example of how the corporate-financial elite is exploiting the coronavirus catastrophe to further enrich itself at the expense of society and at the cost of human lives.

The CARES Act was passed with the unanimous support of the Democrats in the Senate—including the votes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—and by voice vote in the House, with no effort by so-called “progressives” such as Democratic Socialists of America members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib to stall, let alone defeat, its passage.

While big restaurant chains and other firms whose stock is traded on Wall Street gobbled up large portions of the “small business” relief money, and the major Wall Street banks pocketed $10 billion in loan fees, family-owned restaurants, barber shops, beauty salons, retail stores and other small firms were pushed to the back of the line or denied relief outright.

The program ran out of funds last Thursday, less than two weeks after it was launched, leaving hundreds of thousands of small businesses high and dry and their millions of laid-off employees facing destitution. Now the Trump administration and Congress are rushing to inject an additional $310 billion into the PPP.

On Wednesday, the Senate passed by unanimous consent a new $484 billion bailout bill, whose central component is the renewal of the PPP. At the urging of the Democrats, looking to provide a “progressive” fig leaf to the pro-corporate measure, and with the agreement of Trump, the bill tacked on a totally inadequate $75 billion for hospitals and a derisory $25 billion for COVID-19 testing.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has announced that the Democratic-controlled chamber will vote on the new bill on Thursday. On Tuesday, she hailed the passage of the bill in the Senate, declaring that the Republicans “have seen the light—and we had a great victory for the American people.”

Among the businesses that have received low-interest PPP loans, which are to be forgiven if the firms use 75 percent of the money to keep their workers employed for eight weeks, are:

  • The Ruth’s Chris steakhouse chain, with some 5,000 employees at over 100 locations in 2019 and $468 million in revenues. It received two PPP loans totaling $20 million. The total compensation for CEO Cheryl J. Henry was $6,105,629 in 2018. The stock price of the chain’s parent company, Ruth’s Hospitality Group, has risen by 112 percent over the past month.
  • The Potbelly Sandwich Shop chain, with around 6,000 employees at 474 locations in 2019 and revenues of $410 million. The company received a PPP loan for $10 million. Total compensation for CEO Alan Johnson in 2018 was $1,668,251. Potbelly stock has risen 70 percent over the past month.
  • The Shake Shack restaurant chain, with some 6,000 workers at 254 locations in the US and internationally and $595 million in revenues in 2019. It received $10 million in PPP loans. Total compensation for CEO Randy Garutti in 2018 was $3,805,410. Shake Shack stock has risen 40 percent over the past month. On Sunday, Shake Shack announced it was returning its PPP loan.
  • The J. Alexander’s restaurant chain, with 2,700 employees at 46 locations in 2019 and $304 million in revenues in 2016, received $15.1 million in PPP loans. Total compensation for CEO Mark Parkey was $591,000 in 2019. J. Alexander’s stock has risen by 2 percent over the past month.

Other large firms that received PPP loans include:

  • The Ohio-based biotech company Athersys, which raised almost $60 million in a stock offering on Monday. Its shares have nearly doubled in 2020.
  • Indiana-based coal operator Hallador Energy, which received $10 million after it laid off 60 workers in March.
  • Data storage company Quantum took $10 million.
  • Nicola Motor, backed by giant hedge funds and asset management firms and valued at $4 billion, received a loan of $4 million.

According to a Financial Times article published on Tuesday, 83 publicly traded companies received a combined $330 million in loans from the PPP program, an average of $4 million each. The combined stock value of these firms at the end of 2019 was $12 billion.

Other published figures show how the program is skewed to big companies. More than 25 percent of the $349 billion in loans went to fewer than two percent of the firms that got relief. And more than one out of every four dollars in the fund went toward big loans of $2 million and above.

Meanwhile, just eight percent of small businesses that have applied for aid under the CARES Act have received money.

JPMorgan Chase, the largest US bank, processed many of the biggest loans and cashed in the most on the program. Only six percent of its smaller customers got PPP loans, 18,000 out of the 300,000 that applied. But nearly all of the 5,500 larger companies that applied for PPP loans, customers of the bank’s commercial banking business, received them.

A class action lawsuit filed Sunday in federal court in Los Angeles alleges that four banks—Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and US Bancorp—rushed loans to the biggest businesses to maximize their earnings. The suit alleges that the banks prioritized larger loans to bigger firms instead of processing applications in the order in which they arrived in order to generate bigger processing fees.

Sections of corporate media, prominent Democrats and even Trump are feigning shock and dismay over the funneling of “small business” loans to big corporations and the banks. On Tuesday, Trump, for fairly obvious political reasons, singled out Harvard University, which received bailout money under a different part of the CARES Act, and demanded that it return its loan.

These statements are utterly fraudulent. One is reminded of Captain Renault’s shock at discovering that gambling was taking place at Rick’s Casino in the film Casablanca.

As the media and both parties were well aware, restaurant and hotel chains, hedge funds and other corporate interests carried out intensive lobbying of their political servants in Congress prior to the passage of the CARES Act. One result was the insertion of a loophole allowing restaurant and hotel chains to evade the much trumpeted provision restricting the PPP loans to businesses with fewer than 500 employees. The bill that was passed on a fully bipartisan basis allows restaurant and hotel chains to receive loans so long as none of their individual units has more than 500 workers.

There is nothing in the measure renewing the PPP passed by the Senate on Wednesday that addresses this free pass for the chains.

Moreover, the law is written so as to facilitate self-dealing and corruption. There is not even a requirement that the federal Small Business Administration (SBA), which oversees the PPP, disclose to the public or to Congress the recipients of the loans.

Even if more small businesses eventually receive money from the program, the jobs of millions of workers will not be preserved, since the loans are designed to cover payroll for only eight weeks. The public health crisis and the economic disaster will last far longer. With no serious aid to the 22 million who have already lost their jobs and the millions more who will follow in the coming days and weeks, thousands of restaurants and other small businesses will go bankrupt and permanently shut their doors.

The response of the ruling classes in the US and around the world to the coronavirus outbreak has demonstrated the utter failure of the capitalist system. In every country, countless thousands of lives are being sacrificed to the insatiable drive of a tiny financial aristocracy for personal wealth, whatever the cost in death and human suffering.

The ruling classes are focused on devising ways to profit off of the pandemic. The absurdly named “Paycheck Protection Program”—an example of Orwellian Newspeak—is a case in point.

But the oligarchs, like the ancien regimes of old, are digging their own graves. Mass anger and opposition is growing by leaps and bounds. Strikes and protests by workers are taking place on virtually every continent. It is this international movement, made conscious of its revolutionary aims and tasks, that offers the way out for humanity from the nightmare of pandemics, poverty and war.

April 24, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Economics | , | 1 Comment

Craig Murray Defence Fund Launched

By Craig Murray | April 24, 2020

I know of four pro-Independence folk who were last week phoned or visited by Police Scotland and threatened with contempt of court proceedings over social media postings they had made weeks back on the Alex Salmond case. Then on Monday, a Scottish journalist I know had his home raided by five policemen, who confiscated (and still have) all his computers and phones. They said they were from the “Alex Salmond team” and investigating his postings on the Alex Salmond case. He has not to date been charged, and his lawyer is advising him at present to say nothing, so I am not revealing his name.

Then on Tuesday morning, a large Police van full of police pulled up onto the pavement right outside my front gate, actually while I was talking on the phone to a senior political figure about the raid on my friend. The police just sat in the van staring at my house. I contacted my lawyers who contacted the Crown Office. The police van pulled away and my lawyers contacted me back to say that the Crown Office had told them I would be charged, or officially “cited”, with Contempt of Court, but they agreed there was no need for a search of my home or to remove my devices, or for vans full of police.

On Thursday two plain clothes police arrived and handed me the indictment. Shortly thereafter, an email arrived from The Times newspaper, saying that the Crown Office had “confirmed” that I had been charged with contempt of court. In the case of my friend whose house was raided, he was contacted by the Daily Record just before the raid even happened!

I am charged with contempt of court and the hearing is on 7 July at the High Court in Edinburgh. The contempt charge falls in two categories:

i) Material published before the trial liable to prejudice a jury
ii) Material published which could assist “jigsaw identification” of the failed accusers.

Plainly neither of these is the true motive of the Crown Office. If they believed that material I published was likely to have prejudiced the jury, then they had an obvious public duty to take action BEFORE the trial – and the indictment shows conclusively they were monitoring my material long before the trial. To leave this action until after the trial which they claim the material was prejudicing, would be a serious act of negligence on their part. It is quite extraordinary to prosecute for it now and not before the trial. … continue

April 24, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

New US Health Spokesman Says Rothschild Family ‘Craves Control’, Blames Soros Over Virus

Sputnik – April 24, 2020

Last week, Michael Caputo, who worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was appointed by POTUS as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the US Department of Health and Human Services.

The newly nominated spokesman for US the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Michael Caputo, has blamed George Soros and the Rothschild family for trying to exploit the coronavirus pandemic in order to promote their own agendas, according to CNN which managed to uncover more than 1,000 Caputo tweets he deleted before entering office.

In a now-scrapped tweet on 15 March, Caputo, who is infamous for his remarks on social media, responded to self-proclaimed China analyst Jack Prosobiec, who speculated on Twitter why billionaire investor and philanthropist Soros allegedly adheres to his favourite political causes rather anti-COVID-19 efforts.

“Are you kidding? Soros’s political agenda REQUIRES a pandemic”, Caputo claimed, in what was followed by another tweet, in which he posted a Soros photo captioned “The real virus behind everything”, also adding skulls and crossbones.

In a separate tweet last month, Сaputo slammed economist David Rothschild as “an inbred elitist sphincter whose family craves control”, adding, “that’s one reason why he constantly lies about President Trump”.

The economist, thought to be not related to the Rothschild gamily, is known for his fierce criticism of Trump who David Rothschild claims is seeking “to murder” people in a bid to stay in power.

Trump nominated Caputo as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the HHS on 12 April, a decision that was reportedly in part due to POTUS’ frustration over the way department secretary, Alex Azar was dealing with communications during the COVID-19 crisis.

CNN, in turn, reported that ahead of entering office, Caputo had deleted more than 1,300 tweets and retweets on his Twitter page from late February to early April, including those pertaining to the coronavirus. CNN managed to unearth the tweet by using the Internet Archive’s “The Wayback Machine”.

April 24, 2020 Posted by | Aletho News | , | 1 Comment

Why US outsourced bat virus research to Wuhan

By Christina LIN | Asia Times | April 22, 2020

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded bat-coronavirus research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to the tune of US$3.7 million, a recent article in the British newspaper Daily Mail revealed.

Back in October 2014, the US government had placed a federal moratorium on gain-of-function (GOF) research – altering natural pathogens to make them more deadly and infectious – as a result of rising fears about a possible pandemic caused by an accidental or deliberate release of these genetically engineered monster germs.

This was in part due to lab accidents at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in July 2014 that raised questions about biosafety at US high-containment labs.

At that time, the CDC had closed two labs and halted some biological shipments in the wake of several incidents in which highly pathogenic microbes were mishandled by US government laboratories: an accidental shipment of live anthrax, the discovery of forgotten live smallpox samples and a newly revealed incident in which a dangerous influenza strain was accidentally shipped from the CDC to another lab.

A CDC internal report described how scientists failed to follow proper procedures to ensure samples were inactivated before they left the lab, and also found “multiple other problems” with operating procedures in the anthrax lab.

As such in October 2014, because of public health concerns, the US government banned all federal funding on efforts to weaponize three viruses – influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

In the face of a moratorium in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci – the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and currently the leading doctor in the US Coronavirus Task Force – outsourced in 2015 the GOF research to China’s Wuhan lab and licensed the lab to continue receiving US government funding.

The Wuhan lab is now at the center of scrutiny for possibly releasing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and causing the global Covid-19 pandemic.

Additionally, the embassy warned that researchers “showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus,” meaning bat coronaviruses can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases.

Now, the US is up in arms to hold China accountable for the global coronavirus pandemic, filing class-action lawsuits domestically, as well as building a coalition with allies internationally.

Lawsuits have been filed within the US and the International Criminal Court alleging that China used the virus as a bioweapon, and other suits are under way at the International Court of Justice. Republican lawmakers such as Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Dan Crenshaw have also introduced legislation that would allow Americans to sue China in federal court over the deaths and economic damage wrought by the virus.

If evidence is found that Covid-19 is a biological weapon, some pundits such as Fox News host Lou Dobbs have called for the US to declare war on China.

Nonetheless, it is unclear what the legal ramifications would be if the virus was indeed leaked from a Chinese lab, but as a result of a research project that was outsourced and funded by the US government.

Also, if there was a government ban in 2014 on federal funding being used for GOF research, what are the federal compliance and ethical issues surrounding the fact that the NIH still gave federal funding instead of private funding to the Wuhan lab to continue the experiments?

Moreover, could some strains of the coronavirus have originated in US labs, given the fact the US government lifted the ban in December 2017 on GOF research without resolving lab-safety issues?

For now, President Donald Trump’s administration is investigating the $3.7 million in taxpayer money that went to the Wuhan lab, while Republican Representative Matt Gaetz called for an immediate end to NIH funding of Chinese research. Since the federal ban on GOF research has been lifted, US labs can continue creating these monster germs domestically and would no longer need to outsource to China.

Nonetheless, there still needs to be better oversight on the dangerous experiments and regulations over biosecurity of labs.

Currently, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) – a US government interagency panel that advises the NIH’s parent, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) – conducts risk assessment of GOF experiments that pose a significant threat to public health.

The NSABB has given the HHS a framework to assess proposed research that would create pathogens with pandemic potential, such as research on genetically altering a virus to infect more species, or recreating a pathogen that has been eradicated in the wild, such as smallpox.

However, vaccine development and epidemiological surveillance do not automatically trigger an HHS review. In the postmortem of the Covid-19 pandemic, this is likely a dangerous loophole that could be exploited with no oversight, and should probably be brought under HHS review in order to protect public health better in the future.

April 24, 2020 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | | 1 Comment