Aletho News

Brazilian Biosecurity Threatened: Oxitec and the New Dengue Outbreak

By Raphael Machado | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 19, 2024

The latest news about Brazil with international repercussions deals with a new outbreak of dengue fever, which has already affected more than 360,000 people and caused the death of at least 40. The case is notorious enough to have warranted a visit from Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of the WHO, who said that the outbreak in Brazil was part of a global phenomenon.

Without claiming a connection, but honesty requires us to remember that this visit comes just a few days after Mr Adhanom declared in Davos, at the World Economic Forum, the imminence of “Disease X”, which would require restrictive measures at a global level, as well as an upsurge in the fight against “disinformation”.

In the light of the investigations and findings of Russian Ministry of Defence experts regarding the Ukrainian and international activities of Western biolaboratories, however, it may be relevant to take a closer look at some facts that unfolded a few years ago in Brazil.

According to the British company Oxitec’s own official sources (oxitec.com), billions of genetically modified mosquitoes have been released since 2011 with the aim of combating the spread of diseases such as dengue, zika and chikungunya, which periodically re-emerge and affect hundreds of thousands of Brazilians.

The operation is based on manipulating the genes of male Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes (the carrier and transmitter of these diseases) so that the offspring of their crossbreeding with normal female mosquitoes have stunted or defective development, which would eventually lead to the eradication of the mosquitoes and, consequently, dengue fever.

The first tests, such as those carried out in the city of Jacobina in Bahia, pointed to an 85 per cent rate of genetically modified eggs among the entire mosquito population in the city, which was read as a demonstration of the experiment’s success.

However, we saw the result of this optimism in 2019, when the journal Scientific Reports pointed out that experimentation with the Aedes Aegypti mosquito may have created a “supermosquito”. According to the publication, 18 months after the end of the aforementioned experiment, the genetic alterations of the transgenic mosquitoes were already present in the native insect population. Even in neighbouring districts and regions where no genetically modified mosquitoes were released, the mosquitoes had mixed genes.

It was conjectured at the time that these mosquitoes might be more resistant to insecticides and poisons. Doctor Lia Giraldo da Silva Augusto, an environmental health researcher and former member of CTNBio, said she believed there had been lobbying to favour the British company – which was facilitated by the fact that the company dealt directly with town halls in extremely poor cities.

She also denounces the fact that there was no long-term monitoring and that only short-term results were used to press for the commercial release of the transgenic mosquito.

This is not the first controversy involving Oxitec.

The citizens of Florida, more specifically the Florida Keys, have been fighting a battle for more than 10 years against the release of billions of genetically modified mosquitoes. According to various social organisations, such as the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition, there is no evidence that GM mosquitoes limit the spread of diseases such as dengue, not least because there has been no independent study. Oxitec also claims that the results of its studies into the environmental and human impact of its transgenic mosquitoes is “confidential information”.

In 2018, for its part, the Cayman Islands government cancelled Oxitec’s project to spread transgenic mosquitoes after widespread popular pressure, supported by questions about the plan’s effectiveness and safety. The NGO GeneWatch UK released a report at the time, based on documents released by Oxitec itself, which indicated the ineffectiveness of the method used to suppress the mosquito population and prevent the spread of diseases such as dengue, Zika and chikungunya.

Despite these controversies and criticism from citizens’ groups concerned about the risks of Big Pharma manipulating nature for profit, Oxitec is still pushing ahead with projects in Panama, Djibouti, Uganda and the Marshall Islands, at least.

But who is really behind Oxitec? The British company was acquired in 2015 by the U.S. corporation Intrexon (which in 2020 changed its name to Precigen), which in 2020 sold Oxitec to the venture capital company Third Security LLC, which specialises in biotechnology.

Intrexon/Precigen has Third Security itself as its largest shareholder (38.87 per cent), with the other main investors being Germany’s Merck KGaA and the U.S. companies Patient Capital and BlackRock.

The transgenic mosquito project, however, has the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as its main backer, and Bill Gates himself has been one of the main spokespeople for this idea of fighting mosquito-borne diseases through transgenic mosquitoes.

And this is where the “rabbit hole” gets deep. Bill Gates’ interest in controversial biological research programmes, including in Ukraine, is already well known.

In May 2022, for example, RT published a report by Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of the Radiological, Chemical and Biological Protection Force of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, in which the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was implicated in a scheme to finance military biolaboratories in Ukraine – a scheme that also involves the participation of large pharmaceutical corporations, including the aforementioned Merck KGaA. In this scheme, medicines and vaccines would be tested on the Ukrainian population without meeting international safety standards, in order to reduce costs.

Igor Kirillov released another report in July 2023 that may be of interest to us. In this report, which is already the result of Russian investigations into Western biolaboratories in Ukraine, Kirillov emphasises the U.S. Department of Defense’s interest in studying mosquitoes that transmit infections such as dengue fever. He reiterates that Russia has evidence of dangerous experimentation with mosquitoes in special facilities, both in the U.S. and abroad, highlighting precisely Oxitec as a company with ties to the U.S. Department of Defence and capable of mass-producing infection vectors for dengue and other diseases.

Kirillov finally points to a correlation between the spread of the operations of these Western-linked biolaboratories and a growing incidence of unusual diseases in the territories in question.

With this, it is not our intention to launch empty speculations about Oxitec’s activities, but to emphasise the need for a strict Brazilian and Ibero-American biosafety policy that takes into account the Russian findings about the suspicious activities of biolaboratories linked to the U.S. government, the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation and Big Pharma.

February 20, 2024 - Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Gates Foundation, Oxitec