FBI hypes QAnon threat again, says some conspiracy theorists ‘likely’ to attack Democrats
RT | June 14, 2021
Some followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory might decide to engage in real-world violence against the ruling Democrats, FBI and Homeland Security analysts wrote in a memo provided to Congress that has now been made public.
“We assess that some DVE [domestic violent extremist] adherents of QAnon likely will begin to believe they can no longer ‘trust the plan’ referenced in QAnon posts and that they have an obligation to change from serving as ‘digital soldiers’ towards engaging in real world violence—including harming perceived members of the ‘cabal’ such as Democrats and other political opposition—instead of continually awaiting Q’s promised actions which have not occurred,” says the memo, breathlessly reported by CNN and other corporate media outlets as a clear and present danger to the US.
Right below that assessment of likelihood, however, the FBI and DHS say that other QAnon adherents “likely will disengage from the movement or reduce their involvement in the wake of the administration change,” which might be “spurred by the large mainstream social media deplatforming of QAnon content.”
The memo itself leads with the disclaimer that it’s “provided for informational purposes only.” It is dated June 4, and was provided to Congress at the request of Senator Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to CNN. An earlier, classified version of the memo was provided to lawmakers in February, according to Heinrich.
This might explain why there are references to mass deplatforming of QAnon – which was going on in the wake of the January 6 riot at the US Capitol – and that the most recent example of “DVE activity” is dated January 8.
One of the examples, dated back to March 2020, was also questioned by an expert. There was “no evidence” that the train derailment in California “was directly linked to QAnon,” said Marc-Andre Argentino of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King’s College London.
The memo says more than 20 QAnon followers were among those arrested for trespassing at the Capitol on January 6. Over 400 people have been charged in connection with the riot, however. As 25,000 National Guard troops deployed to Washington, DC to secure Joe Biden’s inauguration, mainstream media outlets cited a purported FBI memo warning about militias threatening to storm DC and state capitals. No one showed up on the appointed day, however.
As criticism of the “occupation” in DC grew, the Capitol Police cited another secret intelligence bulletin claiming QAnon, Boogaloo Boys, or some other sovereign citizen militia would try to attack the Capitol on March 4. The House adjourned early citing the threat, while the Senate carried on. Nothing happened.
The Capitol was actually attacked on April 2, but not by QAnon. An African-American man rammed into a barricade, killing one Capitol Police officer and attacking another with a knife before he was shot to death. He claimed to have been a member of Nation of Islam, which disavowed him. The last remaining 2,000 National Guard troops departed the Capitol on May 24.
According to the FBI memo, followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory believe that the US is run by “a corrupt cabal of ‘global elites’ and ‘deep state’ actors run a Satan-worshiping international child sex trafficking ring,” which Donald Trump tried to oppose while president.
Democrats have accused the Republican party of being QAnon believers, but a recent poll suggested that 23% of Republicans – as well as 15% of independent voters and 8% of Democrats – actually found the conspiracy theory plausible.
The Enduring False Narrative About the PULSE Massacre Shows the Power of Media Propaganda
Democrat Hillary Clinton visits the site of Pulse nightclub in Orlando, July 22, 2016. (Photo by Brooks Kraft/Getty Images)
By Glenn Greenwald | June 14, 2021
On the fifth anniversary of the PULSE nightclub massacre in Orlando, numerous senators, politicians and activist groups commemorated that tragic event by propagating an absolute falsehood: namely, that the shooter, Omar Mateen, was motivated by anti-LGBT animus. The evidence is definitive and conclusive that this is false — Mateen, like so many others who committed similar acts of violence, was motivated by rage over President Obama’s bombing campaigns in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and chose PULSE at random without even knowing it was a gay club — yet this media-consecrated lie continues to fester.
On Saturday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) falsely described the massacre as an “unspeakable act of hate toward the LGBTQ+ community.” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) went even further, claiming “the LGBTQ+ community was targeted and killed—all because they dared to live their lives.” Her fellow Illinois Democrat, Sen. Dick Durbin, claimed forty-nine lives were lost due to “anti-LGBTQ hate” (he forgot the +). These false claims were compiled by the gay socialist activist Matt Thomas, who correctly objected: “the shooter literally picked PULSE at random from Google after security was too tight at the mall he went to first,” adding that while LGBT groups “are hopeless of course,” too much money and power is at stake for them to give up this self-serving fiction. But he asked, “Shouldn’t the bar be a little higher for senators?”
In the immediate aftermath of that horrific crime, it may have been reasonable for the public to speculate that Mateen, given his professed support for ISIS, chose PULSE because it was a gay club. That belief also neatly played into a liberal political agenda of highlighting anti-LGBT hate crimes, and also comported with the dual stereotypes of the gay-hating Muslim and the closeted gay man who harbors self-hatred that ends up directed at other gay people. This storyline was instantly consecrated when politicians and LGBT groups quickly seized on this claim and ratified it as unquestionably true.
Rather than acknowledging that it was anger over his relentless bombing raids in the Muslim world, President Obama immediately declared that anti-LGBT hatred was the real cause. “This was an attack on the LGBT community,” the president said, adding: “And hatred towards people because of sexual orientation, regardless of where it comes from, is a betrayal of what’s best in us.” Chad Griffin, then-head of the largest LGBT advocacy group, Human Rights Campaign, claimed: “the maniac who did this was somehow conditioned to believe that LGBT people deserve to be massacred, that they are ‘less than’ in this society.”
Then-candidate Hillary Clinton, as part of her campaign, made a pilgrimage to Orlando and seized on the attack. In addition to its constituting anti-American terrorism, the Democratic nominee proclaimed the massacre “was also an act of hate,” adding that “the gunman attacked an LGBT nightclub during Pride Month.” She vowed: “We will keep fighting for your right to live freely, openly and without fear. Hate has absolutely no place in America.” Speaking with Clinton in Orlando, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that it is “a cruel irony that a community defined almost exclusively by whom they love [LGBT people] is so often a target of hate.” Then-candidate Donald Trump also endorsed this view: “A radical Islamic terrorist targeted the nightclub, not only because he wanted to kill Americans, but in order to execute gay and lesbian citizens, because of their sexual orientation.”
Liberal propagandists who pose as journalists treated this storyline as definitively proven. The massacre was “undeniably a homophobic hate crime,” Jeet Heer wrote in The New Republic. “Let’s say it plainly: This was a mass slaying aimed at LGBT people,” Tim Teeman wrote in The Daily Beast. In USA Today, James S. Robbins speculated that Mateen was likely “trying to reconcile his inner feelings with his strongly homophobic Muslim culture.” In the days following the killing spree, one writer in USA Today, Steph Solis, even accused those of questioning this narrative of propagating bigotry and exhibiting cruel indifference to gay suffering: “Those who insist the shooting was solely an Islamic terror attack try to erase the LGBT community from the narrative, causing only more pain by invalidating their experiences in this ordeal.”
Barack Obama and Joe Biden place flowers for victims of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, June 16, 2016. (Photo SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
But journalism is supposed to function on evidence, not speculation, and there never was any evidence that supported the storyline that he was driven by hatred for LGBTs. The evidence that was available suggested the opposite.
On June 12, 2016, Mateen spent just over three hours in PULSE from the time he began slaughtering innocent people at roughly 2:00 a.m. until he was killed by a SWAT team at roughly 5:00 a.m. During that time, he repeatedly spoke to his captives about his motive, did the same with the police with whom he was negotiating, and discussed his cause with local media which he had called from inside the club. Mateen was remarkably consistent in what he said about his motivation. Over and over, he emphasized that his attack at PULSE was in retaliation for U.S. bombing campaigns in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. In his first call with 911 while inside PULSE, this is what he said about why he was killing people:
Because you have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq. They are killing a lot of innocent people. What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there. … You need to stop the U.S. airstrikes. They need to stop the U.S. airstrikes, OK? . … This went down, a lot of innocent women and children are getting killed in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan, OK? … The airstrikes need to stop and stop collaborating with Russia. OK?
In the hours he spent surrounded by the gay people he was murdering, he never once uttered a homophobic syllable, instead always emphasizing his geo-political motive. Not a single survivor reported him saying anything derogatory about LGBTs or even anything that suggested he knew he was in a gay club. All said he spoke extensively about his vengeance on behalf of ISIS against U.S. bombing of innocent Muslims.
Mateen’s postings on Facebook leading up to his attack all reflected the same motive. They were filled with rage about and vows of retaliation against U.S. bombing. Not a single post contained any references to LGBTs let alone anger or violence toward them. “You kill innocent women and children by doing U.S. airstrikes,” Mateen wrote on Facebook in one of his last posts before attacking PULSE, adding: “Now taste the Islamic state vengeance.”
It was of course nonetheless possible that he secretly harbored hatred for LGBTs and hid his real motive, but that never made sense: the whole point of terrorism is to publicize, not conceal, the grievances driving the violence. And again, good journalism requires evidence before ratifying claims. There never was any to support the story that Mateen’s attack was driven by anti-LGBT hatred, and all the available evidence early on negated that suspicion and pointed to a radically different motive. But the media frenzy ended up, by design or otherwise, obscuring Mateen’s anger over Obama’s bombing campaigns as his motive in favor of promoting this as an anti-LGBT hate crime.
As the FBI investigation into Mateen proceeded, all the early media gossip — that Mateen was a closeted gay man who had searched for male sexual partners and had even previously visited PULSE — was debunked. The month after the attack, The Washington Post reported that “The FBI has found no evidence so far that Omar Mateen chose the popular establishment because of its gay clientele,” and quoted a federal investigator as saying: “While there can be no denying the significant impact on the gay community, the investigation hasn’t revealed that he targeted PULSE because it was a gay club.” The New York Times quickly noted that no evidence could be found to support the speculation that Mateen was gay:
F.B.I. investigators, who have conducted more than 500 interviews in the case, are continuing to contact men who claim to have had sexual relations with Mr. Mateen or think they saw him at gay bars. But so far, they have not found any independent corroboration — through his web searches, emails or other electronic data — to establish that he was, in fact, gay, officials said.
The following year, the local paper that most extensively covered the PULSE massacre, The Orlando Sentinel, acknowledged that “there’s still no evidence that the PULSE killer intended to target gay people.”
As the investigation proceeded, this anti-LGBT hate crime narrative became more and more unlikely. But the question of Mateen’s motives was settled once and for all — or at least it should have been — during the unsuccessful attempt by the Justice Department to prosecute Mateen’s wife, Noor Salman, on numerous felony charges alleging her complicity in her husband’s attack. That trial — quite justifiably — ended in a full acquittal for Salman, but evidence emerged during it that conclusively disproved the widely held view that Mateen chose PULSE because he wanted to kill gay people.
Along with my then-colleague Murtaza Hussain, I extensively reported on the Salman trial and compiled all the evidence that emerged during it that proved anti-LGBT hatred was not part of Mateen’s motive. But it was not just us: virtually every journalist who covered that trial, including several who began believing or at least suspecting that this was an anti-gay hate crime, definitively concluded that this was false. Reporter Melissa Jeltsen covered that trial for The Huffington Post and — writing under the headline “Everyone Got The Pulse Massacre Story Completely Wrong” — explained:
Almost overnight, a narrative emerged that until now has been impossible to dislodge: Mateen planned and executed an attack on PULSE because he hated gay people. . . . Salman’s trial cast doubt on everything we thought we knew about Mateen. There was no evidence he was a closeted gay man, no evidence that he was ever on Grindr. He looked at porn involving older women, but investigators who scoured Mateen’s electronic devices couldn’t find any internet history related to homosexuality. (There were daily, obsessive searches about ISIS, however.) Mateen had extramarital affairs with women, two of whom testified during the trial about his duplicitous ways.
Mateen may very well have been homophobic. He supported ISIS, after all, and his father, an FBI informant currently under criminal investigation, told NBC that his son once got angry after seeing two men kissing. But whatever his personal feelings, the overwhelming evidence suggests his attack was not motivated by it.
Even the gay reporter for NBC News who covers the LGBT community, Tim Fitzsimons, tried to make clear that the commonly held view of the PULSE attack as an anti-LGBT hate crime was false. “The attack on the nightclub has long been seen as a hate crime directed at the LGBTQ community,” explained the headline under which he wrote, “but all evidence says the gunman chose it at random.”
NBC News, June 12, 2018
What that conclusive evidence proved is that Mateen had spent days scoping out Disney locations but concluded they were too secured to attack. Search records from Mateen’s phone and computers showed him looking for “Orlando clubs,” but never “gay Orlando clubs.” That night, after cell tower records and security cameras showed him scoping out several Disney venues, he used his phone to Google the search term “Orlando nightclubs” — not “gay clubs” — and chose PULSE because the popular nightclub was the first search term that appeared. Witnesses said that when he entered, he asked security guards: “where are the women?” As Jeltsen wrote: “As far as investigators could tell, Mateen had never been to PULSE before, whether as a patron or to case the nightclub.” None of Mateen’s phones or computers had any evidence he sought sex with men but contained ample evidence of his affairs with numerous women.
Whatever Mateen’s motives were, the horror and tragedy of the extinguishing of forty-nine innocent lives at PULSE on June 12, 2016, remains the same. But this enduring falsehood — which continues to deceive many well-meaning people through this very day, long past the point that it has been definitively debunked — is damaging for so many reasons.
Lying about what happened dishonors Mateen’s victims. It harms the cause of LGBT equality, which does not need lies and fabrications to be a just movement. It obscures how often U.S. violence in the Muslim world causes “blowback” — to use the CIA’s term — by motivating others to bring violence to the U.S. as retaliation and deterrence for violence against innocent Muslims. And a major reason for the completely unjust prosecution of Noor Salman was to appease understandable demands within the Orlando LGBT community for someone to be punished, but mob justice rarely produces anything benevolent.
No matter how noble the intent, journalism — and activism — becomes corrupted if it knowingly supports falsehoods. That the PULSE massacre was an act of anti-LGBT hatred is a fiction. Unless you are a neocon, there is no such thing as a “noble lie.” It is way past time for politicians and activist groups to stop disseminating this one.
A Covid Timeline, 1943-2021
BY GODFREE ROBERTS • UNZ REVIEW • JUNE 14, 2021
Introduction
In September 1943, the US Army created “Operation Capricious,” a secret biowarfare program described as purely defensive against insect pests enemy nations might use against America by bombing America with germ-infected insects. Under the direction of George W. Merck, president of Merck & Co. The program stockpiled bacillus anthracis (anthrax), clostridium botulinum (botulism), and other deadly bacteria until President Truman approved and operationalized its use by the U.S. military, in 1952, on North Korea and China where, like previous biowarfare efforts, it proved ineffectual.
On March 15, 1976 President Ford, informed of an outbreak of Swine influenza A, planned an immunization program and, once pharmaceutical companies were guaranteed a profit and legal indemnity, they produced a vaccine. But cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome affecting vaccinated patients were reported, and the program was abandoned.
On March 18, 2008, the FBI falsely cast suspicion on former government scientist, Dr. Steven Hatfill, for releasing an anthrax strain developed by the US Army and media implied that Hatfill was the culprit. The long-time Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote, “I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip came in a roundabout way from a high government official. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.”
In 2009, H1N1, Swine Flu, a novel virus with a combination of influenza genes previously unseen in animals or people, spread quickly from the US across the world, killing 284,000. 60 million people, mostly children, received Glaxo Smith Kline’s H1N1 vaccine, Pandemrix, but it caused lifelong narcolepsy and cataplexy–an incurable, lifelong condition requiring extensive medication–in thousands of them. H1N1 still circulates as a seasonal flu, causing hospitalizations and deaths
Throughout 2015, two hundred US biosafety level 3 and 4 labs worked with dangerous pathogens. Their determination to keep their safety records secret stirred nationwide controversy: Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate; Baric lab: Circulating bat coronaviruses and the risk of SARS re-emergence; New SARS-like Virus Can Jump Directly From Bats to Humans, No Treatment Available.
In 2016, researchers began issuing public warnings like SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence and, in February, 2018, H7N4 bird flu sickened 1,600 Chinese and killed 600. Despite this, the White House dissolved the US Pandemic Response Team. “It would be nice if the office were still there,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told Congress.
2019 Year
May 2, 2019 The chemical and biological defense unit of USA Defense Fort Detrick, MD, bids to develop SARS and MERS virus detectors.
June 14. CDC finds the US Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, MD, non-compliant with its pathogen control agreement.
June 30. Unidentified pneumonia in Springfield, VA nursing home kills two and sickens dozens.
July 9. White House withdraws the CDC’s epidemiologist embedded with China’s CCDC. “The message from the administration was, ‘Don’t work with China, they’re our rival”.
July 12: Three dead, 54 sickened in respiratory outbreak at Springfield, VA care home, one hour from Fort Detrick. Since respiratory illness usually spreads in winter, officials can neither explain the number of cases nor the season.
Jul 14. Chinese researcher escorted from infectious disease lab by Cnd’s RCMP for sending biological samples to China.
July 17. Still-unexplained pneumonia epidemic reported at a Burke, VA nursing home, one hour from Fort Detrick, MD.
Jul. 19. CDC shuts down Ft. Detrick Lab, MD. Senior scientist describe its atmosphere as one of “fear and mistrust.”
July 26. VA State stops all nursing home collective activities, screens residents, and mandates cleanliness measures to prevent the spread of pneumonia epidemic.
August 4. First case of EVALI (vaping) reported to CDC. Shortness of breath, pain in breathing, cough, fever, chills, nausea, weight loss, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, ground glass lung CT scan. By Feb 18, 2020, 2,807 EVALI cases and 68 deaths were recorded. No cases reported outside the US.
October 3. Doctors studying EVALI lung tissue rule out vaping, deepening the mystery over the cause of uniquely American illness.
October 3. US Army team arrives in Wuhan for Military Games.
Oct. 18. CIA Deputy Director participates in Event 201, Gates Foundation pandemic exercise modeling a fictional coronavirus pandemic.
November 12. A couple from Inner Mongolia is admitted to Beijing hospital with pneumonic plague. Says physician Li Jifeng: “I am very familiar with diagnosing and treating the majority of respiratory diseases but, this time, I could not figure out what pathogen caused the pneumonia.”
Nov. 15. CDC advertises for quarantine managers in all major cities:
December. 5. FBI arrests Chinese medical researcher taking biological samples to China. His labmates succeed in taking specimens to Beijing.
Dec 17. South Korean coronavirus exercise was ‘blind luck’: a hypothetical South Korean family contracts pneumonia after a trip to China, where cases of an unidentified disease had arisen. It quickly spreads to colleagues and medical workers. Experts develop tests, algorithms to find the pathogen and its origin.
Dec 27. Wuhan’s Dr. Zhang Jixian detects & reports suspicious cases of a ‘pneumonia of unknown origin’ to CCDC. Three more patients arrive, all related to Huanan Seafood Market.
Dec. 30. Wuhan Municipal Health Committee issues notice of an unknown viral illness.
Dec 31. A team from Beijing investigates, informs the WHO of “cases of pneumonia unknown etiology.” Since no medical worker was infected, they find no evidence of human-to-human transmission, and verify this on January 4. Wuhan announces the virus on CCTV and CGTN.
2020 Year
Jan. 1. Huanan Seafood market shut down.
January 2. WHO incident management system activated across WHO country office, regional office, and headquarters.
Jan. 3. Dr. Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC), phones the CDC’s Dr. Robert Redfield to warn him of the virus.
Jan. 3. China reports 44 suspected patients with the mystery pneumonia, classifies it as highly pathogenic, orders all labs without high pathogen licenses to destroy or transfer samples to secure labs.
January 4. WHO reports that Chinese authorities had informed it of “a cluster of pneumonia cases, with no deaths, in Wuhan”.
January 5, WHO’s Disease Outbreak News: “There is limited information to determine the overall risk of this reported cluster of pneumonia of unknown etiology. The symptoms reported among the patients are common to several respiratory diseases, and pneumonia is common in the winter season; however, the occurrence of 44 cases of pneumonia requiring hospitalization clustered in space and time should be handled prudently.”
Jan 8 ‘Unknown cause’ identified as a novel coronavirus.
Jan. 9. Chinese labs begin genetic sequencing of the virus. China reports the death of an infected 61-year-old male in Wuhan with several underlying medical conditions.
Jan. 9. Chinese officials announce 44 confirmed cases of the coronavirus outbreak.
Jan 11. Beijing uploads the genetic sequence of the coronavirus to an international database and distributes preliminary test kits in Wuhan.
Jan 13. Germany develops a test and test protocol.
Jan 17. WHO adopts refined version of German test and protocol.
Jan 15. Wuhan Health Commission: “Although significant evidence confirming human-to-human transmission has yet to be found, the possibility cannot be ruled out.”
Jan 16. President Trump evacuates Americans from Wuhan and bars entry to the US.
Jan. 18. HHS begins six-month Crimson Contagion scenario of a respiratory virus pandemic that begins in China and quickly spreads around the world.
January 20. Respiratory disease expert, Zhong Nanshan, announces the first verified human-to-human transmission.
January 21. China’s National Health Commission reports that the novel coronavirus is a Class B infectious disease and that Class A methods of prevention must be adopted. Chinese epidemiologists publish first Covid-19 paper, A Novel Coronavirus Genome Identified in a Cluster of Pneumonia Cases. Wuhan, China 2019-2020. CCDC Weekly.
Jan 20-21. WHO Field Team Visits Wuhan. “We were at the hospital where the first patient was identified in the last week of December, 2019. We met with staff there, and with one of the earliest known patients”. Team leader Peter Ben Embarek calls the visit “very informative.”
January 22. Scott Liu, 56, a Wuhan native and a textile importer who lives in New York, caught the last commercial flight out.
January 23. Cordon sanitaire around Wuhan. China suspends flights after 571 confirmed cases and 17 fatalities, builds a 1,000-bed hospital over the weekend.
Jan. 24. Following private briefings on COVID-19, five US senators sell major stock holdings, avoiding significant losses before markets fall.
Jan. 24. Slate : “Many of China’s actions to date are overly aggressive and ineffective in quelling the outbreak.” LA Times : “China boasts of ‘people’s war’ against coronavirus, but Wuhan residents see shoddy propaganda”.
Jan. 26 – First clinical cases published in The Lancet: “No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases. Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the seafood marketplace”. Daniel Lucey, infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University: “If the new data are accurate, the first human infections must have occurred in November 2019—if not earlier—because there is an incubation time between infection and symptoms surfacing. The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace.”
Jan. 27. WHO’s Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warns against “unnecessarily interfering with international travel and trade” in trying to halt the spread of coronavirus. China bans citizens from reserving overseas tours. Japan Tourism Company faces 20,000 cancellations from coronavirus outbreak. Tourism industry hit hard as Chinese tourists stay home. China screens people leaving the country.
Jan 29. WHO rejects accusations that China was responsible for the global spread of COVID-19: “[China’s] actions helped prevent the spread of coronavirus to other countries.”
Jan. 30: With 82 cases outside China and zero deaths, WHO declares Covid-19 a global health emergency.
Jan. 30. US State and Federal officials refuse permission for Dr. Chu, U. Washington infectious disease expert, to use ongoing flu tests to monitor for coronavirus.
Jan. 30. NYT : “The fallout from the virus in China will accelerate the return of jobs to North America, with millions at the time placed under lockdown in Wuhan and elsewhere”. The Guardian : “Coronavirus deals China’s economy a bigger blow than global financial crisis”.
Feb. 3. US CDC rejects WHO tests, ships 200 of its own test kits.
Feb 4. 57 personnel arrive at a Nebraska military base from Wuhan. Infectious disease specialist Dr. James Lawler asks to test them. CDC refuses: “The CDC does not approve this study. Please discontinue all contact with the travelers for research purposes.”
Feb. 15. CDC recalls its flawed test kits.
Feb. 25. Against CDC instructions, UW’s Dr. Chu begins testing and gets an immediate Covid-19 result dating from January 28. By then, the virus had contributed to two deaths and would soon kill twenty more. “It must have been here this entire time. It’s just everywhere already,” Dr. Chu recalls thinking.
March 4. US ignores international investigators’ repeated requests for EVALI postmortem lung tissue samples.
March 9. The White House orders federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that hampers response to the contagion.
Mar. 11. US tests 5,000 people suspected of Covid-19 infection.
Mar 12. White House classifies scope of infections, quarantines, and travel restrictions. Moves discussions to Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, SCIF, “It has something to do with China.” CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield testifies that some early fatalities attributed to flu ‘have been attributed to C-19 after post-mortem analysis,’ does not identify dates or locations.
March 12. Chinese FM spokesman Zhao Lijian: “When did patient zero begin in the US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be the US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make your data public! The US owes the world an explanation”.
March 15. Santa Clara, CA, reports 114 infections. Fifteen were associated with travel to China or other infection hot zones, 28 had close contact with infected people, and 52 had no travel or contact with known cases, indicating local acquisition.
March 17. American, British, and Australian virologists: “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible… Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”.
March 18. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vow s to prevent Iran from purchasing medicines and ventilators. US sanctions on Venezuela increase the cost of tests 300%.
March 19. The US sees the sharpest increase in deaths and new infections per day of any country in the world. US doctors exhaust supply of N95 masks.
March 20. White House website petition:
- Why did the U.S. erase internet news reports of the Ft. Detrick Lab shutdown?
- Why was Fort Detrick military lab shut down?
- Why did flu-season come earlier this year?
- What caused vaping pneumonia?
- Why not allow people to do coronavirus testing?
- What are you trying to hide?
- “You owe everyone an explanation,” Julius Ryde tweets to President Trump.
- Why did we withdraw from 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in 2001?
- Why did the US threaten and prevent UNSC from setting up BTWC monitoring?
March 20. US State Department cables all officials: “[PRC] Propaganda and Disinformation on the Covid-19 Pandemic. Chinese Communist Party officials in Wuhan and Beijing had a special responsibility to inform the Chinese people and the threat world since they were the first to learn of it. Instead, the… government hid news of the virus from its people for weeks, while suppressing information and punishing doctors and journalists who raised the alarm. The Party cared more about its reputation than its own people’s suffering”. Says one official, “These talking points are all anyone is really talking about right now. Everything is about China. We’re being told to try and get this messaging out in any way possible, including press conferences and television appearances.”
Mar 21. Oxford University’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease Group says Covid-19 reached the UK no later than mid-January and may have infected half the population by March 21.
March 24. Covid samples taken from Italian patients in Sept-Nov. 2019 prove genetically distinct from China’s strain. Prof. Massimo Galli, at the University of Milan, describes ‘a very strange pneumonia” circulating in Europe in 2019.
Timeline Video:
April 16. Peter Daszak, disease ecologist, “I’ve been working with that [Wuhan] lab for 15 years. And the samples were collected by me and others in collaboration with our Chinese colleagues; they’re some of the world’s best scientists. There was no viral isolate in the lab and no cultured virus that’s anything related to SARS coronavirus 2. So it’s just not possible.”
April 17. Chris Cuomo says, “Cristina believes that at least two of the kids had it in the last few months. It’s atypically long-duration sinus, fever, lethargy. I think we’re going to learn that coronavirus has been in this country since October. How many people do you hear saying, ‘I think I had it, I had this and this, I lost my sense of smell and this and that, but I never got tested’?”.
May 5. Brazilian virologists find antibody samples from November 2019: “We analysed human sewage located in Florianópolis from late October. Our results show that SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating in Brazil since late November 2019”. The tests were repeated in three laboratories independently, with internal controls and negative controls.
May 7. First peer-reviewed Covid article: Identification of a novel coronavirus causing severe pneumonia in humans: a descriptive study.
June 17. Spanish virologists find traces of C-19 in Barcelona wastewater from March 2019: “The levels of SARS-CoV-2 were low but were positive,” said research leader Albert Bosch.
June 20. French virologists find SARS-CoV-2 was spreading in France in December 2019. “Early community spreading changes our knowledge of the COVID-19 epidemic”.
Nov. 16. Italian Researchers find Coronavirus in Italy from September, 2019. “Traces of SARS-Cov-2 have been found in samples of waste water taken in Milan and Turin between September 2019 and March 2020”.
Nov. 30. American researchers find high levels of Covid-19 antibodies in archived Red Cross blood samples throughout the USA from Dec. 2019. Serologic testing of U.S. blood donations to identify SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies: December 2019-January 2020.
Dec. 1. Bloomberg : “COVID-19 was silently infecting Americans before first cases emerged in Wuhan: CDC study. Coronavirus was present in the U.S. weeks earlier than scientists and public health officials previously thought, raising questions about the pandemic’s origin”.
2021 Year
January, 2021. US monthly Covid deaths peak at 95,000. MIT says the number is 133,000.
Feb. 25. “Analyzing Covid genomes using k-mer natural vector method, we conclude that the virus likely already existed in France, India, Netherlands, England, and USA before the Wuhan outbreak”.
Mar. 30. Joint WHO-China Report on Jan.-Feb. China visit: “Researchers reviewed 76,000 clinical records from October to November 2019, in which were 92 possible cases of Covid-19. 67 of those had no signs of infection based on antibody tests done a year later, and all 92 were ultimately ruled out based on the clinical criteria for Covid-19”.
May 4. Mutations of the progenitor and its offshoots have produced many dominant coronavirus strains, which have spread episodically over time. Fingerprinting based on common mutations reveals that the same coronavirus lineage has dominated North America for most of the pandemic in 2020. There have been multiple replacements of predominant coronavirus strains in Europe and Asia and the continued presence of multiple high-frequency strains in Asia and North America. We have developed a continually updating dashboard of global evolution and spatiotemporal trends of SARS-CoV-2 spread: An evolutionary portrait of the progenitor SARS-CoV-2 and its dominant offshoots in COVID-19 pandemic.
June 1. WHO sends 30 Italian 2019 biological samples to Rotterdam’s Erasmus University laboratory for re-testing.
June 3. WHO says the search for Covid’s origins is being “poisoned by politics”.
June 5. European Medicines Agency’s reports 13,867 deaths and 1,354,336 serious injuries following injections of MRNA Moderna (CX-024414), MRNA Vaccine Pfizer-Biontech, AstraZeneca Vaccines, Vaccine Janssen (AD26.COV2.S).
June 8. Erasmus University results confirm Italian 2019 samples ‘are very similar to what (Italy’s National Cancer Institute) discovered, despite some small differences. The combined results made a convincing case that the coronavirus or a similar virus was circulating in Italy months before the country’s first officially recorded case’.
June 9. A study conducted of 52,000 Cleveland Clinic employees found that vaccines significantly reduce the risk of COVID-19 for those who have never tested positive–but not for those with previous infection. 4%-6% of Americans tested positive in December, 2019, according to the CDC.
June 10. UK Government reports 1,295 deaths and 922,596 injuries recorded following the experimental COVID injections: AstraZeneca: 863 deaths and 717,250 injuries; Pfizer- BioNTech: 406 deaths and 193,768 injuries; Moderna: 3 deaths and 9243 injuries. (Source); Unspecified COVID-19 injections: 22 deaths and 2335 injuries. (Source) Italy halted use of AstraZeneca injections for people under the age of 60, following the death of a teenager who died from blood clots.
June 11. CDC lists 329,02 injuries following COVID-19 shots: 5,888 deaths, 4,583, permanent disabilities, 5,884 life-threatening, 43,892 ER visits, and 19,597 hospitalizations.
June 13. Europe’s drug regulator suggests countries stop using AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine for all age groups as more alternatives have become available amid fears of rare blood clots. “In a pandemic context, our position was and is that the risk-benefit ratio remains favorable for all age groups,” he said.
A recipe for disaster
By Pseudonym de Plume | The Conservative Woman | June 14, 2021
1. Mix together some natural pathogens and government science to develop highly infectious coronasauce. Reduce coronasauce until it’s as thick as thieves.
2. Take one patent system which facilitates rent-seeking. Add coronasauce testing kits and coronasauce ‘antidote’.
3. Indemnify coronasauce ‘antidote’ manufacturers from liability, creating toxic brew of moral hazard.
4. Apply coronasauce to the public and baste with hysteria. (Side recipe: create hysteria from fraudulent PCR test data).
5. Exploit monopolistic licensing system to coerce medical doctors into compliance against their better judgment and pricked consciences. And Hippocratic oath.
6. Vigorously suppress mitigating treatment options to justify emergency consumption of coronasauce ‘antidote’.
7. Isolate and discard voices of reason using the Trusted News Initiative.
8. Inject coronasauce ‘antidote’ into every human on the planet initially twice, but aim for ad infinitum*.
9. Profit**
* If a bitter aftertaste of depopulation is experienced, see Build Back Better recipe for soothing utopianism.
**Enjoy your wages of sin while you can. A banquet of consequences may follow.
The Co-Conspirators have received incredible rewards for their treachery. Let’s start with Rick Bright
By Meryl Nass, MD | June 12, 2021
Rick Bright
Immediately after Rick Bright was transferred out of his position as head of BARDA and sent to the NIH, he started making a huge fuss. The April 22, 2020 NYT discribed his statements:
“While I am prepared to look at all options and to think ‘outside the box’ for effective treatments, I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public,” Dr. Bright said. He went on to describe what he said ultimately happened: “I insisted that these drugs be provided only to hospitalized patients with confirmed Covid-19 while under the supervision of a physician.”
By May 14, 2020 Bright was already before Congress, supposedly as the good guy whistleblower who was trying to get things right for the pandemic against huge odds:
Bright told lawmakers Thursday he and other federal health officials had “worked hard” to resist pressure to allow a significant increase in access to hydroxychloroquine, and instead scaled that back to allowing an emergency use authorization but only “with strict guidelines.”
But he said his “concerns were escalated when I learned that officials were pushing to make that drug available outside that emergency authorization.”
“When I spoke outside of the government and shared my concern with the American public, that I believe was the straw that broke the camels back and escalated my removal,” Bright said.
He later said, “The highest priority we have is safety.”
… Bright’s lawyers said last week that the OSC had told them the investigation already had found evidence that Bright was ousted as head of a health agency for pushing back against increasing use of hydroxychloroquine…
HHS, in an emailed statement, said, “Rick Bright was transferred from his role as BARDA director to lead a bold new $1 billion testing program at NIH, critical to saving lives and reopening America.”
“Mr. Bright has not yet shown up for work, but continues to collect his $285,010 salary, while using his taxpayer-funded medical leave to work with partisan attorneys who are politicizing the response to COVID-19,” the statement said.
“His whistleblower complaint is filled with one-sided arguments and misinformation. HHS is reviewing the complaint and strongly disagrees with the allegations and characterizations made by Rick Bright.”
HHS also said that it was under Bright’s leadership that BARDA identified chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as potential Covid-19 treatments.
“Rick Bright was the sponsor of getting hydroxychloroquine and praised his team for acquiring the drugs,” HHS said.
Bright’s reward? He was made a senior vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, after refusing to show up for work at NIH. And who raved about him on the Rockefeller Foundation website? None other than Jeremy Farrar and Michael Ryan. I have not written about Ryan so far, but he is another co-conspirator in the efforts to suppress appropriate treatments, poison patients with excess doses of HCQ and prolong the pandemic, as Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme.
From the Rockefeller Foundation:
“If there is something we have learned throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and other high impact epidemics, it is that pandemic preparedness and response cannot be advanced with a siloed approach,” said Dr. Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme. “Few people bring the full package to the table: profound scientific and public health expertise, years of outbreak response experience, a private and public sector background and a collaborative, innovative, and out-of-the-box mindset. Rick Bright combines all these qualities. His leadership will be an enormous asset to The Rockefeller Foundation and to the global health community.”Dr. Bright resigned from government service in protest over the Trump administration’s approach to handling the Covid-19 pandemic, specifically over the level of political interference in science and the spread of inaccurate information that he said was ‘dangerous, reckless and causing lives to be lost.’
“I’m delighted that Dr. Rick Bright has been appointed as Senior Vice President of Pandemic Prevention and Response at The Rockefeller Foundation,” said Dr. Jeremy Farrar, Director of Wellcome. “The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the human and economic costs of epidemics and the fact that we need to be better prepared to identify and respond to emerging infections. Dr. Bright is a leading figure in global health with a wealth of experience, and we look forward to working with him over the coming years.”
Bright’s job at Rockefeller is to work on future pandemic planning. Need I say more?
The NHS just changed how they count Covid “cases”… here’s why
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | June 11, 2021
The UK’s National Health Service has received new instructions from the government on how it should record Covid19 “cases”, separating those who are actually sick from those who just test positive.
From the beginning of the “pandemic” last spring, the NHS (and other countries all over the world) have defined a “case” as anyone who tests positive for the Sars-Cov-2 virus, regardless of whether or not they have symptoms.
Given that as many as 80% of those who have been infected have no symptoms, and the propensity for the flawed PCR tests to return false-positive results, this lead to likely massively inflated numbers of “cases”.
Now, though, the NHS is going to attempt to differentiate between patients who actually have the alleged disease “Covid19”, and those who are in hospital for other reasons and only “incidentally” tested positive for the virus.
According to a report in the Independent [emphasis added]:
NHS England has instructed hospitals to make the change to the daily flow of data sent by NHS trusts […] Hospitals have been told to change the way they collect data on patients infected with coronavirus to differentiate between those actually sick with symptoms and those who test positive while seeking treatment for something else.
The distinction between “with” and “from” in Covid deaths – and “with” and “for” in hospitalisations – has been one Covid sceptics all over the world have been keen to make for over a year, but this is the first time any institution has really recognised the difference. And, certainly, it’s the first time any healthcare service has endeavoured to actually catalogue them differently.
So what does the NHS expect the impact of this change to be? Again, from the Independent:
One NHS source said the new data would be “more realistic” as not all patients were sick with the virus, adding: “But it will make figures look better as there have always been some, for example stroke [patients], who also had Covid as an incidental finding”.
That’s a frank admission, and an important one.
For the last eighteen months, voices all over the alternate media have been saying the Covid numbers are unrealistic, specifically because they include people who were never actually sick. We have been called “deniers” and “conspiracy theorists” for our trouble.
But now an NHS source has actually said, going forward, the Covid data will be “more realistic” as it will discount all the patients where Covid was only “an incidental finding”. This is a bigger story than the media coverage suggests – only the Indy and Telegraph are covering it right now, and neither with the focus it deserves.
NHS England is, essentially, tucking away a covert admission that a lot of their fear-mongering statistics were never “realistic”.
Why would they do this? And why now?
Well, here’s what they claim [emphasis added]:
[The NHS said] the move was being done to help analyse the effect of the vaccine programme and whether it was successfully reducing Covid-19 sickness.
But it doesn’t really make any sense, when you think about it.
It will “help analyse the effect of the vaccine programme”? How so?
How does changing the definition at this point possibly help “analyse” anything? Doesn’t it confuse the issue?
Won’t it, in fact, effectively reduce the numbers of official “covid cases”? Doesn’t making the numbers “look better”, at this stage, make the “vaccine” appear more effective?
It’s also important to note that the changes in data collection will only apply to new patients, it will not be retroactive. Prof Keith Willett, NHS England’s Covid incident director, was very clear on that in a quote for the Telegraph [emphasis added]:
In lay terms this could be considered as a binary split between those in hospital ‘for Covid-19’ and those in hospital ‘with Covid-19’. We are asking for this binary split for those patients newly admitted to hospital and those newly diagnosed with Covid while in hospital.”
So, the old (and now admitted unrealistic) data, will not be subject to change. The Covid “case” numbers before June 7th are etched in stone – everyone who tested positive was a “case”.
But after June 7th they will be separating Covid cases who are actually hospitalised due to Covid19, from other patients who only have “incidental covid”.
Any good scientist will tell you you can’t change the way you measure or collect your data halfway through an experiment, and you can’t compare data gathered in one way to data gathered in another. That is not “analysing the effect” of anything, it’s altering the experiment conditions.
The difference between “with” and “for” has always existed, but by applying that filter only to new data they will make it appear that it’s a new phenomenon, caused by the vaccination programme.
It is incredibly bad science.
… but it’s also totally in keeping with the trend of altering Covid practices to create the impression the “vaccine” is having a positive impact.
We’ve already reported that WHO changed their Covid diagnosis guidelines, and their PCR test guidelines, in late 2020 and early 2021, right in line with the first vaccination programs being launched. The US CDC has likewise been repeatedly fiddling their definition of “breakthrough infection” in order to make the vaccines appear more effective.
This NHS change is just more of the same – altering the experimental conditions to achieve the desired outcome. A total, complete inversion of the scientific method, by the same people who zealously scream about “following the science”.
It is deliberate manipulation of the data, being done brazenly in the public eye.
But what impact will it actually have? Throughout the pandemic, how many patients were ever sick with only Covid, and how many had cancer, or a stroke or Alzheimers along with “incidental covid”?
Well, official figures on deaths have shown that well over 80% of so-called “Covid deaths” had at least one serious pre-existing condition, and Bernard Marx did a great breakdown of how the cause of death figures are manipulated. But that’s deaths, what about hospital admissions?
Although only anecdotal, we have been sent results of several Freedom of Information Act requests that UK citizens submitted to their local NHS trusts. These FOI requests ask for the number of people currently in hospital being treated for Covid, or numbers who died solely due to Covid or variations on that theme. Here’s 1, 2, 3, 4 them. There are a lot more available.
The numbers are uniformly small. So, it’s entirely possible that, under this new method of “analysis”, the NHS’s list of “Covid cases” will shrink to almost nothing.
Don’t worry though, should that happen we will likely never be told about it, because NHS England has made it quite plain that they might never release this data to the public. Both the Independent and Telegraph say so, with almost word-for-word the exact same sentence:
NHS England has not yet confirmed whether the data will be made public, as it must be checked and verified first.
They need to “check” and “verify” the data before we’re allowed to see it, huh? It’s almost as if they’ve got something to hide.
Sorry Ukraine, US won’t be riding to your rescue: Essential wake-up call to Kiev, ending years of delusion
By Paul Robinson | RT | June 9, 2021
Since 2014, the US has encouraged Kiev’s leaders to believe that it has their back, come what may. Now, as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline nears completion, the Ukrainian president is screaming betrayal as he realizes he was misled.
A while back, it used to be popular in some circles to play up talk of the “Putinsliv” – the impending sell-out in which Russian President Vladimir Putin was apparently destined to throw the rebels of Donbass under the bus and surrender them to the tender mercies of the Ukrainian government. The irony is that, while Putinsliv never happened, the fury coming out of Kiev this week suggests that Ukraine itself has suffered a dramatic and unexpected “Bidensliv,” being sold out by US President Joe Biden.
Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, had a troubled relationship with the country, which he accused of trying to undermine his election campaign in 2016. Republicans also used the business dealings of Biden’s son, Hunter, in Ukraine to paint Trump’s Democratic opponent as corrupt. Consequently, Ukrainians generally welcomed Biden’s election as president and have viewed him as a much more reliable ally.
Until this week, that is. Now, things are looking a little different.
For the past few months, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pressing Biden for a meeting. His position was that this should take place before Biden holds talks with Putin. Otherwise, the argument goes, the Russian and American leaders might stitch up Ukraine’s fate and then present Kiev with a fait accompli. Better that Zelensky gets to Biden first, they say, so as to forestall any attempt by the Americans to betray Ukraine to the Russians.
This, however, was not to be. Speaking to Zelensky by phone on Monday, Biden offered to host him in Washington later this summer, after Biden meets Putin in Geneva on 16 June. Apparently, the White House has decided that managing relations with Russia takes precedence over keeping Ukraine happy – a not unreasonable position given that Moscow has nearly 1,500 nuclear warheads in its arsenal, whereas Ukraine has not a single one. The safety of the world tends to focus the mind on what is really a priority.
In another blow to Zelensky, the Biden administration has finally given up its campaign to sabotage the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is designed to bring natural gas directly from Russia to Germany. At present, Russia exports natural gas to the rest of Europe largely through an old Soviet pipeline system running through Ukraine, and pays Kiev some $3 billion a year for the privilege. Kiev fears that, once the new underwater link is up and running, Russia will be able to stop the supply of gas through the country, thereby depriving it of much-needed cash.
For this reason, Zelensky and his allies have been lobbying the Americans to prevent the pipeline from being finished. To that end, the Trump administration imposed numerous sanctions on companies involved in the project. Now, though, the Biden government has waived those sanctions on the main German company involved, in effect giving the pipeline a green light for completion.
This was little more than a recognition of reality: Nord Stream 2 was going to be completed no matter what America did. So it made little sense for the US to degrade its relations with Berlin any more than it has already. Given a choice between the goodwill of rich and powerful Germany on the one hand, or of weak and impoverished Ukraine on the other, it was fairly obvious which one Washington would side with. The only surprise was that it took so long to work it out.
Adding insult to injury, Putin announced last week that the first section of the pipeline had been completed. This news provoked Zelensky into a mini tantrum. Speaking to the Axios news website, he complained that he was “confused” and “disappointed” by the American decision to waive sanctions on the project. He was “positive” that America could stop construction if it wanted, he said. Zelensky was also angered by the fact that the Americans didn’t tell him about their decision, and that he had to learn about it from a White House press briefing. “How many Ukrainian lives does the relationship between the United States and Germany cost?” he asked.
The Ukrainian president’s comments reveal a remarkable naivety. It seems he truly believed both that the United States is all-powerful; and that the Americans would prioritize relations with Kiev over relations with Moscow and Berlin. Now he is learning the hard way that in international politics, as Thucydides said, “the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer as they must.”
If the episode acts as a wake-up call for Zelensky’s government, that will be a good thing. For too long, Ukrainian leaders have given the impression they are living in a fantasy world in which the West will in due course induce Russia to abandon any support for the rebellion in Donbass with a campaign of massive economic, military and diplomatic pressure. This vision has manufactured an unwillingness in Kiev to make the concessions required to bring peace to Donbass under the Minsk II Agreement of February 2015, most notably the granting of “special status” to the provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk. As a result, it has played a major role in perpetuating the conflict in Eastern Ukraine.
To be fair to Zelensky, the Americans have done everything they can to encourage the fantasy that Russia can be pressured into surrender. As he notes in his interview with Axios, Biden had offered him “direct signals” that the US was prepared to block the [Nord Stream 2] pipeline. This is plausible. It fits a pattern of behavior in which Washington has led Kiev’s ruling elite to believe it will have their back come what may, including in its efforts to ignore the Minsk Agreement.
Consequently, it is perhaps not surprising that Zelensky feels betrayed. The American government has misled Ukraine’s leaders into thinking that it will go the whole hog on the country’s behalf. To an outside observer, this was never plausible. But in the desperate world of Ukrainian politics, it may well have appeared otherwise. Kiev’s bubble has long since needed bursting. To the extent that the Nord Stream 2 debacle has done that, it has paradoxically been a rather good week for Ukraine – no matter what Zelensky or his supporters may think.
Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics, and is author of the Irrussianality blog
Pentagon Gave $39 MILLION To Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance
“Charity” that funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab accused of being the source of the outbreak, federal data reveals
By JOSH BOSWELL and MARTIN GOULD – Daily Mail – June 10, 2021
The Pentagon gave $39 million to a charity that funded controversial coronavirus research at a Chinese lab accused of being the source for Covid-19, federal data reveals. The news comes as the charity’s chief, British-born scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, was exposed in an alleged conflict of interest and back-room campaign to discredit lab leak theories.
The charity, EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), has come under intense scrutiny after it emerged that it had been using federal grants to fund research into coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
The U.S. nonprofit, set up to research new diseases, has also partly funded deeply controversial ‘gain of function‘ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells.
A political storm broke when former president Donald Trump canceled a $3.7 million grant to the charity last year amid claims that Covid-19 was created in, or leaked from, the Wuhan lab funded by EHA.
But federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government – from 2017 to 2020 – and that one of its biggest funders is the Department of Defense, funneling almost $39 million to the organization since 2013.
Exactly how much of that money went toward research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is unknown.
Federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government – and that one of its biggest funders is the Department of Defense, funneling almost $39million to the organization since 2013.
Grants from the Pentagon included $6,491,025 from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2017 to 2020 with the description: ‘Understanding the risk of bat-borne zoonotic disease emergence in Western Asia.‘
The grant was categorized as ‘scientific research – combating weapons of mass destruction.‘
The majority of the DoD funding came from the DTRA, a military branch with a mission to ‘counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.’
EHA also received $64.7 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), $13 million from Health and Human Services, which includes the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control, $2.3 million from the Department of Homeland Security, and $2.6 million from the National Science Foundation.
A government funding figure of $3.4 million was widely reported, after White House chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci was questioned in a Senate hearing on how much money the National Institutes of Health sent to the Wuhan lab via its grants to EcoHealth Alliance in 2019.
But the total grant figures including Pentagon funding dwarf that number.
Researchers James Baratta and Mariamne Everett assembled grant filings from US government agencies to EHA, which were published on popular science site Independent Science News in December.
The site found EHA’s declaration of its vast military funding is nestled deep in the ‘Privacy Policy’ section of its website, under the title ‘EcoHealth Alliance Policy Regarding Conflict of Interest in Research’.
In the disclosure EHA says it is ‘the recipient of various grant awards from federal agencies including the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense.‘
It does not disclose the size of its DoD funding.
In 2014 the Obama administration outlawed gain of function research, such as the experiments funded by EHA, after concerns were raised among scientists that it could lead to a global pandemic from a genetically enhanced virus escaping a lab.
But EHA reportedly continued to legally fund the practice, using a loophole that allowed for the research in cases ‘urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.‘
One notable EHA ‘policy advisor’ is David Franz, a former commander at the principal US government biowarfare and biodefense facility Fort Detrick.
Franz was an official in the United Nations Special Commission which inspected for bioweapons in Iraq.
The charity’s head, Daszak, has been accused of orchestrating a behind-the-scenes ‘bullying’ campaign to ensure the blame for covid-19 did not fall on the Wuhan lab he funded.
The 55-year-old worked closely with the lab’s so-called ‘bat woman,’ Shi Zhengli, in their studies of coronaviruses.
In February 2020 Daszak persuaded more than two dozen other scientists to sign off on a letter he had written to highly respected medical journal The Lancet, that was seen as so influential that it cowed most experts into refusing even to consider that the virus could have been man-made and escaped from the Wuhan institute.
Former high-level Clinton administration staffer Jamie Metzl, who now sits on the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome editing, told DailyMail.com that the Lancet letter ‘was scientific propaganda and a form of thuggery and intimidation.‘
Freedom of Information Act disclosures revealed Daszak tried to distance his charity from the letter to make it appear it was coming from ‘a community supporting our colleagues.‘
The charity chief told his fellow signatories in an email that the letter would not be sent under the EcoHealth logo ‘and will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person.‘
The joint letter, published in the journal on February 19 last year, praised the Chinese ‘who continue to save lives and protect global health during the challenge of the Covid-19 outbreak‘ and added ‘We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.‘
Despite his close connections to the Chinese lab, Daszak was also picked by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be part of its 13-member team that was tasked with finding the cause of the pandemic which began in Wuhan, a city of some 11 million people in Central China.
Metzl told DailyMail.com the appointment was a ‘massive and outrageous conflict of interest,‘ allowing a man who had significant financial and reputational stakes in discrediting lab leak theories to investigate those theories.
Prominent scientists have criticized the WHO probe, which dismissed lab leak theories, as lackluster and incomplete.
In a Freedom of Information disclosure of Fauci’s emails obtained by Buzzfeed last month, Daszak thanked the White House doctor for pushing back on the theory that covid-19 was man made.
‘I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,‘ Daszak wrote in April 2020.
Fauci says the emails have been taken out of context.
EHA’s most recent financial statements filed with the IRS say that around 90 per cent of its funding comes from government sources.
The 2019 report says Daszak was paid a total $410,801 for the year, including $311,815 base pay, $42,250 bonus, $24,500 deferred compensation and $32,236 nontaxable benefits.
Featured Video
Trump Announces Operation To Escort Ships – Fmr. CIA Analyst Larry Johnson
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Who Runs Our World?
Netanyahu addresses US Congress
By Richard Hugus | January 4, 2019
Our world is run by oligarchs, the holders of vast wealth from monopolies in banking, resource extraction, manufacturing, and technology. Oligarchs have such power that most of the world doesn’t even know of their influence over our lives. Their overall agenda is global power — a world government, run by them — to be achieved through planned steps of social engineering. The oligarchs remain in the background and have heads of state and entire governments acting in their service. Presidents and prime ministers are their puppets. Bureaucrats and politicians are their factotums.
Who are politicians? Politicians are people who work for the powerful while pretending to represent the people who voted for them. This double-dealing involves a lot of lying, so successful politicians must be good at it. It’s not an easy job to make the insane agenda of the powerful seem reasonable. Politicians can’t reveal this agenda because it almost always goes against the interests of their constituents, so they become adept at sophistry, mystification, and the appearance of authority. For example, wars for Israel have been part of the agenda of the powerful for years. Since 2001, wars for Israel have been sold as “the war on terror” and lots of lies had to be made up as to why the war on terror was a real thing. The visible faces promoting the war on terror were neoconservatives in the US, almost all of whom were advocates for Israel, or Zionists. Zionists are not the only members of the oligarchy, but they seem to be its lead actors. ... continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Palantir touts record expansion and ‘battlefield’ AI value
- Israeli telecom networks used for mass surveillance across countries
- US claim of sinking Iranian boats ‘a lie’, senior military official tells IRIB
- New KC-46 Supertankers Promise Israel Conventional Samson Option Strike Сapability
- No, New York Times, We Don’t Need to Dam the Bering Strait
- Gates-Funded ‘Big Catch-Up’ Delivers 100 Million Vaccine Doses — Including High-Risk DTP Vaccine Not Used in U.S.
- No commercial ship or oil tanker transited Strait of Hormuz in past hours: IRGC
- Russia warns of escalating NATO military activity in Baltic region
- Government Kills the Spirit
- How ‘Israel’s’ Iran regime change plot failed – again
- If Americans Knew
- As in Gaza, Israel is targeting rescue workers in South Lebanon, killing more than 100 since March
- Israel’s Obliteration Ecocide from Gaza to Lebanon and Beyond
- Israel Said It’s Applying the Gaza Model in Lebanon. This Is What the Devastation Looks Like.
- New Member of Trump’s Iran Negotiating Team Comes From Notoriously Pro-Israel Think Tank
- Israeli army demolishes Christian monastery, nuns’ school in southern Lebanon
- Tokenizing Christians In Israel
- One Gaza is not enough: Israel is turning southern Lebanon into another Gaza – Daily Update
- As Palestinians die, Ben-Gvir celebrates birthday with golden noose cake – Daily Update
- Israel’s New Ambassador to the ‘Christian World’ Served as Envoy to Azerbaijan During the Ethnic Cleansing of Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh
- US set to sell $1B “Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System” to Israel – Daily Update
- No Tricks Zone
- Another Study Links Warming To Cloud Forcing, Shortwave Radiation, Natural Atmospheric Circulation
- Wind Energy Is Toxic, Hazardous To Human Health, Scientific Review Shows
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
Aletho News 