Two Types of Terror in Michigan
By James Bovard | American Institute for Economic Research | October 9, 2020
#StopTrumpsTerror is one of the hottest trending topics on Twitter, with more than 90,000 tweets. Yesterday, the FBI announced the arrest of six people in a plot (perhaps government-hatched) to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for treason for destroying the state’s economy with the lockdowns she imposed. Seven other individuals were arrested and charged with violating Michigan’s anti-terrorism law.
Trump had no connection to the plot, and at least one of the alleged plotters denounced Trump as a “tyrant” and “the enemy.” But Trump’s condemnations of lockdowns was enough for Gov. Whitmer to denounce Trump yesterday as “complicit” with the plotters. She derided Trump for spending “the past 7 months denying science, ignoring his own health experts, stoking distrust, fomenting anger and giving comfort to those who spread fear and hatred and division.” Former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi told MSNBC that Donald Trump should be investigated for “aiding and abetting” the Michigan plot.
Whitmer, one of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s favorite governors, enraged many Michiganders by locking down the state after the outbreak of Covid-19. Whitmer placed almost the entire state under house arrest, dictating a $1,000 fine for anyone who left their home to visit family or friends. Business owners faced up to three years in prison for refusing to close their operations. Whitmer severely restricted what stores could sell and prohibited purchasing seeds for spring planting after she decreed that a “nonessential” activity. (Purchasing state lottery tickets was still an “essential” activity.) Though Covid infections were concentrated in the Detroit metropolitan area, Whitmer shut down the entire state — including northern counties with few cases, boosting unemployment to 24 percent statewide. In a tweet yesterday, Trump said Whitmer “has done a terrible job. She locked down her state for everyone, except her husband’s boating activities.”
Whitmer’s actions infuriated many Michiganders and no informants were necessary to spur much of the anti-government rhetoric recited in the federal indictment yesterday. Plenty of hotheads say things online or in allegedly encrypted messages that look menacing or idiotic in cold print afterwards. Threatening violence against government officials – or anyone else – is reprehensible. But how far did those guys move to actually carrying out their plot? Last month, some of the conspirators “drove to the area surrounding the [Whitmer vacation] residence and discussed detonating explosives to divert police — even checking the underside of a bridge for spots to place a charge,” as the Washington Post summarized the indictment.
The FBI admits that it paid one informant $8,600, and there may be other payments that are revealed in the coming days or weeks. FBI agents have been taught that subjects of FBI investigations “have forfeited their right to the truth,” which helps explain the vast increase in federal entrapment operations in recent decades. Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimated that only about 1% of the 500 people charged with international terrorism offenses in the decade after 9/11 were bona fide threats. Thirty times as many were induced by the FBI to behave in ways that prompted their arrest. The bureau’s informant program extends far beyond Muslims. It bankrolled an extremist right-wing New Jersey blogger and radio host for five years before his 2009 arrest for threatening federal judges. A long-term FBI informant organized the Ku Klux Klan rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in July 2017.
The alleged Michigan plot is almost too idiotic to believe. The alleged conspirators purportedly planned to kidnap Gov. Whitmer and take her to Wisconsin for a private trial. This is on par with the 2006 FBI-fabricated terror plot of the Liberty City Seven, where an informant swayed a bunch of dimwits to babble about blowing up government buildings. That group was so knuckle-headed that they asked the informant for military uniforms and wanted to conduct a parade.
The Michigan conspirators are receiving vastly more coverage than a recent Michigan Supreme Court decision, which effectively labeled Whitmer a lawless dictator who had extended a “state of emergency” far beyond what an unconstitutional state law allowed. Instead of obeying the ruling of the highest state court, Whitmer responded by having the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services issue “new COVID-19 emergency orders that are nearly identical to her invalidated emergency orders,” as the Mackinac Center noted.
Four months earlier, the Michigan Court of Claims condemned Whitmer for contorting a Michigan workplace safety law to unjustifiably inflict additional penalties on businesses and individuals who failed to submit to her pandemic commands.
But, according to the media, locking down Michigan isn’t tyranny – it is public service.
Anyone who protests or heartily condemns lockdowns will also be presumed collectively guilty with the Michigan plotters. The same media moral framework will likely be used to exonerate new lockdowns that may be imposed in the name of curbing Covid-19. Earlier this week, many pundits denounced Trump as a would-be Mussolini for his statement on the White House balcony after he returned from Walter Reed Hospital. Commentators were horrified that Trump, who was standing outside not close to anyone, removed his facemask.
If Biden is elected president and fulfills his promise to impose a national facemask mandate or dictates a national shutdown of the economy, such actions will be portrayed as benevolence at its best, rather than the most foolhardy federal interventions since the 55 mile per hour speed limit.
Will the Michigan plot be touted by the media to valorize every government official who placed any American under house arrest in response to the pandemic? It is possible to heartily condemn both nitwit conspirators and oppressive politicians. Unfortunately, the media will likely pay far more attention to the bluster of boneheads than to actual devastation produced by unjustified shutdowns.
James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American
Battlefield Social Media: The West’s Growing Censorship
By Ulson Gunnar – New Eastern Outlook – 08.10.2020
Censorship in the West flourishes as tech giants turn social media back into traditional programmed media.
The United States, United Kingdom and the European Union are fond of passing judgement on nations around the globe regarding “free speech.”
While it is increasingly clear to a growing number of people that this “concern” is disingenuous and aimed at merely defending agitators funded and directed by Western special interests in these targeted nations, the West still likes to fashion itself as a sort of champion of free speech.
Yet back home the Internet has been taken over by social media and tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Their platforms clearly serve as online public squares where everything is discussed and even election campaigns play out. Yet these companies have, over the years, begun to eliminate voices of dissent against a notion known as “consensus.”
If you are speaking out against “consensus” you are in real danger of disappearing from these platforms. Some of these platforms, like Google-owned YouTube, serve as the livelihood to people who have for years built up their audiences, produced hundreds of videos and when their accounts are deleted for speaking out against the “consensus,” they have their livelihoods destroyed.
In the wake of these incremental “purges” is a chilling effect with content creators self-censoring or even withdrawing entirely from Western social media.
It is the sort of very real censorship the West has crusaded against in fiction around the globe for decades.
Consensus or Else
A more recent example is Google’s decision to ban ad revenue for those going against the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) “consensus.”
CNBC in their story “Google will ban ads from running on stories spreading debunked coronavirus conspiracy theories,” would claim:
Google next month will ban publishers from using its ad platform to show advertisements next to content that promotes conspiracy theories about COVID-19. It will also ban ads that promote those theories. In cases where a particular site publishes a certain threshold of material that violates these policies, it will ban the entire site from using its ad platforms.
Those “conspiracy theories” might include questioning the official death rates of COVID-19. Yet even the British government itself has been recently forced to investigate its statistics regarding death rates, vindicating the very sort of people who would have been either forced into silence or forced to give up ad revenue.
The London Guardian in its article, “Matt Hancock orders urgent review of PHE Covid-19 death figures,” would admit:
The UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, is ordering an urgent review of the daily COVID-19 death statistics produced by Public Health England, after it emerged that they may include recovered former sufferers who could have died of other causes.
False reporting over deaths to hype COVID-19, induce greater public panic and pave the way for billions in government handouts to pharmaceutical giants is at the very core of many of these so-called “conspiracy theories” Google seeks to silence through its campaign of financial coercion.
Imagine if this chilling effect was achieved sooner. Would the British government have even bothered investigating its faulty statistics if there weren’t people suspicious of them?
The chilling effect this has over openly discussing something as serious as COVID-19 considering its socioeconomic impact is truly alarming and much more so because it is happening in the so-called “free world” overseen by its self-appointed arbitrators in the US, UK and EU.
A similar campaign was carried out to purge Google, Twitter and Facebook of anyone allegedly connected with “Russia” who also so happened to be anti-war and anti-NATO for waging those wars.
Entire lists are compiled by Western government-funded organizations which are then submitted to these tech giants for purging. The Western media writes accompanying articles announcing, justifying and spinning the purges… but also sending a warning to those left about what is and isn’t going to be tolerated on these platforms.
Social Media Transforming Back into Programmed Media
Content creators are faced with two decisions; to either self-censor themselves to protect their work, their audiences and their livelihood, or to accept the possibility they will eventually be “purged” (censored) and need to rebuild their audiences from scratch on platforms with far fewer potential readers, viewers and patrons.
Social media, of course, is no longer social media in this sort of environment, but more akin to the sort of programmed media giant Western special interests built their power on over the course of the 20th and early 21st century.
Private Public Squares?
Of course the defense is that Google, Facebook and Twitter are “private companies”and can do as they please with their platforms. In reality, these companies work in tandem with Western governments whether it is fomenting political destabilization abroad or creating “concensus” at home.
The notion that censorship is “OK” because the US, UK and EU governments launder it through private companies ignores the close relationship these companies have with the government and how their platforms have been transformed into de facto public squares and critical channels of public communication and participation.
The West’s growing overt censorship leaves it with a choice; to either accept that it is in reality as guilty of censorship and manipulating the public as it has claimed its opponents are, or continue pretending it isn’t but at the continued cost of its legitimacy upon the global stage.
There is a very good reason the West is in decline around the globe and why its attempts to leverage notions like “human rights” and “free speech” against nations like China or Russia are increasingly impotent. That reason can be found, at least in part, among the growing number of purge lists, censorship campaigns and calls for “consensus” across Western social media.
Finally, the increasingly overt nature of censorship and controlled narratives promoted by tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter should have them facing restrictions and bans around the globe. Why should any nation host a “public square” where discourse is entirely controlled by interests oceans away? Why shouldn’t a local alternative be created instead where the revenue is kept locally and if narratives are to be controlled, controlled in a way that best suits people locally?
It is ironic that, China for example, is condemned for not allowing Google, Facebook and Twitter to operate freely within their information space because it is a violation of “free speech,” even as Google, Facebook and Twitter cudgel free speech on their own respective platforms.
How much longer will the world tolerate these double standards? How long until individuals, organizations and even entire nations begin creating alternatives to Google, Facebook and Twitter to at the very least balance out the lopsided power and influence they have collectively accrued and abused?
As Boris Johnson announces Britain’s ‘great reset’, were the Covid ‘conspiracy theorists’ right all along?
By Neil Clark | RT | October 7, 2020
The UK Prime Minister’s remote speech to his party conference saw him dismiss the idea of returning to normality. Is he using Covid-19 to follow the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ agenda, as many have warned?
‘It’s not really about public health or a virus. They have another agenda.’ That’s what the so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ have been saying since March, when the first British lockdowns were imposed and our lives were turned upside down.
Those ‘conspiracy theorists’ were denounced, as always, as ‘cranks’ and ‘flat-Earthers’ but here we are in October, and, let’s face it, there is absolutely no sign, despite very low numbers of deaths ‘with’ Coronavirus, that we are returning to anything like normal. In fact, in his keynote speech yesterday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson specifically ruled out a return to normal, not even with a vaccine.
“After all we have been through, it isn’t enough just to go back to normal. We have lost too much. History teaches us that things of this magnitude – wars, famines, plagues, events that affect the vast bulk of humanity, as this virus has – they do not just come and go. They can be the trigger for economic and social change.”
When I heard Johnson utter those words I thought, ‘where have I heard this stuff before?’ Well, the answer is in the book ‘Covid-19: The Great Reset’ by Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, and Thierry Malleret. They too, like Johnson, invoked the Second World War as the trigger for fundamental changes, not only to the global order and global economy, but to society and the way human beings interact with one another. Like Johnson, they don’t want to return to normal. “Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is never.”
Instead, Schwab and Malleret want a world changed forever by a virus which they admit is only ‘mild’ compared to others in history. Covid-19 is seen as the catalyst for the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’.
As to where all this is heading, I recommend you read Schwab’s ‘Great Reset’, and his earlier ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’, but please don’t do so late at night, because they will probably give you nightmares. Schwab’s elitist Davos-man utopia is a trans-human, socially distanced, utterly soulless dystopia for the rest of us. Think of the most terrifying sci-film you’ve ever watched and that still doesn’t go anywhere near it. And the worst thing is that it is sold to us as some kind of ‘progressive’ vision.
Johnson, in his speech yesterday, showed he’s a fully-signed up ‘Great Resetter’. It was, for me, the most chilling oration ever made by any British prime minister at a party conference.
The man who justified a national lockdown in March on a purely temporary three-week basis to ‘flatten the curve’, and ‘protect the NHS’, and who said in the summer, after the lockdown had lasted three months, that he hoped Britain would return to ‘significant normality’ by November, now tells us: “We have been through too much frustration and hardship just to settle for the status quo ante – to think that life can go on as it was before the plague; and it will not… We are resolving not to go back to 2019.”
For Johnson, using the globalists’ phrase ‘Build Back Better’, this is the time to launch Britain on the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. “From internet shopping to working from home, it looks as though Covid has massively accelerated changes in the world of work… as old jobs are lost and as new ones are created… The Covid crisis is a catalyst for change…” he said.
Did Schwab actually write his speech? It looks like it. Although Johnson didn’t use the phrase ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’, he did mention a ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ twice.
Johnson foresees a future in which every home in Britain relies on wind power (he certainly produces a lot of that), and “instead of being dragged on big commutes to the city” people can “start a business in their home town… and bring up their children in the neighbourhoods where they grew up themselves.”
Working from home is here to stay, with “gigabit broadband,” shopping from home, conferencing from home… in fact, let’s do everything from home. Who needs to meet other human beings? Not that there’d be anywhere to meet, with pubs, cinemas and theatres all closed down due to the never-ending coronavirus restrictions.
Johnson pledged to make Britain “the greatest place on Earth” but to me it sounds more like hell. The question, as ever, is who benefits?
The World Economic Forum, founded by Schwab, has been incredibly influential when it comes to the changes we’ve already seen in 2020, and what is being openly planned for the future. It was the WEF which co-hosted the ‘Event 201’ conference in New York in October 2019, which modelled a fictional global pandemic.
It was at the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos on January 24, 2020 that Bill Gates’ Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI) held a press conference to announce a ‘new partnership’ to develop vaccines for the virus, when the number of confirmed worldwide cases was still in the hundreds.
It was the WEF’s Schwab who declared in June: “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world.”
It was the WEF that in July was promoting a Covid-19 ‘Health Passport’ app, the ‘brainchild’ of one of its ‘Young Global Leaders’, as the future for travel and attending events.
And for those who don’t have the app or a ‘negative‘ test result? Well, you can just stay at home.
If you take a look at the ‘founding partners’ of the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution you’ll see names such as Microsoft, Palantir, Facebook, Netflix and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Yes, that’s right, hi-tech online giants and hi-tech multi-billionaires supporting a big shift towards a stay-at-home, ‘do everything on the Internet’ society.
Is it a ‘conspiracy theory’ to say that Covid-19 is being used as a convenient opportunity to introduce long-planned changes to the economy and society, when those pushing for such changes like Schwab openly talk of there being a “rare but narrow window” for a major ‘reset’?
Actually, after Johnson’s speech yesterday, the biggest ‘conspiracy theorists’ now are those who DON’T think the British government is working to another agenda.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66
Covid experts: there is another way
Three eminent epidemiologists met in Massachusetts to plan a better response to the pandemic
By Sunetra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff | UnHerd | October 5, 2020
As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical, and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.
“This is the saner approach, the more scientific approach,” the authors tell Freddie Sayers
Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 4th October 2020
To sign the declaration, follow this link (will be live later today): www.GBdeclaration.org
Dr Sunetra Gupta is a professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modelling of infectious diseases
Dr Bhattacharya is a professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.
Dr Kulldorff is a Professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations.
Vaccines Are Complicated
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | September 30, 2020
Eager as we are for a COVID vaccine, we need to be realistic about possible harms – and about a plausible timeline.
There’s a phrase being tossed around with abandon these days. Everywhere we turn, there’s talk of a “safe and effective” COVID-19 vaccine.
USA Today quotes infectious disease chief Anthony Fauci: “We feel cautiously optimistic that we will be able to have a safe and effective vaccine.”
Two days ago, former US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioners, and
Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, similarly declared recently: “Canadians must have access to a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19…”
Let us now turn to Vaccines: Truth, Lies and Controversy, a book written by Peter Gotzsche, a Danish physician who has spent decades evaluating the quality of published medical research. 27 years ago, he was among those who founded the Cochrane Collaboration, an organization that systematically assesses healthcare interventions.
In the context of discussing Japanese encephalitis, Gotzsche writes:
according to the WHO “safe and effective vaccines are available.” You should never believe such reassuring statements, which is [drug] industry jargon. Nothing is both safe and effective; effectiveness always comes with a price.
He continues:
In healthcare, people rarely use the term harms. They talk about side effects, which is a euphemism for the inevitable – some people will be harmed and in rare cases even die after having received a vaccine.
Generally speaking, Gotzsche considers vaccines “the most valuable interventions and the best buy for money we can offer.” But the overriding message of his book is that every vaccine must be judged on its own merits. In his view, some vaccines promoted by health authorities are “marginal at best.”
He’s skeptical, for example, of annual flu vaccines, to the point of accusing the website of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) of promulgating a “massive amount of misinformation” on this topic. When discussing whether medical personnel and others should be forced to get an annual flu shot, he says:
No vaccine is entirely harmless, and in the worst case, the healthcare worker might die, e.g. because of an anaphylactic shock caused by the vaccine, or fainting with head trauma after the injection, or development of the Guillain-Barre syndrome…
… A common argument for mandatory flu shots is that they prevent transmission of the virus to other people. However, there is no evidence that the vaccine does this…
… Many people will think that their chance of benefitting from the vaccination exceeds 50%, but it is less than 2%…Furthermore, the vaccine does not reduce admission to hospital or days off work…
… It has never been shown in reliable research that flu shots reduce deaths.
Which brings us to COVID-19. The fact that 160 different teams are currently working on a vaccine is immensely encouraging. Surely one of them will hit the target. On the other hand, we must be sensible.
In a July interview, Kenneth Frazier, the CEO of Merck pharmaceutical company, had some words of caution:
What worries me the most is that the public is so hungry, so desperate to go back to normalcy, that they are pushing us to move things faster and faster. But ultimately, if you’re going to use a vaccine in billions of people, you better know what that vaccine does.
… There are a lot of examples of vaccines in the past that have stimulated the immune system, but ultimately didn’t confer protection. And unfortunately, there are some cases where it stimulated the immune system and…actually helped the virus invade the cell…
… I think when people tell the public that there’s going to be a vaccine by the end of 2020, for example, I think they do a grave disservice to the public. I think at the end of the day, we don’t want to rush the vaccine before we’ve done rigorous science. We’ve seen in the past, for example, with the swine flu, that that vaccine did more harm than good. We don’t have a great history of introducing vaccines quickly in the middle of a pandemic.
Where Did Covid-19 Come From?
By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute For Political Economy | September 30, 2020
Evidence indicates that it came from NIH funding of EcoHealth Alliance, an entity doing “gain-of-function” research in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Many experts believe that the virus was created by that research and escaped from the Wuhan lab.
Gain-of-function research involves enhancing the pathogenicity and transmissibility of pathogens. Many scientists are opposed to this research as it amounts in effect to bioweapons research. The rationale for the research is that it enhances with pre-knowledge the ability to respond to some emerging pandemic. In the case of the research at Wuhan, it might have caused one.
There are other explanations of the Covid pandemic, as it is called. Ron Unz based on circumstantial evidence makes a rational case that the US unleashed the virus on China from where it blew back on the US and the rest of the world. Having watched Washington destroy in whole or part seven countries in the past 20 years, it is not difficult to believe that Washington would unleash Covid on China. However, the fact that the NIH itself was financing the research in China is inconsistent with the US having created and unleashed the virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Alergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of NIH, supports gain-of-function research. Last April 28 Newsweek reported:
“Just last year [2019], the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases [NIAID], the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
“In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.
“Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.”
Dr. Joseph Mercola presents views of experts who are critical of the ongoing gain-of-function research in this article: Bioweapon Labs Get More NIH Funding for Deadly ‘Research’
Although it is difficult for those of us who are not experts to have a confident opinion, we should be aware that many experts are convinced that research funded by NIH gave us the Covid pandemic.
The question whether in effect gain-of-function research amounts to banned bioweapons research needs to be taken up by Congress, the UN, and governments around the world. Covid, largely from its mishandling by public authorities, has done a great deal of economic and other damage to many countries that is larger than the cost of the virus itself.
Scientists love to monkey around with things that probably should be left alone. For example, humanity certainly does not need nuclear weapons. Neither does it need weaponized coronaviruses.
