Alexis's Blog
There are two leading scientists who claim to have physical evidence that the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, originated in bats and was transmitted directly, or through an intermediate host, to humans: Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and his collaborator Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is a medical doctor who has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. He’s best known in his current role as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans put their faith in Fauci. His bedside manner―straightforward, modest and unassuming―made it easy to warm up to this grandfatherly nerd. Inspiring trust that he was unbiased, non-partisan and strictly scientific, he quickly became “America’s Favorite Doctor.”
The Organic Consumers Association has fought the use of genetic engineering in food production since our founding in 1998.
But, in recent years, experiments in genetic engineering have spread to other areas, specifically medical research and warfare—and this too has serious implications for our health and wellbeing.
As co-founder Ronnie Cummins explained in his discussion with biological warfare epidemiologist Dr. Meryl Nass (watch the video here), as an anti-genetic-engineering campaigner whose work predated Monsanto’s launch of GMOs for agriculture, the first concern about this technology was that recombinant DNA experiments “might accidentally create a dangerous new pathogen.”
Lab accidents happen.
When the first Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-1) pandemic ended in 2003, lab-acquired infections continued.
Immediately following the end of the 2003 pandemic of SARS-1, there were four separate outbreaks of lab-acquired infections of SARS-1 within one year at three different labs in Beijing, Singapore and Taipei. The situation was so bad that Science Magazine warned, “health experts fear that the next SARS epidemic may be more likely to emerge from a research lab than from the presumed animal reservoir.”
In one lab accident, a 26-year-old graduate student was exposed while working at the Institute of Viral Disease Control at the Chinese CDC. Her mother caught the disease from her and died.
She’s known as China’s “Bat Woman.” Shi Zhengli is a virus hunter and microbiologist, and director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
She also plays a central role in a whodunnit that may ultimately prove impossible to solve.
Shi’s work involves collecting bat viruses and using techniques of genetic engineering and synthetic biology to enable these viruses to infect human beings.
Since the Biological Weapons Convention took effect, what scientists like Shi do has been called “gain-of-function” research or “dual-use research of concern” (DURC).
In other words, Shi, and other scientists like her, are in the business of weaponizing viruses by genetically engineering or otherwise altering them to make them more lethal, and more easily transmitted, to humans.
Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, is a top scientific collaborator, grantwriter and spokesperson for virus hunters and gain-of-function/dual-use researchers, in labs both military and civilian.
Daszak works with dozens of high-containment laboratories around the world that collect pathogens and use genetic engineering and synthetic biology to make them more infectious, contagious, lethal or drug-resistant. These include labs controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense, in countries in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.
Many of these labs are staffed by former biological weapons scientists. (See Arms Watch’s reports.)
Before the Biological Weapons Convention was ratified, this research was called what it is: biological weapons research. Now, it’s euphemistically called gain-of-function or dual-use research.
Guess what year this ScienceDaily headline appeared:
“New SARS-Like Virus Can Jump Directly from Bats to Humans, No Treatment Available.”
If you guessed 2020, you’re wrong. The article was published in 2015. The source was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That’s where scientist Ralph Baric, Ph.D, and a team that included Baric’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) colleague, Shi Zhengli, used genetic engineering and synthetic biology to create a “new bat SARS-like virus . . . that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans.”
Baric is known as the Coronavirus Hunter. Zhengli’s nickname is Bat Woman.
The two are scientists whose work involves collecting samples of the nearly 5,000 coronaviruses in bat populations and manipulating them for the sole purpose of making them more infectious to humans.
Organic Consumers Association recnetly launched its Gain of Function Hall of Shame with a profile of government scientist, Christian Hassell. Hassell chairs a secret committee known as P3CO (Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight), which is tasked with reviewing all gain-of-function experiments, including research that could be used to develop biological weapons from bat coronaviruses.
In this profile, we bring you Christian Hassell’s boss, Dr. Robert Kadlec.
Kadlec's title is Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response (ASPR) for the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS). In that role, Kadlec oversees a multi-billion-dollar stockpile of medical countermeasures to "defend" the American people against any biological threat, whether military, criminal, natural or accidental.
The stockpile overseen by Kadlec used to be housed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. But Kadlec fought to put it under his control.
Any scientific lab work that involves making pathogens more lethal, contagious, infectious, or resistant to treatment—even when done, ostensibly, for defensive purposes or medical countermeasures development—is really too risky to do at all.
Especially when you consider that 30 years’ worth of gain-of-function research has produced no vaccine, and no cure for a pandemic.
But perhaps an even better reason to stop experiments that could be used to create biological weapons, or the next pandemic, is the large number of high-profile—some accidental, some nefarious—releases of deadly pathogens from U.S. labs.
The corporate takeover of our food and farming system has led to poor health, polluted waterways, degraded soils, hollowed out rural economies and communities and a host of other ills.
It’s time to re-diversify, re-democratize and re-localize the U.S. food system—the place to start is by addressing the origins of corporate control, which include slavery, racism and land theft.
Or, make a personal act of reparations to a farmer of color.
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