Is Bird Flu Being Weaponized?

January 4, 2023 | Alexis Baden-Mayer

Organic Consumers Association

There’s been a lot of talk about the conflict in Ukraine causing the release of dangerous pathogens, including highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1), from U.S. funded biolabs.

This isn’t the first time that H5N1 bioweapons fears have gripped Ukraine. In 2009, when a flu broke out in Ukraine (the official story is that it was H1N1), rumors circulated that it was H5N1, spread via vaccines or aerial spraying.

Making the whole H5N1 saga even sketchier is its origin story in the late 1990s. The emergence of the virus in 1997 in Hong Kong was eerily predicted by Kennedy Shortridge, the scientist who would discover it. H5N1 didn’t infect humans until Shortridge and his colleagues had been studying its human infection potential in their labs for several years. At the time, the natural leap of a flu directly from poultry to humans was so improbable that scientists first suspected that it was the result of contamination from Shortridge’s lab. The 1997 H5N1 outbreak in Hong Kong was the first flu to be diagnosed by PCR test.

Does this scenario sound familiar?

I’ve documented all of that below, but there are several even more obvious reasons why, if there’s ever a human H5N1 outbreak or vaccination push, we’ll know we’re in the midst of another Plandemic:

1. H5N1 hardly ever infects people. News about highly pathogenic avian influenza usually leads with how deadly it is. Rarely is it mentioned that the disease hardly ever infects people. H5N1 kills more than half of the people who get it, but H5N1 has circled the globe for decades and there have only ever been 860 human infections worldwide.

2. There has never been an H5N1 pandemic and no human infection with H5N1 bird flu has ever been identified in the U.S. That’s an extraordinary safety record, given how filthy U.S. factory farms and slaughterhouses are and how fast the infection spreads among crowded birds. So far in 2022, 29 states have reported outbreaks of bird flu in 213 flocks resulting in the culling of nearly 31 million birds, including almost 5 percent of egg-laying hens. In 2015, it was even worse with 50 million birds culled, but there wasn’t a single human case.

3. H5N1 isn’t transmitted person-to-person. There are only a handful of “possible” cases worldwide. That’s how the CDC puts it. My research suggests that virus hunters like the Gates Foundation’s Scott Dowell have stretched the truth in their search for transmissible H5N1. Regardless, the CDC says there is no evidence from those “possible” cases that spread could be sustained beyond a single transmission.

4. There are no food safety risks associated with H5N1. If farm workers and meat packers don’t get bird flu in filthy factory farms or slaughterhouses, it’s no surprise the rest of us don’t get bird flu from eating raw eggs or handling raw chicken.

5. Anthony Fauci has made significant investments in gain-of-function research to give H5N1 pandemic potential, making it easily transmissible from person to person—and Bill Gates chipped in, too!

In this article, I lay out the evidence that:

1. Fauci and Gates funded the weaponization of H5N1.

2. Fauci’s H5N1 research is ongoing and is being done all over the world, including in Pentagon-funded biolabs in Ukraine.

3. Some of the scariest, most scandal-plagued corporations on the planet are involved in the Ukraine biolabs, from our Millions Against Monsanto nemesis Bayer to the likes of Battelle, Metabiota and Southern Research, biodefense contractors variously linked to the Biden family, the origins of COVID-19 and the 2001 anthrax attacks.

4. The U.S. has already authorized and stockpiled a human H5N1 vaccine.

Christian Westbrook at IceAgeFarmer.com is warning that bird flu will be the next human pandemic and that the catastrophe is being engineered to usher in the post-meat/post-farmer world that Bill Gates aspires to. I sincerely hope he’s wrong, but it’s hard to be optimistic when people like Robert Redfield, who was CDC director under Trump and is known for his suspicion that COVID-19 originated in a lab, are coming out of the woodwork to make the same eerie prediction.

Fauci & Gates Funded the Weaponization of H5N1

Fauci and Gates figured out how to get scientists to participate in biological weapons research with a clean conscience:

They pay them to…

1. Believe pandemics are caused by pathogens that don’t infect humans.

2. Use genetic engineering and synthetic biology to “predict” how those pathogens will infect humans.

In his 2006 piece, “The Science: How a Human Pandemic Could Start,” Scott Dowell, wrote:

“While rare instances of H5N1 passing from person to person have been documented, there is no indication that it can do so efficiently. That could change. … A series of mutations or a single genetic reassortment event (a type of gene swapping among viruses) could enable H5N1 to spread efficiently among humans, triggering a pandemic. … H5N1 may evolve into something that’s easily spread through coughing, sneezing, or contact with contaminated hands.”

In his wisdom, Fauci decided to see if he could make that happen in a lab.

As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci commissioned two gain-of-function research teams with grants titled “Pandemic Potential of H5N1 Influenza Viruses” and “Understanding the Emergence of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Viruses.”

Gates chipped in, too, with grants 48339 and OPPGH5383 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (Ice Age Farmer’s Westbrook found a lot more documentation of Gates’ funding of gain-of-function research to make highly pathogenic avian influenza even more pathogenic and transmissible.)

The scientists Fauci chose to lead the H5N1 teams, Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Tokyo, were scientists Fauci had funded since 1990 under grants with titles including “Influenza Virus Assembly.”

In February 2006, Fauci convened a one-day in-house “NIAID Influenza Research Summit” to identify influenza research priorities. In September, he opened up the topic to a 35-member “Blue Ribbon Panel on Influenza Research” that included Fouchier and Kawaoka. The Blue Ribbon panel’s report doesn’t mention gain-of-function experiments, but Fauci gave them grants to do just that.

Fouchier and Kawaoka’s now infamous gain-of-function research showed that, through lab manipulation, H5N1 could be altered to become highly transmissible among humans via airborne infection.

Did Fauci & Gates’ Weaponized H5N1 End Up In Ukraine?

In this video from IceAge Farmer, Christian Westbrook talks about Russia’s claim that the U.S. funded Ukraine experiments with engineered strains of bird flu that could kill 50 percent of humanity:

 

Russia’s accusation was presented to the United Nations:

 

Russia’s information on U.S. funding of pathogen research in Ukraine was gleaned from public sources. Robbie Martin of Media Roots Radio has compiled the documentation in a searchable database housed by Our Hidden History. Martin did a great podcast on the subject, “Is the US Making Bioweapons Under the Guise of ‘Biodefense’ in Ukraine & Elsewhere? w/ Gumby.”

As Igor Kirillov, the head of the Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Protection Troops of the Russian Armed Forces, has reported, the Pentagon-funded pathogens projects in Ukraine were labeled UP for Ukraine Project and given numbers starting with UP-1.

Currently, the project lead for U.S.-funded H5N1 research in Ukraine (the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) refers to it as UP-4 or Ukraine Project 4) is Denys Muzyka. (The link goes to his publications on Google Scholar.)

This is all very well documented and the U.S. hasn’t denied it (although it insists it is in full compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention):

 

Ukraine is a hub for Pentagon biolab funding, and biotech & pharmaceutical companies are going where the government contracts are. Our Millions Against Monsanto nemesis Bayer is sidling up to the trough, too.

 

A series of bioweapons scandals that predate the current crisis reveal that the U.S. has been funding H5N1 research in Ukraine for many years.

Beginning in 2018, Dilyana Gaytandzhieva of ArmsWatch published a series of reports on U.S.-funded biolabs, revealing that defense contractor Black & Veatch got a total of $208.5 million in Pentagon contracts to design, construct and equip 11 bio-labs in Ukraine in 2008, 2012 and 2020. The company completed Ukraine’s first Bio-Safety Level 3 (BSL-3) laboratory in 2010. Black & Veatch also maintains the Pentagon’s systems in Ukraine for the “control and accounting of biological materials in laboratories” and the “early detection of a disease outbreak and assist[ance] in an effective response.”

Gaytandzhieva was also the first to report Metabiota’s Pentagon contracts to research pathogens in Ukraine.

Metabiota received a Pentagon contract worth up to $23.9 million that included a 2014 line item allocating $307,091 for “Ukraine Research Projects.” As mentioned above, Russia claimed that the U.S. labeled its Ukraine biolab projects as UP for Ukraine Project and gave them numbers. This matches the way American scientists working on these projects refer to them, but they call them “Metabiota Ukraine Projects.” For example, there’s this reference to “Metabiota UP-8” on LinkedIn.

Black & Veatch and Metabiota co-lead the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s so-called Science Writers Mentorship Program (SWMP) in Ukraine, begun in 2016. That’s how the Pentagon puts one degree of separation between itself and Ukrainian scientists. The scientists put a disclaimer on their published research that says that their research isn’t funded by DTRA but their publications are, through the SWMP.

For example, the authors of “Phylogenetic Analysis of H5N8 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Viruses in Ukraine, 2016–2017” thank “Greg Glass [program director for DTRA’s Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) in Ukraine] and the scientific staff at BV/Metabiota (Kyiv, Ukraine) for critical reading and assistance with preparation of the article.” They also thank the “Science Writers Mentorship Program (SWMP) for their support in providing resources for writing this manuscript.” Then, they claim that “DTRA/CBEP did not directly support the research described herein.” They leave out the fact that they work in laboratories designed, built and equipped by the Pentagon. But, their most revealing acknowledgment is to the Center of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance (CEIRS).

CEIRS funding comes from Fauci.

As Gaytandzhieva reported in “Potential pandemic bird flu modified to be more dangerous in new risky NIH research,” CEIRS is one of Fauci’s funding streams for research that could start a human bird flu Plandemic.

The I.I. Mechnikov Anti-Plague Scientific Research Institute of Ukraine is Fauci’s regional CEIRS hub.

Is the Mechnikov Institute being set up as the next Wuhan Institute of Virology?

The Surprising Links Between the Origins of COVID-19, Ukraine Biolabs and the 2001 Anthrax Attacks

In addition to Black & Veatch, Fauci’s Center of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance, and Metabiota, there are two other notable U.S. organizations working in the Pentagon-funded biolabs in Ukraine: Southern Research and Battelle.

Southern Research has had Pentagon projects in Ukraine since 2008 and a Ukraine office since 2010. It has received $688.5 million in government funding since 2001.

According to this LinkedIn profile, Battelle is also operating Ukraine biolabs, running Pentagon-funded “projects in Virology, Bacteriology, Decontamination, Aerosol science, BSL-2/3 laboratory activities, CONOP, Data Analytics and Molecular Biology.”

 

Battelle, Metabiota and Southern Research’s involvement connects U.S.-funded pathogens research in Ukraine to two very hot topics: 1) the Biden family’s economic interests in Ukraine; and 2) the truth about COVID-19, as well a much older incident that shouldn’t be memory-holed: the 2001 anthrax attacks.

 

The above video from the Reese Report, ties it all together, but here are a few additional details, as well as information about how Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, Southern Research and Battelle link back to the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Metabiota was part of the PREDICT team hunting viruses in China in 2013 when they found what it now believed to be the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, a bat virus named RaTG13. PREDICT is a USAID project, funded by U.S. tax dollars, but it got its start at Google.org.

In 2008, Google.org committed $30 million to virus hunting and gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens through a project it called Predict and Prevent. At least $5.5 million of that went to Dr. Nathan Wolfe’s non-profit Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, which was soon to become the for-profit Metabiota. Other GVFI funders at the time included the Skoll Foundation, which also gave $5.5 million, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Merck Research Laboratories and the US Department of Defense.

When the GVFI became the for-profit Metabiota, Google Ventures continued to invest. In addition, it created a business partnership with Metabiota, “offering its big-data expertise to help the company serve its customers–insurers, government agencies and other organizations–by offering them forecasting and risk-management tools.” In other words, they sell pandemic insurance.

Google’s Predict and Prevent was a profitable investment. The company parlayed the $30 million it bundled through its non-profit Google.org, into hundreds of millions in government grants for its partners in the pandemic industrial complex, including $99.5 million for its for-profit partner Metabiota since 2008.

Now that Metabiota has gotten caught up in the COVID origins scandal, its original investors, Eric Schmidt of Google, Jeffrey Skoll of EBay, Rajiv Shah of The Rockefeller Foundation (formerly USAID director, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) chipped in to fund the COVID Commission Planning Group, a white-wash led by Philip Zelikow who gave us the 9-11 Commission cover-up.

One of Metabiota’s PREDICT partners is EcoHealth Alliance, whose science and policy advisor, David Franz, produced the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks while working for Southern Research and partnering with scientists at Battelle.

Franz, a former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases went from Fort Detrick to working at Southern Research for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which from 1999-2001 contracted with Advanced Biosystems for microencapsulated anthrax. Franz’s Southern Research was a subcontractor on that project. His partners, Advanced Biosystems’ Ken Alibek, a former Soviet bioweapons scientist, and Charles L. Bailey, another former Fort Detrick commander, filed a patent on the silicon microencapsulation technology in 2001. In their 2012 article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Bioterrorism & Biodefense, “Evidence for the Source of the 2001 Attack Anthrax,” Martin E. Hugh-Jones, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg and Stuart Jacobsen link the forensic evidence from the attack anthrax to the Alibek, Bailey and Franz’s microencapsulation techniques. The trio likely engineered the attack anthrax in Battelle’s West Jefferson, Ohio, facility. As Whitney Webb has reported, the Pentagon contracted with Battelle to “create the genetically-modified anthrax, a task that was overseen by Battelle’s then-program manager for all things bioweapons, Ken Alibek.”

The 2009 Ukraine Flu Panic

One of the many pharmaceutical companies working under U.S. government contracts at Ukraine biolabs is the pharmaceutical company Baxter.

In 2009, after the company nearly sparked an H5N1 pandemic, rumors circulated that Baxter caused the flu outbreak that swept Ukraine later the same year.

In early February 2009, Baxter accidentally combined the highly pathogenic avian influenza with an H3N2 flu that commonly infects humans. The mistake occurred in Baxter’s Austrian laboratories, and the deadly chimera was distributed to subcontractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany. The contamination was discovered—and human lives were spared—when what they called an “experimental virus material” killed ferrets in a test conducted by researchers who believed they were working with a common seasonal flu. Baxter never explained what happened.

An H1N1 swine flu pandemic began the next month, March 2009. The U.S. government gave Baxter contracts to produce swine flu vaccines despite the H5N1 contamination incident. “Coincidentally,” Baxter had filed a patent on its H1N1 vaccine on August 28, 2008.

When the swine flu hit Ukraine in October 2009, the recent Baxter H5N1 scandal and their laboratories in Kyiv caused rumors to circulate that it was actually H5N1 spread via vaccines or aerial spraying.

An interesting bit of history from the 2009 pandemic is an opinion piece in Foreign Policy claiming that “Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian prime minister and presidential candidate purposely inflated fears of an ongoing swine-flu epidemic to aid her presidential run.” It mocked her “full-blown panic over swine flu, complete with quarantines, school closures, runs on pharmacies” and alleged that “she also banned all mass gatherings and political rallies — after she had already had hers.” (Foreign Policy revealed its true reason for attacking Tymoshenko when it mentioned her “pandering to Russia on gas deals.”)

The Curious Origin of H5N1

The first human H5N1 outbreak occurred in Hong Kong in 1997, the year of what the British call the “Hong Kong handover,” when sovereignty over Hong Kong was transferred from the U.K. to China.

It was during this “politically sensitive” year that Kennedy Shortridge, an Australian scientist who was the director of the World Health Organization’s reference laboratory at the University of Hong Kong, confirmed human cases of highly pathogenic bird flu.

Shortridge’s colleague Yuen Kwok-Yung attended to the H5N1 patients and devised a rapid diagnostic test known as RT-PCR to analyze respiratory secretions from these patients. As they published in the Lancet, this was the first time that a purely avian virus had been isolated from people with a respiratory disease and the first time that a PCR test was used for rapid diagnosis of such patients in a clinical setting.

The 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 virus was unique in every respect.

Time magazine reported, “On the H gene at a point called the cleavage site, [was] found a telltale mutation, the same kind of mutation found in other highly pathogenic avian viruses. …The virus … had regions that were identical to portions of [an] avian virus that struck Pennsylvania [chickens] in 1983.”

The L.A. Times reported, “The H5 piece came from a virus in a goose. The N1 piece came from a second virus in a quail. The remaining flu genes came from a third virus, also in quail.”

Shortridge had been studying how avian influenza viruses spread to humans since 1975. Prior to discovering H5N1, Shortridge eerily predicted its emergence. As Frank Ching reported in “Bird Flu, SARS and Beyond”:

As early as 1982, Shortridge had labeled southern China, where humans and domestic animals lived in close proximity, “an epicenter for the origin of pandemics.” Ten years later, he called southern China a “virus soup” and warned that pandemic influenza was a zoonosis, that is, it could be transmitted from animals to humans and, in 1995, he warned that influenza in southern China could not properly be called an “emerging” infection because it was constantly lurking. “Elusive might be more apt,” he wrote.

An example of Shortridge’s penchant for such predictions is his 1995 Lancet article “The next pandemic influenza virus?” Curiously, H5N1 emerged two years later, in 1997, in the same city where Shortridge worked, Hong Kong.

At the time, the natural leap of a flu directly from poultry to humans was thought to be so unlikely that scientists first suspected contamination from Shortridge’s lab was the cause of the highly improbable H5N1 diagnosis.

How would that contamination happen unless Shortridge hadn’t already been working with H5N1 in the lab?

Time magazine reported, “In an earlier study, conducted with great discretion, his lab had found that residents of rural Hong Kong had antibodies to all the known bird-flu viruses.”

H5N1 didn’t cause disease humans until this potential had been studied in a lab for several years.

Fauci had been funding Kawaoka and Fouchier’s efforts to get bird flu to leap to humans since 1990 and their work was connected to what Shortridge was doing in Hong Kong. For seven years prior to the first human H5N1 outbreak in 1997, Fauci had been funding Kawaoka’s gain-of-function bird flu research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Kawaoka’s mentor there, Robert G. Webster, was working and publishing with Shortridge. Every year, Webster spent three months working with Shortridge at the University of Hong Kong, according to this profile of Webster which mentions Kawaoka as his protege.

The most eerie connection between Shortridge and Webster’s labs is that the closest known relative of the 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 was the avian virus that struck Pennsylvania chickens in 1983—that Yoshihiro Kawaoka had studied. According to Time magazine:

Webster assigned a young scientist, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, to try to figure out how the [1983] virus transformed itself into such a “hot” pathogen. Kawaoka, now a professor of virology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, compared the genetic structure of viruses from the first and second waves and found only a single, extremely subtle change in the H gene. The two viruses differed by just one nucleotide–one of 1,700 nucleotides that made up the gene.

In 1997, Fauci rewarded Shortridge and Webster’s team for the H5N1 outbreak by creating and funding the St. Jude Center of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance which continues to operate today in the U.S., Canada, Bangladesh, China, Colombia, and Egypt.

Webster was one of the first gain-of-function scientists, publishing a successful creation of a recombinant virus in 1973. As Lyle Fearnley writes in “Wild Goose Chase”:

For an influenza pandemic to arise, a new form of the virus is necessary, one able to escape the immune responses cultivated by human populations during previous flu outbreaks. The American Robert Webster had previously shown that such new viruses can be experimentally produced in the laboratory: taking viruses derived from different species, he co-infected a single animal host, a process that Webster and his coauthors observed had encouraged the two viruses to swap genetic material and create “recombinant” forms.

There’s also a connection to Fouchier, through his mentor at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Jan De Jong, also a colleague and collaborator of Shortridge and Webster’s.

Kawaoka’s colleague and mentor Robert G. Webster and Fouchier’s colleague and mentor Jan De Jong were the first scientists outside of Hong Kong to receive samples of the 1997 H5N1 flu from Shortridge’s lab.

De Jong is often credited with being the one who identified the 1997 Hong Kong flu as H5N1, but he did so with “a panel of reagents to every type of flu strain yet known” that had been brought from Webster’s lab in Memphis to the National Influenza Centre in Rotterdam.

Kawaoka and Fouchier are of post-Biological Weapons Convention era where the weaponization of pathogens is euphemistically called “gain-of-function” research, but their older colleagues, De Jong, Shortridge and Webster came of age prior to 1972 and their mentors were of the pre-Biological Weapons Convention era when virologists knowingly and openly engineered viruses for military purposes.

Shortridge and Webster were trained by Frank Macfarlane Burnet who served on the Australian Department of Defence’s New Weapons and Equipment Development Committee in the 1940s and 50s. The Federation of American Scientists lists some of the most chilling things Burnet recommended:

Burnet … said Australia should develop biological weapons that would work in tropical Asia without spreading to Australia’s more temperate population centres.

“Specifically to the Australian situation, the most effective counter-offensive to threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic countries would be directed towards the destruction by biological or chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of infectious disease capable of spreading in tropical but not under Australian conditions.”

… Burnet argued that Australia’s temperate climate could give it a significant military advantage.

“The main contribution of local research so far as Australia is concerned might be to study intensively the possibilities of biological warfare in the tropics against troops and civil populations at a relatively low level of hygiene and with correspondingly high resistance to the common infectious diseases.”

[In] Note on War from a Biological Angle suggesting that biological warfare could be a powerful weapon to help defend a sparsely populated Australia… [he] urged the government to encourage Australian universities to research areas of biological science of relevance to biological weapons.

“The main strategic use of biological warfare may well be to administer the coup de grace to a virtually defeated enemy and compel surrender in the same way that the atomic bomb served in 1945. Its use has the tremendous advantage of not destroying the enemy’s industrial potential which can then be taken over intact. Overt biological warfare might be used to enforce surrender by psychological rather than direct destructive measures.”

***

In a report … Burnet concluded that “In a country of low sanitation the introduction of an exotic intestinal pathogen, e.g. by water contamination, might initiate widespread dissemination.”

“Introduction of yellow fever into a country with appropriate mosquito vectors might build up into a disabling epidemic before control measures were established.”

[And] …”the possibilities of an attack on the food supplies of S-E Asia and Indonesia using B.W. agents should be considered by a small study group”.

Conclusion

The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention could and should be enforced, but so far it hasn’t been. It merely changed biological weapons research from overt to covert.

While it is still largely funded and carried out by the Pentagon (and the CIA, which the New York Times reported was involved in anthrax research prior to the 2001 attacks), biological weapons research today is draped with the fig leaf of Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funding to maintain the image of peaceful, public-health purposes. It is entirely possible that the whole controversy around Fauci’s “gain-of-function” research is an elaborate red herring and it is the Pentagon and/or the CIA that are behind the plandemics.

As the World Socialist Web Site reports, President Joe Biden’s 2023 military budget proposal—more than $2 billion per day—contains a massive amount of money that could be used for biological weapons:

A record $130 billion will be devoted to military research and development, including hypersonic weapons, biotechnology and microelectronics.

Another $40 billion in the Air Force budget will go to other agencies on a classified basis. This is known as the “black budget” and finances operations which the national-security state does not report even to Congress, let alone the American people.

In addition, the Director of National Intelligence is requesting a $67.1 billion classified budget.

Another funding pause on gain-of-function research wouldn’t be a bad thing, but it isn’t going to stop the next plandemic. Indicting Fauci is important, but even that isn’t the end-game.

Ultimately, we need to declassify and cut the Pentagon and CIA’s budgets and work for enforcement of the Biological Weapons Convention.

Alexis Baden-Mayer is the Political Director for the Organic Consumers Association.