In the January 22, 2021, lecture above, Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., discusses what he has dubbed the pandemic virus industrial complex — who they are, how they function and interact with elements within the academic, military and commercial complexes, and how they have been trying to obscure facts that indicate SARS-CoV-2 is a manmade virus that originated in a lab.

I have previously interviewed Latham a few times. He is the publisher of Independent Science News, a website that provides critical commentary on food, agriculture and biotechnology. It’s part of the Bioscience Resource Project, an educational nonprofit public interest group co-founded by Latham and Allison Wilson, Ph.D., that provides independent research and analysis of genetic engineering and its risks.

Latham points out that there are currently no data to suggest a natural zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence and data suggesting the virus was genetically manipulated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. Much of the related research was done by a scientist called Shi Zheng-Li, Ph.D.

He goes on to summarize the Mojiang miners passage theory. This theory postulates that the virus evolved inside the bodies of six miners who became ill with a suspected novel coronavirus infection in 2012. Some of the miners were sick for several weeks — a sufficient amount of time for the virus to mutate, Latham believes.

Viral samples from the miners were sent to the WIV. Latham and Wilson believe research on these samples was what led to an accidental release of the virus in late 2019.

The Pandemic Virus Industrial Complex

Latham describes the pandemic virus industrial complex as “an interlocking set of corporations and other institutions who feed off and support each other with goods and services in a self-reinforcing way.” It is an enterprise that leverages public money for private profit. He also notes that many of these participants play unexpected roles. For example:

• Philanthropic organizations act as string-pullers, influencers and profit centers
• The Defense Department is both a cash cow and a provocateur 
• Academia provides public relations via legacy media controlled by philanthropic organizations and the drug industry
• Academic nonprofits act as money launderers

“These nontraditional roles are intended to confuse and camouflage the various moving parts of what is a complex situation,” Latham says, “thereby protecting the whole from scrutiny.” While there are many similarities between the military industrial complex and the pandemic virus industrial complex, there’s an important difference between the two.

The pandemic virus industrial complex is public facing, and is expected to be beneficial and transparent. As such, it has an image of respectability that must be maintained, and that is why academics and philanthropic and nonprofit organizations play such important roles in this scheme.

Together, they help obscure the real agenda under a veneer of respectability and public good. In essence, they maintain the illusion that everything that’s taking place is for the betterment of mankind when, in reality, it’s a profit-making scheme.

Latham believes the pandemic virus industrial complex has played a decisive role in the effort to obscure the likely origin of the pandemic. He also believes this is the missing framework that helps explain the politicization of the pandemic.

Previous Obscuration Attempts of Manmade Outbreaks

In his lecture, Latham reviews some of the history of this viral pandemic industrial complex. In 2014, an Ebola outbreak in West Africa was decisively blamed on zoonotic transfer from infected bats. According to a report in EMBO Molecular Medicine,¹ a 2-year-old boy playing with bats in a tree stump was Patient Zero.

However, while the paper failed to produce conclusive evidence to support its conclusion, Western media ran with this story. In West Africa, however, the rumor was that the real source of the outbreak was a hospital in Sierra Leone, which housed a biological laboratory where research on Ebola and related viruses, such as the lassa fever virus, was being done.

This research was largely funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. The reason for this funding was a recent upgrading by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the lassa fever virus as a Category A infectious substance, meaning a pathogen likely to be used as a bioweapon by terrorists. The research was carried out under the auspices of the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium, led by Harvard University.

The Consortium is also tied to other academic institutions, including Tulane University, Scripps Research Institute, the University of California, San Diego, the Broad Institute of Boston and the University of Texas, as well as a number of private drug companies. According to Latham, statements made by some of the people involved in the research suggest they were taking advantage of West Africa’s lax and inferior biosecurity standards.

In his book, “The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Corporate Gangsters, Multinationals & Rogue Politicians,” Chernoh Bah provides evidence showing the Patient Zero story was a fraud. The young boy died at 18 months of age, far too young to play with bats, and he was never diagnosed with Ebola. Neither was anyone in his family. The first recorded case of Ebola was actually found in Guinea, some three months after the little boy had died.

Bah also found other gaping holes in the narrative. For example, despite widespread sampling, no Ebola virus was ever found in any animal, and no animal die-offs occurred before the outbreak, which tends to be typical in natural zoonotic spillover events. Despite the obvious problems with the official narrative, no formal investigation of the lab leak theory was ever performed.