This is the third program in a short series updating not only our inquiry into the Covid “op” but the overlapping inquiry into the Metabiota/Pentagon biological research/warfare program in Ukraine.
In our “Bio-Psy-Op Apocalypse Now” programs, we noted Gilead Sciences’ development of the Tamiflu anti-viral developed for use in the event of a human adaptation of H5N1 avian flu.
Previously the chairman of Gilead’s board of directors, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had the Pentagon stockpile Tamiflu, while retaining generous amounts of Gilead stock–Rumsfeld profited handsomely thereby.
We have also discussed the gain-of-function research done on H5N1 to make it more infective in numerous programs.
This program explores the Ukraine programs and the allegation that weaponized H5N1 was being developed in that country.
Our research into Metabiota and the Ukraine biological laboratories is discussed in–among other programs–FTR#1239.
Research into the allegation of “digitized” migratory birds to be used as weapons is highlighted in FTR#1243.
In this and succeeding programs, we will analyze a very important article presenting depth on a number of overlapping considerations about biological warfare, the Covid “op” and the Ukraine war.
Recapping, underscoring and detailing an important milieu involved for decades with biological warfare advocacy, gain-of-function advocacy and manipulation of H5N1 avian flu, and researching the rare human outbreaks of the disease:
Two figures at opposite temporal ends of this array are Anthony Fauci and Frank Macfarlane Burnet. Fauci has channeled financing to gain-of-function manipulations performed by Ron Fouchier and Yoshihiro Kawaoka. Kawoka and Fouchier, in turn, are networked with Jan De Jong and Robert G. Webster.
Webster and Kennedy Shortridge are both colleagues/proteges of Macfarlane Burnet.
The decades long network of research projects and curious outbreaks of H5N1 among both birds and humans is detailed below:
Key Points of Analysis and Discussion Include:
1.–” . . . . 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. . . .”
3.–Normally, H5N1 human infections are extremely rare: ” . . . . 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. . . .”
4.–More about how rare human infections are and the rise of avian infections in 2022: ” . . . . 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. . . .”
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! . . .”
6.–” . . . . 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. [Ron] Fouchier and [Yoshihiro] 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. . . .”
7.–” . . . . 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. . . .”
8.–” . . . .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.’ . . . .”
9.–” . . . . 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. . . .”
10.–” . . . . 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. . . .”
11.–” . . . . 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? . . .”
12.–” . . . . H5N1 didn’t cause disease in 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. . . .”
13.–” . . . . 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. . . .”
14.–“. . . . 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. . . .”
15.–” . . . . 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. . . .”
16.–” . . . . 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. . . .”
17.–” . . . . 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. . . .”
18.–” . . . . 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. . . .”
19.–Burnet’s observations: ” . . . . ‘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.’ . . .”
20.–The broadcast notes a frightening relationship between Metabiota and the selection of Philip Zelikow to head a commission to determine the origin of Covid-19: ” . . . . 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. . . .”
21.–” . . . . 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. . . .”
22.–“. . . . 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. . . .”
23.–In past programs, we have noted that David Franz, former head of the U.S.A.M.R.I.I.D at Fort Detrick was a key advisor to EcoHealthAlliance. Franz helped produce the encapsulated, weapons-grade anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks: ” . . . . 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. . . .”
Pivoting to the subject of apparent Russian discoveries of an advanced American-financed biological warfare program in Ukraine, we access the commentary of M.K. Bhadrakumar, a former Indian diplomat.
Bhadrakumar underscores some terrifying aspects of the apparent B.W. program, including “digitized” migratory birds, tracked by satellite and fitted with capsules of deadly microbes. When the birds are over a targeted country, they can be killed, triggering a pandemic.
” . . . . A mind-boggling ‘discovery’ that Russian forces in Ukraine stumbled upon is the use of numbered birds by the Pentagon-funded labs. . . . On the basis of this data, groups of migratory birds are caught, digitized and capsules of germs are attached to them that carry a chip to be controlled through computers. . . . During the long flight of the birds that have been digitized in the Pentagon bio-labs, their movement is monitored step by step by means of satellites and the exact locations are determined. . . . During the long flight of the birds that have been digitized in the Pentagon bio-labs, their movement is monitored step by step by means of satellites and the exact locations are determined. . . . The idea is that if the Biden Administration (or the CIA) has a requirement to inflict harm on, say, Russia or China (or India for that matter), the chip is destroyed when the bird is in their skies. Plainly put, kill the bird carrying the epidemic. . . . once the ‘digitized’ bird is killed and the capsule of germs it carries is released, the disease spreads in the ‘X’ or ‘Y’ country. It becomes a highly cost-effective method of harming an enemy country without any need of war or coup d’état or color revolution. The Russians have made the shocking claim that they are actually in possession of such migratory birds digitized in the Pentagon’s bio-labs. . . .”
A 2014 blog post details a 1960’s program in India that may have been a precursor to the apparent “digitized/weaponized” migratory birds program in Ukraine.
” . . . . It appeared that a unit of the U.S. Army called Migratory Animal Pathological Survey was interested in the project. The Army’s interest lay in knowing whether bacteria were being transmitted by the migrating birds. The project offered an excellent means of investigation and therefore had acquired an ominous significance. . . .”
Another possible 1960’s precursor of the “migratory birds of mass destruction” in Ukraine was a program to place voracious, disease-carrying Lone Star ticks in the Atlantic Flyway, through which migratory birds travel from Latin America through to the American Northeast.
” . . . . The sites were located on the Atlantic Flyway, the migratory bird superhighway that runs along the eastern South American and North American coasts. . . . . . . . Lone star ticks have several survival advantages over their deer tick cousins. They don’t wait patiently on a stalk of grass for passing prey; they are active hunters that crawl toward any carbon dioxide-emitting animal, including birds. . . . But in the 1970s, these ticks began rapidly expanding their range. 7 The first lone star tick observed on Montauk, Long Island, was in 1971, and as of 2018, established populations have been observed as far north as Maine. 8 . . . . All this begs the question: What is driving this mass migration of the lone star tick and its disease-causing hitchhikers northward? . . . .”
Is this research in any way linked to the Russian allegations of weaponization of H5N1 avian flu detailed in FTR#’s 1248 and 1249?
