April 29, 2020

Organic Consumers Association

Health Issues ,

Politics & Globalization

“I am not saying that China deliberately released this, shooting itself in the foot. But it was clear they were developing an extremely dangerous unknown biological weapon that had never been seen before, and it leaked out of the lab… I personally believe that until our political leaders come clean with the American people, both at the White House and in Congress and our state government, and publicly admit that this is an extremely dangerous offensive biological warfare weapon that we are dealing with, I do not see that we will be able to confront it and to stop it, let alone defeat it.” —Dr. Francis Boyle, International Bioweapons Expert, April 15, 2020

According to Johns Hopkins University, as of today, COVID-19 has infected more than 3 million people and killed at least 210,000 worldwide.

Those are big numbers, considering the fact that six short months ago, few members of the general public had ever heard of the coronavirus. And almost no one was harboring fears of a looming and deadly global pandemic.

But here we are. As our new reality sinks in, as we adjust to lockdowns and home schooling and long lines at grocery stores, as we look for ways to protect ourselves and our families—and as some grieve for lost loved ones—most of us are also seeking answers.

Why does this virus cause so many mysterious symptoms ? Why are some cases mild, others deadly? How can we protect ourselves? Whose advice should we follow?

But the biggest questions of all are these: Where did COVID-19 come from? And how can we prevent this from ever happening again?

The answers to these questions may be too disturbing to ponder, especially while we’re still grappling with the impact of the virus on nearly every aspect of our lives.

But our failure to investigate, and directly address, the origins of COVID-19 almost certainly guarantees our failure to protect ourselves from future, possibly even more deadly, pandemics.

Science most foul

Thousands of dangerous viruses and other pathogens, such as the bat coronavirus and the avian flu, are being collected in the wild by Chinese, U.S. and international researchers. These viruses are then analyzed and weaponized (i.e. genetically engineered, manipulated, recombined) in secretive, accident-prone, labs like the Wuhan Virology Lab in China or the U.S. Army Lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Coronaviruses typically have a narrow host range, infecting one or just a few species, such as bats. However, using targeted RNA recombination , gene engineers can manipulate viruses such as COVID-19 for “gain of function” to enable them to infect other species (i.e. human cells), interfere with immune system response and readily spread through the air.

A growing arsenal of synthetic viruses have been lab-engineered, despite U.S. and international laws banning biowarfare weapons and experimentation. A disturbing number of these so-called “dual use” Biowarfare/Biodefense labs have experienced leaks, accidents and thefts over the past three decades.

As the well-respected Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently warned :

“A safety breach at a Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab is believed to have caused four suspected SARS cases, including one death, in Beijing in 2004. A similar accident caused 65 lab workers of Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute to be infected with brucellosis in December 2019 . . . In January 2020, a renowned Chinese scientist, Li Ning, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for selling experimental animals to local markets.”

China is hardly the only place to experience such accidents. A USA Today investigation in 2016, for instance, revealed an incident involving cascading equipment failures in a decontamination chamber as U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researchers tried to leave a biosafety level 4 lab . The lab likely stored samples of the viruses causing Ebola and smallpox, according to the report .

In 2014, the CDC revealed that staff had accidently sent live anthrax between laboratories, exposing 84 workers. In an investigation, officials found other mishaps that had occurred in the preceding decade.

In 2019, the U.S. Army Fort Detrick, Maryland Biological Weapons Lab was temporarily shut down for improper disposal of dangerous pathogens, according to a New York Times report . Officials refused to provide details about the pathogens or the leak, citing “national security” concerns.

As Sam Husseini recently reported in Salon magazine, biowarfare engineers in labs such as Wuhan or Fort Detrick are deliberately and recklessly evading international law:

“Governments that participate in such biological weapon research generally distinguish between ‘biowarfare’ and ‘biodefense,’ as if to paint such ‘defense’ programs as necessary. But this is rhetorical sleight-of-hand; the two concepts are largely indistinguishable. ‘Biodefense’ implies tacit biowarfare, breeding more dangerous pathogens for the alleged purpose of finding a way to fight them. While this work appears to have succeeded in creating deadly and infectious agents, including deadlier flu strains, such ‘defense’ research is impotent in its ability to defend us from this pandemic.”

Activist critics of genetic engineering and biological warfare experiments, including myself, Dr. Mercola and GM Watch, joined now by independent voices in the mass media, are reporting, albeit in some cases reluctantly, that mounting evidence indicates that the deadly COVID-19 virus may have accidentally leaked out of one of the supposedly high-security biowarfare labs (the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese Center for Disease Control) that were analyzing and manipulating bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China.

In order to conceal their scientific malpractice and criminal negligence, to protect their “right” to carry out dangerous, unregulated research, and to safeguard billions of dollars in annual Biopharm and GMO industry profits (Monsanto/Bayer, among others, is now conducting its own biowarfare research), Chinese and U.S. officials, Big Pharma, Facebook, Google and an arrogant and unscrupulous network of global scientists are frantically trying to cover up the lab origins and diabolical machinations of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A widely-cited paper, published in the journal Nature on February 3, 2020, claims to establish that SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus of bat origin that naturally jumped the species barrier between bats and humans and was not synthetically constructed in a lab. However, as Mercola.com reports one of the Chinese authors of this article, Dr. Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Virology Lab, actually worked previously on weaponizing the SARS virus (the progenitor of COVID-19) and has published peer-reviewed articles on the procedures involved in this genetic manipulation.

Another oft-cited but problematic article in Nature Medicine (March 17, 2020), co-authored by a bio-entrepreneur industry scientist, has been repeatedly cited by the mass media as offering “proof” that the COVID-19 virus arose “naturally” as opposed to being lab-derived.

But recent critiques offered by independent scientists, including the London-based molecular geneticist Dr. Michael Antoniou, a long-time critic of genetic engineering, argue convincingly that the computer-modeling “proof” cited by Nature Medicine offers no proof at all. As GM Watch reports :

“Dr. Antoniou told us that while the authors [of the March 17 Nature Medicine article] did indeed show that SARS-CoV-2 was unlikely to have been built by deliberate genetic engineering from a previously used virus backbone, that’s not the only way of constructing a virus. There is another method by which an enhanced-infectivity virus can be engineered in the lab. . .”

Antoniou told GM Watch that this method, called “ directed iterative evolutionary selection process ,” involves using genetic engineering to generate “a large number of randomly mutated versions of the SARS-CoV spike protein receptor,” and then to select those protein receptors most effective at infecting human cells.

As Antoniou points out, the inventors of this technique received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2018, a fact the authors of the Nature Medicine article surely knew. Did the authors of the Nature Medicine article deliberately leave this more plausible hypothesis out, in order to bolster their questionable thesis that COVID-19 arose naturally—even though biowarfare labs in Wuhan were engineering bat viruses years before the fatal outbreak?

If lab technicians in the Wuhan lab did use the directed iterative evolutionary selection process to engineer a “gain of function” (weaponized) bat coronavirus, and the virus subsequently leaked, infected one or more lab technicians, then spread to people outside the lab, including people from the Wuhan Seafood Market, there would be no trace of the virus having been genetically engineered or manipulated.

Peer-reviewed, published articles, going back more than a decade, indicate that researchers at the Wuhan Labs (Dr. Shi Zhengli and others) have been carrying out experiments to manipulate and weaponize deadly bat coronavirus so that they can readily infect human cells. In a 2008 article in the Journal of Virology, Zengli and other scientists report on how they have genetically engineered SARS-like viruses from horseshoe bats to enable the viruses to gain entry into human cells.

The powers that be, in Beijing and Washington, like to reassure us that researchers in places like the Wuhan Virology Lab, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, or the U.S. Army Biological Weapons Lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland are only “studying” (not manipulating or weaponizing) dangerous pathogens like bat coronaviruses, and that security in these government/WHO/NIH-monitored labs is so strict that accidents could never happen.

But a number of well-respected scientific critics of genetic engineering and biological warfare have been sounding the alarm for decades.

Critics including Francis Boyle (author of the 1989 U.S. Bioterrorism law banning bioweapons research) and Dr. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, have warned that experiments and manipulations of viruses and pathogens are inherently extremely dangerous, (not to mention that they violate international law), given human error and the fact that security has been dangerously lax in the world’s biowarfare/biodefense laboratories.

Almost too incredible to believe, funding for the reckless germ war experiments in Wuhan have included more than $3 million from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), with apparent collaboration, according to Boyle, from scientists at the universities of North Carolina, Wisconsin, Harvard and other institutions.

In 2014, the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy put a hold or “funding pause” on “gain of function” experimentation on dangerous viruses in U.S. labs due to “biosafety and biosecurity risks.”

Yet experimentation apparently continued uninterrupted (with U.S. funding) in China at the Wuhan lab. Then in 2017, the Trump Administration reversed this “funding pause,” essentially allowing illegal germ warfare research to continue.

Longtime anti-GMO activists at GM Watch in the UK recently published an article entitled “COVID-19 Could Be a Wake-Up Call for Biosafety.” The article explains how, below the public radar, secretive and reckless research on genetically engineering and weaponizing coronaviruses has been going on for decades:

“Stuart Newman, professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York, editor-in-chief of the journal Biological Theory , and co-author of Biotech Juggernaut , adds crucial historical context that shows exploring whether COVID-19 could have been genetically engineered should not be dismissed as a subject fit only for conspiracy theorists.

“[Newman] points out that the genetic engineering of coronaviruses has been going on for a long time. According to Newman , ‘Even most biologists are not aware that virologists have been experimentally recombining and genetically modifying coronaviruses for more than a decade to study their mechanisms of pathogenicity.’ Indeed, Newman points to papers on engineering coronaviruses that go back a full 20 years.”

Dr. Peter Breggin points out that in 2015, researchers from the U.S. and China's Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated to transform an animal coronavirus into one that can attack humans. Breggin’s provocative essay includes a direct link to the original study which was published in the British journal, Nature.

Recent investigative reporting, including an explosive April 14 Washington Post article by Josh Rogin , followed by more muted coverage by CBS News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and others, have alerted millions of people to the fact that the official Chinese/Big Pharma/WHO/NIH “bat in the market” story about the origins of COVID-19 may no longer be credible.

As Rogin’s article points out, officials from the U.S. embassy in Beijing visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology numerous times in early 2018, and tried to warn the Trump Administration that there were serious safety violations in the lab’s handling of bat coronaviruses. The officials were especially concerned that inadequately trained staff and lax security procedures at the lab, jointly funded by the Chinese and U.S., posed a serious risk of unleashing a “new SARS-like pandemic.”

In fact, in 2004, foreshadowing the current disaster, there were two serious accidents at the high-security Beijing Virology lab, infecting two researchers with the dangerous SARS virus.

Ebright, who has been speaking out on lab safety since the early 2000s, said this about the dangerous security procedures at the Wuhan labs:

“ . . . bat coronaviruses at Wuhan [Center for Disease Control] and Wuhan Institute of Virology routinely were collected and studied at BSL-2 {Biosecurity Level 2), which provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers. Virus collection, culture, isolation, or animal infection at BSL-2 with a virus having the transmission characteristics of the outbreak virus would pose substantial risk of infection of a lab worker, and from the lab worker, the public.”

Politics most foul

The Trump Administration did nothing about the repeated warnings from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 2018, concerning the dangerous practices at the at the Wuhan Lab. Nor scientists at the NIH and the World Health Organization (WHO) who were supposedly monitoring the lab’s coronavirus experiments. After the outbreak happened, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) silenced or “disappeared” scientists and journalists who had earlier published research or news articles indicating that the COVID-19 virus leaked from a government lab and infected researchers.

As the Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk wrote :

“Faced with the coronavirus threat, Chinese authorities, according to comprehensive reports by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times , suppressed whistleblowers, ignored critical evidence and responded so tardily to the outbreak that they moved to compensate for their failures with a draconian lockdown . . .”.

Frantically covering their tracks, the CCP removed every scientific article and news report from the internet and public record which contradicted their official story. Aiding and abetting the CCP/Biopharm cover-up were the gatekeepers at Facebook (now heavily invested in Big Pharma), who censored and removed an article by Steve Mosher, published by the NY Post on Feb. 22, which called the official story into question. Facebook finally unblocked the NY Post article after it was revealed that Facebook’s objective “fact checker,” Danielle E. Anderson, was in fact previously a paid researcher at the same Wuhan lab whose lax security so alarmed State Department officials.

Trying hard to cover up the fact that they ignored the repeated warnings of the State Department and intelligence officials, the Trump Administration and the entire U.S. Biopharm and Vaccine Establishment are doing their utmost to uphold the official Chinese-scripted story. Especially troubling to the powers that be is the fact that the criminally negligent Wuhan Lab bat experiments were being funded , at least in part, by Dr. Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, along with the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch—even after these types of germ warfare experiments had been banned in the U.S.

Commander-in-Chief Trump himself, in between suggesting people might want to ingest or inject some disinfectants for COVID-19 protection, goes back and forth on the “bat in the market” theory, torn between rousing his populist base by denouncing the “Chinese Virus,” and siding with his good friend, and Corporate America’s most important business partner, Xi Jinping, the Chinese Dictator, who just happens to control not only trillions of dollars in U.S. Treasury Bonds and exports, but the medical equipment, Pharma drugs and lab chemicals that are in such short supply in the U.S.

Trump also has millions of dollars in real estate loans coming due from Chinese banks next year.

In an Instagram post , Robert Kennedy Jr. exposes the complicity of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the supposed “rational voice” of the Trump Administration on COVID-19, in the Wuhan disaster:

“The Daily Mail today reports that it has uncovered documents showing that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID gave $3.7 million to scientists at the Wuhan Lab at the center of Coronavirus leak scrutiny. According to the British paper, ‘the federal grant funded experiments on bats from the caves where the virus is believed to have originated.’ Background: following the 2002-2003 SARS coronavirus outbreak, NIH funded a collaboration by Chinese scientists, U.S. military virologists from the bioweapons lab at Ft. Detrick & NIH scientists from NIAID to prevent future coronavirus outbreaks by studying the evolution of virulent strains from bats in human tissues. Those efforts included ‘gain of function’ research that used a process called ‘accelerated evolution’ to create COVID Pandemic superbugs: enhanced bat borne COVID mutants more lethal and more transmissible than wild COVID. Fauci’s studies alarmed scientists around the globe who complained, according a Dec. 2017 NY Times article that ‘these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.’ Dr. Mark Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health’s Communicable Disease Center told the Times that Dr. Fauci’s NIAID experiments ‘have given us some modest scientific knowledge and done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemic, and yet risked creating an accidental pandemic.’ In October 2014, following a series of federal laboratory mishaps that narrowly missed releasing these deadly engineered viruses, President Obama ordered the halt to all federal funding for Fauci’s dangerous experiments. It now appears that Dr. Fauci may have dodged the federal restrictions by shifting the research to the military lab in Wuhan. Congress needs to launch an investigation of NIAD’s mischief in China.”

Kennedy also calls out two of the other supposed “health experts” on the Trump team, Robert Redfield and Deborah Birx:

“Redfield, Birx & Fauci lead the White House #coronavirus task force. In 1992, two military investigators charged Redfield & Birx with engaging in ‘a systematic pattern of data manipulation, inappropriate statistical analyses & misleading data presentation in an apparent attempt to promote the usefulness of the GP160 AIDS vaccine.’ A subsequent Air Force tribunal on Scientific Fraud and Misconduct agreed that Redfield’s ‘misleading or, possibly, deceptive’ information ‘seriously threatens his credibility as a researcher and has the potential to negatively impact AIDS research funding for military institutions as a whole. His allegedly unethical behavior creates false hope and could result in premature deployment of the vaccine.’ The tribunal recommended investigation by a ‘fully independent outside investigative body.’ Dr. Redfield confessed to D.O.D. interrogators and to the tribunal, that his analyses were faulty and deceptive. He agreed to publicly correct them. Afterward, he continued making his false claims at 3 subsequent international HIV conferences, & perjured himself in testimony before Congress, swearing that his vaccine cured HIV. Their gambit worked. Based upon his testimony, Congress appropriated $20 million to the military to support Redfield/Birx’s research project. Public Citizen complained in a 1994 letter to the Congressional Committee’s Henry Waxman that the money caused the Army to kill the investigation & ‘whitewash’ Redfield’s crimes. The fraud propelled Birx & Redfield into stellar careers as health officials. Docs obtained via Tom Paine."

Although the Chinese government and most of the U.S. political establishment continue to support the official “bat in the market” story, the majority of Americans, do not. As reported in the UK’s Sunday Times:

“According to a Pew Research poll, only 43 percent think the virus came about naturally, while a sizeable 29 percent believe it was made in a laboratory.”

Journalism most foul

It is frustrating, and indeed alarming, that so few independent journalists, scientists, activists, and public officials have thus far been willing to question the “official story.”

For 30 years now, myself and others have warned about the dangers of genetically engineered foods and crops and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in general, including gene-altered bioweapons, gene drives, and the new CRISPR gene-editing technologies.

Now it appears that our worst fears have materialized.

We need a global public inquiry, led by independent scientists, to gather the evidence on what really happened with COVID-19, followed by an International Biowarfare Crimes Tribunal, so that we can bring the Chinese, U.S. and other perpetrators of this pandemic to justice, and prevent this type of disaster from ever happening again.

It’s time to shut down every Biosafety/Biowar lab in the world (including Bayer and Monsanto’s lab) and implement a true global ban on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), including all atomic, chemical and biological weapons and WMD experimentation.

Until we do this, none of us will ever be safe again.

The so-called progressive media in America, with a few exceptions, have up until now failed to investigate the real causes of the COVID-19 pandemic, partly out of ignorance of the machinations and arrogant recklessness of the gene engineers and bio-warfare scientists, partly out of fear of appearing to agree with Trump’s racist rantings, or even worse, being branded a “conspiracy theorist” by Establishment Democrats and mass media outlets.

And speaking of conspiracies and murder most foul, almost everyone seems to have forgotten about the nationwide panic surrounding the post-9/11 2001 anthrax bioterrorist attacks—used to help justify the invasion of Iraq—against liberal members of the media and the U.S. Congress. Then and now, it was clear that these attacks were carried out not by Arab terrorists, nor a single crazed individual, but by a yet unidentified cabal who engineered and deployed weaponized spores from the U.S. military biowarfare lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

But perhaps you think we shouldn’t worry so much, since a blockbuster lineup of anti-COVID vaccines are on the way, funded by the Chinese government, Big Pharma and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, likely including some of the same gene engineers who weaponized COVID-19?

Never mind that Bill Gates, Monsanto, the Gene Giants and Big Pharma appear quite willing to join up with Facebook and Google to implement a 24/7 totalitarian medical surveillance state, with everyone injected with a mandatory and expensive COVID-19 vaccine, while the world’s dictators, corporate criminals and billionaires hunker down in their underground mansions and bunkers.

Never mind that most flu vaccines up until now don’t work that well, especially against constantly mutating viruses like COVID-19, or that they’re routinely laced with aluminum adjuvants and mercury preservatives.

Never mind that perhaps our only real defense against biowarfare is to stop eating Big Ag and Big Food’s poison products, and instead strengthen our health and our immune systems, clean up the world’s air, water and environment, shut down factory farms, stop destroying wildlife habitat and pray that herd immunity eventually stops the spread of COVID-19, since so many of us have already been infected, but are asymptomatic.

In the meantime, please don’t believe everything you read in the corporate mass media, Facebook or even the progressive press. Stay in touch with and support those of us determined to seek and defend the truth, fight for freedom and justice, and organize for a regenerative future and climate.

Don’t forget to eat healthy, organic, regenerative foods, take your immune-boosting supplements, get as much exercise, fresh air and sunshine as possible, wash your hands frequently, stay safe, and stay out of the way of those most vulnerable.

Please sign our petition demanding an end to genetic engineering of viruses.

Venceremos. We shall overcome.

Ronnie Cummins is co-founder of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) and Regeneration International , and the author of “ Grassroots Rising: A Call to Action on Food, Farming, Climate and a Green New Deal .” To keep up with OCA’s news and alerts, sign up here .