Is This The Long Awaited Pandemic?

[Ed Jewett]

Thanks, Peter Presland, for posting that great Radar interview with John Young.

[Magda Hassan]

Tamiflu-resistant swine flu spreads 'between patients'


By Fergus Walsh
Health correspondent, BBC News


Tamiflu is used to treat swine flu

Health officials say a Tamiflu-resistant strain of swine flu has spread between hospital patients.
Five patients on a unit treating people with severe underlying health conditions at the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, were infected.
Three appear to have acquired the infection in hospital.
They are thought to be the first confirmed cases of person-to-person transmission of a Tamiflu-resistant strain in the world.
There have been several dozen reports around the world of people developing resistance to Tamiflu while taking the drug - but they have not passed on the strain to others.
Just one possible cases of person-to-person transmission of a resistant strain has been recorded - between two people at a US summer camp - and this has never been confirmed.
Two of the University Hospital Wales patients have recovered and have been discharged from hospital, one is in critical care and two are being treated on the ward.
The health officials stressed there was no risk to anyone else.
They said tests were being carried out to confirm exactly what happened.
The UK has bought enough doses of Tamiflu, which can shorten the duration of swine flu and reduce the risk of complications, for half the population.
Serious concern
So any spread of a Tamiflu-resistant strain of the illness is a serious public health concern.
The H1N1 virus has been remarkably stable since it emerged in April, but virologists had been half expecting new resistant strains to emerge.
Dr Roland Salmon, director of the National Public Health Service for Wale's Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre, said: "The emergence of influenza A viruses that are resistant to Tamiflu is not unexpected in patients with serious underlying conditions and suppressed immune systems, who still test positive for the virus despite treatment.
"In this case, the resistant strain of swine flu does not appear to be any more severe than the swine flu virus that has been circulating since April."
Dr Tony Jewell, Chief Medical Officer for Wales, said: "We know that people with suppressed immune systems are more susceptible to the swine flu virus, which is why they are a priority group under the first phase of the vaccination programme in Wales which is progressing at pace.
"We have stringent processes in place for monitoring for antiviral resistance in the UK so that we can spot resistance early and the causes can be investigated and the cases managed.
"Identifying these cases shows that our systems are working so patients should be reassured.
"Treatment with Tamiflu is still appropriate for swine flu and people should continue to take Tamiflu when they are prescribed it.
"It's also important that good hygiene practices are followed to further prevent the spread of the virus."
Professor Peter Openshaw, a respiratory physician at Imperial College London, said of the spread: "It's not surprising that this has happened, indeed it has always been anticipated".
Dr Ronald Cutler, deputy director of biomedical science at Queen Mary, University of London, said: "Shortening the time taken to produce new vaccines and improving the methods to control and treat the disease while vaccines are being made would be a way forward".
On Thursday it was announced that more than three million healthy children under five across the UK will be offered the swine flu jab.
Figures released on Thursday showed an estimated 53,000 new cases of swine flu in England in the last week, down from 64,000 in the week before.
In Scotland, the figure was 21,200, down from about 21,500 in the previous seven days.
The rate of flu-like illnesses diagnosed by GPs in Wales dropped to 36 cases for every 100,000 people from 65.8 the previous week.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8370859.stm

[Ed Jewett]

Scientist Repeats Swine Flu Lab-Escape Claim in Published Study

November 25th, 2009 From where did the 2009 ’swine-origin’ influenza A virus (H1N1) emerge?
Virology Journal 2009, 6:207 doi:10.1186/1743-422X-6-207
Adrian J Gibbs, John S Armstrong, Jean C Downie
Via: Bloomberg:
Adrian Gibbs, the virologist who said in May that swine flu may have escaped from a laboratory, published his findings today, renewing discussion about the origins of the pandemic virus.
The new H1N1 strain, which was discovered in Mexico and the U.S. in April, may be the product of three strains from three continents that swapped genes in a lab or a vaccine-making plant, Gibbs, and fellow Australian scientists wrote in Virology Journal. The authors analyzed the genetic makeup of the virus and found its origin could be more simply explained by human involvement than a coincidence of nature.
Their study, published in a free, online journal reviewed by other scientists, follows debate among researchers six months ago, when Gibbs asked the World Health Organization to consider the hypothesis. After reviewing Gibbs’ initial three-page paper, WHO and other organizations concluded the pandemic strain was a naturally occurring virus and not laboratory-derived.
“It is important that the source of the new virus be found if we wish to avoid future pandemics rather than just trying to minimize the consequences after they have emerged,” Gibbs and colleagues John Armstrong and Jean Downie said in today’s eight- page study.
Gibbs and Armstrong are on the emeritus faculty at the Australian National University in Canberra and Downie is affiliated with the Centre for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology Laboratory Services at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital, according to the study.
While the exact source of the new H1N1 strain is a mystery, their research has “raised many new questions,” they said. The authors compared the genetic blueprints of flu strains stored in the free database Genbank and found the pandemic virus’s nearest ancestors circulate in pigs.
‘Simplest Explanation’
While migratory birds may have acted as conduit for their convergence, human involvement in bringing them together is “by far the simplest explanation,” Gibbs said in a telephone interview today.

[Kate Story]

I live in Georgia approx. 45 miles from Madison where there is a roadside field that now holds over 500,000 plastic grave liners complete with lids. The CDC leased this land and it is reported that the liners were purchased by FEMA. I have lived in this same location for 25 years and this stockpile only began a few years ago. It is a bone chilling sight to say the least. From reports on the net these coffin stockpiles can now be found all over the nation. Someone is expecting or PLANNING something for millions of people.

Once you view the liners, you can continue on up toward Atlanta, home of the CDC, and stop at Elberton Ga. where the ghastly Illuminati Guidestones stand in the middle of a pasture. Whoever had those monuments constructed paid out millions as they are made of tons blue Georgia granite so I would hardly think it is a joke. Once you read the first 'commandment' on the stones you will get the message. I have a feeling all of what is happening now was planned to take place in the mid 80's but was hindered. Here are two very informative videos. Don't miss the second one.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=gu...3879249963

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=gu...6871235156

[Ed Jewett]

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Public Menace-Private Profit: America's Biowarfare Alliance

In September, The New York Times reported that a University of Chicago researcher, Malcolm Casadaban, died after exposure to "a weakened and ordinarily harmless strain of the bacteria that cause plague."

According to the Times, "Dr. Casadaban, an associate professor at the university, was studying the bacteria to create a better vaccine for plague ... in part because of concerns about its possible use in bioterrorism." The Times averred that "infectious disease experts said researchers rarely die from being infected with an ordinarily harmless strain of the bacteria or viruses they are studying."

Which of course, raise inevitable and troubling questions: just how "safe" was the strain of plague studied by Casadaban, and was this research part of a new round of illicit, highly compartmented experiments meant to bulk-up America's first-strike arsenals?

While there is no evidence that Casadaban ever worked on banned weapons, indeed the molecular geneticist was a leading expert into the origins of bubonic plague, the casual agent responsible for the Black Death, and an opponent of biological warfare, what of his colleagues?

One expert, Dr. Kenneth Alexander, told the Times "there might have been something unusual about the bacteria that caused it to be dangerous, a mutation, for example." Alexander hastened to add that "it was more likely" that the researcher had a "pre-existing condition," one that "made him more susceptible to infection."

Perhaps. But according to Edmond Hammond, director of the now-defunct Sunshine Project, records pried from the federal government through the Freedom of Information Act uncovered a disturbing pattern of criminal neglect amongst university and corporate officials.

Hammond discovered, and shared with Congress back in 2007, information that should have blown the lid off of one of America's dirtiest--and deadliest--little secrets. In excruciating detail, citing case after case, Hammond told congressional investigators that amongst the deadly pathogens that escaped containment in a series of underreported accidents were the following substances: Plague, anthrax, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, brucellosis and Q fever.

Lab workers became sick, communities were threatened and yet, illicit work with these dangerous germs continue; just another day at the office for militarists, corporate grifters and their academic accomplices.

While Dr. Casadaban's death is a tragedy for family and friends, was a "pre-existing condition" responsible for the scientist's demise or was something more sinister taking place behind closed doors without his knowledge?

In the former Soviet Union, the Sunshine Project revealed that scientists involved in illegal offensive biowarfare research developed "plague bacteria (Yersinia pestis) ... that were resistant to 16 different antibiotics. Today, the genetic introduction of antibiotic resistance into bacterial pathogens is routine work in almost any microbiology laboratory."

While it is quite possible that Casadaban's death was a freak accident, nothing however can, or should, be ruled out.

Fanciful speculation? Better think again!

In June, Global Security Newswire reported that during a routine inventory at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., safety officers "found nearly 10,000 more vials of potentially lethal pathogens than were known to be stored at the site."

Claiming that there are "multiple layers of security," Ft. Detrick's deputy commander Col. Mark Kortepeter said it was "extremely unlikely" that any of the center's samples had been smuggled out. "Unlikely," but not impossible.

Amongst the 9,200 extra samples uncovered during the inventory were "bacterial agents that cause plague, anthrax and tularemia; Venezuelan, Eastern and Western equine encephalitis viruses; Rift valley fever virus; Junin virus; Ebola virus; and botulinum neurotoxins." In other words substances which can, and probably have, been weaponized by the Pentagon.

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, with "biodefense" as a cover, the U.S. National Security State has spent tens of billions of dollars ($56.9 billion since 2001, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation) on secretive programs investigating the deadliest pathogens known to nature, or ginning up new chimeric monsters in any number of privately-run labs.

The antinuclear watchdog group Tri-Valley CAREs (TVC) obtained documents under the Freedom of Information Act that revealed how Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a "limited liability corporation" overseen by the University of California, Bechtel, BWX Technologies, Washington Group International and Battelle, routinely violated federal regulations and had carried out "restricted experiments" that resulted in the inadvertent release of anthrax in 2005.

Noting that "the relevant details of the 2005 anthrax accident were kept from the public at the time, just as happened with the illegal experiments that are coming to light today," TVC learned that this work is expanding, with little in the way of effective oversight by Congress or indeed, by any regulatory agency.

LLNL has now opened a Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) facility and is planning to experiment with pathogens exquisitely suited for use as offensive weapons. Activities contemplated include, "aerosolizing (spraying) pathogens such as plague, tularemia and Q fever, in addition to anthrax. Moreover, government documents disclose that planned experiments in the BSL-3 include genetic modification and potentially novel manipulation of viruses, prions and other agents."

In October, TVC filed a motion for summary judgement in Federal Court in the Northern District of California "aiming to stop the operation of a bio-warfare agent research facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) main site in Livermore, California."

According to TVC, "the large inventory of multiple bio-weapon agents, the presence of genetically modified variants, and the fact that some of the pathogens have been put into just the right form to be effectively spread via an airborne release, all serve to make the Livermore BSL-3 a potential magnet for terrorism from either an internal or external source."

Currently, some 400 research facilities and more than 15,000 individuals are cleared "to have access to select agents, which include anthrax, smallpox and the Ebola virus," according to a September report by the National Research Council.

The NRC averred that lax security at laboratories that work with select agents "pose a severe risk to human or animal health," risks that "have grown as the amount of research has increased in recent years."

And if one or more of these researchers should "go rogue," for money or as a plausibly deniable component of a Pentagon or CIA operation, doesn't the public have the right to expect the civilian side of government would weed out such miscreants from work with these deadly toxins?

A History of Illicit Research

The close proximity of U.S. biological warfare programs and the pharmaceutical industry is hardly an historical accident. From its inception, American research drew from a rich pool of biomedical researchers backed by the formidable technological resources of Big Pharma.

As Leonard Cole revealed in his 1988 exposé, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas, biowarfare research during World War II and the Cold War period was a public/private affair in which the government provided funds to state agencies and private corporations alike in the hope that such solicitous relationships would lead to breakthroughs in the area of offensive weapons or what is now euphemistically called "biodefense."

Indeed, none other than George W. Merck, the president of the Merck Pharmaceutical Company, was a top-flight consultant to the Secretary of War. In that capacity, Merck and his company provided expertise and technological know-how for work on America's nascent biowar programs. In a 1946 report to the Secretary of War penned by Merck, Cole revealed that the program "included research, testing, development, and production of biological agents," all carried out as Merck wrote, in the "strictest secrecy."

While wartime fears of biological attacks by the Axis powers represented a clear and present danger to the United States and their allies as revelations of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan's active programs attest, this information was scrupulously covered-up and suppressed for decades. Indeed after the war, the United States actively recruited these sociopaths into their biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.

As is now known, America's military establishment struck a devil's bargain with the same war criminals who, in the name of science, visited death upon millions. While the doctors and biologists who filled the ranks of Japan's Unit 731 hadn't achieved a "breakthrough" in terms of delivery systems' development, as researcher Sheldon H. Harris revealed in Factories of Death, they possessed an invaluable resource sought by U.S. bioweaponeers: detailed records of the Japanese Army's obscene human experiments.

After the war with a new official enemy looming on the horizon--the Soviet Union--Merck admonished the state to maintain a strong biological warfare program, writing: "Work in this field, born of the necessity of war, cannot be ignored in time of peace; it must be continued on a sufficient scale to provide an adequate defense."

By 1948, the newly-emerging national security state stood-up a Committee on Biological Warfare within the Department of Defense to do just that. Shortly thereafter, the Central Intelligence Agency, particularly the Company's Technical Services Division (TSD), so-called "wizards of Langley," ran a series of illicit programs that sought to "secure the realm" through the application of the latest advances in the biological and psychological sciences.

Over decades, projects such as Bluebird, Artichoke, MKDELTA, MKNAOMI and MKULTRA, variously identified by researchers as "mind control" projects--which they were--garnered outrage when it was revealed during the 1970s that the Agency conspired with leading psychiatrists, psychologists, medical doctors, biologists and academic institutions in funding obscene human experiments employing psychoactive drugs such as LSD, mescaline and BZ on unwitting test subjects.

As the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, popularly known as the Church Committee, revealed during hearings to examine the Watergate scandals of the 1970s, the Pentagon's own programs ran simultaneously with those of the CIA. The Committee discovered:

In many respects, the Army's testing programs duplicated research which had already been conducted by the CIA. They certainly involved the risks inherent in the early phases of drug testing. In the Army's tests, as with those of the CIA, individual rights were also subordinated to national security considerations; informed consent and followup examinations of subjects were neglected in efforts to maintain the secrecy of the tests. Finally, the command and control problems which were apparent in the CIA's programs are paralleled by a lack of clear authorization and supervision in the Army's programs. (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, Project MKULTRA, The CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, United States Senate, August 3, 1977, Appendix A, p. 92)

While these projects may only have achieved modest success in standing up programmable assassins, as evidence on Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan may suggest, MKULTRA and its spin-offs were primarily behavioral modification programs subsequently useful for what are now euphemistically termed "enhanced interrogation techniques," e.g., torture and as a formidable bioweapons project.

Indeed, Ft. Detrick's Special Operations Division (SOD), chock-a-block with CIA officers and assets, was, by the early 1950s experimenting with, and assembling biologically-based assassination weapons that were easily concealed and could be deployed by "wet work" specialists to murder foreign leaders such as the multiple failed plots against Fidel Castro, or Patrice Lumumba attest. As researcher Ed Regis documented, Congolese Prime Minister Lumumba was a thorn in the secret state's side.

Refusing to play ball with Washington so as to facilitate the extraction of that nation's vast mineral wealth by American multinational corporations, Lumumba sealed his fate when he sought military assistance from the Soviet Union. At that point, the national liberation leader became an object for Agency "executive action."

It was around this time that the CIA's Deputy Director for Plans, Richard Bissell, had a couple of informal talks with his scientific adviser, Sid Gottlieb, concerning the subject of the covert assassination of foreign leaders. Gottlieb suggested that biological agents were perfect for the task: they were invisible, untraceable, and, if intelligently selected and delivered, not even liable to create a suspicion of foul play. The target would get sick and die exactly as if he'd been attacked by a natural outbreak of an endemic disease. Plenty of lethal or incapacitating germs were out there and available, Gottlieb told Bissell, and they were easily accessible to the CIA. (Ed Regis, The Biology of Doom, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999, pp. 182-183)

While proponents of continued research with nature's deadliest pathogens argue that the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) allows for purely "defensive" work to protect the public against potential bioattacks, this mendacious logic studiously avoids the issue of the dual-use nature of this work.

Cole unearthed documents, including a 1968 official history of Ft. Detrick penned by a Pentagon bioweaponeer who asserted forthrightly that "research and development in the offensive aspects of BW proceeded hand in hand with defensive developments for, in truth, the two are almost inseparable."

But MKULTRA and its grisly spin-offs are a thing of the past, right? Not by a long shot!

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist and critic of the torture-enabling American Psychological Association (APA), revealed November 23, that the group had organized a workshop in 2007 at the Arlington, Virginia headquarters of the dodgy RAND Corporation.

That conference, entitled "Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory," discussed new and novel ways "to utilize drugs and sensory bombardment techniques to break down interrogatees. Those are signal techniques of psychological torture long utilized by the CIA and other intelligence agencies and military around the world."

Citing APA documents, Kaye discovered that APA and their friends at CIA were actively looking for "pharmacological agents ... known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior." Kaye learned that amongst the probative questions driving the spooks and contractors was this revealing sentence: "What are sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors? How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?"

According to numerous researchers, the CIA, and the psychologists and psychiatrists they contracted to work with them, including many of the top behavioral scientists of their day, experimented with many drugs in their quest to find a “truth” drug that would open up the recalcitrant and expose the liar and the dissembler. The CIA has declassified a paper from its in-house intelligence journal from the early 1960s, "'Truth' Drugs in Interrogation," where they discuss research on drugs for interrogation ranging from scopolamine, amphetamines, and barbiturates to cannabis, LSD, and mescaline. The CIA authors discuss the limitations of using drugs, based on research, and conclude that a special use for drugs may be found in detection of deception. (Jeffrey Kaye, "Who Will Investigate CIA/RAND/APA Torture 'Workshop'?," The Public Record, November 21, 2009)

What was true throughout the Cold War period is just as true today and remains a pressing public health issue. As Global Security Newswire reported in August, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) began construction on a new facility at Ft. Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. The brief report states that "new site will allow for more study of lethal diseases and should have space for 952 staffers, compared to the 800 now using facilities that date back four to five decades."

While the National Academy of Sciences "plans to assess health and safety issues raised by observers who believe there has been insufficient consideration regarding the potential release of an infectious agent from the facility," the same can also be said for the BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities in private hands, under contract to the U.S. government.

As I reported in "Bringing the (Bio) War Home," the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists revealed that "massive U.S. biodefense spending and a buildup of high-containment laboratories throughout the country might have created an internal security risk that no outside terrorist group could ever duplicate. Nearly two dozen new federal and many more new private biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories have been built in recent years, meaning a large cadre of scientists has access to extraordinarily lethal material."

And if today's bioweaponeers have their way, such risks will increase exponentially with untold consequences for us all.

Building Banned Weapons

Leading experts, as I reported in August, have derided the possibility that terrorist groups have the know-how to fabricate smallpox or other pathogens into biological weapons as a massive "fraud ... and a substantial one" perpetrated on the American people.

Hysterical claims by securocrats that "bioterrorism is one of the most pressing problems we have on the planet today," an assertion made by Dr. Tara O'Toole, the Undersecretary of Science and Technology at the Department of Homeland Security, is not borne out by the facts.

Indeed, such claims not only distort available evidence that terrorist groups have such capabilities but conceal the more salient fact that Pentagon weaponeers continue to build banned weapons.

According to Jeanne Guillemin, author of Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism, the Pentagon and CIA made and tested a model of a Soviet anthrax bomb and created an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax.

After consulting with scientists who strongly suggested that the CIA anthrax bomb project would violate the BWC, "CIA lawyers decided the project was within the allowed realm of defensive research," Guillemin revealed.


Project Clear Vision, a joint investigation by the CIA and the Battelle Memorial Institute, under contract to the Agency, reconstructed and tested a Soviet-era anthrax bomblet in order to test its dissemination characteristics. The Agency "decided the same" for the small, fully functional bioweapons facility built under the rubric of Project Bacchus.

The third initiative, Project Jefferson, led to the development of an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax based on a Soviet model. After the outgoing Clinton administration hesitated to give the CIA the go-ahead for the project, the Bush regime's National Security Council gave the Pentagon permission. "They believed" Guillemin wrote, "the Pentagon had the right to investigate genetically altered pathogens in the name of biodefense, 'to save American lives'."

Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon authorized the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), one of the most secretive and heavily-outsourced Defense Department branches, to re-create the deadly anthrax strain.

Commenting on the close proximity of the 2001 anthrax provocation and the rush towards the invasion and occupation of Iraq, constitutional law expert Glenn Greenwald writes that the anthrax attack "played at least as large of a role as the 9/11 attack itself, if not larger, in creating the general climate of fear that prevailed for years in the U.S. and specifically how the anthrax episode was exploited by leading media and political figures to gin up intense hostility towards Iraq."

Which is why, according to Greenwald, "it's so striking how we've collectively flushed this terrorist attack down the memory hole as though it doesn't exist." Indeed, "what makes this particularly significant is that the anthrax attack is unresolved and uninvestigated."

Here we have one of the most consequential political events of the last decade at least--a lethal biological terrorist attack aimed at key U.S. Senators and media figures, which even the FBI claims originated from a U.S. military lab. The then-British Ambassador to the U.S. is now testifying what has long been clear: that this episode played a huge role in enabling the attack on Iraq. Even our leading mainstream, establishment-serving media outlets--and countless bio-weapons experts--believe that we do not have real answers about who perpetrated this attack and how. And there is little apparent interest in investigating in order to find out. Evidently, this is just another one of those things that we'll relegate to "the irrelevant past," and therefore deem it unworthy of attention from our future-gazing, always-distracted minds. (Glenn Greenwald, "A key British official reminds us of the forgotten anthrax attack," Salon, November 27, 2009)

On and on it goes, America's headlong rush into the abyss.

While the American people believed the election of Barack Obama signaled a change in direction from decades' long policies that have brought the planet to the brink of disaster, those hopes are little more than cynical illusions manufactured by media specialists and spin-doctors, the ubiquitous army of "message force multipliers" who do the bidding of their corporatist masters.

After all, $57 billion buys much in the way of silence.



Posted by Antifascist at 5:14 PM

[Magda Hassan]

WHO ‘Swine Flu Pope’ under investigation for gross conflict of interest
By F. William Engdahl
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Dec 15, 2009, 00:22


The man with the nickname “Dr Flu,” Professor Albert Osterhaus, of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Holland, has been named by Dutch media researchers as the person at the center of the worldwide Swine Flu H1N1 Influenza A 2009 pandemic hysteria. Not only is Osterhaus the connecting person in an international network that has been described as the Pharma Mafia, he is THE key advisor to WHO on influenza and is intimately positioned to personally profit from the billions of euros in vaccines allegedly aimed at H1N1.
Earlier this year the Second Chamber of the Netherlands Parliament undertook an investigation into alleged conflicts of interest and financial improprieties of the well-known Dr. Osterhaus. Outside of Holland and the Dutch media, the only note of the sensational investigation into Osterhaus’ business affairs came in a tiny note in the respected British magazine, Science.
Osterhaus’s credentials and expertise in his field were not in question. What is in question, according to a short report published by the journal Science, are his links to corporate interests that stand to potentially profit from the swine flu pandemic. Science carried the following brief note in its October 16 2009 issue about Osterhaus:
“For the past 6 months, one could barely switch on the television in the Netherlands without seeing the face of famed virus hunter Albert Osterhaus talking about the swine flu pandemic. Or so it has seemed. Osterhaus, who runs an internationally renowned virus lab at Erasmus Medical Center, has been Mr. Flu. But last week, his reputation took a nosedive after it was alleged that he has been stoking pandemic fears to promote his own business interests in vaccine development. Last week, his reputation took a nosedive after it was alleged that he has been stoking pandemic fears to promote his own business interests in vaccine development. As Science went to press, the Dutch House of Representatives had even slated an emergency debate about the matter.” [1]
On November 3, 2009, it appeared that Osterhaus emerged with at least the damage somewhat under control. An updated Science blog noted, “The House of Representatives of the Netherlands today rejected a motion asking the government to sever all ties with virologist Albert Osterhaus of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, who had been accused of conflicts of interest in his role as a government adviser. But Dutch health minister Ab Klink, meanwhile, announced a “Sunshine Act” compelling scientists to disclose their financial ties to companies.” [2]
The Minister, Ab Klink, reportedly a personal friend of Osterhaus, [3] subsequently issued a statement on the ministry’s website, claiming that Osterhaus was but one of many scientific advisers to the ministry on vaccines for H1N1, and that the Ministry “knew” about the financial interests of Osterhaus. [4] Nothing out of the ordinary, merely pursuit of science and public health, so it seemed.
More careful investigation into the Osterhaus Affair suggests that the world-renowned Dutch Virologist may be at the very center of a multi-billion Euro pandemic fraud which has used human beings in effect as human guinea pigs with untested vaccines and in cases now emerging, resulting in deaths or severe bodily paralysis or injury.
The ‘Bird Shit Hoax’
Albert Osterhaus is no small fish. He stands at the global nexus of every major virus panic of the past decade from the mysterious SARS deaths in Hong Kong, where current WHO Director Margaret Chan got her start in her career as a local health official. According to his official bio at the European Commission, Osterhaus was engaged in April 2003, at the height of the panic over SARS (Severe Acquired Respiratory Syndrome) in investigation of the Hong Kong outbreak of respiratory illnesses. The EU report states, “he again showed his skill at moving fast to tackle a serious problem. Within three weeks he had proved that the disease was caused by a newly discovered coronavirus that resides in civet cats, other carnivorous animals or bats.” [5]
Then Osterhaus moved on as SARS cases vanished from view, this time publicizing dangers of what he claimed was H5N1 Avian Flu. In 1997 he had already began sounding the alarm following the death in Hong Kong of a three-year-old who Osterhaus learned had had direct contact with birds. Osterhaus went into high gear lobbying across Holland and Europe claiming that a deadly new mutation of avian flu had jumped to humans and that drastic measures were required. He claimed to be the first scientist in the world to show that H5N1 could be transferred into humans. [6]
In a BBC interview in October 2005 on the danger of Avian Flu, Osterhaus declared, “ . . . if the virus manages indeed to, to mutate itself in such a way that it can transmit from human to human, then we have a completely different situation, we might be at the start of the pandemic.” He added, “there is a real chance that this virus could be trafficked by the birds all the way to Europe. There is a real risk, but nobody can estimate the risk at this moment, because we haven’t done the experiments.” [7] It never did manage to mutate, but he was ready to “do the experiments,” presumably for a hefty fee.
To bolster his frightening pandemic scenario, Osterhaus and his lab assistants in Rotterdam began assiduously assembling and freezing samples of, well, bird shit, in an attempt to build a more scientific argument. He claimed that at certain times of the year up to 30 percent of all European birds acted as carriers of the deadly avian virus, H5N1. He also claimed that farmers working with hens and chickens were then exposed. Osterhaus briefed journalists who dutifully noted his alarm. Politicians were alerted. He wrote papers proposing that the far away deaths in Asia from what he termed H5N1 were coming to Europe, presumably on the wings or in the innards of deadly sick infected birds. He claimed that migratory birds were carrying the deadly new disease as far west as Rügen and Ukraine. [8] He conveniently ignored the fact that birds do not migrate east to west but rather north to south.
Osterhaus’ Avian Flu alarm campaign really took off in 2003 when a Dutch veterinary doctor became ill and died. Osterhaus claimed the death was from H5N1. He convinced the Dutch government to order slaughter of millions of chickens. Yet no other infected persons died from the alleged H5N1. Osterhaus claimed that that was simply proof of the effectiveness of the preemptive slaughter campaign. [9]
Osterhaus claimed that bird feces were the source, via air bombardment or droppings, onto populations and birds below. That was the vehicle for the spread of the deadly new Asian strain of H5N1 he insisted.
There was only one problem with the now voluminous frozen samples of diverse bird excrement he and his associated had collected and frozen at his institute. There was not one single confirmed example of H5N1 virus found in any of his samples. At a May 2006 Congress of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), Osterhaus and his Erasmus colleagues were forced to admit that in testing 100,000 samples of their assiduously saved bird feces, they had discovered not one single case of H5N1 virus. [10]
At a WHO conference in Verona in 2008 titled “Avian influenza at the Human-Animal Interface,” in a presentation to scientific colleagues undoubtedly less impressed by appeals to pandemic emotion than the non-scientific public, Osterhaus admitted that “A proper risk assessment of H5N1 as the cause of a new pandemic cannot be made with the currently available information.” [11] By then, however, his sights were already firmly on other possible pandemic triggers to focus his vaccination activities.
Swine Flu and WHO corruption
When no mass wave of human deaths from Avian Flu materialized and after Roche, maker of Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline had banked billions of dollars in profits from worldwide government stockpiling of their dangerous and reportedly ineffective antiviral drugs, Tamiflu by Roche, and Relenza by GlaxoSmithKline, Osterhaus and other WHO advisers turned to other greener pastures.
By April 2009 their search seemed rewarded as La Gloria, a small Mexican village in Veracruz, reported a case of a small child ill with what had been diagnosed as “Swine Flu” or H1N1. With indecent haste, the propaganda apparatus of the World Health Organization in Geneva went into gear, with statements from the director-general Dr Margaret Chan, about a possible danger of a global pandemic.
Chan made such irresponsible statements as declaring “a public health emergency of international concern.” [12] The further cases of outbreak at La Gloria Mexico were reported on one medical website as, “a ‘strange’ outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm.” [13]
Notably those were symptoms which would make sense in terms of the proximity of one of the world’s largest pig industrial feeding concentrations at La Gloria owned by Smithfield Farms of the USA. Residents had picketed the Smithfield Farms site in Mexico for months complaining of severe respiratory problems from the fecal waste lagoons. That possible cause of the diseases in La Gloria apparently did not interest Osterhaus and his colleagues advising the WHO. The long-awaited “pandemic” that Osterhaus had predicted ever since his involvement with SARS in the Guandgong Province of China in 2003, was now finally at hand.
On June 11, 2009 Margaret Chan of WHO made the declaration of a Phase 6 “Pandemic Emergency” regarding the spread of H1N1 Influenza. Curiously in announcing it, she noted, “On present evidence, the overwhelming majority of patients experience mild symptoms and make a rapid and full recovery, often in the absence of any form of medical treatment.” She then added, ”Worldwide, the number of deaths is small . . . we do not expect to see a sudden and dramatic jump in the number of severe or fatal infections.”
It later was learned that Chan acted, following heated debates inside WHO, on the advice of the scientific advisory group of WHO, or SAGE, the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts. One of the members of SAGE at the time and today was Dr. Albert “Mr Flu” Osterhaus.
Not only was Osterhaus in a key position to advocate the panic-inducing WHO “Pandemic emergency” declaration. He was also chairman of the leading private European Scientific Working group on Influenza (ESWI), which describes itself as a “multidisciplinary group of key opinion leaders in influenza [that] aims to combat the impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza.” Osterhaus’ ESWI is the vital link as they themselves describe it, “between the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin and the University of Connecticut, USA.”
What is more significant about the ESWI is that its work is entirely financed by the same pharma mafia companies that make billions on the pandemic emergency as governments around the world are compelled to buy and stockpile vaccines on declaration of a WHO Pandemic. The funders of ESWI include H1N1 vaccine maker Novartis, Tamiflu distributor, Hofmann-La Roche, Baxter Vaccines, MedImmune, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Pasteur and others.
Not to lose the point, the world-leading virologist, official adviser on H1N1 to the governments of the UK and Holland, Dr Albert Osterhaus, head of the Department of Virology at the Erasmus Medical College of Rotterdam, also sat on the WHO’s elite SAGE and served as chairman at the same time of the pharma industry-sponsored ESWI, which in turn urged dramatic steps to vaccinate the world against the grave danger of a new Pandemic they insisted could rival the feared 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.
The Wall Street bank, JP Morgan, estimated that in large part as a result of the WHO pandemic decision, the giant pharma firms that also finance Osterhaus’ ESWI work, stand to reap some €7.5 to €10 billion in profits. [14]
A fellow member of WHO’s SAGE is Dr Frederick Hayden, of Britain’s Wellcome Trust and reportedly a close friend of Osterhaus. Hayden also receives money for “advisory” services from Roche and GlaxoSmithKline among other pharma giants involved in producing products related to the H1N1 panic.
Chairman of WHO’s SAGE is another British scientist, Prof. David Salisbury of the UK Department of Health. He also heads the WHO H1N1 Advisory Group. Salisbury is a robust defender of the pharma industry. He has been accused by UK health citizen health group One Click of covering up the proven links between vaccines and an explosive rise in infant autism as well as links between the vaccine Gardasil and palsy and even death. [15]
Then on September 28, 2009 the same Salisbury stated, “There is a very clear view in the scientific community that there is no risk from the inclusion of Thiomersal.” The vaccine being used for H1N1 in Britain is primarily produced by GlaxoSmithKlilne. It contains the mercury preservative Thiomersol. Because of growing evidence that Thiomersol in vaccines might be related to autism in children in the United States, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Public Health Service called for it to be removed from vaccines. [16]
Yet another SAGE member at WHO with intimate financial ties to the vaccine makers that benefit from SAGE’s recommendations to WHO is Dr. Arnold Monto, a paid consultant to vaccine maker MedImmune, Glaxo and ViroPharma.
Even more, the meetings of the “independent” scientists of SAGE are attended by “observers” who include, yes, the very vaccine producers GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Baxter and company. One might ask if the SAGE are supposed to be the world’s leading experts on flu and vaccines, why they would ask the vaccine makers to sit in.
In the past decade the WHO, in order to boost funds at its disposal entered into what it calls “public private partnerships.” Instead of receiving its funds solely from member United Nations governments as its original purpose had been, WHO today receives almost double its normal UN budget in the form of grants and financial support from private industry. The industry? The very drug and vaccine makers who benefit from decisions like the June 2009 H1N1 Pandemic emergency declaration. As the main financiers of the WHO bureaucracy, naturally the Pharma Mafia and their friends receive what has been called “open door red carpet treatment” in Geneva. [17]
In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in Germany, epidemiologist Dr. Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration, an organization of independent scientists evaluating all flu related studies, noted the implications of the privatization of WHO and the commercialization of health:
“ . . . one of the extraordinary features of this influenza -- and the whole influenza saga -- is that there are some people who make predictions year after year, and they get worse and worse. None of them so far have come about, and these people are still there making these predictions. For example, what happened with the bird flu, which was supposed to kill us all? Nothing. But that doesn’t stop these people from always making their predictions. Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur.
SPIEGEL: Who do you mean? The World Health Organization (WHO)?
Jefferson: The WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies. They’ve built this machine around the impending pandemic. And there’s a lot of money involved, and influence, and careers, and entire institutions! And all it took was one of these influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding . . . [18]
When asked if the WHO had deliberately declared the Pandemic Emergency in order to create a huge market for H1N1 vaccines and drugs, Jefferson replied,
“Don’t you think there’s something noteworthy about the fact that the WHO has changed its definition of pandemic? The old definition was a new virus, which went around quickly, for which you didn’t have immunity, and which created a high morbidity and mortality rate. Now the last two have been dropped, and that’s how swine flu has been categorized as a pandemic.” [19]
Conveniently enough, the WHO published the new Pandemic definition in April 2009 just in time to allow WHO, on advice of SAGE and others like Albert “Dr Flu” Osterhaus and David Salisbury, to declare the mild cases of flu dubbed H1N1 Influenza A to be declared Pandemic Emergency. [20]
In a relevant footnote, the Washington Post on December 8 in an article on the severity, or lack of same, of the world H1N1 „pandemic“ reported that, “with the second wave of H1N1 infections having crested in the United States, leading epidemiologists are predicting that the pandemic could end up ranking as the mildest since modern medicine began documenting influenza outbreaks.” [21]
Russian Parliamentarian and chairman of the Duma Health Committee, Igor Barinow has called on the Russian Representative to WHO in Geneva to order an official investigation into the growing evidence of massive corruption of the WHO by the pharmaceutical industry. “There are grave accusations of corruption within the WHO,” said Barinow. “An international commission of inquiry is urgently required.” [22]
Notes
1. Martin Enserink, In Holland, the Public Face of Flu Takes a Hit, Science, 16 October 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5951, pp. 350 – 351; DOI: 10.1126/science.326_350b.
2. Science, November 3, 2009, Roundup 11/3 The Brink Edition.
3. Article from Dutch, De Farma maffia Deel 1 Osterhaus BV, 28 November 2009.
4. Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport, Financiële belangen Osterhaus waren bekend Nieuwsbericht, 30 september 2009.
5. European Commission, “Research“, Dr Albert Osterhaus.
6. Ibid.
7. Jane Corbin, Interview with Dr Albert Osterhaus, BBC Panorama, 4 October, 2005.
8. Karin Steinberger, Vogelgrippe: Der Mann mit der Vogelperspektive, Seuddeutsche Zeitung, 20 October, 2005.
9. Ibid.
10. Schweinegrippe—Geldgieriger Psychopath Auslöser der Pandemie?.
11. Ab Osterhaus, External factors influencing H5N1 mutation/reassortment events with pandemic potential, OIE, 7-9 October 2008, Verona, Italy.
12. WHO Health Advisory, April 2009.
13. Biosurveillance,Swine Flu in Mexico- Timeline of Events, April 24, 2009.
14. Cited in Louise Voller, Kristian Villesen, Stærk lobbyisme bag WHO-beslutning om massevaccination, Information, Copenhagen, 15 November 2009.
15. Jane Bryant, et al, The One Click Group Response: Prof. David Salisbury Threatens Legal Action, 4 March, 2009.
16. Prof. David Salisbury cited in, Swine flu vaccine to contain axed additive, London Evening Standard, 28 September 2009.
17. Bert Ehgartner, Schwindel mit der Schweinegrippe Ist die Aufregung ein Coup der Pharmaindustrie?
18. Tom Jefferson, Interview with Epidemiologist Tom Jefferson: ‘A Whole Industry Is Waiting For A Pandemic’ Der Spiegel, 21 July 2009.
19. Ibid.
20. Louise Voller, Kristian Villesen, Mystisk ændring af WHO’s definition af en pandemi, Copenhagen Information, 15 November 2009.
21. Rob Stein, Flu Pandemic Could Be Mild, Washington Post, December 8, 2009.
22. Polskanet, Russland fordert internationale Untersuchung, 5 December 2009.
F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press), and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca). His latest book is Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press). He may be reached via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/...5377.shtml

[Ed Jewett]

Well, isn't that interesting? Thanks, Magda. I should send this to the people who hired me to create that virtual tabletop exercise... :call2::argh:

[Jan Klimkowski]

Magda, yes - thank you for posting that pretty devastating expose.

Here's another one (originally posted elsewhere) suggesting that, not only is the pandemic risk hyped, but that the "cure" is far from proven:

New doubts over Tamiflu
Updated on 08 December 2009
By Channel 4 News

The claim was that Tamiflu could reduce the hospitalising of patients with swine flu by up to 60 per cent. But Channel 4 News can reveal that a key paper upon which this claim was based is being questioned. Email us your experiences of Tamiflu at news@channel4.com.


Scientists attempting to peer review the paper requested vital data, and did not get it. Tonight we report a key plank of the evidence forTamiflu's effectiveness is being called into question.

As swine flu hit the UK, the anti-viral drug Tamiflu hit the headlines, becoming the de facto first line of defence against the epidemic.

It was lauded for reducing the length and duration of flu like illnesses and, importantly, for reducing hospitalisations.

Governments around the world stockpiled supplies. In the UK alone the estimated bill for Tamiflu is approaching half a billion.

Tonight Channel 4 News can reveal that serious scientific questions are being raised over the evidence base for Tamiflu.

Scientists we have spoken to say they have been unable to judge and properly test some of the claims made about the antiviral by its makers, Roche.

Claims about the the drug's effectiveness in reducing hospitalisations have been a key factor in decisions by governments around the world to stockpile Tamiflu (oseltamivir), to defend their citizens against a global pandemic.

Manufacturer Roche estimates that sales of Tamiflu this year will reach £1.6bn. The UK government has yet to say exactly how much money it has spent so far - but the unconfirmed figure suggests it could be as much as £500m.

Tamiflu's benefits are well publicised. Advocates say it reduces the chance of flu being transmitted in the first place, and that once someone has become infected it shortens the duration of the illness. Today's review confirms these findings.

But the drug is also credited with reducing complications and hospitalisations in those who develop full-blown flu. In a recent interview Roche Pharmaceuticals CEO William Burns said: "What Tamiflu can do is actually reduce hospitalisations by more than 60 per cent, which is really important if we are in the midst of a major pandemic."

This is the claim now under scrutiny. An investigation by Channel 4 News and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has discovered that an independent team of scientists has been unable to verify the scientific evidence-base to support it.

The review, commissioned in July by the NHS and published today at BMJ.com, was conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration - a worldwide group of scientists and researchers that reviews medical research. They are internationally recognised for their work.

Speaking on Chanenl 4 News, Dr Tom Jefferson, one of the Cochrane reviewers said: "This is not just any drug, this is a public health drug which is recommended by governments... and the World Health Organisation - and has been recommended for some years."

Much of the Cochrane team's work has looked at the leading piece of clinical research supporting claims that Tamiflu reduces hospitalisations. This research was authored by swiss scientist Professor Laurent Kaiser.


His research, based on 10 clinical trials set up by Roche found that Tamiflu reduced by 59 per cent the number of people with flu who ended up in hospital. Roche have repeatedly referred to Professor Kaiser's paper when talking about Tamiflu's ability to reduce hospitalisations.

The study released today acknowledges that Tamiflu has a modest effect in reducing symptoms and duration of illness in otherwise healthy adults by about one day, but says there is insufficient published data to independently confirm its effects on reducing complications leading to hospitalisations .


When the Cochrane reviewers approached Professor Kaiser for the original data in order to verify his conclusions, he said he didn't have it and referred them to Roche. However, following detailed communication with the company, Roche did not supply the Cochrane team with the complete data they had requested and they were unable to verify the paper's findings.

Because they were unable to independently verify this data, the Cochrane review disregarded Kaiser’s paper from their analysis of the scientific evidence base supporting Tamiflu’s effectiveness in reducing complications. This removes a key plank of evidence supporting a claim repeatedly made by Roche and governments like ours.


And without this study, the reviewers came to a stark conclusion. Dr Jefferson told Channel 4 News: "We didn't find any convincing evidence that Tamiflu affects complications such as as hospitalisations and chest infections."

Dr Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the BMJ, says this leaves important questions about effectiveness unresolved.


She said: "I think we're now in a situation where the evidence base for Tamiflu is far from compelling. Really, government needs to get to grips with this and to understand the truth around the evidence, given that this is a drug on which vast sums of public money have been spent."

But Roche stand by the paper saying that the study reports on which the paper was based had been shared with regulatory authorities worldwide. A spokesman for Roche said: "I think the figure of around 60 per cent reduction in complications, that came from this - the analysis of that was robust".

Roche also put forward a number of observational studies which they say support the effectiveness of Tamiflu in reducing complications.

Channel 4 News and the BMJ asked Professor Nick Freemantle and Dr Melanie Calvert, from the University of Birmingham, to review these observational studies. They concluded: "Oseltamivir may reduce the risk of pneumonia in otherwise healthy people who contract flu. However, the absolute benefit is small, and side effects and safety should also be considered.

Professor Freemantle added: "There is very little evidence to support the widespread use of oseltamivir in the otherwise healthy population who are developing signs of influenza like illness."

Dr Fiona Godlee and Professor Mike Clarke, Director of the UK Cochrane Centre, say this updated review is important because it calls into question not only the effectiveness of Tamiflu but "the whole system by which drugs are evaluated, regulated and promoted".

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/sc...lu/3454737

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...php?t=2756

[Peter Lemkin]

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Public Menace-Private Profit: America's Biowarfare Alliance

In September, The New York Times reported that a University of Chicago researcher, Malcolm Casadaban, died after exposure to "a weakened and ordinarily harmless strain of the bacteria that cause plague."

According to the Times, "Dr. Casadaban, an associate professor at the university, was studying the bacteria to create a better vaccine for plague ... in part because of concerns about its possible use in bioterrorism." The Times averred that "infectious disease experts said researchers rarely die from being infected with an ordinarily harmless strain of the bacteria or viruses they are studying."

Which of course, raise inevitable and troubling questions: just how "safe" was the strain of plague studied by Casadaban, and was this research part of a new round of illicit, highly compartmented experiments meant to bulk-up America's first-strike arsenals?

While there is no evidence that Casadaban ever worked on banned weapons, indeed the molecular geneticist was a leading expert into the origins of bubonic plague, the casual agent responsible for the Black Death, and an opponent of biological warfare, what of his colleagues?

One expert, Dr. Kenneth Alexander, told the Times "there might have been something unusual about the bacteria that caused it to be dangerous, a mutation, for example." Alexander hastened to add that "it was more likely" that the researcher had a "pre-existing condition," one that "made him more susceptible to infection."

Perhaps. But according to Edmond Hammond, director of the now-defunct Sunshine Project, records pried from the federal government through the Freedom of Information Act uncovered a disturbing pattern of criminal neglect amongst university and corporate officials.

Hammond discovered, and shared with Congress back in 2007, information that should have blown the lid off of one of America's dirtiest--and deadliest--little secrets. In excruciating detail, citing case after case, Hammond told congressional investigators that amongst the deadly pathogens that escaped containment in a series of underreported accidents were the following substances: Plague, anthrax, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, brucellosis and Q fever.

Lab workers became sick, communities were threatened and yet, illicit work with these dangerous germs continue; just another day at the office for militarists, corporate grifters and their academic accomplices.

While Dr. Casadaban's death is a tragedy for family and friends, was a "pre-existing condition" responsible for the scientist's demise or was something more sinister taking place behind closed doors without his knowledge?

In the former Soviet Union, the Sunshine Project revealed that scientists involved in illegal offensive biowarfare research developed "plague bacteria (Yersinia pestis) ... that were resistant to 16 different antibiotics. Today, the genetic introduction of antibiotic resistance into bacterial pathogens is routine work in almost any microbiology laboratory."

While it is quite possible that Casadaban's death was a freak accident, nothing however can, or should, be ruled out.

Fanciful speculation? Better think again!

In June, Global Security Newswire reported that during a routine inventory at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., safety officers "found nearly 10,000 more vials of potentially lethal pathogens than were known to be stored at the site."

Claiming that there are "multiple layers of security," Ft. Detrick's deputy commander Col. Mark Kortepeter said it was "extremely unlikely" that any of the center's samples had been smuggled out. "Unlikely," but not impossible.

Amongst the 9,200 extra samples uncovered during the inventory were "bacterial agents that cause plague, anthrax and tularemia; Venezuelan, Eastern and Western equine encephalitis viruses; Rift valley fever virus; Junin virus; Ebola virus; and botulinum neurotoxins." In other words substances which can, and probably have, been weaponized by the Pentagon.

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, with "biodefense" as a cover, the U.S. National Security State has spent tens of billions of dollars ($56.9 billion since 2001, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation) on secretive programs investigating the deadliest pathogens known to nature, or ginning up new chimeric monsters in any number of privately-run labs.

The antinuclear watchdog group Tri-Valley CAREs (TVC) obtained documents under the Freedom of Information Act that revealed how Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a "limited liability corporation" overseen by the University of California, Bechtel, BWX Technologies, Washington Group International and Battelle, routinely violated federal regulations and had carried out "restricted experiments" that resulted in the inadvertent release of anthrax in 2005.

Noting that "the relevant details of the 2005 anthrax accident were kept from the public at the time, just as happened with the illegal experiments that are coming to light today," TVC learned that this work is expanding, with little in the way of effective oversight by Congress or indeed, by any regulatory agency.

LLNL has now opened a Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) facility and is planning to experiment with pathogens exquisitely suited for use as offensive weapons. Activities contemplated include, "aerosolizing (spraying) pathogens such as plague, tularemia and Q fever, in addition to anthrax. Moreover, government documents disclose that planned experiments in the BSL-3 include genetic modification and potentially novel manipulation of viruses, prions and other agents."

In October, TVC filed a motion for summary judgement in Federal Court in the Northern District of California "aiming to stop the operation of a bio-warfare agent research facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) main site in Livermore, California."

According to TVC, "the large inventory of multiple bio-weapon agents, the presence of genetically modified variants, and the fact that some of the pathogens have been put into just the right form to be effectively spread via an airborne release, all serve to make the Livermore BSL-3 a potential magnet for terrorism from either an internal or external source."

Currently, some 400 research facilities and more than 15,000 individuals are cleared "to have access to select agents, which include anthrax, smallpox and the Ebola virus," according to a September report by the National Research Council.

The NRC averred that lax security at laboratories that work with select agents "pose a severe risk to human or animal health," risks that "have grown as the amount of research has increased in recent years."

And if one or more of these researchers should "go rogue," for money or as a plausibly deniable component of a Pentagon or CIA operation, doesn't the public have the right to expect the civilian side of government would weed out such miscreants from work with these deadly toxins?

A History of Illicit Research

The close proximity of U.S. biological warfare programs and the pharmaceutical industry is hardly an historical accident. From its inception, American research drew from a rich pool of biomedical researchers backed by the formidable technological resources of Big Pharma.

As Leonard Cole revealed in his 1988 exposé, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas, biowarfare research during World War II and the Cold War period was a public/private affair in which the government provided funds to state agencies and private corporations alike in the hope that such solicitous relationships would lead to breakthroughs in the area of offensive weapons or what is now euphemistically called "biodefense."

Indeed, none other than George W. Merck, the president of the Merck Pharmaceutical Company, was a top-flight consultant to the Secretary of War. In that capacity, Merck and his company provided expertise and technological know-how for work on America's nascent biowar programs. In a 1946 report to the Secretary of War penned by Merck, Cole revealed that the program "included research, testing, development, and production of biological agents," all carried out as Merck wrote, in the "strictest secrecy."

While wartime fears of biological attacks by the Axis powers represented a clear and present danger to the United States and their allies as revelations of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan's active programs attest, this information was scrupulously covered-up and suppressed for decades. Indeed after the war, the United States actively recruited these sociopaths into their biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.

As is now known, America's military establishment struck a devil's bargain with the same war criminals who, in the name of science, visited death upon millions. While the doctors and biologists who filled the ranks of Japan's Unit 731 hadn't achieved a "breakthrough" in terms of delivery systems' development, as researcher Sheldon H. Harris revealed in Factories of Death, they possessed an invaluable resource sought by U.S. bioweaponeers: detailed records of the Japanese Army's obscene human experiments.

After the war with a new official enemy looming on the horizon--the Soviet Union--Merck admonished the state to maintain a strong biological warfare program, writing: "Work in this field, born of the necessity of war, cannot be ignored in time of peace; it must be continued on a sufficient scale to provide an adequate defense."

By 1948, the newly-emerging national security state stood-up a Committee on Biological Warfare within the Department of Defense to do just that. Shortly thereafter, the Central Intelligence Agency, particularly the Company's Technical Services Division (TSD), so-called "wizards of Langley," ran a series of illicit programs that sought to "secure the realm" through the application of the latest advances in the biological and psychological sciences.

Over decades, projects such as Bluebird, Artichoke, MKDELTA, MKNAOMI and MKULTRA, variously identified by researchers as "mind control" projects--which they were--garnered outrage when it was revealed during the 1970s that the Agency conspired with leading psychiatrists, psychologists, medical doctors, biologists and academic institutions in funding obscene human experiments employing psychoactive drugs such as LSD, mescaline and BZ on unwitting test subjects.

As the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, popularly known as the Church Committee, revealed during hearings to examine the Watergate scandals of the 1970s, the Pentagon's own programs ran simultaneously with those of the CIA. The Committee discovered:

In many respects, the Army's testing programs duplicated research which had already been conducted by the CIA. They certainly involved the risks inherent in the early phases of drug testing. In the Army's tests, as with those of the CIA, individual rights were also subordinated to national security considerations; informed consent and followup examinations of subjects were neglected in efforts to maintain the secrecy of the tests. Finally, the command and control problems which were apparent in the CIA's programs are paralleled by a lack of clear authorization and supervision in the Army's programs. (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, Project MKULTRA, The CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, United States Senate, August 3, 1977, Appendix A, p. 92)

While these projects may only have achieved modest success in standing up programmable assassins, as evidence on Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan may suggest, MKULTRA and its spin-offs were primarily behavioral modification programs subsequently useful for what are now euphemistically termed "enhanced interrogation techniques," e.g., torture and as a formidable bioweapons project.

Indeed, Ft. Detrick's Special Operations Division (SOD), chock-a-block with CIA officers and assets, was, by the early 1950s experimenting with, and assembling biologically-based assassination weapons that were easily concealed and could be deployed by "wet work" specialists to murder foreign leaders such as the multiple failed plots against Fidel Castro, or Patrice Lumumba attest. As researcher Ed Regis documented, Congolese Prime Minister Lumumba was a thorn in the secret state's side.

Refusing to play ball with Washington so as to facilitate the extraction of that nation's vast mineral wealth by American multinational corporations, Lumumba sealed his fate when he sought military assistance from the Soviet Union. At that point, the national liberation leader became an object for Agency "executive action."

It was around this time that the CIA's Deputy Director for Plans, Richard Bissell, had a couple of informal talks with his scientific adviser, Sid Gottlieb, concerning the subject of the covert assassination of foreign leaders. Gottlieb suggested that biological agents were perfect for the task: they were invisible, untraceable, and, if intelligently selected and delivered, not even liable to create a suspicion of foul play. The target would get sick and die exactly as if he'd been attacked by a natural outbreak of an endemic disease. Plenty of lethal or incapacitating germs were out there and available, Gottlieb told Bissell, and they were easily accessible to the CIA. (Ed Regis, The Biology of Doom, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999, pp. 182-183)

While proponents of continued research with nature's deadliest pathogens argue that the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) allows for purely "defensive" work to protect the public against potential bioattacks, this mendacious logic studiously avoids the issue of the dual-use nature of this work.

Cole unearthed documents, including a 1968 official history of Ft. Detrick penned by a Pentagon bioweaponeer who asserted forthrightly that "research and development in the offensive aspects of BW proceeded hand in hand with defensive developments for, in truth, the two are almost inseparable."

But MKULTRA and its grisly spin-offs are a thing of the past, right? Not by a long shot!

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist and critic of the torture-enabling American Psychological Association (APA), revealed November 23, that the group had organized a workshop in 2007 at the Arlington, Virginia headquarters of the dodgy RAND Corporation.

That conference, entitled "Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory," discussed new and novel ways "to utilize drugs and sensory bombardment techniques to break down interrogatees. Those are signal techniques of psychological torture long utilized by the CIA and other intelligence agencies and military around the world."

Citing APA documents, Kaye discovered that APA and their friends at CIA were actively looking for "pharmacological agents ... known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior." Kaye learned that amongst the probative questions driving the spooks and contractors was this revealing sentence: "What are sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors? How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?"

According to numerous researchers, the CIA, and the psychologists and psychiatrists they contracted to work with them, including many of the top behavioral scientists of their day, experimented with many drugs in their quest to find a “truth” drug that would open up the recalcitrant and expose the liar and the dissembler. The CIA has declassified a paper from its in-house intelligence journal from the early 1960s, "'Truth' Drugs in Interrogation," where they discuss research on drugs for interrogation ranging from scopolamine, amphetamines, and barbiturates to cannabis, LSD, and mescaline. The CIA authors discuss the limitations of using drugs, based on research, and conclude that a special use for drugs may be found in detection of deception. (Jeffrey Kaye, "Who Will Investigate CIA/RAND/APA Torture 'Workshop'?," The Public Record, November 21, 2009)

What was true throughout the Cold War period is just as true today and remains a pressing public health issue. As Global Security Newswire reported in August, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) began construction on a new facility at Ft. Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. The brief report states that "new site will allow for more study of lethal diseases and should have space for 952 staffers, compared to the 800 now using facilities that date back four to five decades."

While the National Academy of Sciences "plans to assess health and safety issues raised by observers who believe there has been insufficient consideration regarding the potential release of an infectious agent from the facility," the same can also be said for the BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities in private hands, under contract to the U.S. government.

As I reported in "Bringing the (Bio) War Home," the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists revealed that "massive U.S. biodefense spending and a buildup of high-containment laboratories throughout the country might have created an internal security risk that no outside terrorist group could ever duplicate. Nearly two dozen new federal and many more new private biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories have been built in recent years, meaning a large cadre of scientists has access to extraordinarily lethal material."

And if today's bioweaponeers have their way, such risks will increase exponentially with untold consequences for us all.

Building Banned Weapons

Leading experts, as I reported in August, have derided the possibility that terrorist groups have the know-how to fabricate smallpox or other pathogens into biological weapons as a massive "fraud ... and a substantial one" perpetrated on the American people.

Hysterical claims by securocrats that "bioterrorism is one of the most pressing problems we have on the planet today," an assertion made by Dr. Tara O'Toole, the Undersecretary of Science and Technology at the Department of Homeland Security, is not borne out by the facts.

Indeed, such claims not only distort available evidence that terrorist groups have such capabilities but conceal the more salient fact that Pentagon weaponeers continue to build banned weapons.

According to Jeanne Guillemin, author of Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism, the Pentagon and CIA made and tested a model of a Soviet anthrax bomb and created an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax.

After consulting with scientists who strongly suggested that the CIA anthrax bomb project would violate the BWC, "CIA lawyers decided the project was within the allowed realm of defensive research," Guillemin revealed.


Project Clear Vision, a joint investigation by the CIA and the Battelle Memorial Institute, under contract to the Agency, reconstructed and tested a Soviet-era anthrax bomblet in order to test its dissemination characteristics. The Agency "decided the same" for the small, fully functional bioweapons facility built under the rubric of Project Bacchus.

The third initiative, Project Jefferson, led to the development of an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax based on a Soviet model. After the outgoing Clinton administration hesitated to give the CIA the go-ahead for the project, the Bush regime's National Security Council gave the Pentagon permission. "They believed" Guillemin wrote, "the Pentagon had the right to investigate genetically altered pathogens in the name of biodefense, 'to save American lives'."

Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon authorized the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), one of the most secretive and heavily-outsourced Defense Department branches, to re-create the deadly anthrax strain.

Commenting on the close proximity of the 2001 anthrax provocation and the rush towards the invasion and occupation of Iraq, constitutional law expert Glenn Greenwald writes that the anthrax attack "played at least as large of a role as the 9/11 attack itself, if not larger, in creating the general climate of fear that prevailed for years in the U.S. and specifically how the anthrax episode was exploited by leading media and political figures to gin up intense hostility towards Iraq."

Which is why, according to Greenwald, "it's so striking how we've collectively flushed this terrorist attack down the memory hole as though it doesn't exist." Indeed, "what makes this particularly significant is that the anthrax attack is unresolved and uninvestigated."

Here we have one of the most consequential political events of the last decade at least--a lethal biological terrorist attack aimed at key U.S. Senators and media figures, which even the FBI claims originated from a U.S. military lab. The then-British Ambassador to the U.S. is now testifying what has long been clear: that this episode played a huge role in enabling the attack on Iraq. Even our leading mainstream, establishment-serving media outlets--and countless bio-weapons experts--believe that we do not have real answers about who perpetrated this attack and how. And there is little apparent interest in investigating in order to find out. Evidently, this is just another one of those things that we'll relegate to "the irrelevant past," and therefore deem it unworthy of attention from our future-gazing, always-distracted minds. (Glenn Greenwald, "A key British official reminds us of the forgotten anthrax attack," Salon, November 27, 2009)

On and on it goes, America's headlong rush into the abyss.

While the American people believed the election of Barack Obama signaled a change in direction from decades' long policies that have brought the planet to the brink of disaster, those hopes are little more than cynical illusions manufactured by media specialists and spin-doctors, the ubiquitous army of "message force multipliers" who do the bidding of their corporatist masters.

After all, $57 billion buys much in the way of silence.



Posted by Antifascist at 5:14 PM

While I myself have not worked with such disease organisms, I have worked with persons who did. It is INDEED very rare for some researcher to be infected, much less die. The negative pressure containment labs and other precautions almost rule that out, except in the case they were targeted by others to so die of the organism they were working with, to make it look like an 'accident'. An actual accident can not be ruled out, but given how things have played out since the Second World War, I'd want to know more about the dead researchers motives, life, political beliefs and who his enemies might be.

[Magda Hassan]

EU to probe pharma over “false pandemic”
04 January 2010
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is to hold an emergency debate and inquiry this month into the “influence” exerted by drugmakers on the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) global H1N1 flu campaign.

The text of the resolution approved by the Assembly calling for the debate and inquiry states that: “in order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies, and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.”

The WHO’s “false pandemic” flu campaign is “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century,” according to Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, chairman the PACE Health Committee, who introduced the parliamentary motion. “The definition of an alarming pandemic must not be under the influence of drug-sellers,” he adds.

Dr Wodarg, a doctor and former SPD member of the German Bundestag, says that the “false pandemic” campaign began last May in Mexico City, when a hundred or so “normal” reported influenza cases were declared to be the beginning of a threatening new pandemic, although there was little scientific evidence for this. Nevertheless the WHO, “in cooperation with some big pharmaceutical companies and their scientists, re-defined pandemics,” removing the statement that “an enormous amount of people have contracted the illness or died” from its existing definition and replacing it by stating simply that there has to be a virus, spreading beyond borders and to which people have no immunity.

These new standards forced politicians in most states to react immediately and sign marketing commitments for additional and new vaccines against swine flu, through “sealed contracts” under which orders are secured in advance and governments take almost all responsibility. “In this way, the producers of vaccines are sure of enormous gains without having any financial risks. So they just wait until WHO says ‘pandemic’ and activate the contracts,” says Dr Wodarg.

“In January, we will arrange an emergency debate about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the WHO, and 47 parliaments all over Europe are going to be informed. Following this, we will initiate an investigation and hearings involving those responsible for the pandemic emergency. The aim is that none of the pharmaceutical companies under any circumstances must be allowed to make their influence felt on pandemic emergencies,” he went on.

“The victims among millions of needlessly vaccinated people must be protected by their states, and independent scientific clarification should provide evidence and transparency for national and, if necessary, European courts,” added Dr Wodarg.
http://www.pharmatimes.com/WorldNews/art...x?id=17147