Ill-gotten Gains
Part 4

1,946 words

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Was the pandemic itself planned in advance? The book does not address that far reaching conspiracy theory head on, but it does point to facts which in the light of subsequent events might be interpreted in an extremely sinister light. Kennedy notes that the epidemic came as no surprise to many of those who stood to profit most from it:

Like a pair of Cassandras, Bill Gates and Antony Fauci spent a decade prophesying a worldwide pandemic with what, in retrospect, seems eerie precision. Preaching their doomsday jeremiads on the favored rostrums of the global elite-the World Economic Forum’s roundtable in Davos, the United Nations’ podium in New York, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) platform in Geneva, Silicon Valley stages, and from network television studios-these savvy sages waged their frantic crusade to rouse the complacent public, press and politicians to the imminent threat of calamity by contagion…Gates warned his TED Talk audience that the defining catastrophe of our time would be not missiles but microbes.

In March 2019, months before COVID-19 reached any headlines, the government funded bio-tech start-up Moderna sought federal patent approval for a coronavirus vaccine. It even begged the US Patent Office to act with alacrity citing “a concern for re-emergence or a deliberate release of the SARS coronavirus.” The CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, is the former CEO of bioMérieux, which actually built the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In 2016 Moderna patented the concept of using the so-called spike protein in future corona vaccines.

The researchers themselves claimed that their work was environmentally friendly and wholly benevolent. Gain-of-function research into the SARS Covid virus was portrayed by the EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak as research into the perils of a zoonotic transfer of pathogens crossing a species barrier to infect human beings. In other words, the claim by the deniers of a lab leak is that the “leap to humans” by a SARS-Covid virus occurred coincidentally as a natural result of the very kind of danger which was being researched at the WIV!

Parties seeking funding into gain-of-function research have been voluble for many years in stressing what they claim to be a growing danger of zoonotic transfer to humans of hitherto unknown pathogens. The danger is said to be increasing as humans venture into previously uninhabited areas. One frequently iterated hazard is the consumption of “bush meat”, that is to say, wild animals whose meat is sold in so-called “wet markets”. Another danger is described as the trade or transportation of wild animals, another intense human contact with animals.

Presumably, although Kennedy does not mention this in his book, the argument that zoonotic contagions was the focus of research at Wuhan would offer a perfect pretext to American scientists sharing gain-of-function research in a laboratory in China with  Chinese gain-of-function researchers like Shi Zhengli. It would explain and justify American money invested in research in a Chinese laboratory in China. On the other hand, were research in Wuhan proven to be research on bioweapons and not zoonotic transfer, then Westerners who took part in it or helped finance it would be open to charges of treason.

Some pathogens are regarded as zoonotic and some not. For example, Yersinia pestis (the bubonic plague bacterium) is generally described as zoonotic but not Orthopoxvirus variola (the smallpox virus). Is zoonosis common or usual? That is another debate lying outside the scope of this book, but it is disappointing that Kennedy is somewhat summary in his dismissal of the principle argument put forward by Daszac among others, namely that gain-of-function research is in the service of zoonotic disease prevention. There are those who insist that zoonotic transfer is common and others who say it is virtually unknown. Kennedy clearly believes in a predominant role in what he calls “human intervention” in most recent pandemics. Unsurprisingly, Wuhan researchers claim the opposite.

Kennedy cites Daszac himself who in a paper he coauthored in The Lancet stated, “Most pandemics, eg. HIV/AIDS, sever acute respiratory syndrome, pandemic influenza-originate in animals.” But Kennedy retorts, “He provides no proof for these canonical assertions and nowhere mentions that the preceding century’s most deadly and destructive outbreaks and pandemics might have emerged from human interventions.” Kennedy further comments on a disease whose origins as a human pathogen are also disputed in the same way as the origin of Covid-19 is disputed: Lyme Disease.

Strong evidence suggests.. that the engineered bioweapon Borrelia burgdoferi escaped from the former US army lab on Plum Island around 1975 causing the North American Lyme Disease pandemic that now infects up to 476,000 Americans each year.

Kennedy also quotes Professor Goddard, the author of Pandemic, “who derides the official supposition that most pandemics originate from so-called zoonotic events as a self-serving myth promoted by the bioweapons cartel.” (p.163) Dr. Goddard writes:

Drs Daszac and Fauci hold that most pandemics are zoontic in origin..I would suggest that pandemics never occur from the immediate spread from an animal. In order to occur, a reservoir of the infection, adapted to human beings, must develop.

Whatever one thinks of the origin and disappearance of such pathogens as Yersinia pestis, virulent strains of the virus are stored by the CDC in Atlanta and by VECTOR in Kolzowo in the Russian Federation on the same grounds used to justify gain-of-function research, namely that work is still needed on developing vaccines to combat conceivable future outbreaks. Interestingly, Janet Parker, the last recorded person to die of smallpox, was infected from a laboratory escape in the University of Birmingham in England in 1978.

It is therefore not surprising that Westerners involved in the WIV vigorously argue for a natural genesis of the virus strain, nor is it surprising that China and Chinese scientists do so too, but the natural genesis theory is highly implausible. The SARS Covid-2 virus is carried by a species of horseshoe bat which naturally lives hundreds of miles from Wuhan. As is acknowledged and nowhere denied, the hapless bats were captured and removed from their caves and transported to the WIV for research on the SARS Covid-2 virus. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

A large part of the work into bioweapons is covered by the Orwellian term “life sciences” . Life science experiments always end in death of the victims “studied” and are conducted on millions of animals (and not infrequently some would say, on humans too) every year. Given the secrecy involved in life science research, it is impossible for an outsider to know for certain what life science work seeks to improve human health, to relieve human suffering, to advance human knowledge, or rather to advance the careers and prestige of individual scientists, to maximize company profits or is even part of a bioweapon program, or a mixture of all or some of these. There are after all, many overlapping and gray areas. Ethics in all events appears to be low on the priority list of researchers, and non-existent for those engaged in bioweapons research. In his book Biowarfare and Terrorism, Francis Boyle points to a survey of over seven thousand research scientists, according to which 33% of respondents admitted by their own assessment to have been engaged in at least ten ethically sanctionable activities in the previous three years. One may expect that by an assessment made by unbiased outsiders instead of the scientists themselves, the percentage of sanctionable activities would be much higher.

Kennedy writes:

[…]bioweapons science has been a moral wasteland since its inception, and modern gain-of-function and vaccine research are irrevocably hobbled to the bioweapons-industrial complex.

According to Kennedy, the CIA director Richard Helmes ordered the agency in 1973 to destroy records related to experimentation programs, to prevent their exposure to Senate scrutiny, but intelligence and military sources admitted in 1977 that filed Department of Defense and CIA experiments involving the spreading of pathogens over urban areas between 1949 and 1969 “would be considered acts of war if conducted by any other nation”.

Those describing action in response to health challenges often use military language, and the response to Covid-19 was no exception. Politicians, journalists and scientists talked of “fighting a war” to “defeat” Covid. Kennedy acknowledges Dr Fauci’s skill (he calls it a “masterstroke”) of conflating his responsibilities of assuming responsibility to coordinate the NIH wide effort to develop counter measures against chemical or biological threats with the traditional role of the NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) of preventing infectious disease.

Dr. Fauci thus put his agency’s efforts against all infectious disease on a par with war, institutionalizing the militarized response to disease outbreaks and laying the groundwork for the martial culture of pandemic preparedness and response. In the future, NIAID would draw no distinction between biodefense and infectious disease research.

From an early stage, according to Kennedy, military researchers understood that biological weapons were more effective against populations which had compromised immune systems. Out of this realization developed what Dr. John McClure called the “one-two punch” approach in biowarfare: punch one: weaken the immune system, punch two: strike with the weapon. A weak immune system is a hugely important MEF. This chilling abbreviation stands for Mortality Enhancing Factor. In 1965 two MEF researchers at Fort Detrick observed that diseases that would normally kill laboratory animals in six to nine weeks took less than a week when combined with components that dampened immune response, which showed that weakening immune response systems was a key contributory MEF.

It is well established that the percentage of people around the Western world, most especially Americans, who are immuno-compromised has risen dramatically since the 1950’s. In the 1950’s, only 6% of Americans were considered to be suffering from chronic disease. In 2022 it was close to 60% (and that despite the dramatic fall in the numbers of people smoking). The leading diseases related to a weakened auto immune system are: obesity, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and neurological diseases. These diseases are themselves said to be in large part the result of the Standard American Diet (SAD), which raises the question of the origin of that diet.

The new diet came about thanks to the ready availability of cheap convenience food and snacks. Agricultural subsidies which put quantity before quality made this possible. The agricultural state subsidy program in the US was introduced and nurtured by Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture in the Nixon and Ford administrations. A similar program had been launched in Europe, called the CAP-Common Agricultural Policy, and of course such programs existed already in all communist countries. The program maximized industrial farming, thereby destroying many family farms and dramatically lowering the nutritional quality of agricultural produce. To what extent was Butz’s plan a pragmatic and necessary response to the demands of rapidly rising urban populations, and to what extent was it a money driven plan to destroy independent farmers and make agriculture state dependent? Was it even intended to weaken immune systems? It certainly might be thought a “conspiracy too far” to regard the rise in the number of immuno-compromised people which it brought about as part of a plan to make people sick, but conspiracy or not, a dramatic fall in immunity strength in the US and elsewhere was demonstrably the result of the industrialization of agriculture.

Populations are now more vulnerable than they were in the 1940’s and 1950’s to all kinds of autoimmune disease triggers. Kennedy does not discuss all this, although it is a subject dear to his heart. To be fair, although relevant, it would take him too far from the focus of his study and as it is his story here is a long one. The fact is that when Covid-19 struck, it struck swathes of immuno-compromised people, people who had already been winded by the first blow of the McClure double punch.