Your Tax Dollars At Work - For "Biosafety and Biosecurity", Another Manufactured Epidemic Of H5N1 Bird Flu - Just Around The Corner - Don't Be Surprised - And Don't Fall For Round 2 Of The Same BS...
Rinse, wash, repeat, it worked for the manufactured coronavirus epidemic, it will work again for H5N1 bird flu, the next big thing waiting just around the corner…
“[T]he 2015 paper published by UNC Chapel Hill Professor Ralph Baric et al. [was] titled A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence. As the authors (including Zhengli-Li Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology) state in their abstract:
Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.
The purported purpose of this Gain-of-Function work—i.e., generating a chimeric virus (combining genetic material from two different viruses) capable of infecting human airway cells—was to lay the groundwork for vaccine development and testing in the event that a wild bat coronavirus were eventually to infect humans.
“Reported studies were initiated after the University of North Carolina Institutional Biosafety Committee approved the experimental protocol (Project Title: Generating infectious clones of bat SARS-like CoVs; Lab Safety Plan ID: 20145741; Schedule G ID: 12279). These studies were initiated before the US Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses (http://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf). This paper has been reviewed by the funding agency, the NIH. Continuation of these studies was requested, and this has been approved by the NIH.”
So there it is. Ralph Baric and his colleague at the Wuhan Institute of Virology plainly state that they engineered a bat coronavirus, using Gain-of-Function methods, that infected the respiratory tract of humanized mice, and the NIH approved their study because it was initiated before the US Government pause on Gain-of-Function Research.”
Compare with this - quite a track record here - it’s Orwellian, “public health” agencies creating dangerous viruses and spreading them in populations either by design or sheer incompetence:
”EBRIGHT: In 2001, we had 9/11 and the anthrax mailings. By November of 2001, Congress had moved to make very large appropriations for defense against biological terrorism.
DICHRON: We also started scaling up the number of these labs that work on these dangerous pathogens—the BSL-4, or biosafety level-4 labs.
EBRIGHT: We ended up with a factor-of-20 to a factor-of-40 increase in the biodefense research in the U.S. Vice President Cheney believed that the United States needed to expand research on biological weapons agents.
The Department of Defense had strict systems in place to ensure compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention. Those restrictions limited its freedom to undertake new research programs, particularly those referred to as “the leading edge of biodefense.” This meant potential offensive as well as potential defensive relevance.
Cheney’s response was to transfer this research from the Department of Defense to the National Institutes of Health, specifically to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). By about 2004, this transfer was complete, and NIAID had been transformed into an arm of the defense sector.
This made the NIAID Director Anthony Fauci a major player.
DICHRON: What happened then?
EBRIGHT: In 2003-2004, the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) established a committee that reviewed biomedical “dual use research of concern.” This is defined as biomedical research that has both health and military implications.
The NAS committee identified seven research activities—“seven deadly sins”—that posed high risk. The seven deadly sins were activities that render a vaccine or drug therapy ineffective, or that increased a pathogen's virulence, transmissibility, or range of hosts. These five correspond to gain-of-function. The final two are evasion of diagnostics or detection, and then weaponization. These are more directly military oriented.
Although the NAS committee originally focused on controlling information about high-risk research, scientists and science policy specialists later agreed that information about high-risk research posed much less of a threat than the actual products of the high-risk research. Enhanced, more dangerous pathogens from this research could trigger a pandemic, if released deliberately or accidentally.
By 2004-2005, the term “dual use research of concern” began to be superseded by “gain-of-function research of concern.” The main threat was not information with dual-use, but the enhanced pathogen with its gain-of-function.
DICHRON: OK.
EBRIGHT: And right around that time, it's announced that the 1918 pandemic influenza virus had been reconstructed.
DICHRON: Whatever happened to that virus? Did they destroy it afterwards?
EBRIGHT: No. On the contrary, it has been distributed for research worldwide.
DICHRON: So then we have 2011. That’s when Ron Fouchier and Yoshihiro Kawaoka announce they can make this crazy dangerous, airborne version of avian influenza.
EBRIGHT: Avian influenza virus H5N1 very rarely infects humans. But, when it does, it kills more than half.
With funding from NIAID, Fouchier in the Netherlands and Kawaoka in Wisconsin showed that they could start with H5N1, and obtain an enhanced version of H5N1 that freely transmitted by respiratory droplets in mammals. They did this with serial passage in ferrets, basically selective breeding of the virus.
The virus they created, were it deliberately or accidentally released, would have high pandemic potential. This got major attention and major pushback, both from the Congress and from the White House.
DICHRON: This would be the Obama administration.
EBRIGHT: Yes. Policy makers insisted on an explanation why NIAID had funded this work, and, especially, why NIAID had funded this work without performing a prior risk-benefit assessment.
DICHRON: This is a great time to do virus research. It’s like being an oilfield wildcatter before the Department of the Interior and EPA are created. You just go out, start drilling … here’s my oil well.
In this case, Fauci just funded whatever kind of research he wanted. Nobody to say no.
EBRIGHT: Basically, the question to the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, and the NIH Director, Francis Collins was: “How could you again have funded high-risk research without performing a risk-benefit assessment, particularly after we went through this same discussion five years ago with 1918 pandemic influenza virus?”
Another source of outrage was that NIAID had funded this high-risk not only in the U.S., but also overseas. Fouchier was based at a university in the Netherlands. But Fauci and Collins insisted the research was critical for US security, penning an op-ed in the Washington Post titled, “A Flu Virus Risk Worth Taking.”
Fauci then orchestrated a short moratorium on similar work with influenza viruses. After Congress and the White House turned their attention elsewhere, Fauci and Collins lifted the moratorium and expanded funding for gain-of-function research.
DICHRON: But they implemented a review process for this research.
EBRIGHT: No. That’s much later. After the moratorium, more funding was made available for this research, and the funding continued to be approved without risk-benefit assessment.
DICHRON: So what triggered the Cambridge Working Group to form in July of 2014, because this is first organized effort against this type of research.
EBRIGHT: In 2014, there was a major anthrax accident at the CDC in Georgia, and a major anthrax accident at a Department of Defense facility in Utah. Then, vials containing smallpox virus were found in a leaking box in an unsecured storage room at an FDA and NIH facility in Maryland.
That’s three biosafety and biosecurity breaches, at three national labs.
The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) had been established to advise the U.S. government on biosafety and biosecurity, but had not met in more than a year. Well, they expressed an interest in addressing these three incidents and the still-unresolved issue of gain-of-function research.
The NIH, in response, dismissed most members of the NSABB and selected newer, more malleable members. This came to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre at the NSABB.”
Angered by their dismissal, and NIH lack of interest in biosafety and gain-of-function research, the dismissed NSABB members joined with others to found an independent task force.
This was called the Cambridge Working Group.
DICHRON: So that’s what started it.
EBRIGHT: The accidents at national labs and the founding of the Cambridge Working Group captured the attention of the Obama White House. By October of 2014, Obama’s Office of Science Technology Policy (OSTP) announced a “pause” on federal funding for gain-of-function research.
Federal agencies were asked to inventory their current and proposed research projects. If they were reasonably anticipated to increase transmissibility or pathogenicity of influenza, SARS, or MERS viruses, then they were to “pause” those projects and proposals.
The “pause” enabled time to develop a process that would assess risk-benefit for this category of work.
Eighteen projects initially were identified and sent cease-and-desist letters, but seven were exempted two months later. NIH Director Collins certified these were urgently necessary for U.S. public health.
DICHRON: What happened next.
EBRIGHT: In December 2017, under Trump, the “pause” was lifted and was replaced by the Potential Pandemic Pathogen and Care and Oversight Framework, which is called P3CO. P3CO calls for risk-benefit assessment of high-risk pathogens research.
This means research that increases the pathogenicity and/or the transmissibility of a potential pandemic pathogen. Under P3CO, agencies must identify such research proposals and forward them to be assessed at the Cabinet or Secretary level.
Well, the agencies have nullified the P3CO framework by just not identifying research proposals that meet the criteria.
In the 3 1/2 years that the P3CO Framework has been in effect, only three out of several dozen research proposals that meet the criteria have been forwarded for risk-benefit assessment.
DICHRON: Has anyone from the Cambridge Working Group been invited to be a part of this review process?
EBRIGHT: No.
DICHRON: So we now have a system in place, but the system is essentially ignored?
EBRIGHT: Correct. NIAID Director Fauci and NIH Director Collins realized that, by failing to identify and forward proposals for review, they effectively nullify the policy.
DICHRON: This includes the funding to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance for the project that Trump shut down.
EBRIGHT: Correct. That project met the criteria for the “pause” and also met the criteria to be reviewed under P3CO. But it was not paused, and it was never reviewed.
DICHRON: Are there other problems with P3CO?
EBRIGHT: There is no transparency in the review process. The names of members of the review committee, their affiliations, the proceedings, and the committee’s decisions all are secret.
DICHRON: So we finally have a safety process in place, but it's secretive. We don't know who's doing it and we don't know what they're doing.”
Here’s where the rubber hits the road for this continuing racket:
First, look at this:
”DICHRON: So then we have 2011. That’s when Ron Fouchier and Yoshihiro Kawaoka announce they can make this crazy dangerous, airborne version of avian influenza.
EBRIGHT: Avian influenza virus H5N1 very rarely infects humans. But, when it does, it kills more than half.
With funding from NIAID, Fouchier in the Netherlands and Kawaoka in Wisconsin showed that they could start with H5N1, and obtain an enhanced version of H5N1 that freely transmitted by respiratory droplets in mammals. They did this with serial passage in ferrets, basically selective breeding of the virus.
The virus they created, were it deliberately or accidentally released, would have high pandemic potential. This got major attention and major pushback, both from the Congress and from the White House.” (from the article posted above)
Now, look at this, from the current issue of Foreign Affairs:
“Now, 14 years after H1N1, and with COVID-19 still roiling the world, the United States is again facing the prospect of an influenza pandemic. Avian influenza, or H5N1, has been tearing through animals for over a year, spreading more widely than it ever has before. In the United States, H5N1 has been detected in more than 6,300 wild birds and in every state. Outbreaks in commercial flocks have been registered in 47 states, leading farmers to cull over 58 million birds. It has been found in American mammals, such as raccoons and harbor seals. And the number of affected birds and mammal species continues to grow.
Yet this time, there is little evidence of the tenacity that propelled action in 2005 and 2009. Instead, the world has largely chosen to wait and see what happens next. It is a dangerous proposition. Thus far, although H5N1 has rarely infected humans, among the cases that have been diagnosed, the fatality rate has been roughly 50 percent. A bird flu that spreads efficiently among people would result in a new pandemic and exact extraordinary costs to human life, society, and the global economy.
The United States needs to make sure it is ready for such a pandemic—just in case it happens. It can start by updating evaluations of how likely H5N1 is to start spreading between humans and what effect such spread would have. It should identify and prepare emergency steps to control the virus, should it mutate. The country also needs to look at the existing vaccines it has for the avian flu to see if they are effective, and it must review its distribution plans. It has to restock whatever health supplies it burned through while fighting COVID-19. And it must communicate all these steps to the U.S. population. Otherwise, the United States risks finding itself mired in another catastrophic pandemic.
But the third scenario, and the one of greatest concern, is that H5N1 could evolve to spread efficiently between people.
It is impossible to say which of these scenarios will come to pass, and overreacting risks wasting public attention and resources. In the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks, for example, concerns about future acts of bioterrorism motivated the United States to offer smallpox vaccines to health-care workers and emergency responders. But the vaccine in use at the time was fairly risky, and smallpox attacks were a theoretical concern, so the program was stymied by low participation. Ultimately, the federal government spent important political capital on something unpopular.
But an even worse failing would be to underreact to the next emerging threat, especially given the stakes. Policymakers therefore must take steps to prepare for a human H5N1 pandemic. That way, if one does emerge, the country can respond swiftly and aggressively.
The most important immediate action that governments can take is to better gauge exactly how likely it is that bird flu will efficiently spread between humans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses a standardized Influenza Risk Assessment Tool that is meant to do just that. But the agency has not updated it for H5N1 since March 2022—before the recent explosion of cases, and before scientists gained a greater understanding of the virus. The tool should be updated now and more frequently going forward, at least until this animal epidemic ends.
H5N1 could gain the ability to spread between humans. [Foreign Affairs, this week]
“With funding from NIAID, Fouchier in the Netherlands and Kawaoka in Wisconsin showed that they could start with H5N1, and obtain an enhanced version of H5N1 that freely transmitted by respiratory droplets in mammals. They did this with serial passage in ferrets, basically selective breeding of the virus. The virus they created, were it deliberately or accidentally released, would have high pandemic potential.” [Article posted above]
The federal government should also establish metrics and triggers for when to escalate its public health response to H5N1. During previous public health crises, officials lost time negotiating over when such a response is justified. During the 2014 to 2016 outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa, the international public health community infamously took months to rally because it falsely assumed the outbreak would easily come under control. The result was an outbreak that spread across the region and took 11,325 lives. To avoid repeating that error with H5N1, officials should hold discussions now with the goal of identifying clear and agreed-upon indicators for when to initiate certain emergency actions—for example, if multiple human cases are diagnosed within a short period. Relatedly, government departments and agencies with pandemic management responsibilities should explain clearly and in great detail what those emergency actions will be. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, for example, might revisit its Pandemic Influenza Plan to incorporate lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. (The plan was last updated in 2017.)
Officials should also begin preparing public health actions—especially for how they will produce and distribute vaccines. Here, unlike with COVID-19, the United States will not have to start from scratch: the Pandemic Influenza Stockpile contains a vaccine designed to protect against H5N1. But the government must make sure this vaccine has been tested against the currently circulating strain. It must also determine whether it needs new investments to scale up vaccine production, and it should check plans to distribute doses. Right now, the vaccine is likely stored in bulk form to extend its shelf life. To be usable, the doses would instead need to be “filled and finished”—in other words, put into vials—a possibly time-consuming process that the government should map out. Finally, the United States must examine its Strategic National Stockpile. It usually holds materials necessary for successful mass vaccination campaigns, such as syringes, but its stores may have been drawn down by the government’s responses to COVID-19 and mpox (formerly known as monkeypox). If the government does not have enough of these materials, it needs to rapidly replenish them now.
Finally, the federal government should increase its communications regarding the H5N1 situation and the measures it is taking to prepare. Right now, there is very little information available in the public domain, a misstep that echoes the early days of the COVID-19 and mpox epidemics. As both outbreaks have shown, information voids are inevitably filled with misinformation, whether maliciously spread or not. The United States should not let that happen again.
None of this will be easy. Washington may face even greater competing crises today than in 2005, when Bush launched the country’s influenza strategy. But it also has the institutional and public memory of the COVID-19 pandemic, which can work to its advantage. And critically, it still has time. If Washington uses this opportunity right, the United States can be well prepared for a scenario where H5N1 becomes a human virus.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/next-pandemic-bird-flu-preparedness
The author of the Foreign Affairs article has interesting affiliations:
”CAITLIN RIVERS is Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. From 2021 to 2022, she served as founding Associate Director of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
And the focus on vaccines is very interesting, in light of this:
”Surprisingly, little has changed with influenza vaccines since 1957 when they were first administered in US national vaccination programs. Over the years, influenza vaccines have never been able to elicit durable protective immunity against seasonal influenza virus strains, even against non-drifted strains. Although current influenza vaccines reduce the risk of severe disease, hospitalization, and death to some degree, their effectiveness against clinically apparent infection is decidedly suboptimal, ranging from 14% to 60% over the past 15 influenza seasons. Furthermore, the duration of vaccine-elicited immunity is measured only in months. Current vaccines require annual re-vaccination with updated formulations that are frequently not precisely matched to circulating virus strains.” “Rethinking next-generation vaccines for coronaviruses, influenzaviruses, and other respiratory viruses” by David M. Morens, Jeffery K. Taubenberger, and Anthony S. Fauci“, at https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(22)00572-8
More yearly - or even quarterly - shots, another stream of cash for big pharma, more government control, and a sicker population unable to resist a government that sucks the lifeblood out of its citizens and denies them even the smallest bit of essential liberty. There’s a cure for all of this and it has nothing to do with so-called public health:
”[A]ll men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it … but when a long train of abuses & usurpations, begun at a distinguished period, & pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to subject them to arbitrary power, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government & to provide new guards for their future security.” https://jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/selected-documents/jefferson%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Coriginal-rough-draught%E2%80%9D-declaration-independence