Pandemic Preparedness: Arsonists Run the Fire Department

https://brownstone.org/articles/pandemic-preparedness-arsonists-run-the-fire-department/

Written by Clayton A Baker, MD and Brian Hooker, PhD

Imagine if you will, an exceptionally ambitious city Fire Department, located in a city with very few naturally occurring fires.

These ambitious firemen don’t have nearly enough work, prestige, or pay for their liking. Uninterested in simply polishing their trucks, lifting weights, and cooking chili, these firemen want more. A lot more.

They construct a plan. They will start a research program, funded by taxpayers, whereby they will develop an arsenal of the biggest, scariest, most flammable products on earth. They will justify this program under the pretense that these destructive creations are absolutely necessary for the development of bigger and better fire extinguishers. Incidentally, they will also develop, market, and sell these fire extinguishers themselves.

These proprietary fire extinguishers will net the ambitious firemen an incredible fortune – if they can just get every man, woman, and child in the city to buy one….

Eventually they get to the H5N1 virus, to GOF research in general, and what should be done to stop this before things REALLY get out of hand. For example:

The Pandemic Preparedness Sweepstakes

Under the cover of vaccine development, there are dozens – perhaps hundreds – of biolabs around the world performing gain-of-function research on countless viruses and other infectious agents. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is the most infamous, but a great many of these labs are located in the United States, with at least 5 US labs manipulating H5N1 avian flu alone. This vast, shady industry of manufactured pathogenicity has infiltrated our government agencies, our military, and our universities, and of course, the pharmaceutical industry is thoroughly entwined in the whole enterprise.

Such “research” involves a multi-step process:

• obtaining grant funding – which also provides legal, intellectual, and ethical cover – for gain-of-function research, by promoting it as essential for “pandemic preparedness” and vaccine development

• obtaining pathogens (usually viruses) from nature that do not currently transmit to and among humans, but could be made to do so

• altering those pathogens genetically in the lab by adding, manipulating, or removing genetic material, to make them more transmissible and/or more deadly in humans

• speeding the evolution of these viruses by passaging them through mammals with immunological features similar to humans, as well as to human cell cultures

• publishing one’s “achievements” of successfully enhancing the transmissibility and/or virulence of pathogens in the scientific literature, thereby securing continued grant support

• securing patents on key elements of the manufactured viruses to ensure royalties when and if a vaccine for the pathogen is developed

• waiting for (or perhaps causing) the escape of these pathogens into animal or human populations

• setting into motion the entire pandemic response/vaccine development juggernaut

This is a great complement to my talk yesterday, as we cover much of the same material, but differently. It’s a long article so please go to Brownstone for the full experience.