thiscantbehappening | On Thursday, a reader who is an MD contacted someone he knew at
Tulane, Vice President for Research Laura Levy, asking her to explain
what Tulane was doing in Kenema. He later sent me her response, which
was a link to a web page on Tulane's website. It seeks to debunk "myths"
about Tulane's work in West Africa. In that article [3],
it states that it is a "myth" that Tulane has been ordered to leave
Sierra Leone. But no one is saying that. Tulane was ordered to shut down
it's Ebola lab in the town of Kenema, not to leave Sierra Leone
altogether. The article also states that it is a "myth" that the
University and its researchers are "collaborating" with the military in
Sierra Leone. It goes on to say that "Tulane is working with Harvard
University and others in the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium to
develop diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics for Lassa fever and
Ebola. Support for the consortium has come principally from the National
Institutes of Health."
But actually the consortium's own website [4] says that Tulane is the leader
of the consortium. It lists a number of partners, including Harvard
University, Scripps Research Institute, and a company called Corgenix.
No government "partners" are listed. Yet Corgenix, on its company site [5], lists USAMRIID, the Pentagon's bioweapons research unit, as a "member of the consortium."
Curious indeed that Tulane Research VP Levy omitted that important bit of information.
Here's what Coregenix had to say about USAMRIID:
USAMRIID (U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious
Diseases), located at Fort Detrick, Maryland, is the lead medical
research laboratory for the U.S. Biological Defense Research Program,
and plays a leading role in national defense and in infectious disease
research. The Institute’s mission is to conduct basic and applied
research on biological threats resulting in medical solutions (such as
vaccines, drugs and diagnostics) to protect the warfighter. USAMRIID is a
subordinate laboratory of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material
Command.
Corgenix and USAMRIID are members of the Viral Hemorrhagic fever
Consortium, working to develop state of the art diagnostic products for
biothreat agents and emerging pathogens./em>
Navy Times, hardly a den of conspiracy writers, published an article about Ebola [6]
and the US decision to send 3000 troops (not doctors!) to the impacted
countries in west Africa, back on August 1. That article states:
Filoviruses like Ebola have been of interest to the Pentagon
since the late 1970s, mainly because Ebola and its fellow viruses have
high mortality rates — in the current outbreak, roughly 60 percent to 72
percent of those who have contracted the disease have died — and its
stable nature in aerosol make it attractive as a potential biological
weapon.
Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, researchers at the
U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID)
have sought to develop a vaccine or treatment for the disease.
Boyle’s contention is that ever since the US signed onto the Geneva
Convention outlawing germ warfare, it has used research into defense
against germ weapons as a cover for US research into germ weapons
themselves.
It’s interesting that Navy Times is reporting that
Pentagon-funded researchers at USAMRIID have been trying to develop a
vaccine for Ebola for decades, yet how does that square with a report on Oct. 23 in the New York Times [7]
that Canadian and US researchers had developed an Ebola vaccine that
was 100% successful in monkeys a full decade ago, long after the
Pentagon began “seeking to develop a vaccine” and several years after
the NIH began a campaign to develop one. And yet, as the Times
article states, the promising vaccine “sat on the shelf” for years
without being tested in humans, because it encountered a “biotech valley
of death” with no drug companies willing to pay for human testing.
So where was all that public US Defense Department and NIH funding, given the promise that this vaccine was showing?
Maybe it was just bureaucratic bumbling, nationalist prejudice (the vaccine was developed by the Public
Health Agency of Canada, for god’s sake!, a concept that is toxic to
the US drug industry), or just Washington stupidity. But then, if Boyle
is right, then the Pentagon may not really have been all that interested
in finding a vaccine, but rather was focussed on doing covert research
on bioweapons, including Ebola.
It may seem hard to swallow the idea that your government could be
contemplating such awful weapons, but let’s remember that the US is the
country that continues to insist on its right to strew highly toxic and
carcinogenic depleted uranium dust all over countries it invades or
bombs, like Afghanistan, Syria and especially Iraq (according to a new report by David Swanson [8],
the Obama administration is sending DU-armed aircraft to the Middle
East again, evidently for use in its attacks on ISIS in Syria and Iraq,
as if it hadn't spread enough of the stuff across the desert already).
As well, the US stands credibly accused of having deployed germ
weapons in Cuba, Nicaragua and East Germany over the years, and perhaps
in other places too.
And there was one other article in the New York Times [9]
-- this one pulled, oddly, after it made it into the first edition of
the paper on October 17. It reported that President Obama, “Prompted by
controversy over dangerous research and recent laboratory accidents,”
had announced that he was temporarily halting “all new funding for
experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them
more dangerous.” He asked those scientists already doing such
government-funded research to “voluntarily halt” their work during this
moratorium. Could this be a backhanded admission, or at least hint, that
something like that might have been done to the Zaire Ebola strain that
is circulating now in west Africa?
Got that? Your government has been paying researchers to do genetic modification of dangerous pathogens like avian or pandemic flu strains, SARS...and hemorrhagic fever viruses like Ebola, to make them more deadly and/or more easily transmitted!
(Of course the government and its apologists insist that they and the
researchers they fund in this work are only trying to see if it could be
done, either by some nefarious enemy, or by nature itself.)
