Friday, October 31, 2014

how would you like to live in denial of what goes on under the stairs?


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.)

14 comments:

rohan said...

Been thinking about this for a minute now. You know this is just a test?

CNu said...

SARS was a test, this is a full-scale dress rehearsal. What was the tipping-point(s) that decided it for you?

rohan said...

Same one that hipped you. http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2014/10/i-want-me-one-of-these-anti-ebola.html - looks like the Internet scrubbers are already disappearing the evidence. Thankfully they haven't gotten all of'em. http://youtu.be/T-9Dd7PuO5Q

CNu said...

How far you think they'll let it run in Africa?

woodensplinter said...

While we're at the dailykos: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/18/1315081/-A-Cops-take-on-Ferguson As a cop I learned that it is usually best to wait until you know as much information as possible before you go on the record so I'll be completely honest;

I don't know why an unarmed 18 year old was shot multiple times.

I don't know what that police officer felt in the seconds before he pulled the trigger.

I don't know why the Ferguson Police chooses to withhold details about this shooting.

I don't know why this police chief decided to have SWAT teams on foot patrols.

I don't know why this police chief deployed Armored Vehicles and Snipers to this area.

I don't know why police officers were locking up reporters.

I don't know how a community that is 67% black has a police department that is 96% white.

But here are a few things that I do know. I know what it's like to walk around in a Kevlar helmet, gas mask, shield, and baton dressed in riot control gear. It's hot, it's frustrating, and most of the time you are just standing around waiting. I know that Protests and Riots are not the same thing and just because someone is protesting the police does not make them a "thug". I know that the criminals that are using this situation to loot and cause havoc should be arrested and prosecuted period. I know that whether you are a rapper, a teacher, a nun, or a congressmen you should have the same rights. I know that if your police department continues to let the community's questions go unanswered for days while you post armored vehicles and snipers in their neighborhoods you might not get a very positive outcome. I know that if your unofficial departmental policy is to ignore the underlying problems in a community and never address their actual issues don't be surprised if protests become riots.

woodensplinter said...

Did chickenshit just now threaten your president's life? http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2014/10/30/the-chickenshit-lobby-is-mad-as-hell/ What’s surprising is how Netanyahu, in a speech to the Knesset, took the opportunity to answer

his critics
in the Obama administration: "Netanyahu angrily insisted

he was ‘under attack simply for defending Israel,’ adding that he ‘cherished’

Israel’s relationship with the US."

The famously combative Israeli Prime Minister went on to say:

"When there are pressures on Israel to concede its security, the easiest thing to do is to concede. You get a round of applause, ceremonies on grassy knolls, and then come the missiles and the tunnels."



Bibi, who spent many years in the United States, is surely cognizant of what

his "grassy knoll" reference connotes. You can argue it was just an

infelicitous phrase, or that Bibi was referring to himself, not Obama. Maybe

so. But what if, say, an Iranian official, even a low-ranking one, had said

such a thing? The uproar would be deafening. And so the question must be asked:

was Bibi threatening the President of the United States?

Ed Dunn said...

I find it hard to believe the premise of this article that hyper-local white candidates are more well-funded to win offices in Ferguson than a black candidate that offer descriptive representation giving the demographics of the city population.

CNu said...

Believe it. While it's tempting to cite the headline-grabbing levels of activity like what Chevron's doing in Richmond California, http://billmoyers.com/2014/10/21/chevron-greases-local-election-gusher-cash/ - the truth is really a lot more prosaic than that. When you take into consideration the local civic and religious organizations, knights of columbus, rotary, neighborhood associations, league of women voters, etc, etc, etc..., and the long established electioneering businesses that exist to service these entities - it should come as no surprise that certain candidates are not only better funded - but also have long-established and deeply organic campaign machinery deployed on their behalf to ensure sufficient turnout and greatly influence the results in local elections.

As I push deeper into these organizations as a member and at the board level, I find it astonishing how much "behind the scenes" isht goes on to influence and maintain property values, school district boundaries, and municipal services. I'm not happy with what I've been discovering, but I'm glad to have finally pulled aside yet another curtain to see what's going on behind the scenes. I'd go so far as to say that St. Louis and Kansas City may in fact comprise special cases of intensive, bee-hive like organization and orchestration. My experiences this past year have been greatly illuminating with regard to the local, low-intensity political warfare continuously waged across various municipal polities and the governing "civic community" (local elites) who keep this isht on and popping.

BigDonOne said...

...rotfl...
In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, a reporter did some on-the-street interviews with iq.75z in an urban area, like Balt or DC,


Nearly all went as follows:
Who you gonna vote for?.... "Obama..."
What are your reasons?.... "...(pause)...uh, Hope and Change..."
Can you name something Obama stands for?.... "...(uh)..."
These folks hardly even qualify as Sheeple....

CNu said...

In the run-up to the 2014 mid-term elections, despite the fact that he's spent more time here at school than I have, Big Don continues to demonstrate a fundamental inability to assimilate the curriculum. Like many struggling children, instead of redoubling his personal efforts or simply asking for help, he chooses to "act out" in a futile effort to misdirect/redirect away from subject matters bound to go over his head.....,

Vic78 said...

http://pleasecutthecrap.com/this-is-your-tea-party-in-action/

Where were you in this crowd of iq160+ geniuses?

BigDonOne said...

@Vic..."Where were you in this crowd..."

[Remember, BD is just the messenger here...]

Where BD was -- reading one of y'all's bro's---> Taleeb Starkes. http://freedomoutpost.com/author/taleebstarkes/
He has coined a very creative and descriptive new term for what is going to happen when Officer Wilson's exoneration is announced ---> The NEGROGEDDON

Vic78 said...

So he was at the parade with you?

BigDonOne said...

Awesome unqualified voter item----> http://nalert.blogspot.com/2014/11/college-students-who-dont-know-who-won.html

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