Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘EcoHealth Alliance’

Democrats, Not Trump, Are The Real Crooked Record-Keepers


BY: JOSEPH LOBUE | MAY 29, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/05/29/democrats-not-trump-are-the-real-crooked-record-keepers/

Donald Trump speaking about manhattan trial

Author Joseph LoBue profile

JOSEPH LOBUE

MORE ARTICLES

President Trump is on trial in New York for allegedly falsifying business records because the bookkeepers in his organization recorded certain legal expenses — specifically, a legal settlement — as “legal expenses.” According to Democrat prosecutors, the bookkeepers should have recorded these payments as campaign contributions and expenditures because, they say, the payments were “intended” to “influence” the 2016 election “unlawfully” by concealing a purported sexual encounter with a pornographer.

Convoluted and bizarre enough for you yet? It should be. Because there is absolutely nothing “unlawful” about concealing a purported sexual encounter with a pornographer.

There is, nevertheless, a good deal of crooked record-keeping going on these days. But Democrats are the ones doing it.  

False Characterization of Record-Keeping Requirements

Federal campaign finance law actually prohibits candidates from characterizing the payments at issue in the Trump case as campaign contributions and expenditures.

Brad Smith, a leading expert on campaign finance law and former member of the Federal Election Commission, was set to testify to that very thing in open court in the Trump case. Except Juan Merchan, the partisan Democrat Biden-donor judge presiding over the case, barred him from doing so. 

To accept the prosecution’s case, one must conclude that New York law requires candidates to make business records that violate federal law. The supremacy clause of the Constitution does not allow that. So, it is Democrat prosecutors, not the Trump organization, that conspired to falsely characterize the record-keeping issues in the case.

Judge Merchan’s Manipulation of the Trial Record

Judge Merchan’s rationale for excluding Smith’s testimony is that judges traditionally instruct the jury on the law. The problem is that Merchan already allowed prosecution witnesses, and prosecutors themselves, to opine on their understanding of campaign finance laws. Once he allowed that, Merchan was constitutionally required to allow Trump to mount a defense on the same point.

Merchan also overlooked the fact that how people align their behavior with the law is based as much on the policies of the administrators who enforce the law as on the words of the statute itself. Smith, a former member of the regulatory body that enforces federal campaign law, was prepared to testify that the agency’s policy precludes candidates from treating payments like these as campaign contributions and expenditures.

This leads to the obvious conclusion that the Trump organization booked the payments in the manner that they did, not to “unlawfully” influence the 2016 election, but because they were (or at least thought they were) required to do so in that manner by federal law, completely negating the factual element of unlawful intent.

In fact, had Trump “intended” to “influence” the 2016 election by covering up the Stormy Daniels’ NDA payments, the easiest way to do so would have been to characterize the late October 2016 payments as campaign contributions and expenditures. This is because, under federal campaign finance law, contributions and expenditures made in late October of an election year do not need to be reported until after the election.

Unfortunately (and unjustly), the jurors in the New York case will not hear any of this exculpatory information because the partisan Democrat judge has excluded it from the record. Like I said, it’s the Democrats who have the record-keeping problem. 

Talk About Falsifying Business Records to Influence an Election

Joe Biden is old. As Bill Maher puts it, Joe Biden is “cadaver-like” old. Polls show that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe Biden does not possess the mental fitness to serve another term as president. Do you think that might incentivize the White House to alter records to mitigate the political effects of Biden’s mental deterioration?

The White House is doing just that. It recently released the official transcript of Biden’s May 19 speech to the NAACP in Detroit. It was official. Except it wasn’t a transcript. It was a political circular designed to clean up the incoherent mess left by a mentally diminished man selfishly trying to hold onto the most difficult, demanding, and consequential job in the world.

The so-called “transcript” substantively corrected numerous significant instances of mental lapses or gibberish uttered by Biden, including the claim that he was vice president during the Covid “pandemic,” and that President Obama told him to go to Detroit and “fix it.”

Records? We Don’t Have to Show You Any Stinking Records!

There’s no need to falsify records if you improperly refuse to let the public see them at all. That’s what the White House did last week by claiming “executive privilege” over the audio recordings of Biden’s interviews with the special counsel investigating Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.

That’s the case where Biden took highly classified documents from the government while he was a senator and vice president, “willfully” retained them openly in dilapidated boxes in his garage, and then “willfully” disclosed the classified information to his ghostwriter as part of a lucrative $8 million book deal. Biden’s Justice Department declined to prosecute Biden, concluding that he would present himself to a jury like he did in his interviews — “as a sympathetic elderly man with a poor memory” — making it difficult to prove a felony “that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

In an effort to control the damage from the special counsel’s report, the White House and its allies released redacted transcripts of Biden’s interviews with investigators, apparently hoping that presenting the cold, written version of Biden’s testimony might minimize public fears about his declining mental state. It did not. Yet, it did open the door for Congress to subpoena the audio tapes of the interviews.

Last week, the White House barred the Justice Department from releasing those audio tapes to Congress on the grounds of “executive privilege.” However, the White House has already voluntarily released the transcripts of the interviews, so any privilege that may have existed has been waived. It is a basic principle of law that a party waives confidentiality privileges once the party voluntarily discloses any significant portion of the information. In fact, in these circumstances, the White House’s claim of executive privilege is not merely wrong, it is ludicrous.    

The White House’s assertion of “executive privilege” is not really a legal one — it knows it has no chance of prevailing in court. Rather, the assertion of privilege is purely political. The White House believes it can conceal the audio tapes until after the election while the issue is litigated.

The audio tapes must be really, really bad for Biden. How do we know this?  Because not releasing the tapes is really bad for Biden. The special counsel essentially reported that Biden appeared mentally diminished in his interviews. By refusing to release the audio tapes, Biden just confirms that perception.

There were no good options for the White House on the audio tape issue. Because the White House chose a bad option (withholding the tapes), one can only assume that the other option (releasing the tapes) was substantially worse. 

Why Withhold Records if You Can Just Hide or Destroy Them Instead?

That, apparently, was the credo of one of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s top advisers — and possibly Fauci as well — during the Covid panic in relation to their dealings with EcoHealth Alliance and the now-admitted use of federal funding to perform gain-of-function research at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology.

This month, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released shocking emails sent from the private Gmail account of David Morens, an adviser to Fauci, detailing an apparent effort by administrators to evade public open records laws — commonly referred to as “FOIA” — by improperly performing government work through private Gmail accounts or by deleting records altogether.

In one such email, Morens tells Peter Daszak, president of EchoHealth Alliance, that “there is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his home. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

In another email, Morens confesses, “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d, but before the search starts, so i think we’re all safe. Plus, i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”  

Wow, that’s bad. But you have to understand, to Democrats, booking legal expenses as “legal expenses” is the real threat to democracy.

Joseph LoBue is a retired Naval officer and attorney.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

EcoHealth Alliance subcontractor  among COVID-19 ‘patients zero’ at Wuhan lab: Report


By: JOSEPH MACKINNON | June 21, 2023

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/wuhan-gain-of-function-researcher-among-first-to-contract-virus-received-funding-from-fauci-led-niaid/

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

A damning new report indicates Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under Anthony Fauci, and the Chinese military-co-opted Wuhan Institute of Virology all have their fingerprints on research that may have ultimately resulted in the deaths of over 1.1 million Americans and well over 6.9 million worldwide.

Federal documents recently obtained as the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit reveal the NIAID and United States Agency for International Development funded an EcoHealth Alliance subcontractor’s work on coronaviruses to the tune of $41 million. That subcontractor, listed as an investigator on the grants, was Ben Hu, whom TheBlaze previously noted was the WIV’s lead on gain-of-function research on SARS-like coronaviruses and among the “patients zero” — having been one of the three lab researchers first infected with COVID-19 in November 2019.

Alina Chan, molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said, “Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli. … He was her star pupil. He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice. If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him.”

The White Coat Waste Project has obtained federal accounting records through a 2021 FOIA lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health that confirm Ben Hu had his name on American taxpayer-funded grants awarded by the then-Fauci led NIAID and the USAID. According to the grant form, an EcoHealth-administered grant of $3,586,760 from the NIAID was marked “pending” for a project titled “understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence” for work to be undertaken from June 2019 through May 2024. The same project had previously received $3,086,735 in American taxpayer money from NIAID between June 2014 and May 2019. The grant form further indicated that USAID had poured $38 million into an EcoHealth alliance project titled “PREDICT-2” between October 2014 and September 2019, again with Hu’s name on it.

A USAID spokesman told the Wall Street Journal that the funding for research at the Wuhan lab ended in 2019 and “was part of the agency’s mission to identify and contain pandemic threats. The project provided about $815,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and $39,000 to Wuhan University.”

The White Coat Waste Project noted that “Hu’s animal experiments were being bankrolled with U.S. taxpayer funds from NIAID and USAID grants that received over $41 million,” but that the total amount injected into Hu’s lab has not yet been disclosed by the U.S. government.

“Agency stonewalling and reporting loopholes made it incredibly challenging to follow the money from government agencies to the Wuhan lab, but the documents make it clear that U.S. taxpayer money funded some of Hu’s experiments,” Anthony Bellotti, president of WCW, told the Journal.

The Wall Street Journal reported that much of Hu’s research “focused on modifying coronaviruses so they could bind to human cells. The stated purpose of the research was to identify viruses that could lead to a pandemic and facilitate the development of a vaccine.”

The WCW summarized its findings thusly: “U.S. taxpayer-funded Wuhan white coats collect wild coronaviruses from bats in remote caves in China without adequate protective gear, transport the viruses to a lab in a major metropolitan area, do gain-of-function animal experiments to make the viruses more contagious and deadly to humans, and then fall ill with COVID-like symptoms and their identities and medical histories are covered up.”

Investigative reporter Paul Thacker noted that Fauci denied ever funding this research. Fauci told Congress in May 2021 that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology” and made similar denials on multiple other occasions.

Then-Principal Deputy Director of the NIH Lawrence A. Tabak appeared to undercut Fauci’s denial, writing to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Oct. 20, 2021, that EcoHealth’s “limited experiment” in Wuhan tested whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” These mice “became sicker,” according to Tabak, who added, “EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant.”

According to a January report from the HHS Office of Inspector General, the NIH also knew about potential risks associated with the research being performed in China that had been executed using federal grant money funneled to and through EcoHealth Alliance. Despite this knowledge, it reportedly “did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance with some requirements.”

British zoologist Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, previously called NIH requests that U.S. federal officials inspect the WIV “heinous” and derided suggestions that the virus might have leaked from the WIV as “conspiracy theories.”

Hu did not respond to requests for comment from the Wall Street Journal, as Daszak and the NIH similarly declined to provide comment to Thacker.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Category:

Health

Tagged with:

Report: NIH Threw EcoHealth Alliance Millions Of Tax Dollars To Study Coronaviruses, Then Didn’t Supervise


BY: JORDAN BOYD | JANUARY 26, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/26/report-nih-threw-ecohealth-alliance-millions-of-tax-dollars-to-study-coronaviruses-then-didnt-supervise/

virus research
The inspector general found that NIH and EcoHealth Alliance failed to comply with federal standards when it came to the Wuhan lab.

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

MORE ARTICLES

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not give proper oversight to EcoHealth Alliance even after it awarded the organization millions of dollars to study bat coronaviruses, a new 72-page report from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General found.

More than a year and a half after the OIG announced an investigation into the NIH’s funding of the Wuhan lab suspected of playing a role in the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, the inspector general officially announced that NIH and EcoHealth Alliance failed to comply with federal research and reporting standards. That included failing to adequately monitor what U.S. money was being used for and whether that research was safe and legal.

The report did not directly address whether EcoHealth Alliance engaged in illegal and dangerous gain-of-function research, as legislators and documents have alleged, but noted that NIH repeatedly neglected to refer questionable enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPPs) research to the Department of Health and Human Services.

After EcoHealth Alliance failed to submit a mandatory report on its research progress the fall before the global Covid-19 outbreak, the NIH did not mention the report’s tardiness until nearly two years later in July 2021. That was a direct violation of HHS requirements, which state the NIH must follow up with grant recipients “no later than 30 days after the established due date.”

“This oversight failure is particularly concerning because NIH had previously raised concerns with EcoHealth about the nature of the research being performed,” the inspector general’s report states.

For more than a decade, EcoHealth Alliance received taxpayer dollars to conduct dangerous high-level research on various pathogens including coronaviruses. EcoHealth Alliance often used part of its grant money, at least $1.1 million from October 2009 to May 2019, to employ the help of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

The NIH attempted in April of 2020 to cut off the money pipeline from EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) over fears that the lab “may have been involved with the release of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19.” By July 2020, the NIH reinstated the grant it had previously severed under the condition that the EcoHealth Alliance ensured the WIV fixed its “facilities in China that posed serious biosafety concerns and, as a result, created health and welfare threats to the public in China and other countries.”

Because the WIV received American tax dollars as a sub-recipient for years, it was subject to certain reporting standards just like EcoHealth Alliance was. Yet, when the NIH requested an update about the WIV in November of 2021, EcoHealth Alliance said the WIV failed to turn over key documents.

“EcoHealth officials confirmed to us that WIV had not been responsive to its request to provide the scientific documentation and indicated it was unlikely to receive the requested information,” the inspector general stated in the report.

That observation confirms previous reporting, which suggested that EcoHealth Alliance stonewalled the release of lab records to the NIH after China barred investigators from inspecting WIV databases.

Mismanagement by the NIH also allowed EcoHealth to waste $89,171 of the $8 million U.S. taxpayer dollars granted to it from fiscal years 2014-2021 on “unallowable costs,” including salaries, bonuses, travel, tuition, benefits, and sub-awards to Chinese Communist Party-controlled entities such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who challenged the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ then-Director Anthony Fauci over the NIH’s funding of gain-of-function research, tweeted that the OIG’s report “confirms what we already knew.”

“NIH failed to conduct adequate oversight of EcoHealth Alliance’s grant awards. The continued funding of EcoHealth Alliance despite its repeated noncompliance with federal regulations and policies further demonstrates the need to reform oversight of risky research paid for by the American taxpayers,” Paul said.

The White Coat Waste Project, which first documented the connection between EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology and discovered that the NIH helped EcoHealth Alliance circumvent a federal ban on gain-of-function research, also said the report confirms that “EcoHealth Alliance shipped tax dollars to Wuhan for dangerous animal experiments that probably caused the pandemic, violated federal laws and policies and wasted tax dollars.”

“Yet, the Wuhan lab remains eligible for even more taxpayer money for animal tests and just since the pandemic began, EcoHealth has raked in at least $46 million in new federal funds from the DOD, USAID, NIH, and NSF,” Justin Goodman, the senior vice president of advocacy and public policy at White Coat Waste, said in a statement.

Despite its history of noncompliance, EcoHealth Alliance secured another $653,392 in October of 2022 to sustain more bat-based coronavirus research, but that’s just the first installment. The five-year plan involves giving EcoHealth $3.3 million by 2027.

Goodman said Congress should “defund these rogue organizations once and for all” because, “Taxpayers should not be forced to bankroll reckless white coats who waste money, break the law and place public health in peril.”

Rep. Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania and Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, both Republicans, joined together on Thursday to do just that with the reintroduction of a bill dubbed the Defund EcoHealth Alliance Act.

If passed, the legislation would not only bar American taxpayer dollars from going to EcoHealth, but it would require the U.S. Government Accountability Office to conduct a report on how much money given to EcoHealth ended up in the hands of communist China-controlled entities in the last 10 years.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Category:

Health, Political

Tagged with:

Daniel Horowitz Op-ed: Hunter Biden’s role in Ukrainian biolabs raises serious questions about gain of function and Ukraine policy


Commentary by DANIEL HOROWITZ | March 30, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-hunter-bidens-role-in-ukrainian-biolabs-raises-serious-questions-about-gain-of-function-and-ukraine-policy

Recent emails unearthed by the U.K. Daily Mail and the National Pulse reveal that during the last decade, Hunter Biden seemed to have a keen interest in pathogen research in Ukraine and using it as a tool for geopolitical affairs in that country. It just so happens to be that a pathogen connected to gain-of-function research destroyed the world, and then the next “big current thing” on the geopolitical stage was none other than Ukraine. Shouldn’t the American people get some answers as to why our government was so heavily involved – via the vice president’s son – in both pathogen research and Ukraine and to make sure Ukraine is not Wuhan 2.0?

Earlier this month, I detailed the known connections between biotech firm Metabiota Inc., responsible for the pathogen research in Ukraine, the DOD, and EcoHealth Alliance, along with the Wuhan lab most likely responsible for the leak of SARS-CoV-2. I also noted that Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP), a subsidiary of the Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz-founded Rosemont Capital, gave Metabiota, a company accused of dangerous lab protocols during the African Ebola pandemic, its first infusion of cash a decade ago. Now, new emails from Hunter’s laptop demonstrate that his involvement in Metabiota and pathogen research in Ukraine was much deeper than just an initial investment.

On April 4, 2014, Metabiota vice president Mary Guttieri wrote an email to the younger Biden outlining how they could “assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia’” with their joint venture, according to an email from Hunter’s laptop obtained by the U.K. Daily Mail. That is quite a curious goal for a company that supposedly does scientific research and analysis about emerging pandemics.

The outlet also posted another email dated April 8, 2014, from Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi referring to a “science project” Hunter had pitched to him involving Burisma and Metabiota in Ukraine. “Please find few initial points to be discussed for the purposes of analyzing the potential of this as you called, ‘Science Ukraine’ project,” Pozharskyi wrote. Hunter sits on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company owned by corrupt billionaire Mikolay Zlochevsky, who fled to Monaco after he was put under investigation.

Hunter’s dad, as vice president, was in charge of our foreign policy with Ukraine in 2014 when all of this was occurring and when the U.S. government was backing the color revolution that led to the ouster of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych. It was at this time that the Defense Department began funding the Metabiota operations in Ukraine.

After receiving 18.4 million from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) between February 2014 and November 2016, with $307,091 earmarked for “Ukraine research projects,” “Metabiota has worked in Ukraine for Black & Veatch, a US defense contractor with deep ties to military intelligence agencies, which built secure labs in Ukraine that analyzed killer diseases and bioweapons,” according to the Daily Mail.

“It raises the question, what is the real purpose of this venture? It’s very odd,” said former senior CIA officer Sam Faddis in an interview with the Daily Mail. “His father was the Vice President of the United States and in charge of relations with Ukraine. So why was Hunter not only on the board of a suspect Ukrainian gas firm, but also hooked them up with a company working on bioweapons research?”

Biden was so involved in Metabiota that one email written that same month in 2014 reveals that he and his business partner Eric Schwerin discussed subletting their office space to the San-Francisco-based biotech firm.

So, what exactly were they working on? Last week, the National Pulse reported that a feature in the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine’s 2016 Annual Report recounts an October 2016 meeting involving U.S. military officials and their Ukrainian counterparts together with Black & Veatch and Metabiota staff to discuss the lab work. The discussion centered around “existing frameworks, regulatory coordination, and ongoing cooperative projects in research, surveillance and diagnostics of a number of dangerous zoonotic diseases, such as avian influenza, leptospirosis, Crimea Congo hemorrhagic fever, and brucellosis.”

The National Pulse cites a 2019 paper authored by researchers from Metabiota and three Ukraine-based institutes and funded by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency sharing how they isolated a form of African swine flu using a pig from Ukraine in 2016. They also detail their research on Anthrax in animals in Ukraine.

Well, where else have we heard of Metabiota partners working on gain-of-function research of pathogens that typically are in animals? Oh yes, EcoHealth Alliance in Wuhan. In the past, Metabiota has worked with EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The zoonotic projects being described in Ukraine sound awfully similar to the gain-of-function work EcoHealth was involved with in Wuhan. In Feb. 2016, EcoHealth’s founder, Peter Daszak, explained the company’s zoonotic pathogen work as follows:

So as an example, first of all, we are only looking at viral families that include those that have gone into people from animals. So, we narrow it down straight away. Then when you get a sequence of a virus and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS, we found other Corona viruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So, we sequenced the spike protein, the protein that attaches to cells. Then we, well, I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work, you create the pseudo-particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses [to see if they] bind to human cells. And each step you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people. So, you narrow down the field, you reduce the cost and you end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers. (C-Span, 1:16:22.)

Sure sounds a lot like the coronavirus that actually broke out several years ago and destroyed the world as we know it. Less than a month later, Ralph Baric, the UNC Chapel Hill biologist who spearheaded the gain-of-function projects for Daszak, co-authored a paper warning with certitude of the emergence of this disease. “The results indicate that viruses using WIV1-CoV spike are poised to emerge in human populations due to efficient replication in primary human airway epithelial cell cultures,” concluded the authors.

How did they know? And doesn’t anyone have a concern that the same players were up to no good in Ukraine, especially given Hunter Biden’s ethical problems and the fact that his dad, the vice president and now the president, was overseeing Ukrainian affairs during that time?

Recently, the National Pulse found, based on EcoHealth’s 990 filings and analysis by ProPublica, that the company’s investment income surged by 342% in the year of the pandemic. EcoHealth received millions of dollars from Fauci’s NIAD to work on “killer” viruses with the Wuhan Institute, creating “chimeric” viruses that spread in humans at rates “equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”

Now consider the fact that Metabiota’s CEO, Nathan Wolfe, penned an article in Time on Aug. 1, 2014, detailing his opinion on the Ebola outbreak in Africa and then literally predicted coronavirus as the next outbreak:

While Ebola virus won’t be the next global Andromeda strain, there are viruses out there that could be. Coronaviruses (like SARS) and influenza viruses (like the H1N1 virus of 1918) for example, show that some viruses truly can spread around the world in ways that will blindside and impact our entire planet. It is notable that a novel coronavirus, the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and a novel influenzavirus, the H7N9 virus, receive very little attention from the international media. Perhaps as importantly, there are millions of still unidentified viruses in animal reservoirs, among which, almost certainly is a virus that we’d have no capacity to understand, or stop were it to suddenly emerge today.

If we didn’t have a pandemic likely created by similar research – possibly by the same players – killing millions globally and injuring tens of millions of others, I wouldn’t be too concerned with these research projects in Ukraine. But given what has occurred, why is there zero concern from the media or the politicians about what we have been doing in Ukraine and elsewhere? And how does it shape our entire geopolitical worldview on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Category:

Opinion, Political

Tagged with:

Tag Cloud