Sunday, October 19, 2014

THE PAPER TRAIL: The US Government Involvement in Developing Ebola as a BioWeapon

By Robert Wenzel

It is my suspicion that the current Ebola outbreak is the result of US testing of the virus as a potential bioweapon (SEE: The US Military and the Ebola Outbreak and Ebola and the United States Government).

Now, thanks to a paper by Dr. Cyril Broderick, a Liberian scientist and a former professor of Plant Pathology at the University of Liberia’s College of Agriculture and Forestry, we are getting the first indications of a paper trail linking the US Defense Department, bioweapons, Ebola and West Africa.

Dr. Broderick points to a 1996 book by  Leonard G. Horowitz, Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola : Nature, Accident or Intentional? 


Here's how Dr. Broderick summarizes parts of the book that pertain to Ebola:

Horowitz (1996) was deliberate and unambiguous when he explained the threat of new diseases in his text...In his interview with Dr. Robert Strecker in Chapter 7, the discussion, in the early 1970s, made it obvious that the war was between countries that hosted the KGB and the CIA, and the ‘manufacture’ of ‘AIDS-Like Viruses’ was clearly directed at the other. In passing during the Interview, mention was made of Fort Detrick, “the Ebola Building,” and ‘a lot of problems with strange illnesses’ in “Frederick [Maryland].” By Chapter 12 in his text, he had confirmed the existence of an American Military-Medical-Industry that conducts biological weapons tests under the guise of administering vaccinations to control diseases and improve the health of “black Africans overseas.”
Remember, this is not something written in the current panic atmosphere over Ebola. The book was published in 1996 and references an interview conducted in the 1970s.

Dr. Broderick also lists a number of institutions that various documents show have been involved in Ebola research. Among the organizations:
(a) The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), a well-known centre for bio-war research, located at Fort Detrick, Maryland;

(b) Tulane University, in New Orleans, USA, winner of research grants, including a grant of more than $7 million the National Institute of Health (NIH) to fund research with the Lassa viral hemorrhagic fever;

(c) the US Center for Disease Control (CDC);

(d) Doctors Without Borders (also known by its French name, Medicins Sans Frontiers);

(e) Tekmira, a Canadian pharmaceutical company;

(f) The UK’s GlaxoSmithKline; and

(g) the Kenema Government Hospital in Kenema, Sierra Leone.

Further commenting on various reports, he writes:
Reports narrate stories of the US Department of Defense (DoD) funding Ebola trials on humans, trials which started just weeks before the Ebola outbreak in Guinea and Sierra Leone. The reports continue and state that the DoD gave a contract worth $140 million dollars to Tekmira, a Canadian pharmaceutical company, to conduct Ebola research. This research work involved injecting and infusing healthy humans with the deadly Ebola virus. Hence, the DoD is listed as a collaborator in a “First in Human” Ebola clinical trial NCT02041715, which started in January 2014 shortly before an Ebola epidemic was declared in West Africa in March. Disturbingly, many reports also conclude that the US government has a viral fever bioterrorism research laboratory in Kenema, a town at the epicentre of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The only relevant positive and ethical olive-branch seen in all of my reading is that Theguardian.com reported, “The US government funding of Ebola trials on healthy humans comes amid warnings by top scientists in Harvard and Yale that such virus experiments risk triggering a worldwide pandemic.”..
The U. S., Canada, France, and the U. K. are all implicated in the detestable and devilish deeds that these Ebola tests are. There is the need to pursue criminal and civil redress for damages, and African countries and people should secure legal representation to seek damages from these countries, some corporations, and the United Nations. Evidence seems abundant against Tulane University, and suits should start there. See Yoichi Shimatsu’s article, The Ebola Breakout Coincided with UN Vaccine Campaigns....

From the  Shimatsu article:
The mystery at the heart of the ebola outbreak is how the 1995 Zaire (ZEBOV) strain, which originated in Central Africa some 4,000 km to the east in Congolese (Zairean) provinces of Central Africa, managed to suddenly resurface now a decade later in Guinea, West Africa. Since no evidence of ebola infections in transit has been detected at airports, ports or highways, the initial infections must have come from one of either two alternative routes:

- First, the possibility of an anonymous “Patient A”, a survivor of the devastating 1995 Zaire pandemic, perhaps a doctor or medical worker who was a carrier of the dormant virus into Guinea. An example of a Patient A is Patrick Sawyer, the infected American resident of Liberia who first transmitted ebola to Nigeria. No attempt has been made by the national health ministry or international agencies to trace and identify the original ebola case in Guinea. So far, not a shred of evidence has surfaced to indicate&nbs p;the very first victim to be a foreigner or a Guinean who had traveled abroad.

- Second, the absence of a Patient A leaves the prospect of an unauthorized test in humans of a new antidote for ebola in rural Guinea, done under the cover of a vaccination program for another disease. Whether the covert clinical trial’s purpose was civilian health or military use of an antibody-based antidote cannot be determined as of yet.

The reason for suspecting a vaccine campaign rather than an individual carrier is due to the fact that the ebola contagion did not start at a single geographic center and then spread outward along the roads. Instead. simultaneous outbreaks of multiple cases occurred in widely separated parts of rural Guinea, indicating a highly organized effort to infect residents in different locations in the same time-frame.

The ebola outbreak in early March coincided with three separate vaccination campaigns countrywide: a cholera oral vaccine effort by Medicins Sans Frontieres under the WHO; and UNICEF-funded prevention programs against meningitis and polio.

Shimatsu also has a theory on how the testing might have gone awry:
After exposure to the ebola virus, a patient shows symptoms of high fever, vomiting and diarrhea, no less than 8 days later and likelier after two weeks. Re-arriving on schedule, the covert drug-testing team administers the anti-ebola antibodies as “the second dose of cholera vaccine”. The perfect crime of illegal human testing should have gone off without a hitch.

A problem arises, however, when many of the test subjects fall sick in less than two weeks and are unable to walk dozens of kilometers to the vaccine centers. With much of the original cohort of human test subjects absent for the antidote, and ebola out of control in the hinterland, the secret clinical trial free-falls toward a pit of liability and legal action...The Guinea outbreak was not reported by WHO until 6 weeks after the initial round of infections in February, which is quite odd considering the armies of medical workers afield in the countryside during those three vaccine campaigns. By contrast, the MSF office in next-door Senegal knew about the Guinean ebola contagion less than a month after outbreak.
Also note Dr. Broderick's key point that the “First in Human” Ebola clinical trial of Ebola began early this year. He identifies the study as: NCT02041715, There is no written indication that any tests were conducted in West Africa, but the reports on the testing are significant:

A quick Google search shows at ClinicalTrials.gov that an NCT02041715 clinical trial was indeed started by Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corporation. with, get this, the US Department of Defense listed as a collaborator.

ClinicalTrials.gov on the same page provides these resource links related to the clinical trials:
Resource links provided by NLM:
MedlinePlus related topics: Ebola Fever Hemorrhagic Fevers
Under purpose. we have this:
Ebola Virus Infection
So what is the timeline here:

January 9, 2014-The "First in Huma" Ebola clinical trial.

March, 2014- Reports of an Ebola outbreak begin to emerge.

The report implies but is not clear that the test was conducted in San Antonio, Texas, but, if this was indeed a DOD related experiment, is it difficult to believe that further tests were being done in West Africa, if indeed the test was ready to be conducted stateside? Is it possible that a healthy person was tested in Texas with the vaccine as a sort of control, with further testing done in West Africa where subjects were first given the Ebola virus, where it was then planned to give them the antidote, before things then got badly out of control?

I note that the press release by Tekmira reports that  "it has dosed the first subject in a Phase I human clinical trial of TKM-Ebola, an anti-Ebola viral therapeutic that is being developed under a US$140 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense." I have done my share of financial consulting with early stage biotech companies to know you don't need $140 million to dose up one person and monitor that person. This project appears to be much larger than what the press release suggests and sure seems to point to possible monkey business in West Africa.

There is no smoking gun here, but I sure am starting to smell gun powder in the air.

 Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and of Target Liberty. He is also author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics

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