In a conversation with retired pharma R&D executive Sasha Latypova (@sasha_latypova) physician and writer Dr. Meryl Nass (@NassMeryl) gives a ten-minute overview of biological weapons research in the U.S. from WWI all the way up to present-day gain-of-function research. pic.twitter.com/j84U7YiWnS
— Sense Receptor (@SenseReceptor) November 17, 2023
In World War I, there was a lot of gas used, so, chlorine, phosgene, and other gases were used, and everybody felt that these were worse than bullets. Now, I don't know why they thought that but they did. There were also biological weapons used. There were biological agents, for example, used to kill horses because horses are used in war. In 1925, the Geneva Protocol came into force, where the nations that were involved in World War I, said, we don't want to use biological or chemical weapons anymore, and we're going to make this treaty. So they did, but not everyone ratified the treaty. The United States signed it, but we never ratified it. It took us 50theFaars to ratify it; we didn't ratify it until 1975. To this day, I don't know what we did between 1925 and 1942. But by the time World War II came along, we were making chemical and biological weapons and stockpiling them in great numbers. Everyone knows about Fort Deitrick Lab which is where the research [bioweapons] is done, but there were large places for storage underground in Alabama and in Arkansas. When the United States tried to get rid of some of its chemical weapons by pouring them down holes in the ground, into caverns and things, actual earthquakes occurred. And so in some places, we had to pump them out, and then a lot of our chemical weapons were actually dumped in leaking canisters into the Atlantic Ocean off a little Naval Base in New Jersey near Sandy Hook they were just scuttled from there.
2:00. In any event, we continue to develop all sorts of weapons--electromagnetic, radiologic, chemical, nuclear, conventional, and in 1969, after a lot of complaints about what was going on in the Vietnam War, President Nixon said we would stop the biological weapons, we would no longer research them, make them, keep them, and we would encourage every other nation to do the same thing. About four months later, he added toxins to that list, because we had quite a storage of toxins, which were primarily used for assassinations but could be used for other purposes; for instance, we had toxins that could give you diarrhea. So if you had a small group of soldiers and you just wanted to incapacitate them for a few days, you could do it with those sorts of toxins, including cholera toxin. So the Biological Weapons Convention was written up in 1972 and came into force in 1975 and almost all the countries signed it. But there was no enforcement mechanism in it; that was supposed to be put in later. And there were review conferences set up every 5 years to develop a protocol for how to do inspections, you know, how could one country call for inspections of another country? What would it take? How would we do it? What are the parameters? And then, if we found they were cheating and actually were working on biological weapons, how would we punish them? And how would we maintain the validity of the treaty? Those things did not get established over the first 15 years, after that the United States really got in the way. Now, Russia and other countries may not have wanted inspections added, but it was generally the United States that was pulling the plug. Particularly in 2001, the countries had all negotiated together and thought they had a done deal, and at the very last minute, the US pulled out. So we had an unworkable biological weapons convention. Now, in the 80s and '90s, we did sign a convention to ban chemical weapons, but the United States said it was going to take some enormous amount of time, like 20 years or more to get rid of all their chemical weapons . . . which, by the way, I thought was always funny because when we decided that Syria needed to get rid of their chemical weapons, it only took a few months; of course, for the US, it was going to take 20 years. Eventually, it was only last year that the United States destroyed the last of the chemical weapons it had declared. The Russians also got rid of the last of their chemical weapons, and Syria long ago, and other countries. So, supposedly the chemical weapons are gone. The biologicals, however, we don't know. So, the Russians had a leak from an Anthrax factory in 1979, so everybody knew they were cheating. In the book, Germs by Judith Miller, 2002, of the New York Times and two of her colleagues at the time, it was revealed that the United States had these three programs to develop Anthrax weapons in different ways and that they were also considered by most people who knew about these treaties to be transgressing, to be going against the treaty provisions. So there we were. There were some sort of standards that scientists were going by. Scientists were not asking the federal government or funders to pay for biological warfare research; in general, it was considered a no-no. But then there were experiments on avian flu, on smallpox, and the 1918-1919 Spanish flu that most scientists thought were very dangerous and were going against the biological weapons convention. But they were basically allowed to proceed with a bit of a pause to discuss them but then they continued.
6:30 There was a researcher Kawaoka, Yoshihiro Kawaoka . . . From Japan who works at the University of Wisconsin who is doing this work and Ron Fouchier at Erasmus University in Holland, doing this work. So they changed the name. If you want to let it continue or start again, you need a new name. You need a benign name, so they called it Gain-a-Function, and that way nobody knew what the hell it was. Now it's Gain-of-Function. In 2013 and 2014, there were calls by many scientists because of the work of Kawaoka and Fouchier to stop it. "This is too dangerous. We can have a pandemic and kill hundreds of m millions of people on this planet. Why are we doing this after hundreds of scientists signed petitions?"
The Obama Administration said, okay we're going to have a moratorium on this gain of function work. And people like me thought "Oh, good, we're going to have a moratorium we're going to figure out how to regulate it and everything's going to get better," but, in fact, the only moratorium was on SARS Coronavirus and the Avian flu viruses. So if you're doing gain a function on any other organism, you could continue. No problem. The NIH was supposed to come up, particularly Fauci's group was supposed to come up with a way to vet these experiments. So somebody applied to the NIH for grants for Gain-of-Function, Fauci's people were going to look at it and see if it was dangerous or not. That never really got put into place.
8:10. A committee was established but it never looked at more than 6 experiments over the six years or so that it was in existence. Ralph Baric's experiments on the SARS Coronavirus never went through that group. So illegally they were allowed to continue. Baric thought that he had been given a waiver because he actually published in one of his papers that he had been doing Gain-of-Function research, and the moratorium came in, and he was given a waiver, so he was able to continue. But the Fauci emails showed that there was no waiver, that his experiments had never been looked at. In 2017, the moratorium was lifted, and Fauci and Francis Collins wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, saying "This gain-of-function research is so important that it's worth the risk." That it's worth the risk! Can you imagine the temerity of them?
Wikipedia explains that,
On 19 December 2017, the NIH lifted the moratorium because gain-of-function research was deemed "important in helping us identify, understand, and develop strategies and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that pose a threat to public health."
So it's continued, and they've continued to fund it. Now somewhere in the 2000s, the Department of Defense got the idea that it would be better to have some of their weapons, we assume it was the Defense Department, they're doing weapons research, be handled by Fauci at the NIH rather than being done by them. And Fauci started farming it out, and that's how some of it wound up at Wuhan, we believe. So the DoD added to Fauci's salary, which is how he became the highest-paid employee of the US government. A large part of his remit was to make decisions on Gain-of-Function research that would be funded at the NIAID.
