As the COVID-19 pandemic's dust settles, public scrutiny on decision-makers' actions has grown sharper. One particularly troubling case involves Dr. David Morens, a senior scientific advisor at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a long-time associate of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Morens have co-authored numerous articles and papers over the past two decades, consistently shaping public health discourse and policy.
They remdesivir(ed) and used other toxic substances and did not allow proper treatment in our hospitals murdering many people all over the world. Trust is broken. The cabal ruling needs to end.
Dee I see you are on top of your game! “They” (Fauci - Gates - Collins - Daszak et al… poisoned to death many people in Uganda where my wife is from. First they infected the people with Ebola then They brought in their “new” drug remdesivir. More people died from the treatment protocol than the planted Ebola disease. The Africans/Ugandans were used by (They) as test rats.
('m going to two-part this lengthy comment that reviews the CFR article)
But a first unexpected and marginally related revelation in it,is when CFR tells us what the forever war in Afghanistan was really about: Big Pharma, the biggest militarized drug cartel in the world. Not 9-11:
"ENDY: Right now, the sourcing of these medicines is realized by growing poppies—agricultural fields of poppies, opium poppies, that are harvested. And the compounds are extracted and brought into preparations and used to treat pain. There are a number of problems with this current practice. As most are aware domestically, we have massive problems with addiction. We have side effects from the medicines themselves. They’re declared as essential medicines by the World Health Organization. And that’s important because when you look at who has access to these medicines, only about 2 ½ billion people on Earth have access to these essential medicines."
FF - It then gets into a discussion about CRSPR, innovations, the perils of unintended consequences messing with the natural world we know very little about. Impressively at least giving those concerns a voice.
Then it goes on to describe a meeting with Fauci and Collins about Zika, proposals to mitigate. This was the "good" Fauci, like the one who told his colleagues masks don't work when the cameras were off.
Transitioning int Dual-Use Research of Concern (DURC) and Gain-of-Function research (GOF)in the context of bioterrorism, different ethics about permissible research globally, risk tolerances. For those with an interest in earlier virus/vaccine debates:
"GERBERDING: But you know, go back to even, you know, smallpox vaccine or, you know, the early days of vaccinology, where the same debates occurred between the technology of advancing the opportunity to prevent infectious disease versus the safety concerns and the academe. So these are ongoing tensions that exist between scientific advances and concerns for unknown risks. I can’t really think of an example where the science has stopped because of the safety concerns, but I do think that the boundary conditions are important to face up to. And in this case, the stakes are particularly high.
NICHOLS: Do you think we’ve made any mistakes so far, with respect to the potential medical applications?
GERBERDING: Well, what we might not understand and the mistakes that we’ve actually made. And, you know, the biome is one example where I don’t think we really fully understand what our manipulation, even our antimicrobial use, for example, or anything that put we into our bodies, what’s that really doing to our internal ecosystems, let alone the environmental ecosystem. And if you take an ecological approach and really think about emerging infectious disease and their zoonotic origins, about 80 percent of the time we really probably have underestimate—have underestimated the perturbations that we’ve caused in the system. So, you know, I don’t have a startling example to give you, but I have a strong sense that we probably don’t know what we don’t know."
FF - There's a bird flu/monkeypox/cattle, etc marker!
Followed by a long discussion on manufacturing the human genome, directed evolution, gene editing, etc. But it does hearken back to an earlier time when science could be openly debated!:
"NICHOLS: We agreed on a conference call yesterday, among the four of us, that this is not a good idea to have a secret meeting, actually. Science thrives best when it’s very open, very transparent, very much debated. And I think we’ve all agreed on that."
FF - Them's was the days, huh? It goes on to speak to the encroaching surveillance state peril:
"GARRETT: And now we have this massive cybersecurity crisis, where nobody in the world feels like their data is secure, that their very personality, their very thoughts are accessible, whether it’s to their own government or to some hacker somewhere out there, or to a foreign government. "
FF - And, here's the revolving door between private sector and regulators:
"GERBERDING: But I do think that—you know, I want to very respectful of the quality of the scientists that are at the FDA, because there are some very outstanding people there. And again, part of the 21st century cure legislation is to give the FDA the hiring flexibilities and the salary support that they need to try to be more attractive to people. So I really want to get behind them and say how can we help you, because I completely agree with your point. We all agree with the problem that we need to help them solve it."
FF - But the nexus to the CFR article and Justin's Stack is found...below in my reply to this comment....
"ENDY: There are exceptions to this, which have been developed, in my opinion, on a responsive and ad hoc basis. You know, so for example spent more time over the last 20 months than I might have wished as a member of the National Biosecurity Board, trying to be responsive to government requests around how—if and how work involving gain-of-function with flu and MERS and SARS might proceed or not. And about a month ago, we shipped our recommendations into the government for how to think about—
NICHOLS: You better explain a little more of what that means, what the problem was. But take a minute or two to.
ENDY: Sure. But I mean, but it’s a good example to illustrate how much we’re on our heels in many respects in terms of responding to security concerns. So a number of years ago, as many might know, there was public funding for work to explore how particular strains of flu might be adapted to potentially create a new type of flu variant that might lead to a pandemic. So, could you take bird flu and have it be adapted so it would passage through mammals, create casualties in mammals. Very controversial work. When it was brought forward by the research community, it first emerged in the context of scientific papers that were being considered for publication. And at that point, very late in the practice of the work, concerns were raised that resulted in debate about whether or not such research should be published ever, never mind whether or not the work should have been done.
This experience, combined with imperfect inventory control, imperfect management of shipping of samples from U.S. government labs, combined with other factors, led to the federal government putting a pause on all funding for doing gain-of-function research on specific human pathogens—viral pathogens, like flu. And it took us the better part of 20 months to work through the aspects of that and come up with a set of recommendations that the federal government could consider implementing in terms of if and how to allow such work to proceed. The point I’m trying to communicate, if I zoom out for a second, is this is a lot of work for a specific case. We’re operating on our heels a little bit. It’s very ad hoc and idiosyncratic. It doesn’t really scale as an approach. And if you look at where this landscape is going, and how the technology trends are moving, it seems like we have a lot more on the horizon and beyond the horizon to consider."
"Q: Jeffrey Glueck from Foursquare.
A question for Professor Endy and one for Laurie. Is it possible that you could engineer a gene drive, professor, that you could insert into a nation’s food supply, that would rend the entire food supply vulnerable to a trigger chemical or the like, as a bioweapon, or engineer an insect to bite humans and insert a gene drive into humans? Are these—are these conceivable bioweapons with the new gene drive technology?
And for Laurie, the U.S. is signatory to the ENMOD, the Environmental Modifications Treaty, banning environmental modifications. Should that global entity be convened as a forum for some of these global regulations?
NICHOLS: So the first question was to Drew, I think, gene drive in the food supply.
ENDY: Yeah, very quickly—yeah, very quickly, we don’t know but it’s conceivable. The patent filings coming out of Harvard suggest that that could be practiced, but nobody’s practiced it. I’d refer to Kevin Esvelt and others for thoughtful, technical responses. The one thing I would point out regarding gene drives is I have not seen any experimental evidence of a gene drive been 100 percent successful in terms of penetrating a population, even in the most carefully controlled laboratory experiments with relatively homogeneous strains of yeast. You get to the high 90s, but I’ve never seen anything to total completion. Now, I might not have the latest data, but I think that’s relevant from a policy perspective. Could you still nevertheless realize disturbances of some significance? Yes."
"GARRETT: Yeah. I think I’d kind of prefer to take it jumping off the previous question, because it doesn’t matter which international entity you imagine activating to address which specific problem. We have a first problem in front of that, which Drew hinted at when he said, you know, safety and security are cultural issues. They’re about the culture of how you do science. and they’re about the culture in which science is occurring—what’s going on around the outside of it. It’s about the nature of governance in any given setting—whether it’s how a university governs safety on campus of how a nation governs safety within and without its borders.
And when we’ve had various international-level meetings looking at GOF, looking at DURC, and now looking at synthetic biology questions, what you see is that the world cannot even agree on the word security, OK? And it’s very serious. I see it now also in trying to improve the World Health Organization so that it’s capable of responding better than it did to Ebola to the next great outbreak, which now the next great is already here, it’s called Zika. And what you see is that the word “security” is so charged, it’s perceived when Americans say the term, as we’re about security for us not you. But we want you to do things so that we feel safer. And while we’re at it, we define security blended in with terrorism.
And if you go to poor countries, particularly in Africa and South Asia, their attitude is: You’re just trying to come in here and mobilize us, and get us to buy into your tech and your parameters of control. But it’s all in your interests, not ours. And one of the biggest complaints you hear at a lot of meetings on this topic is that the more you securitize biology, the harder it is for people from many parts of the world to engage with biological enterprises in Western Europe and North America, because they become security risks."
FF - Followed by discussion about getting global governments on the same safety and security page, including China and Russia. Then there's this revelation of the contempt these self-designated "elites" have for the rest of us:
"GERBERDING: I mean, one thing I would just add to that is that I sense that I’m in a room of elites, some really, really, really brilliant people who have a breadth of knowledge and scientific literacy and a lot of capabilities. But, you know, talk about the 0.1 percent, you know, we live in a world where scientific competency, numeracy, literacy is increasingly the focus of enormous disparity. And so the people at the level who can take in this kind of conversation and participate in it in the debate or the dialogue, versus the citizenry of the nation, you know, that is becoming increasingly large chasm of—
NICHOLS: A gap.
GERBERDING: A huge gap. And you know, we can’t even count on citizens to make good health decisions about ordinary things that are fairly easy to understand, let alone debate the merits of CRISPR, gene drive, or gene editing. And what happens when people don’t understand science is they default to very black and white solutions. Like it’s either really bad, no GMO, that’s off the table, or they just give up and, you know, don’t pay attention and don’t engage in the kind of citizenry manner that would be helpful. So I think we have to accept the reality that not only we do we have to deal with the environment—the safety and security environment of these technologies, but we also have to deal with the fact that we really need to help people understand what they are. And that’s a tall order."
The CFR piece ends with another interesting insight to what we're experiencing with the nonstop fear porn of pathogen after pathogen being "discovered" everywhere in our environment, and how disruptive to society it is to be taken out of context:
"GARRETT: There’s—90 percent, you know, out there is not the United States doing this science. And a huge percent of it is in private sector. So you know, the only thing I would say to add to what Drew—Drew’s really smart analysis, is to—so that you don’t all go out of here paralyzed with terror and fear. There is a self-correcting going on all the time within the scientific community. And just a great example, because yesterday was worldwide Subway Microbiome Day. And so in 54 cities around the world, teenagers and college students were out swabbing subways and bringing samples back to figure out what microbes were in all the subways of the world.
This is a build-on from a study done just in the New York subway systems two years ago, that had a really bad outcome, which is to say they went public with their findings, even though they didn’t have great reference strains to—reference sequences to be sure what strains they were really finding, and whether it was accurate or not. And here in a city where we were subjected to 9/11 and an anthrax attack, they said they found plague and anthrax in our subways, and were very surprised that the public was upset and that the city health department was less than happy with their announcement.
A learning curve has happened. A lot of scientists piled onto those folks and said, let’s do this right. Let’s be much more accurate, much more careful. Let’s think about what we’re saying to the public. If this is a public good, let’s frame it right. And now, yesterday, 54 cities executed—under a whole kind of mutually agreed framework that’s a really sophisticated improvement."
FF - So, they know better. And are doing it anyways. The Council on Foreign Relations isn't some inconsequential think tank of nobodies spouting into thin air. It's one of the most influential organizations in the world. It essentially give marching orders to congress, federal agencies, foreign counterparts. And it discusses how biotech innovations get around regulations they believe are short-sighted and the result of ignorant politicians pandering to ignorant citizens "who don't understand easy, ordinary things."
We could be more harmonious with nature if you serial killers stop fucking with it.
Nothing will be right until people fired and injured are compensated and made whole! Then justice needs to be served on the Covid Cabal - all of them!
They remdesivir(ed) and used other toxic substances and did not allow proper treatment in our hospitals murdering many people all over the world. Trust is broken. The cabal ruling needs to end.
Dee I see you are on top of your game! “They” (Fauci - Gates - Collins - Daszak et al… poisoned to death many people in Uganda where my wife is from. First they infected the people with Ebola then They brought in their “new” drug remdesivir. More people died from the treatment protocol than the planted Ebola disease. The Africans/Ugandans were used by (They) as test rats.
Yep they did. Even when they were visiting the U.S.
The U.S. hospital protocol-ed to death a World Renown Uganda Spiritual Leader -Father Ubald Rugirangoga, https://chbmp.org/cases/murdered-by-fda-death-protocol/father-ubald-rugirangoga/
More protocol-ed at Humanity Betrayal Project https://chbmp.org/
Ecohealth Alliance is a limited hangout. Which means they sacrifice a very public fall guy while the rest of them carry on as usual.
This isnt going to be done right until ALL GOF labs are destroyed and ALL partipicants charged
Yup. A diversion. “See, we do take this seriously” NOT.
I voted for Trump. Trump never drained the swamp, but he did promote poisonous shots.
Exactly. He won’t get my vote again. TDS works both ways.
These are the arrogant little insects who burrow into our government, oozing poison and gorging themselves.
This is an interesting read from the Council on Foreign Relations in 2016 that ties into the subject of your stack, Fauci and Francis Collins.
Biotechnology: The Potential and Perils of Innovation
CFR, June 22, 2016
https://www.cfr.org/event/biotechnology-potential-and-perils-innovation
('m going to two-part this lengthy comment that reviews the CFR article)
But a first unexpected and marginally related revelation in it,is when CFR tells us what the forever war in Afghanistan was really about: Big Pharma, the biggest militarized drug cartel in the world. Not 9-11:
"ENDY: Right now, the sourcing of these medicines is realized by growing poppies—agricultural fields of poppies, opium poppies, that are harvested. And the compounds are extracted and brought into preparations and used to treat pain. There are a number of problems with this current practice. As most are aware domestically, we have massive problems with addiction. We have side effects from the medicines themselves. They’re declared as essential medicines by the World Health Organization. And that’s important because when you look at who has access to these medicines, only about 2 ½ billion people on Earth have access to these essential medicines."
FF - It then gets into a discussion about CRSPR, innovations, the perils of unintended consequences messing with the natural world we know very little about. Impressively at least giving those concerns a voice.
Then it goes on to describe a meeting with Fauci and Collins about Zika, proposals to mitigate. This was the "good" Fauci, like the one who told his colleagues masks don't work when the cameras were off.
Transitioning int Dual-Use Research of Concern (DURC) and Gain-of-Function research (GOF)in the context of bioterrorism, different ethics about permissible research globally, risk tolerances. For those with an interest in earlier virus/vaccine debates:
"GERBERDING: But you know, go back to even, you know, smallpox vaccine or, you know, the early days of vaccinology, where the same debates occurred between the technology of advancing the opportunity to prevent infectious disease versus the safety concerns and the academe. So these are ongoing tensions that exist between scientific advances and concerns for unknown risks. I can’t really think of an example where the science has stopped because of the safety concerns, but I do think that the boundary conditions are important to face up to. And in this case, the stakes are particularly high.
NICHOLS: Do you think we’ve made any mistakes so far, with respect to the potential medical applications?
GERBERDING: Well, what we might not understand and the mistakes that we’ve actually made. And, you know, the biome is one example where I don’t think we really fully understand what our manipulation, even our antimicrobial use, for example, or anything that put we into our bodies, what’s that really doing to our internal ecosystems, let alone the environmental ecosystem. And if you take an ecological approach and really think about emerging infectious disease and their zoonotic origins, about 80 percent of the time we really probably have underestimate—have underestimated the perturbations that we’ve caused in the system. So, you know, I don’t have a startling example to give you, but I have a strong sense that we probably don’t know what we don’t know."
FF - There's a bird flu/monkeypox/cattle, etc marker!
Followed by a long discussion on manufacturing the human genome, directed evolution, gene editing, etc. But it does hearken back to an earlier time when science could be openly debated!:
"NICHOLS: We agreed on a conference call yesterday, among the four of us, that this is not a good idea to have a secret meeting, actually. Science thrives best when it’s very open, very transparent, very much debated. And I think we’ve all agreed on that."
FF - Them's was the days, huh? It goes on to speak to the encroaching surveillance state peril:
"GARRETT: And now we have this massive cybersecurity crisis, where nobody in the world feels like their data is secure, that their very personality, their very thoughts are accessible, whether it’s to their own government or to some hacker somewhere out there, or to a foreign government. "
FF - And, here's the revolving door between private sector and regulators:
"GERBERDING: But I do think that—you know, I want to very respectful of the quality of the scientists that are at the FDA, because there are some very outstanding people there. And again, part of the 21st century cure legislation is to give the FDA the hiring flexibilities and the salary support that they need to try to be more attractive to people. So I really want to get behind them and say how can we help you, because I completely agree with your point. We all agree with the problem that we need to help them solve it."
FF - But the nexus to the CFR article and Justin's Stack is found...below in my reply to this comment....
"ENDY: There are exceptions to this, which have been developed, in my opinion, on a responsive and ad hoc basis. You know, so for example spent more time over the last 20 months than I might have wished as a member of the National Biosecurity Board, trying to be responsive to government requests around how—if and how work involving gain-of-function with flu and MERS and SARS might proceed or not. And about a month ago, we shipped our recommendations into the government for how to think about—
NICHOLS: You better explain a little more of what that means, what the problem was. But take a minute or two to.
ENDY: Sure. But I mean, but it’s a good example to illustrate how much we’re on our heels in many respects in terms of responding to security concerns. So a number of years ago, as many might know, there was public funding for work to explore how particular strains of flu might be adapted to potentially create a new type of flu variant that might lead to a pandemic. So, could you take bird flu and have it be adapted so it would passage through mammals, create casualties in mammals. Very controversial work. When it was brought forward by the research community, it first emerged in the context of scientific papers that were being considered for publication. And at that point, very late in the practice of the work, concerns were raised that resulted in debate about whether or not such research should be published ever, never mind whether or not the work should have been done.
This experience, combined with imperfect inventory control, imperfect management of shipping of samples from U.S. government labs, combined with other factors, led to the federal government putting a pause on all funding for doing gain-of-function research on specific human pathogens—viral pathogens, like flu. And it took us the better part of 20 months to work through the aspects of that and come up with a set of recommendations that the federal government could consider implementing in terms of if and how to allow such work to proceed. The point I’m trying to communicate, if I zoom out for a second, is this is a lot of work for a specific case. We’re operating on our heels a little bit. It’s very ad hoc and idiosyncratic. It doesn’t really scale as an approach. And if you look at where this landscape is going, and how the technology trends are moving, it seems like we have a lot more on the horizon and beyond the horizon to consider."
"Q: Jeffrey Glueck from Foursquare.
A question for Professor Endy and one for Laurie. Is it possible that you could engineer a gene drive, professor, that you could insert into a nation’s food supply, that would rend the entire food supply vulnerable to a trigger chemical or the like, as a bioweapon, or engineer an insect to bite humans and insert a gene drive into humans? Are these—are these conceivable bioweapons with the new gene drive technology?
And for Laurie, the U.S. is signatory to the ENMOD, the Environmental Modifications Treaty, banning environmental modifications. Should that global entity be convened as a forum for some of these global regulations?
NICHOLS: So the first question was to Drew, I think, gene drive in the food supply.
ENDY: Yeah, very quickly—yeah, very quickly, we don’t know but it’s conceivable. The patent filings coming out of Harvard suggest that that could be practiced, but nobody’s practiced it. I’d refer to Kevin Esvelt and others for thoughtful, technical responses. The one thing I would point out regarding gene drives is I have not seen any experimental evidence of a gene drive been 100 percent successful in terms of penetrating a population, even in the most carefully controlled laboratory experiments with relatively homogeneous strains of yeast. You get to the high 90s, but I’ve never seen anything to total completion. Now, I might not have the latest data, but I think that’s relevant from a policy perspective. Could you still nevertheless realize disturbances of some significance? Yes."
"GARRETT: Yeah. I think I’d kind of prefer to take it jumping off the previous question, because it doesn’t matter which international entity you imagine activating to address which specific problem. We have a first problem in front of that, which Drew hinted at when he said, you know, safety and security are cultural issues. They’re about the culture of how you do science. and they’re about the culture in which science is occurring—what’s going on around the outside of it. It’s about the nature of governance in any given setting—whether it’s how a university governs safety on campus of how a nation governs safety within and without its borders.
And when we’ve had various international-level meetings looking at GOF, looking at DURC, and now looking at synthetic biology questions, what you see is that the world cannot even agree on the word security, OK? And it’s very serious. I see it now also in trying to improve the World Health Organization so that it’s capable of responding better than it did to Ebola to the next great outbreak, which now the next great is already here, it’s called Zika. And what you see is that the word “security” is so charged, it’s perceived when Americans say the term, as we’re about security for us not you. But we want you to do things so that we feel safer. And while we’re at it, we define security blended in with terrorism.
And if you go to poor countries, particularly in Africa and South Asia, their attitude is: You’re just trying to come in here and mobilize us, and get us to buy into your tech and your parameters of control. But it’s all in your interests, not ours. And one of the biggest complaints you hear at a lot of meetings on this topic is that the more you securitize biology, the harder it is for people from many parts of the world to engage with biological enterprises in Western Europe and North America, because they become security risks."
FF - Followed by discussion about getting global governments on the same safety and security page, including China and Russia. Then there's this revelation of the contempt these self-designated "elites" have for the rest of us:
"GERBERDING: I mean, one thing I would just add to that is that I sense that I’m in a room of elites, some really, really, really brilliant people who have a breadth of knowledge and scientific literacy and a lot of capabilities. But, you know, talk about the 0.1 percent, you know, we live in a world where scientific competency, numeracy, literacy is increasingly the focus of enormous disparity. And so the people at the level who can take in this kind of conversation and participate in it in the debate or the dialogue, versus the citizenry of the nation, you know, that is becoming increasingly large chasm of—
NICHOLS: A gap.
GERBERDING: A huge gap. And you know, we can’t even count on citizens to make good health decisions about ordinary things that are fairly easy to understand, let alone debate the merits of CRISPR, gene drive, or gene editing. And what happens when people don’t understand science is they default to very black and white solutions. Like it’s either really bad, no GMO, that’s off the table, or they just give up and, you know, don’t pay attention and don’t engage in the kind of citizenry manner that would be helpful. So I think we have to accept the reality that not only we do we have to deal with the environment—the safety and security environment of these technologies, but we also have to deal with the fact that we really need to help people understand what they are. And that’s a tall order."
The CFR piece ends with another interesting insight to what we're experiencing with the nonstop fear porn of pathogen after pathogen being "discovered" everywhere in our environment, and how disruptive to society it is to be taken out of context:
"GARRETT: There’s—90 percent, you know, out there is not the United States doing this science. And a huge percent of it is in private sector. So you know, the only thing I would say to add to what Drew—Drew’s really smart analysis, is to—so that you don’t all go out of here paralyzed with terror and fear. There is a self-correcting going on all the time within the scientific community. And just a great example, because yesterday was worldwide Subway Microbiome Day. And so in 54 cities around the world, teenagers and college students were out swabbing subways and bringing samples back to figure out what microbes were in all the subways of the world.
This is a build-on from a study done just in the New York subway systems two years ago, that had a really bad outcome, which is to say they went public with their findings, even though they didn’t have great reference strains to—reference sequences to be sure what strains they were really finding, and whether it was accurate or not. And here in a city where we were subjected to 9/11 and an anthrax attack, they said they found plague and anthrax in our subways, and were very surprised that the public was upset and that the city health department was less than happy with their announcement.
A learning curve has happened. A lot of scientists piled onto those folks and said, let’s do this right. Let’s be much more accurate, much more careful. Let’s think about what we’re saying to the public. If this is a public good, let’s frame it right. And now, yesterday, 54 cities executed—under a whole kind of mutually agreed framework that’s a really sophisticated improvement."
FF - So, they know better. And are doing it anyways. The Council on Foreign Relations isn't some inconsequential think tank of nobodies spouting into thin air. It's one of the most influential organizations in the world. It essentially give marching orders to congress, federal agencies, foreign counterparts. And it discusses how biotech innovations get around regulations they believe are short-sighted and the result of ignorant politicians pandering to ignorant citizens "who don't understand easy, ordinary things."
Exactly.