NIH’s $2 Billion Biodefense Handoff to the Pentagon: the New Pandemic Money Trail?
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has created a 10-year route for potentially $2 billion in infectious-disease projects, including work against “future pandemic strains,” to move from its civilian research apparatus into Pentagon biodefense funding channels with documented transparency failures.
COVID-19 pandemic origins investigations have relied on identifying and tracing specific federal grants, contracts, and funding streams to determine who financed the research, where it was performed, and what work the money supported.
Future investigations into the provenance of pandemics or other disasters could therefore become substantially more difficult if the underlying research is routed through Pentagon funding mechanisms that obscure the ultimate recipients, projects, and purposes of federal spending.
The new agreement was signed August 4 by Pentagon biodefense chief Robert Kadlec and the following day by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya.
People familiar with the arrangement reportedly told The New York Times that as much as $2 billion from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) could be involved.
That’s roughly one-third of NIAID’s budget.
The agreement itself does not specify an amount or identify the projects.
Nature reported in September that NIH is already identifying projects for transfer.
Nature also reported that the arrangement would “untangle civilian public-health initiatives from defence priorities.”
A senior NIH official then explained:
“We’re trying to get research that’s more Department of War-related back to Department of War,” the official said. “When the public hears that NIAID funds biodefence, they think we’re developing bioweapons, and we’re trying to get out of that business.”
NIH is distinguishing civilian public-health initiatives from “defence priorities,” describing the research being moved as “Department of War-related,” and then explicitly invoking perceptions that “we’re developing bioweapons” while explaining why NIH is “trying to get out of that business.”
But NIH is not simply terminating that work.
It is transferring projects to the Pentagon.
And the agreement creates a mechanism for NIH to continue financing and supplying selected pandemic and biodefense projects after their administration moves there.
It was signed just after the Trump administration quietly filled two positions at the top of the federal government’s vertically integrated pandemic-response architecture.
source jonfleetwood.substack.com
Tom
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More than obvious that all fake pandemics (and all of them are) are military operations. What does the military usually do? Its prime focus? Murder people under the belief that it’s for the good of the country. No, it’s for the good of those in power.
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