WHO Proposed Treaty Will Increase Man-Made Pandemics. Final version
This report is designed to help readers think about some big topics: how to really prevent pandemics and biological warfare, how to assess proposals by the WHO and its members for responding to pandemics, and whether we can rely on our health officials to navigate these areas in ways that make sense and will help their populations
We start with a history of biological arms control and rapidly move to the COVID pandemic, eventually arriving at plans to protect the future.
Weapons of Mass Destruction: Chemical / Biological
Traditionally, the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) have been labelled Chemical, Biological, Radiologic, and Nuclear (CBRN).
The people of the world don’t want them used on us—for they are cheap ways to kill and maim large numbers of people quickly and indiscriminately.
And so international treaties were created to try to prevent their development (only in the later treaties) and use (in all the biological arms control treaties). First was the Geneva Protocol of 1925, following the use of poison gases and limited biological weapons during World War I, which banned the use of biological and chemical weapons in war.
The US and many nations signed it, but it took 50 years for the US to ratify it, and during those 50 years the US asserted it was not bound by the treaty.
The US used both biological and chemical weapons during those 50 years. The US almost certainly used biological weapons in the Korean War (see this, this, this and this) and perhaps used both in Vietnam, which experienced an odd outbreak of plague during the war.
The use of napalm, white phosphorus, Agent Orange (with its dioxin excipient causing massive numbers of birth defects and other tragedies) and probably other chemical weapons like BZ (a hallucinogen/incapacitant) led to much pushback, especially since we had signed the Geneva Protocol and we were supposed to be a civilized nation.
In 1968 and 1969, two important books were published regarding our massive stockpiling and use of these agents. They had a great influence on the American psyche. The first book, written by the young Seymour Hersh about the US’ chemical and biological warfare program was titled Chemical and Biological Warfare; America’s Hidden Arsenal.
In 1969 Congressman Richard D. McCarthy, a former newspaperman from Buffalo, NY published The Ultimate Folly: War by Pestilence, Asphyxiation and Defoliation about the US production and use of chemical and biological weapons.
Prof. Matthew Meselson’s review of the book noted,
Our operation, “Flying Ranch Hand,” has sprayed anti-plant chemicals over an area almost the size of the state of Massachusetts, over 10 per cent of its cropland.
“Ranch Hand” no longer has much to do with the official justification of preventing ambush. Rather, it has become a kind of environmental warfare, devastating vast tracts of forest in order to facilitate our aerial reconnaissance.
Our use of “super tear gas” (it is also a powerful lung irritant) has escalated from the originally announced purpose of saving lives in “riot control-like situations” to the full-scale combat use of gas artillery shells, gas rockets and gas bombs to enhance the killing power of conventional high explosive and flame weapons.
Fourteen million pounds have been used thus far, enough to cover all of Vietnam with a field effective concentration. Many nations, including some of our own allies have expressed the opinion that this kind of gas warfare violates the Geneva Protocol, a view shared by McCarthy.
A Biological Weapons Convention to End Biological Warfare
Amid great pushback over US conduct in Vietnam, and seeking to burnish his presidency, President Nixon announced to the world in November 1969 that the US was going to end its offensive biowarfare program (but not the chemical program).
Following pointed reminders that Nixon had not eschewed the use of toxins, in February 1970 Nixon announced we would get rid of our toxin weapons also. These included snake, snail, frog, fish, bacterial and fungal toxins that could be used for assassination, incapacitation and other purposes.
It has been claimed that Nixon’s declarations resulted from careful calculations that the US was far ahead technically of most other nations in its chemical and nuclear weapons. But biological weapons were considered the “poor man’s atomic bomb” and required much less sophistication to produce.
Therefore, the US was not far ahead in the biological weapons arena. By banning this class of weapon, the US would gain strategically.
Nixon told the world that the US would initiate an international treaty to prevent the use of these weapons ever again. And we did so: the 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction, or Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) for short, which entered into force in 1975.
But in 1973 genetic engineering (recombinant DNA) was discovered by Americans Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen, which changed the biological warfare calculus. Now the US had regained a technological advantage for this type of endeavor.
The Biological Weapons Convention established conferences to be held every 5 years to strengthen the treaty, making it verifiable and enforceable. The expectation was that these would add a method to call for ‘challenge inspections’ to prevent nations from cheating, and would add sanctions (punishments) if nations failed to comply with the treaty.
However, since 1991 the US has consistently blocked the addition of protocols that would have an impact on cheating. By now, everyone accepts that cheating occurs and is likely widespread.
A leak in an anthrax production facility in Sverdlovsk, USSR in 1979 caused the deaths of about 60 people. While the USSR tried a sloppy cover-up, blaming consumption of contaminated black market meat, this was a clear BWC violation to all those knowledgeable about anthrax.
US experiments with anthrax production during the Clinton administration, detailed by Judith Miller et al. in the 2001 book Germs, were also thought by experts to have transgressed the BWC.
Meanwhile, a chemical weapons treaty did get negotiated, came into force in 1997, and it contains provisions for challenge inspections and punishments. It has taken many years, but by 2022 all declared stocks of chemical weapons had been destroyed by the USA, by Russia, and the other 191 member nation signatories.
It is now 2023, and during the 48 years the Biological Weapons Convention has been in force the wall it was supposed to build against the development, production, and use of biological weapons has been steadily eroded.
Meanwhile, especially since the 2001 anthrax letters, many nations (with the US at the forefront) have been building up their “biodefense” and “pandemic preparedness” capacities.
Under the guise of preparing their defenses against biowarfare and pandemics, nations have conducted “dual-use” (both offensive and defensive) research and development, which has led to the creation of more deadly and more transmissible microorganisms.
And employing new verbiage to shield this effort from scrutiny, biological warfare research was renamed as “gain-of-function” research.
How Would You Create a Biological Warfare Agent?
Gain-of-function research is a euphemism for biological warfare research aka germ warfare research. It is so risky that funding it was banned by the US government (but only for SARS coronaviruses and avian flu viruses) in 2014 after a public outcry from hundreds of scientists.
Then in 2017 Drs. Tony Fauci and Francis Collins lifted the moratorium, with no real safeguards in place. Fauci and Collins even had the temerity to publish their opinion that the risk from this gain-of-function research was ‘worth it.’
What does gain-of-function actually mean? It means that scientists are able to use a variety of techniques to turn ordinary or pathogenic viruses and bacteria into biological weapons. The research is justified by the claim that scientists can get out ahead of nature and predict what might be a future pandemic threat, or what another nation might use as a bioweapon.
The functions gained by the viruses or other microorganisms to turn them into biological warfare agents consist of two general but overlapping categories: enhanced transmission and enhanced pathogenicity (illness severity).
1) Enhanced transmissibility may result from:
a) needing fewer viral or bacterial copies to cause infection,
b) causing the generation of higher viral or bacterial titers,
c) a new mode of spread, such as adding airborne transmission to a virus that previously only spread through bodily fluids,
d) expanding the range of susceptible organs (aka expanded tissue tropism); for example, not only respiratory secretions but also urine or stool might transmit the virus, which was found in SARS-CoV-2,
e) expanding the host range; for example, the virus is passaged through humanized mice and thus acclimated to the human ACE-2 receptor, infecting humans preferably to bats or other animals, which was found in SARS-CoV-2,
f) improving the ability to enter cells; for example, by adding a furin cleavage site, which was found in SARS-CoV-2
2) Enhanced pathogenicity:
a) Instead of causing a milder (or no) illness, the pathogen would be reengineered to cause severe illness, incapacity or death, using a variety of different strategies, including the production of toxins or ability to evade immunity.
b) SARS-CoV-2 had unusual homologies (identical short segments of nucleotides) to human tissues and the HIV virus, which may have caused or contributed to the late autoimmune stage of illness, an impaired immune response and ‘long COVID.’
Funding for (Natural) Pandemics, Including Yearly Influenza, was Lumped Together with Biological Defense Funding
Perhaps the comingling of funding was designed to make it harder for Congress and the public to understand what was being funded, and how much taxpayer funding was going to gain-of-function work?
Understanding the huge sums involved might have led Americans to question why this research was being done at all, given its prohibition by the Biological Weapons Convention, and could have raised additional questions about its lack of benefit for human health.
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield, a physician and virologist, told Congress in March of 2023 that gain-of-function research had not resulted in a single beneficial drug, vaccine, or therapeutic to his knowledge.
So-called nonprofits and universities (for example, EcoHealth Alliance and its affiliation with Professor Jonna Mazet at the University of California, Davis veterinary school) were used as financial intermediaries to obscure the fact that US taxpayers were supporting scientists in dozens of foreign countries, including China, for research that included capturing dangerous viruses and performing gain-of-function work on coronaviruses.
Perhaps to keep the lucrative funding going, government agencies have fanned the fear of pandemics over the past several decades. Huge sums have been spent on alleged “pandemic preparedness” over the past 20 years, routing funds through many federal and state agencies.
President Biden’s proposed 2024 CDC budget requested “$20 billion in mandatory funding across DHHS for pandemic preparedness” while the DOD, DHS, USAID and the State Department have additional budgets for pandemic preparedness, for spending on both domestic and international projects.
The current jargon for this spending is pandemic prevention, preparedness and response or PPPR. While this may be a feel-good way for politicians to spend money, scientifically there is no known way to prevent pandemics, and the methods that governments are spending money on are actually going to make this problem a great deal worse.
The concept of a “response”: withholding cheap, available generic drugs in favor of the ‘warp speed’ development of patentable drugs and vaccines, which will undergo minimal testing and have no liability, is another disaster in the making.
Pandemic preparedness is a myth, a smokescreen behind which lies a fascist approach to social management.
The Steady Drumbeat of Pandemic Fear
Although the 20th century experienced only three significant pandemics (the Spanish Flu of 1918-19 and two influenza pandemics in 1957 and 1968) the mass media and World Health Organization have presented us with almost non-stop pandemics during the 21st century: SARS (2002-3), avian flu (2004-on), swine flu (2009-10), Ebola (2014; 2018-19), Zika (2016), COVID (2020-2023), and monkeypox (2022-23).
And we are incessantly told that more are coming, and that they are likely to be worse. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has declared three “public health emergencies of international concern” during his six years in office.
We have been assaulted with warnings and threats for over two decades to induce a deep fear of infectious diseases. It seems to have worked.
This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here substack.com
Header image: Denis Balibouse / Reuters
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