Saturday, July 24, 2021
#PANDEMIC--The Fort Detrick Connection---FROM AIDS TO COVID-19
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Under the headline "Ft. Detrick workers sought for germ warfare followup," the article was published in the (Hanover, PA) Evening Sun in 1980. "Laboratory workers, contractors and tradesmen" were immunized, but the National Cancer Institute (NCI) was in the process of looking for about 3,000 total and at the time the search was only 66 percent complete, according to Dr. Thomas Mason, head of the study. "We don't want to frighten anyone," Mason said, but considering today's ongoing existential war against the coronavirus pandemic, a closer look at the Fort Detrick history is in order.
A few months later, an FOIA expose by the Church of Scientology revealed that Fort Detrick's Special Ops Division had secretly sprayed a "harmless simulant agent" into gratings above New York City subways in early summer, 1966 to test the effects of scattering as a possible bioweapons tactic. The report also stated the Army tossed light bulbs of the agent from moving trains for a more effective pattern;
"In 1966, one Charles Senseney, a project engineer with the Department of Defense, spent two weeks flinging bulbs of simulated poisons in front of New York City subway trains." (2)
In May, 1980, Robert Cooke warned in The Boston Globe the possibility of less-than-safe conditions at labs conducting genetic experiments;
"Instead of taking elaborate--and some argue unnecessary-- precautions to guard against escape of newly altered organisms, most of the work is now being done in ordinary laboratories under relatively normal conditions." (3)
A photo included in the article shows workers at the Army base conducting research without the least bit of biosafety measures.
When an animal caretaker at a Reston, Virginia lab was exposed to Ebola tainted monkeys in 1989, a decontamination unit was called in to disinfect the cages. (4) As for the recent reference to "The Big Lie," it is worth noting that Patrick Buchanan used the phrase back in 1989 in his Pittsburgh Press column;
"Under glasnost, the propaganda of hatred against the United States continues. Soviet newspapers continue to promote the Big Lie that AIDS was invented at Fort Detrick, Md., as a weapon in biological warfare." (5)
The HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth--
The allegation that AIDS was lab engineered was engineered by an East Berlin biologist, Jacob (Jakob) Segal as reported in the Wilkes-Barre Citizens' Voice;
"The first suggestion that AIDS was made in America goes as far back as 1983 when it appeared in an Indian newspaper and was largely ignored...the suggestion reappeared in October last year in more damaging form in the Soviet magazine Literaturnaya Gazeta in the fall of 1985... Jacob Segal, described as a retired director of the Institute of Biology at an East Berlin university, was quoted by the Express as saying AIDS 'escaped ' from a secret US laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland. " (6)
The Indian newspaper where the story first appeared was the New Delhi Patriot. (6A, see also Addendum)
The Ukiah Daily Journal reported in 1987 that the story was originally planted in the Indian newspaper by the Soviet propaganda tool Novosti. (7) It was flatly rejected by the U.S. government. However, that same year, Uganda's Minister of Health, Samuel I. Okware, asked;
"If Africa was the original source of AIDS, how come Europe, which has so much social interaction with Africa, has fewer problems very remote to Africa, like the United States..." (8)
Okware's statement was in reference to the HIV epidemic prevalent in America in homosexuals, Haitians and African-Americans.
As for the original proponent of the theory, Jacob Segal, a detailed report on the biologist was published in The Baltimore Sun by Ian Johnson in 1992. (9)
With respect to Segal's allegation that AIDS "escaped," Jill Jonnes added;
"In spite of such precautions, however, there have been more than a thousand accidents connected with biowarfare research at Fort Detrick, and three deaths. "(2)
According to the Sun article, Segal's original theory was that AIDS was found in Icelandic sheep, which by extrapolating backward from his initial research in 1986, the HIV virus in humans was the same as sheep in 1978. Perhaps one of the most revealing aspects of Segal's influence, accidental or otherwise, generated by the theory, is found in "Disinformation Squared," (See Addendum;)
"This extraordinary document (Segal's allegation), written from within the East Berlin Administration of the Ministry of State Security, showed 'everyone' guessing that powerful figures in the East German Communist Party were protecting an eccentric biologist while he embarrassed - practically sabotaged - their country." (Page 69)
The Coronavirus-from-Wuhan-lab theory--
In much the same way Segal's HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth gained momentum, the timeline of the COVID-19 origin at the Chinese laboratory was similar. According to Jack Brewster reporting in a Forbes timeline, the first to raise the Detrick connection was found in a Washington Times article by Bill Gertz where Dany Shoham is mentioned. (11) Shoham, a former Israeli intel specialist, first surfaced in 2002 calling out Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons program; real or otherwise didn't seem to matter. (12) Shoham's claim was followed up by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR). (12) The Forbes timeline ended in May, 2020 but wasn't lost on Congress and the media. Last week, in a heated exchange between Dr. Fauci of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), each accused the other of lying about the origin and funding for coronavirus research at the lab. (13) It is clear from the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth that a great deal of political support is being given to the Wuhan myth for political "gain-of-function." The political environment ignores the concept of viral jumping--from animal (bat, civet) to primate--as a weak explanation for the cause of the disease.
The Coronavirus-from-Fort-Detrick theory--
Countering the charge that Wuhan lab was responsible, China's The Global Times responded with a long rebuttal of the Wuhan theory and suggested Fort Detrick was the origin;
" Combing through more than 8,000 pieces of news reports related to the lab-leak theory, the Global Times found that as many as 60 percent of the coverage was from the US alone." (14)
In what appears to be collusion between the U.S. government and Western media, another "disinformation squared" effort is underway. Still, Global Times had no explanation for the viral jumping phenomenon, the principal method of spreading of the pathogen to humans. The Global Times compared the effort to affix blame on Wuhan similar to that of the Saddam Hussein nuclear weapon deception; instead of using the more convincing argument of the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick myth. Clearly that would have undermined the Times' own propaganda agenda. If there is insufficient evidence to fix the blame on Wuhan, insufficient evidence exists as well in Fort Detrick theory.
Preponderance-of-coincidences--
The Disinformation Squared paper refers to a "preponderance-of-coincidences." (page 21) But there is little evidence to support the lab as the kickoff point. Funding by the U.S government granted to the lab is meaningless; it doesn't point to some ulterior, evil motive as suggested by the demagogues in Congress. The first suspected clusters were reported in Wuhan; certainly the Chinese government would not test out its secret new bioweapon on its own population. The source would have to be external, and already in a transmissible form so that "jumping" could be readily achieved, if, of course, the virus was engineered. Even then, the role of coincidence, no matter how many in sequence, does not verify a claim without strong supporting evidence.
On a final note: the concept that the virus "escaped" from a lab, any lab, is nonsense. It doesn't have wings or feet; it was either carried out, floated out or flushed out, either by accident or by intentional design. The focus needs to be on that as a motive to find the origin.
Cited
1.) Staff, "Ft. Detrick workers sought for germ warfare followup," The Hanover Evening Sun, 19 February 1980, Page B1.
2.) Jonnes, J., "Biowarfare: the U.S. record," The Record (Hackensack, NJ), 04 February 1979, Page E1.
3.) Cooke, R., "Relaxed rules spur on the geneticists," The Boston Globe, 04 May 1980, Page A1.
4.) Engelman, R., "Deadly virus found in lab monkeys," The Fresno Bee, 09 Dec 1989, Page A10.
5.) Buchanan, P., "Glasnost can't fix closed Soviet ways," The Pittsburgh Press, 01 December 1987, Page B3.
6.) Staff, "Soviets make AIDS a propaganda issue," Wilkes-Barre Citizens' Voice, 27 December 1986, Page 16.
6A.) Cockburn, M., "No, AIDS virus was not a big Pentagon plot," The Sydney Morning Herald, 30 July 1987, Page 3.
7.) Editorial, "Blatant Propaganda," Ukiah Daily Journal, 17 November 1987, Page 4.
8.) Hale., E., "AIDS rumored to come from CIA, American clothes, witchcraft...," NY Press and Sun- Bulletin, 12 October 1987, Page 10A
10.) n/a
11.) Gertz, B., Coronavirus link to China biowarfare program possible, analyst says - Washington Times
12.) Zacharia, "A Stealth bomber: what Israel fears about Saddam," The Miami Herald, 25 August 2002, Page 5C.
13.) Fauci-Paul, Fauci: Paul doesn't know what he's talking about | TheHill
14.) Lingzhi, F., et.al., Suspect No.1: Why Fort Detrick lab should be investigated for global COVID-19 origins tracing (globaltimes.cn)
Addendum- Geissler, Erhard, and Robert Hunt Sprinkle. “Disinformation Squared: Was the HIV-from-Fort-Detrick Myth a Stasi Success?” Politics and the Life Sciences, vol. 32, no. 2, 2013, pp. 2–99. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43287281. Accessed 25 July 2021.
NBACC image,
University of Nevada, Reno
Undergraduate, College of Liberal Arts, Fall 2021
NYU, Social Media Studies, Fall 2021
Pvt. "JC" L'Angelle, 27th Marines
China Beach, DaNang, 1968
