Republic of the Congo declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
Is this not something we have heard before, and not just when it makes it to Yahoo News – “Weaponised Bugs”, this time in the form of blood sucking ticks?
A recent headline reads: US military chiefs ordered to reveal if Pentagon used diseased insects as biological weapons. Alarmist? Maybe not, when we see other headlines such as: Ebola outbreak in the Democratic
July 17, 2019 – WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus today declared the Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
Ebola kills people. There was a time when huge resources were devoted to eradicating once widespread deadly diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera. That is the world most of us were brought up in. When people talk about “scientific advancement”, and how science is more important and relevant than the arts, this is what they mean.
We like to think we still live in those times. So when we see a public health emergency break out, we assume that it cannot have been started deliberately but [perhaps] was merely an anomaly that slipped through the net of testing and care. We do not want to believe that it might have been started deliberately, as we then know that we could be the next victims, if someone wants it that way.
But are all the billions being pumped into “health improvement” by governments doing what it says on the tin? Here is yet another in a long line of examples. You judge.
Knowing too much to know anything
It is not what the press release about the EVD outbreak says that is important, but rather what it does not say.
Apparently this is yet another killer virus which just came out of the blue. 150 years ago, that might have happened. But we know so much about all these viruses now that the chances of this being true are very small. We can manufacture viruses more easily than we can find new ones, and disseminate them in any number of “approved” and innovative ways.
In 2014 RIA Novosti caused a storm by blaming the United States for the deadly Ebola outbreak in Liberia and Sierra Leone, two of the West African countries known to host American biological warfare laboratories. The Russians would say that, wouldn’t they? I said that tongue n cheek in my last Ebola related article. But where else do you look for the source of a virus than the places which stores, work with and studies it?
The 2014 allegations were supported by quoting Prof. Francis Boyle, a leading American professor and expert on international law. Boyle was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Congress accepted his conclusions then, but has forgotten them ever since.
As Jim Dean of Veterans Today wrote in commentary at that time, with a bit of paraphrasing,
“Considering the whirlwind of Ebola stories in the international media, it is high time for world to take notice of American bio weapons programs (none so named as such) which operate under the flimsy disguise of civilian public health labs.”
It was as obvious in 2014 as it is now that the bio weapons labs should come under close scrutiny. This would be a shell game run on five continents, a wild goose chase to run down what is being done and where. But so is, for example, the international narcotics trade, so do we give up investigating that?
Dr. David Kelly, the British scientist who allegedly committed suicide in 2003, was one of those who went on that wild goose chase. There has still been no inquest into his mysterious death, and the verdict of suicide contradicts the known facts of the injuries he suffered and how they were inflicted.
We are also told that he was “depressed” after contradicting the British government’s dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and this led to his death. Only as an afterthought, if at all, does anyone mention that his primary role as a government scientist was to investigate the biolabs in Eastern Europe and other places, many of which the US took over from the Soviet Union.
We don’t know what he found there – but we do know what happens to others who suggest things are not as they are portrayed by the US and its mainstream media lackeys. They get bricks thrown at them, have their passports take away, are illegally deprived of veteran’s benefits and have family members arrested, threatened and beaten up.
We know this because the victims talk about it, and provide the proof in the form of hospital and legal records, but nothing is done by the government agencies which exist to help them. Or is this just a series of tragic accidents too?
The US, not us
But maybe someone is taking notice now. Better late than never, though as it not as if any of this could come as a surprise, considering the US involvement in using bio weapons and animals for experimental purposes, and the treasure trove of information it took from Japanese field trials in occupied China, where insects were indeed used, according to official records, as part of a then-evolving bio weapons programme.
It is US lawmakers themselves who have voted to demand that the Pentagon discloses whether it has conducted experiments to “weaponise” disease-carrying ticks – and whether any such insects have been let loose outside the lab.
A bill passed in the House of Representatives will require the Defense Department’s Inspector General to investigate whether biological warfare tests involving the tiny arachnids took place over a 25-year period (ticks are not insects).
The tick-related amendment to the fiscal 2020 Defense Authorisation Bill was added by Republican Congressman Chris Smith prior to its passing. The New Jersey politician said the Inspector General’s office should “conduct a review of whether the Department of Defense experimented with ticks and other insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975.”
That period may be too short to tell us much about what is happening now, but what may be revealed is how much of the bio weapons research was outsourced to countries like South Africa, and third world countries, when the bio weapons convention was passed in 1972, under Richard Nixon.
From there, we can extrapolate many things – look at the countries the US has entered to install friendly regimes since then, and how far its sphere of influence has actually grown, and then entertain just how many have what looks suspiciously like a biological weapons lab—as in the case in Georgia, BSL3, and several other countries of the former Soviet Union and the African Continent.
Blood borne and direct contact transmission via bodily fluids is associated with a high rate of virus occurrence. As in the case of the Ebola, these viruses can produce a mortality rate of up to 90%. If various experimental viruses are introduced into ticks, fleas and mosquitoes, it can potentially create an insect minefield for centuries to come, depopulating entire regions, and opening the way for resources to be exploited, with no government or population to defend what was rightfully theirs. Ask the Native American population, both in the US itself and the Southern Cone.
Medicins sans raisonee
What has been reported recently in the mainstream media is but the tip of the iceberg, and much of what the public is fed is mere fairy tales, like the one about eating bats being the cause of Ebola.
The Ebola virus is a zoonosis, meaning an infectious agent that lives inconspicuously and innocuously within some nonhuman animal (its reservoir host). The official line is that this agent can sometimes transmit to humans, causing disease.
Yes it can. But there are other causes of this transmission. After the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak which is estimated to have killed upwards of 20,000, the US Army was involved in its containment. You can see what this “containment” actually involved when you look at the title given to it: Operation United Assistance.
Many still wonder why the US Army was so involved, and not the CDU or World Health Organization. Were they there to shoot the victims? Nor was it Army medical staff who were actually involved – COMBAT TROOPS, from the 101 Airborne Division. Why were engaged to deal with a threatened public health crisis, rather than doctors?!
I wonder how much the US will get involved this time. Perhaps the troops’ job will be to do as the German army did in covering up the work of the death squads, the Sonderkommanders, in occupied Polish and Soviet territory, especially Ukraine, trying to make sure the bodies were burned and buried deep, and no witnesses were alive to tell the story.
Or have they already done that, with Dr. David Kelly being one example? The real answers can likely be found in the existing records of the US Army, and other branches of the armed services. Perhaps soon the US Army, as was the case in South Africa with its own bio weapons programme, will have to acknowledge at least some of its dark past.
Bitten where it hurts
But uncomfortable questions will still remain, as discussed in Bitten, about issues such as why Lyme’s disease can be so difficult to both diagnose and treat, and why the government is so reluctant to classify chronic Lyme as a disease, and insurance companies to pay for treatment.
During the time it was running a bio weapons programme in Plum Island and Fort Detrick the US military had cozy relationship with South Africa. It comes as no surprise these cozy relations with the American equivalent, and information was shared. This is one of many reasons why the Apartheid regime lasted as long as it did, despite sanctions and condemnation – one sort of moral criminal was blackmailing another over its covert programs.
There are even consultants from South Africa who have regularly visited the Lugar Lab in Georgia. Naturally this is all for civilian purposes, but the same consultancy services could have been provided from most other countries, by actual medical personnel rather than US Department of Defense operatives, who still run this allegedly public and animal health facility.
But it is not South African consultants who will be treating the victims of this latest Ebola outbreak but frontline medical staff – most local, naturally. They are the ones at greatest risk of cross infection. Due care should be taken for their welfare, but is the US more concerned with what they will see in the course of helping the sick, and the conclusions they will draw?
In Charles Schulz’s famous comic strip Peanuts, a dialogue takes place between Linus and Charlie Brown about how abject their baseball team is. Linus reads the figures and tells Charlie Brown, “Statistics don’t lie”. Charlie Brown replies, “No, but they sure shout their mouth off a lot”.
The statistics about this or that epidemic may be lies, or they may not. But whichever way you look at it, the fact that they are there at all means they are shouting their mouth off a lot, and it would be wise to listen.
Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.