Debbie Lerman
Debbie Lerman, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, has a degree in English from Harvard. She is a retired science writer and a practicing artist in Philadelphia, PA.
Much finger-wagging and self-righteous condemnation are happening in the halls of government these days, regarding revelations that HHS, our umbrella public health agency, funded poorly supervised gain-of-function (GoF) research in Wuhan, China. The implication, though not the thrust of the condemnation, is that this research might have led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2 and thus to what is known as the Covid pandemic.
Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance – the recipients of HHS grants for GoF research in Wuhan – are the butt of all kinds of denunciations and performative threats of “funding suspension” and “future debarment.” All total theater.
Nobody is discussing the real nature of GoF research, the actual funders of it, and its underlying purpose — which are critical for understanding the Covid pandemic response.
Below is a revised section of an article originally published on Brownstone.org.
Bottom line: If we do not investigate the military/biodefense underpinnings of both gain-of-function research and countermeasure development, we will never understand the true corruption behind the Covid pandemic response. And we will be doomed to repeat it.
GoF Research and Medical Countermeasures Are Two Aspects of the Same Biodefense/Biowarfare Scheme
The point of GoF research is to engineer viruses that could be potential bioweapons and then develop countermeasures (medicines, vaccines) to protect your military and civilian populations from attacks with those bioweapons. (NOTE: “Pandemic preparedness” is the civilian cover/excuse for these efforts.)
This means that the beginning of the Covid saga – a lab leak, and its end – a global medical countermeasure (MCM) campaign, are not just related but mutually dependent.
A series of biodefense equations applied to the Covid pandemic would look like this:
Biodefense strategy = GoF + MCM
GoF + MCM = SARS-CoV-2 + mRNA platform
SARS-CoV-2 + mRNA platform = Covid response
The transitive property yields the final conclusion:
Covid response = Biodefense strategy
In complete sentences, this means the people in the governments, organizations, and companies working on biodefense were involved in interrelated gain-of-function and medical countermeasure research.
It follows that those who knew about the SARS-CoV-2 lab leak and initiated the coverup were part of the network that dictated the entire Covid response, with a monomaniacal focus on mRNA genetic vaccine platforms.
Peter Daszak – the central figure in the recent GoF-research-defunding theater, is a perfect case study, illustrating the entire Covid pandemic arc: from the escape of a bioengineered potential bioweapon, to the ongoing attempted coverup, to the non-public health lockdown-until-vaccine response and the culminating windfall for those engaged in all aspects of MCM deployment.
Case study: Peter Daszak
Before February 27, 2020 nobody had ever heard of him.
He was, and still is, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, which according to its website is “a US-based organization that conducts research and outreach programs on global health, conservation and international development.”
How is this related to Covid? “Dr Daszak’s research has been instrumental in identifying and predicting the origins and impact of emerging diseases across the globe. This includes identifying the bat origin of SARS…”
Daszak and GoF Research
So Daszak did research on emerging viruses, like SARS. Was he directly involved in engineering SARS-CoV-2 and possibly covering up a lab leak? It seems increasingly indisputable. EcoHealth Alliance whistleblower Dr Andrew Huff provided much proof of this way back in 2022. But even if you do not believe Dr Huff’s compelling testimony, and other mountains of evidence, there’s much more to consider:
On February 27, 2020, CNN’s Zachary B Wolf reported about the novel coronavirus outbreak that “Health officials aren’t even calling this outbreak a pandemic yet.”
The Washington Post reported that, according to experts, “in other parts of the world at least, most cases of the virus are mild…The United States has seen 60 cases, none fatal.”
In other words, experts were following the outbreak as they would any other: by counting how many people got sick and how many died. And it seemed like most people had mild disease.
On that very same day, however, the New York Times published a terrifying opinion piece by none other than Peter Daszak, entitled: We Knew that Disease X Was Coming. It’s Here Now.
[Interestingly, you can only find this opinion piece now if you directly search for it, as I did here: https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=daszak+disease+x. If you look at the archived February 27, 2020 edition, Daszak’s piece is nowhere to be found. You have to know it was there to dig it up! Could the NYT be involved in a coverup?]
In the op-ed, the completely unknown author, presumably in his capacity as a student of emerging viruses, assumes the authority to tell us that the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, which has yet to be called a pandemic and which has killed zero people in the United States, is the terrifying “Disease X.”
But what exactly does that term mean, and where does it come from? Daszak tells us that: “In early 2018, during a meeting at the World Health Organization in Geneva, a group of experts I belong to (the R&D Blueprint) coined the term “Disease X.” [LINKS PROVIDED BY DASZAK]
Indeed, The WHO R&D Blueprint: 2018 review of emerging infectious diseases requiring urgent research and development efforts reports that:
Disease X represents the awareness that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently not recognized to cause human disease. Disease X may also be a known pathogen that has changed its epidemiological characteristics, for example by increasing its transmissibility or severity.
So, according to the 2018 report, Disease X was a kind of placeholder for a pandemic-causing pathogen we did not know about yet. The scariness of Disease X, according to this report, is that it is unknown. There is no way of knowing what the characteristics of such a virus would be. It could be a pathogen that has never infected humans before. Or it could be a known pathogen that becomes more transmissible or that causes more severe disease.
Yet in his February 27, 2020 opinion piece, Daszak claims he and his colleagues knew Disease X would be exactly like SARS-CoV-2:
Disease X, we said back then, would likely result from a virus originating in animals and would emerge somewhere on the planet where economic development drives people and wildlife together. Disease X would probably be confused with other diseases early in the outbreak and would spread quickly and silently; exploiting networks of human travel and trade, it would reach multiple countries and thwart containment. Disease X would have a mortality rate higher than a seasonal flu but would spread as easily as the flu.
[EMPHASIS ADDED]
I could not find any article or information from the WHO R&D Blueprint with this type of detail about Disease X.
What Daszak seems to be saying is that, somehow, he knew in 2018 that a virus would jump from animals to humans with exactly the characteristics that were the identifiers of the “novel coronavirus” and that were trumpeted by the biodefense planners and implementers of Covid response as making it particularly scary:
– it would spread quickly and silently
Remember Deborah Birx’s The Silent Spread? This was the number one reason she, and all the Covid fear-mongers, used to claim we had to test everyone all the time and measure the severity of the virus by counting positive test results instead of cases of severe illness and death – all contrary to any previous management of a respiratory viral outbreak.
Also, no other zoonotic virus in recent memory (SARS-CoV-1, MERS, Ebola, Zika) behaved this way, so there was no reason to suspect Disease X would do so. Unless you knew that it was not zoonotic and had engineered characteristics that made it especially transmissible among humans.
– it would be deadlier than the flu but spread just as easily
Again, why would Daszak describe an unknown virus this way? All the other recent zoonotic viruses may have been deadlier than the flu but they spread much more slowly and were more easily containable. Unless he thought he knew something about the particular Disease X he was describing – because it had been engineered to easily spread among humans.
Disease X links right to…genetic vaccine platforms
It gets better. In the link Daszak provides from “Disease X” we find a 2018 CNN article quoting a prominent expert who is mostly interested not in defining Disease X, but rather in explaining why we need to develop countermeasures to combat it. The expert? Dr Anthony Fauci. The countermeasures he’s advocating? Flexible platforms using customizable genetic information:
When confronted with the unknown, the WHO recognizes that it must “nimbly move” and that this involves creating platform technologies, explained Fauci.
Essentially, scientists develop customizable recipes for creating vaccines. Then, when an outbreak happens, they can sequence the unique genetics of the virus causing the disease and plug the correct sequence into the already-developed platform to create a new vaccine.
But wait, there’s more. The CNN story is about Fauci’s interest in genetic vaccine platforms. What about Daszak?
In February 2016, Daszak participated in a working group on Rapid Medical Countermeasure Response to Infectious Diseases: Enabling Sustainable Capabilities Through Ongoing Public- and Private-Sector Partnerships.
The summary of the workshop bemoans the difficulty of developing countermeasures when nobody is that interested in them until a pandemic strikes, at which point it’s too late. And who is doing the bemoaning? You guessed it:
Daszak reiterated that, until an infectious disease crisis is very real, present, and at an emergency threshold, it is often largely ignored. To sustain the funding base beyond the crisis, he said, we need to increase public understanding of the need for MCMs such as a pan-influenza or pan-coronavirus vaccine. A key driver is the media, and the economics follow the hype. We need to use that hype to our advantage to get to the real issues. Investors will respond if they see profit at the end of process, Daszak stated.
To summarize:
Peter Daszak, a scientist who studied SARS viruses, warned the world that SARS-CoV-2 was “Disease X” – an unknown pathogen that he claimed he miraculously knew two years prior would behave exactly like SARS-CoV-2, although no other recent viral outbreaks behaved this way.
He linked his inexplicably dire warning to a statement from Dr Anthony Fauci about why it’s important to develop genetically based vaccine platforms to combat Disease X. And, several years earlier, Daszak himself described exactly what it would take to bridge the interest and funding gap between Disease X and the “pancoronavirus” vaccine platform: media hype and profit for investors.
Thus is the entire Covid catastrophe encapsulated in a single case study:
- Scientists who worked on GoF pathogens and genetic platform MCM hid the fact that they knew SARS-CoV-2 was an engineered potential bioweapon.
- They warned the world that this was a zoonotic virus of terrifying deadliness and transmissibility, creating the hype and panic necessary to shut everything down in anticipation of a genetic vaccine platform.
- The genetic vaccine platform was developed through “ongoing public- and private-sector partnerships” generating astronomical profits for all involved.
Conclusion
If Congressional investigators are serious about uncovering the origins of the Covid pandemic and Peter Daszak’s ties to it, they should focus on these issues.
Republished from the author’s Substack.
