Alex Constantine - October 15, 2014
Data Dumped by Alex Constantine
Right-wing GOP fear brokers have blamed undocumented children for the domestic outbreak of the lethal enterovirus, Fox News claims that Barack Obama wants the entire country to “suffer with less fortunate nations,” and Rush Limbaugh maintains that Obama's refusal to divert flights from Liberia is the unleashing of a racially-motivated vendetta against white people.
Given these unfounded allegations from the right, it is only fair to ask if white supremacists on the federal payroll had anything to do with it.
The suggestion that Ebola is an American-made WMD has arisen far and wide:
U.S. Government Patented Ebola! Why?
(Snippet from Western Journalism, October 7, 2014)
... We have two huge entities supposedly here helping us from outside invaders, albeit the tiniest of enemies being single cell viruses, but just how outside are they? What if I were to tell you that one of those big ‘helper’ entities actually had a patent on Ebola? Sound far-fetched? One guess which of the two big happy helpers it is. Drug companies, right? …Wrong. It’s big government. Specifically, The United States of America. Before you dismiss this as far-fetched or even impossible, just run a simple free patent search under the keyword ‘Ebola’. Not only will you see that Uncle Sam owns the patent on Ebola, but they also own the rights to all variations on Ebola, with the rights to all Ebola research.
The official owner of this Ebola patent is: The Government of the US as Represented by the Secretary of the Dept. of Health. Essentially, it is a patent issued by The United States government to The United States government. Please, look up U.S. patent number 20120251502, and then read the rest of this article—if you dare. … Now you know what very few people know–that Ebola is not only able to be patented, but that patent is owned by the U.S. government! So ask yourself one question: What word is synonymous with patentable creations or inventions? …You guessed it: Inventors. Read more at http://www.westernjournalism.com/u-s-government-patented-ebola/#eeLuUHHMww95PTES.99
Farrakhan claims Ebola invented to kill off blacks
Inventors of Ebola must be punished – Palmer Buckle
(Vibe Ghana, "Inventors of Ebola must be punished – Palmer Buckle," October 15, 2014)
... “We hope and pray that the world would talk about it, if it is true that they did some experimentation with human beings without authorization, so that whoever it was, whatever country was involved in something like that could be brought to book because it should not be allowed to happen” Palmer Buckle told Starr News in an exclusive interview. ... Various people across the world have also shared similar thoughts that Ebola was specifically created by some scientists. However, Palmer Buckle said the world must look to God to help the sub-region overcome this pandemic. “If the Lord our God would have the Church become a channel for – call it this way – causing infection it would be quite a very sad story, so we are praying to God to help this country, to help the sub-region to lift this scourge of this Ebola from all of us”.
Pharmaceutical companies and their interests
(Excerpt, "'There is no natural disease called Ebola," FinalCall, September 30, 2014)
... ZMapp, an experimental treatment developed by Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc., in limited use, appears to have been effective in treating Ebola. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, two medical workers operating in Liberia, were treated with ZMapp in the U.S., and appeared to have improved dramatically within 30 days.
Although ZMapp had not passed the initial human trial stage, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency access to ZMapp in order to treat Mr. Brantly and Ms. Writebol. Prior to their treatment ZMapp had not been used at all on human beings, officials said. Officials are cautious about the success of the treatment made from Ebola antibodies, however, plans are in motion to produce more and quickly.
Device Used to Treat Ebola Made in San Diego
A new medical device designed in San Diego has been used to treat an Ebola patient in Germany, company officials confirmed Wednesday. A Ugandan doctor who contracted the Ebola virus in Sierra Leone was treated with the Aethlon Hemopurifier last week at a hospital Frankfurt, Germany. The dialysis-like device has an antiviral and an immunotherapeutic affect, according to Aethlon Medical, Inc. CEO Jim Joyce. It removes an infectious virus before cells and organs can be infected and eliminates the proteins viruses release to suppress the immune system. ...
The Hemopurifier may help improve the benefit of ZMapp, an anti-viral agent used to treat seven Ebola patients including survivors Dr. Kent Brantley and Nancy Writebol. It has also been used on an English nurse, a Spanish priest and two Liberian doctors who contracted Ebola. The priest and one of the doctors died despite receiving the treatment.
ZMapp was developed by Mapp Bio located in Sorrento Valley north of San Diego. ...
Read an Interview With One of the Doctors Who Discovered Ebola in 1976
SPIEGEL: In the end, you discovered that the Belgian nuns had unwittingly spread the virus. How did that happen?Piot: In their hospital, they regularly gave pregnant women vitamin injections using unsterilized needles. By doing so, they infected many young women in Yambuku with the Ebola virus. We told the nuns about the terrible mistake they had made, but looking back I would say that we were much too careful in our choice of words. Clinics that failed to observe this and other rules of hygiene functioned as catalysts in all additional Ebola outbreaks. They drastically sped up the spread of the virus or made the spread possible in the first place. Even in the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa, hospitals unfortunately played this ignominious role in the beginning. ...
Ebola 'Caused by Red Cross'
(Excerpt: International Business Times, "Ebola 'Caused by Red Cross' and Other Conspiracy Theories," October 114, 2014)
... News website the Event Chronicle republished the post allegedly written by Nana Kwame, from Ghana's capital Accra, who claimed that the deadly virus is just an invention and "people in the Western World need to know what's happening here in West Africa.
Ebola is only contracted by those who receive treatments and injections from the Red Cross, the post said, adding that the virus "was invented" to allow western troops on African soil. ...
“The U. S., Canada, France, and the U.K. are all implicated in the detestable and devilish deeds that these Ebola tests are,” wrote Broderick. ...
US Links to Bio-Warfare Labs in Ebola Zone: Scholar
(From Rio Novosti, October 8, 2014)
NEW YORK, October 8 (RIA Novosti) – The United States may be behind the deadly Ebola outbreak in Liberia and Sierra Leone, two West African countries known to host American biological warfare laboratories, a University of Illinois College of Law scholar told RIA Novosti on Wednesday.
USAMRID -THE US MILITARY AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE RESEARCH - ONE ARM OF BIOECONOMIC WARFARE
(Excerpt from CounterPunch, "Ebola, the African Union and Bioeconomic Warfare, October 10, 2014)
... The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, is supposed to be the frontline research institution for the USA in its bioshield preparations, which is the preparedness of the US government to fight against biological threats. President Richard Nixon had ended the offensive biological warfare program of the USA with his “Statement on Chemical and Biological Defense Policies and Programs” on November 25, 1969 in a speech from Fort Detrick. The statement was supposed to put an end, unconditionally, to all U.S. offensive biological weapons programs. The United Nations Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction was signed in 1972.
DUAL USE RESEARCH
Dual use research (DURC) is life sciences research that, based on current understanding, can be reasonably anticipated to provide knowledge, information, products, or technologies that could be directly misused to pose a significant threat with broad consequences to public health and safety, agricultural crops and other plants, animals, the environment, or national security. In short, dual use research was research that could be used to assist in advancing human health and security or at the same time be used for biological warfare. We have learnt from research carried out by UNESCO that “military interest, in harnessing genetic engineering and DNA recombinant technology for updating and devising effective lethal bioweapons is spurred on by the easy availability of funding, even in times of economic regression, for contractual research leading to the development of bioweapons.” [8]
This is the research environment within which to grasp the present outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. On the day before President Barack Obama spoke to the world on the Ebola pandemic, the White House on Wednesday September 24, 2014 issued new guidelines intended to strengthen the oversight of federally funded biology research that could inadvertently produce bioweapons. According to the report in the New York Times carried on Thursday September 25, “The new policy shifts the burden of finding and disclosing the dangerous aspects of research from the funding agency — usually the National Institutes of Health — to the scientists who receive the grants and the universities or other institutions where they work.”
On the same day, the National Public Radio (NPR) was more specific that the ruling related to dual use pathogens and research being carried in government funded laboratories. This report came three years after the controversies about bird flu research that was being carried out for bioterror purposes. In 2011, there had been a fierce debate in the media about the use of biological research for terror, in short bioterrorism. Then as NPR reported, “Scientists and security specialists are in the midst of a fierce debate over recent experiments on a strain of bird flu virus that made it more contagious weapons. In September of 2011 at a scientific conference in Malta, one scientist made a stunning announcement at a flu conference “he’d done a lab experiment that resulted in bird flu virus becoming highly contagious between ferrets — the animal model used to study human flu infection. It seemed that just five mutations did the trick.” This report on NPR in November 2011 did not reappear but in the same broadcast one noted bioterrorism expert and director of the Center for Biosecurity at a national university stated that,
“It’s just a bad idea for scientists to turn a lethal virus into a lethal and highly contagious virus. And it’s a second bad idea for them to publish how they did it so others can copy it.”
So far no expert or whistle-blower has come forward to speak openly about experimentation with viral haemorrhagic fevers, which are now lumped under the name of Ebola. Today as a vital component of prevention and public education there is the need for scientists and researchers to speak out about the laboratories in the West or elsewhere that have been experimenting with dual use pathogens. It is also necessary for the international community to know whether any of these research teams or university personnel associated with dual use pathogens has been active in the countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea or Nigeria before the present outbreak of Ebola. At the minimum, ECOWAS and the AU should pressure the UN Ebola Fund to focus not only on fund raising but to also make Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to fully develop the measures to properly organize against outbreaks of the current type. From the reports coming in on the numbers of people who have been left to die without attention or a decent burial, the figures on the number of deaths in West Africa from WHO have been a clear undercount to minimize the extent of the devastation by Ebola. In contrast to the numbers being broadcast by WHO, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta reported on Tuesday September 23 that “Ebola cases could increase to between 550,000 and 1.4 million in four months, based on several factors including how many people are infected by Ebola carriers. The report questioned whether the official number of deaths recorded by WHO, 2,800 out of at least 5,800 Ebola cases, has been underreported.
DC has said it is likely that 2.5 times as many cases, or nearly 20,000, have occurred so far.” [9] On the same Tuesday that the CDC issued its dire warning of the prospect of 1.4 million persons dying, the New England Journal of Medicine also weighed in and stated that “if the disease isn’t adequately contained, it could become endemic among the populations in countries hardest hit by the outbreak — Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. …. “Without drastic improvements in control measures,” researchers say, “the numbers and cases and deaths from [Ebola] are expected to continue increasing from hundreds to thousands per week in coming months.” According to the WHO, “Extensive, immediate actions – such as those already started – can bring the epidemic to… a rapid decline in cases.”
BEYOND THE MILITARIZATION OF THE RESPONSE TO EBOLA
The extensive and immediate action referred to by WHO concerns the deployment of military forces by the United States, Britain and France to the countries most affected. The US has deployed over 4,000 military personnel to West Africa to assist in the fight against Ebola. The fight against Ebola cannot be a military effort. It must be an effort that is based on seeking to bring back the health and safety of the peoples whose communities have been destroyed with hundreds of families losing loved ones. The US plans to quickly increase its presence in Liberia, where military personnel are deploying to help the people halt the advance of the worst Ebola epidemic on record but we also need to know what the private security contractors have been doing in Liberia over the past ten years.
President Obama has stated that the military is required to set up the medical and transportation infrastructure needed to deploy health workers. Why could this infrastructure work not be carried out by civilian agencies? From India, Sreeram Chaulia noted correctly in an article entitled ‘Foreign Pulse: Viral Politics’, that “As the Ebola epidemic ravages West Africa, a familiar act with troublesome connotations is playing out. The international response to the conjoined public health crises in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea is following imperial patterns of tutelage and patronage, wherein each of these three countries has been exclusively taken over by its respective former master from America and Europe through targeted humanitarian aid…….
An erstwhile colony established by American citizens freed from slavery, Liberia is back to being literally a ward of the US, which faces no competition from any other Western donor there. Washington is deploying up to 4,000 military personnel to set up hospitals, medical laboratories and treatment centres on a war footing. This mission, codenamed “Operation United Assistance”, is being overseen by the controversial US Africa Command (AFRICOM).” In a context where the international news media is dominated by the western news agencies, ECOWAS has also called for military mobilization to respond to Ebola. In the opinion of this author, ECOWAS and the AU have dropped the ball because the militarization of the international response will make it difficult for countries such as China, Cuba, India, South Korea and other societies to properly harmonize the medical response to this Ebola outbreak. The AU and ECOWAS need a new kind of medical diplomacy which is rooted in the valuation of black bodies.
Chaulia noted that “if the US, UK and France were driven by humanitarian motives, why did they not contribute to the multilateral UN Ebola response fund that would have distributed the funds more equitably among the three worst-hit West African countries? Thus far, only India and Australia have made sizeable donations of $10 million each to the UN Ebola fund that is woefully undersubscribed.”
PROJECT 112
In North America, the Fox news organization and its affiliates have been at the forefront of the racialization of the present outbreak of Ebola. When the Liberian national was hospitalized and later succumbed to Ebola, the conservative media whipped up an unprecedented hysteria about the possibilities of an Ebola outbreak in the United States. (This patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, has since passed away). Within this hysteria, there are questions in the media whether this virus could go airborne.
Some readers will remember that the possibility of the airborne transmission of Ebola was the theme of the film Outbreak that was produced by Hollywood. What has not been in the public domain is the fact that it was the US government that from 1962 to 1973 carried out a biological and chemical weapon experimentation project called Project 112. This was specifically conducted so that those who were being experimented with did not know that they were guinea pigs.
In 2000 when US television network CBS made known the existence of this biological warfare program, it was also revealed that apart from testing on individuals in the USA there were tests carried out in countries where “The US Department of Defense (DoD) conducted testing of agents in other countries that were considered too unethical to perform within the continental United States.”
PROJECT BIOSHIELD
We are yet to know which African societies were considered ripe for the testing of toxins by the US Department of Defense. After the anthrax scare in the USA in 2001 and the war against the people of Iraq in 2003, the US Congress passed the Project Bioshield Act in 2004 calling for U.S. $5 billion for purchasing vaccines that would be used in the event of a bioterrorist attack. There has been a ten-year program to put money into the same forces that were experimenting with dual use pathogens. In the words of the Congress, Project Bioshield was a ten-year program to acquire medical countermeasures to biological, chemical, radiological, and nuclear agents for civilian use. The US government has been working on countermeasures against biological warfare. Is it by accident that the top three threats that the Bioshield program is meant to defend the citizens of the US from are Anthrax, Ebola and Bird Flu?
AFRICA AND BIOTERRORISM
Africans have faced bioterrorism from the time of colonialism and apartheid and this is well documented in the book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Author Harriet Washington went into great details about the bioterrorism against black people. The Tuskegee experiment is now the most well-known case of using black bodies as guinea pigs for medical experimentation. The book on Hela Cells (Henrietta Lacks) is another devastating account of the use of black bodies. [11] Harriet Washington placed chemical and biological warfare under the larger category of “bioterrorism,” which “employs chemical or biological agents such as microbes and poisons in the service of terrorism…weapons often consist of disease-causing organisms, usually microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, or derivatives from humans, animals or plants” [12]
Another important aspect of biological warfare that Harriet Washington brings forth is the fact that it can be both direct and indirect when used against populations. In other words, chemical agents can be used to kill people directly by physically harming them with something such as nerve gas, or biological warfare can be used to pollute the environment in which someone lives in order to cut off their source of food (plants, livestock), water, or both.
Cuba is one society outside of Africa that has been forced to develop the medical and biosafety capabilities after the outbreak of Dengue fever in 1977. We now know from the new book, Back Channel to Cuba, that Henry Kissinger had organized a plan to ‘smash’ Cuba. [13] This was because Kissinger was angry about the Cuban intervention in Angola in 1975-1976 to beat back the racist South African incursion. Kissinger who had overseen the authorship of the National Security Memorandum 39 of 1969 which predicted that whites were destined to stay and rule in Southern Africa was upset that a small island committed to an alternative mode of economic organization could ruin his plans for Africa. It was reported in the recent New York Times article that in the discussions between Kissinger (then Secretary of State) and President Gerald Ford, Kissinger used “language about doing harm to Cuba that is pretty quintessentially aggressive.” [14] The Cubans have exposed that the Dengue fever which broke out in Cuba in 1977 was linked to biological warfare by the US government. This has been corroborated by press reports from the United States. At that time the US government blocked efforts by the Cuban government to purchase fumigators and chemicals to control the Dengue spread. As a small island, Cuba has been able to develop quarantine measures but more importantly develop the scientific capacity to research the root of outbreaks such as Dengue.
AU AND ECOWAS MUST TAKE THE LEAD TO RESPOND TO THIS LETHAL VIRUS
In August the President of the US called the first US-Africa Summit in Washington. Although the Ebola pandemic was already killing more persons than the four episodes discussed in the website of the CDC, White House was not focused on the devastation that was being wrought on West Africa. In Africa, Ebola has exposed the porousness of the so-called borders. The AU has so far failed to take the lead in mobilizing to fight this pandemic.
Does the African Union have in place any kind of bioshield preparation? At the time of the outbreak of the HIV AIDS pandemic it was significant that western pharmaceuticals placed their profits before human lives. It took the massive organizing of a grassroots movement such as the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) of South Africa to pressure the pharmaceuticals to allow for the production of generic drugs to treat AIDS patients in Africa. This TAC campaign influenced the cooperation between India, Brazil and South Africa which later merged into BRICS. A similar grassroots mobilization is now needed in West Africa to break the slow and lackadaisical response of ECOWAS and the AU. ECOWAS has been able in the past to intervene in Liberia and Sierra Leone to bring peace. Collectively, ECOWAS and the AU possess the technical and medical capabilities to be more vigorous in response to Ebola.
There is the mistaken perception abroad that Africa does not have the medical personnel to fight this epidemic. However, the ability to mobilize the resources in Africa for a more robust response depends on political will. Nigeria alone has over 40,000 doctors with thousands having experience in infectious diseases. In the economic warfare against Africa the medical profession of Africa was assaulted and there was a massive brain drain of African medical personnel to Europe and North America. African governments have been very clear about their objections to the wholesale migration of their physicians to rich countries. Despite these objections there are more than 10,000 international medical graduates from Africa in the USA and Western Europe. The US received more than 7,000 doctors from three countries: Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa. Progressive Africans will have to mobilize for a change of course so that the AU and the United Nations can demilitarize the response to Ebola. Already it has been demonstrated in Liberia that the pandemic can be contained. Nigeria and Senegal have been able to contain the virus.
The western media has drawn attention the fact that Firestone Company in Liberia was able to contain and control the virus on its rubber plantation. [15] This author is no fan of Firestone. At the recent Empowered Africa Dialogue in Washington during August, workers at Firestone spoke of the low wage and exploitative working conditions on the rubber plantation. Thus this company cannot be held up as an example, but the important point is that Ebola can be controlled and there is no need for the pandemic to spin out of control. The Firestone story also demonstrates that the military is not needed to organize the medical and transport infrastructure to contain the escalation of the deaths. This author has been critical of saviours from outside but this Ebola pandemic provides an opportunity for the true humanitarian doctors to separate themselves from the militarized response to the Ebola outbreak. The African Union must take the lead so that those medical responders can find a non-military infrastructure to work with. There is the need for full-scale mobilization in all of the countries where health workers, traditional doctors, scientists, civilian agencies and the military will be crucial in the fight against bio-economic warfare. Global health experts have declared the Ebola epidemic ravaging West Africa an international health emergency that requires a coordinated global approach. Although the media has racialized the Ebola pandemic, there is an urgent need for the international community to come together for this coordinated global approach.
The Ebola virus presented a real challenge to Africa and the deployment of scientists, community health workers, volunteers and health brigades to combat this virus is one of the most important tasks of reconstruction in Africa.
(Horace G. Campbell, a veteran Pan Africanist is a Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. He is the author of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Monthly Review Press, 2013.)