Better in their words…

In his recent interview with Chris Cuomo, Dr. Robert Redfield explained how he made one of the most difficult decisions of his career: shutting down Fort Detrick.

Fort Detrick is the army base that hosts USAMRIID, which is located in Frederick, Maryland – just outside of Washington DC. From 1943 to 1969, it was home of the US Biological Weapons Program. Once that was disbanded, it became the US DoD “biological defense” program. Under that program, some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens, such as Ebola, Anthrax and Smallpox, have been experimented with at that location. It also stored some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens. In the early 2000s, it was at the center of the weaponized anthrax attacks. The government concluded early on that Fort Detrick was where those anthrax spores were derived from, although there is contradictory evidence suggesting an alternative source involving a large non-profit contractor company which does a lot of business on behalf of the NIH/DoD/”Biodefense” industrial complex.

Dr. Redfield served as the director of the CDC from March 2018 to January 2021. In that role, he made what he called the most difficult decision of his long career, and shut down Fort Detrick in August 2019. It stayed shuttered until April 2020. Fort Detrick is the largest employer of Frederick County, MD, so it was a very big deal. Dr. Redfield shut down the US biological defense program at Fort Detrick because of a pattern of repeated failed safety violations that he says placed the citizens of Frederick, MD at great risk. Many of us have speculated for years just exactly what that risk was. The whole episode was shrouded in mystery, but my understanding at least partially involved a new research laboratory designed to house non-human primates within which Ebola experiments were planned. At least one of the issues involved problems with air handling, reminiscent of one of the key issues that cropped up at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Fast forward to the latest revelations by Congress (from the House Energy and Commerce Committee press release).

The House Energy and Commerce Committee today released a report titled “Interim Staff Report into Risky MPXV Experiment at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.”

The report details the Committee’s investigation, which was launched following a 2022 Science magazine interview in which Dr. Bernard Moss of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) revealed that he was planning to insert segments of a lethal strain of MPXV (formerly known as “monkeypox”) into a more a transmissible strain of the virus. This proposed experiment alarmed some scientists concerned about the risks of creating an enhanced version of the MPXV virus.

For nearly a year and a half, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the NIH, and NIAID misrepresented and deceived the Committee by repeatedly denying that the potentially dangerous experiment was proposed and approved. However, after being pressed repeatedly by Committee Leaders, HHS ultimately admitted Dr. Moss’s research team had been granted approval to conduct a bidirectional MPVX gene-transfer experiment (i.e., inserting the more lethal strain into the more transmissible strain and vice versa). Documents made available for review to Committee staff confirmed the 2015 approval of the experiment and raised additional concerns.

HHS, the NIH, and NIAID still maintain the riskier research project was never conducted. However, no documentation or any other evidence has been produced to substantiate the claim. NIAID has also failed to offer any explanation of the circumstances and rationale that supposedly led the Moss research team to drop the bidirectional mpox gene-transfer experiment after receiving approval for the project.

The report concludes with a series of recommendations related to biosecurity to ensure future transparency and accountability related to risky research like this.

The Full Report

This documents that, in the case of NIAID, we have an institute that finds it acceptable to lie and obfuscate to Congress, and so far, there is no accountability other than more Congressional investigations. All of this reeks of an institutional culture of chronic arrogance, entitlement, and disregard for fundamental biohazard safety considerations.

Dr. Bernard Moss, the scientist at the heart of this controversy, has not been subpoenaed, nor has his scientific staff that we know of. There is no question that gain-of-function work was performed, and relatively recently, too. The only question is how far did these experiments go.

On October 28, 2022, Science magazine made a clarification to its October 19, 2022, article based on information provided by the NIH. The clarification stated explicitly that the clade II virus in Dr. Moss’ research discussion in the September 2022 Science magazine was clade IIa, not clade IIb, which had spread in the U.S.40 The clarification did not refute that Dr. Moss had proposed or planned gene transfers from clade I to clade IIa. Further, Dr. Moss’ team wrote in an early November 2022 preprint of an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) that later appeared in February 2023 that they intended to extend their research to include clade IIb: “We have started to investigate the genetic determinants responsible for virulence differences of clade I and IIa viruses and plan to extend this to clade IIb pending institutional approval.

NIAID, via Eco Health Alliance, clearly funded the creation of SARS-CoV-2-WIV. They are at least partially responsible for the millions of deaths that this genetically modified virus caused. NIAID has been involved in gain-of-function work with influenza that was so dangerous that it triggered the Obama administration to put a hold on gain-of-function research, which was lifted under Trump.

NIAID also funded H5N1 (avian influenza) gain of function research, which led to the moratorium on GOF research under the Obama administration.

NIAID is out of control. With a budget of 6.1 billion, it controls a vast empire for which there is no accountability and which actively stonewalls congressional oversight attempts.

NIAID has repeatedly failed to put Americans’ safety first and foremost. NIAID has failed to put the safety of the citizens of the world first and foremost.

I am calling for a complete shutdown of NIAID. The current NIAID mission statement reads:

NIAID conducts and supports basic and applied research to better understand, treat, and ultimately prevent infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases.

They have long since abandoned their core mission in favor of biologic “defense,” gain-of-function research, and doing the bidding of big pharma.

Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, NIAID has known it is at least partially responsible for the creation of the virus named SARS-CoV-2. It has had years to come clean and to fix its organizational and cultural issues. Instead, it has lied, obfuscated, and hidden the evidence of its responsibility for what happened. NIAID’s organizational culture is arrogant and has a deep-seated sense of entitlement.

I propose that research at NIAID be shut down and the institute shuttered systematically and carefully. Of course, this must be done in a responsible manner – with biological tissue and pathogen banks being carefully preserved and assessed, but much of this archiving function is already outsourced to independent contractor companies.

Then, two new research institutes can be formed. One focused on infectious diseases, and the other on immunologic and allergic diseases. Leadership in these institutes should be completely replaced. The institutes should be focussed on what can work to provide benefit to the majority of Americans. The good example of how NIAID has ignored effective solutions being the use of Vitamin D with A, K, and zinc to boost the immune system. Another great example is how they have fought the use of generic drugs to fight infectious diseases despite a long track record of such drugs being effective in both the early and late stages of respiratory disease.

How to do this? Recently, President Biden and Congress founded ARPA-H. The same pathways that allowed this new institute to come to fruition can be used to start these two new institutes. The time to act is now, or at worst, certainly come January 20th, 2025.

Dr. Redfield showed true leadership in shuttering Fort Detrick/USAMRIID; it is time for the new President and Congress to do the same.