After the disastrous alleged gain-of-function research done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — sponsored by the U.S. National Institute of Health — that gave the world COVID-19, the U.S. government is at it again. The Biden administration’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has launched a project in cooperation with Washington State University (WSU) and unnamed collaborators in “other countries” to find up to 12,000 novel viruses in nature for the purpose of preventing “future pandemics.”
According to WSU Insider,
To better identify and prevent future pandemics, WSU has entered into a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to head up a new five-year, approximately $125 million global project.
The USAID Discovery & Exploration of Emerging Pathogens — Viral Zoonoses, or DEEP VZN project, will build scientific capacity in partner countries to safely detect and characterize unknown viruses which have the potential to spill over from wildlife and domestic animals to human populations.
Felix Lankester, lead principal investigator for USAID DEEP VZN, argued the work is necessary since the “infectious disease events … are likely to happen more frequently” due to “wild areas becoming increasingly fragmented.” At the same time, the university states that more than 70 percent of viral outbreaks in people originate in animals, therefore identifying “future threats” would benefit both the United States and the “global community.”
The project plans to partner with up to 12 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to carry out large-scale animal surveillance programs within their own countries and using local laboratories. That, the organizers believe, will help to avoid shipping samples to other countries for testing and presumably avoid “leaks.” In addition to that, such a local approach will build an international network of laboratories capable of quickly responding to disease outbreaks.
There are three viral families that will be a center of the researchers’ focus: coronaviruses; filoviruses, such as the Ebola virus; and paramyxoviruses, which includes the viruses that cause measles and Nipah. Those families were chosen because of them having a “large potential for viral spillover from animals to humans.”
Over the course of the project, the scientists expect to detect from 8,000 to 12,000 previously unknown pathogens. Then, the pathogens’ genomes will be screened and sequenced to see which ones of them “pose the most risk to animal and human health.”
Dr. Judith Wasserheit, a co-principal investigator in the project and chair of the UW Department of Global health, promised the “breadth and depth” of the full sequencing and characterizing of the novel viruses will be “unprecedented.” That will be achieved by the collaboration of the university’s three key departments tasked with interconnected goals.
First, the UW Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness will focus of “on a proactive, integrated systems approach to pandemic preparedness that has brought together internationally recognized leaders in the kinds of laboratory methods.”
Another department, the UW Center for One Health Research, will be working “at the interface of human, animal and environmental health.”
Wasserheit’s own department of Global Health, she noted, will work with colleagues in focus countries to “identify high-risk locations and subpopulations at the human-animal interface.”
The USAID says the results of the studies will be shared with the governments of the participating countries “to develop and implement interventions in communities to reduce the risks of virus spillover and therefore, potential outbreaks.”
In addition to “interventions in communities,” the acquired data will be utilized in “developing diagnostics, medicines, and vaccines for new viruses.”
There we have it: Scientists will be sequencing zoonotic viruses with the high potential of infecting humans in hopes of preventing infectious outbreaks. Does this not sound awfully familiar?
According to the National Pulse, the new project closely follows a similar format to the research conducted by EcoHealth Alliance and its partner, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Despite the claims of the EcoHealth Alliance-WIV research being conducted by “leading scientists” in “world-class laboratories” with exceptional safety protocols, the current pandemic arguably occurred because of such research.
Some in the American medical/government establishment strongly advocated for such risky studies. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Biden administration’s COVID guru and chief medical advisor, even claimed in 2012 that gain-of-function research aimed at making viruses more virulent and lethal, no matter how potentially dangerous, was worth the risk of pandemics.
The New American has previously reported that in 2014, two years after Fauci’s defense of the high-stakes research, the U.S. government deemed the work so dangerous it put a moratorium on it, which was set to expire in 2017. According to longtime journalist and former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, Fauci circumvented the U.S. moratorium and supported gain-of-function research with grant money from the NIAID funneled through EcoHealth Alliance.
Allegedly, NIAID did this by exploiting a loophole in the moratorium stating that “an exception from the research … may be obtained if the head of the USG [U.S. government] funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”
The same pretext of “protecting the public health” is being used by the U.S. government yet again.
