by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
Is Ebola, one of the deadliest viruses, really natural? An American scientist presents convincing evidence that it actually came from a bio lab – no different than the Covid-19 pathogen.
Once upon a time, there was a two-year-old boy named Emile Ouamouno. He lived with his parents and four siblings in Meliandou, a village in the south of the West African country of Guinea. One day, while crawling into a hollowed-out tree stump, he came into contact with a bat infected with Ebola. In the process, the little boy picked up the virus – and zoonosis took place, the transfer of a pathogen from animals to humans, with Emile as “patient zero.” On December 6, 2013, the encounter ended fatally for him. A sister also died, as did the mother, who was then eight months pregnant.
That, in a nutshell, is the official Ebola story. One of the most renowned virus hunters at the Robert Koch Institute, a certain Fabian Leendertz, told them in an article he published at the end of December 2014 as the coordinator of a 30-strong research team. (1) Since then, the belief that Ebola arose naturally, rumors to the contrary by conspiracy theorists have no basis whatsoever has been valid for a large part of the professional world, as well as for all leading media and “fact checkers.”
Actually? The American geneticist and virologist Jonathan Latham, co-founder and managing director of the Bioscience Resource Project and editor of Independent Science News, has an entirely different opinion. Together with Sam Husseini, a Jordanian-Palestinian writer, and political activist, he presents research that literally shatters the prevailing Ebola narrative.
“To serve justice and prevent future outbreaks, the people of West Africa deserve the fullest possible exposure on why Ebola came to them in 2014.”
Background: Ebola-Virus under a scanning electron microscope
Picked apart: Pseudo-evidence for a zoonosis
What the unsuspecting Emile is said to have introduced into humanity, one would wish at best on one’s worst enemy. Unspecific flu-like symptoms usually start eight to ten days after infection, but sometimes after two days, with sudden fever, chills, diarrhea, headache and stomach ache, vomiting, and muscle pain. Sometimes dizziness, sore throat, skin rash, and edema also occur. A few days later, the ever-increasing fever becomes hemorrhagic: External and internal bleeding begins – in the throat, on the gums, on the lips, in the conjunctiva of the eyes, and in the vagina. You vomit blood. Tarry feces indicate gastrointestinal bleeding. With the Zaire variant of Ebola (EBOV), which Emile allegedly picked up, the infection is fatal in 50 to 90% of all cases. (2) Then there is septic shock with multiple organ failure.
In December 2013, such Ebola broke out in Guinea. From there, it spread throughout West Africa over the next three years. Over 29,000 people became infected. 11,323 people died from it. (3) Although Ebola epidemics have occurred almost every year since the mid-1970s, this was by far the largest and deadliest in history. (4) With isolated cases emerging outside of Africa – even in Spain, the UK, and the US – a short-lived panic broke out around the world.
Ebola fever outbreaks in Africa since 1976
Detected Ebola infections and deaths in the first half of 2014
And such an avalanche is said to have actually been unleashed by little Emile? In this story, Latham and Husseini found numerous details are rotten. Taken together, they make a natural origin of Zaire Ebola extremely implausible. Instead, they speak for a secret laboratory construct.
A freelance journalist from Sierra Leone, Chernoh Bah, had already come across gaps and inconsistencies. In order to research a book about the Ebola outbreak, he asked around in Meliandou. Local health workers, he learned, were convinced from the start: Emile’s cause of death was malaria, symptoms of which partially overlap with Ebola, as well as cholera and Lassa fever. What really killed the kid? Experts agree that Zaire Ebola can only be reliably diagnosed using genome sequencing or other laboratory tests. (5) Leendertz omitted these tests.
Speaking to the boy’s father, Bah realized that the Leendertz team had made another mistake: when Emile died, he was only 18 months old – too small to play alone in the bush; he was always with his mother, as his father assured him. The specialist literature also fails to mention this critical detail.
Could Emile have eaten infected “bushmeat” from cooked fruit bats? His father, his primary caregiver, presumably did the same. Why did he never get Ebola?
Some bats have antibodies against Ebola. Despite intensive research, scientists have so far only been able to isolate intact Bombali Ebola – another virus genus that is not contagious to humans. (6) The Leendertz team examined the blood and tissue of 159 bats from 13 species native to the Meliandou area – the Ebola virus from Zaire was not found in a single sample.
According to Latham, all previous findings “indicate that bats only rarely transmit Ebola viruses, and if they do, then only in small quantities.”
Remarkably, even Fabian Lendeertz himself doubts that bats are actually a reservoir for the Ebola virus. (7)
“Given the general lack of evidence,” Latham comments, “one wonders how such ill-supported claims made international headlines in the first place.”
The Makona strain of Ebola caused the devastating outbreak in Guinea. There are clear indications in its genome that it has been manipulated. “The Makona strain of Ebola is new and has approximately 400 mutations not found in any previously known Ebola strain,” Latham and Husseini say. “It could be a radically manipulated derivative of a known strain – either by genetic engineering or by passage. (8) A combination of these two options should also be considered.”
The Guinea epidemic was the very first time Ebola emerged from Zaire in West Africa. All previous outbreaks of this deadliest Ebola strain have occurred in the Congo Basin, in the Central African Equatorial Zone, around 3,000 kilometers from Guinea. “Therefore, the emergence of Zaire Ebola in West Africa was a striking and very unexpected development,” Latham and Husseini write. How did it even get there? Ebola is not highly contagious, and transmission usually requires direct contact with bodily fluids and contaminated objects. “How could it have spread so widely with such weak infectious properties and little potential to spread?” Latham and Husseini wonder.
There were no outbreaks along the long stretch between the Congo Basin and Guinea. Wouldn’t they be expected if the disease had spread naturally from person to person? “Although the virus is often fatal and therefore relatively easy to spot when it emerges, it has not caused any known outbreaks in humans or animals on its way from its traditional sanctuary in the Congo.”
No less surprising is the fact that genome sequencing and phylogenetic analysis revealed only a single jump from animals to humans. Husseini and Latham explain (9): “Zoonotic outbreaks, including most Ebola outbreaks in the past, typically involve multiple jumps from an animal source to humans. Single jumps, on the other hand, indicate a laboratory origin and are often considered to be ‘Red Flag'” – as an alarm signal – “for this possibility. The reason for this is that researchers often work with a single isolate, which is particularly easy to propagate in the laboratory, while natural populations are usually diverse. This difference provides a genetic signal to distinguish natural and laboratory origins.”
What is a US bio lab doing in Africa?
But where would an artificial Ebola come from anyway? A multitude of telltale tracks leads to a US bio laboratory in Kemena, in Guinea’s neighboring state of Sierra Leone – just 50 miles from Emile’s home village. It has been operated by the US Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (VHFC) since 2010.
A 203 km drive, 4.5 hours, separates the Ebola outbreak site of Meliandou from Kenema, the site of the US Biolabs, which experimented with Ebola.
What was the research done there?
In early 2011, three years before the mysterious Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the Reuters news agency devoted a detailed article to the research work in Kenema. (10) Readers have learned that “a lab in southeastern Sierra Leone is an outpost of the US government’s war on terror,’ funded by a surge in biodefense spending” — in the tens of millions, according to Reuters appreciated.
Was that about Ebola?
The founder and president of VHFC, the virologist Robert Garry, vehemently denies this: “We didn’t have EBOV [Ebolavirus] in our laboratory, so we couldn’t have released or generated it.” (11) However, he contradicted him in March 2023 in no uncertain terms VHFC Vice President Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego: “We’re being blamed for a lab leak because we were studying Ebola in Kenema, Sierra Leone, and lo and behold, Ebola showed up just a few miles from there in 2014.” (12) Who is lying here?
For government labs studying Ebola, the Zaire species is an obvious choice: it is the deadliest; hence it offers the greatest potential for biological warfare, thus aligning with US biosecurity research priorities.
The Kenema officials were remarkably sloppy in their cover-up, leaving telltale clues. On August 25, 2013, just a few months before the Ebola outbreak, the VHFC published an article on its homepage entitled: “Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute are making great strides in the fight against the Ebola virus.” This article later disappeared; that it existed can be verified with the WayBackMachine.
The headline alone raises pressing questions: Why did the VHFC post about Ebola in 2013 if it wasn’t working on it at the time? What Ebola variant was it studying? What were the experiments about? Why was the post removed?
Evidently, Ebola was important to the VHFC and its partners, at least of primary concern to some of its members. In fact, all of the VHFC’s leading US researchers – Robert Garry, Kristian Andersen, Erica Ollmann Saphire, and Pardis Sabeti – have published several original research papers on the Ebola virus. (13)
In 2013, Robert Garry co-authored an article (14) on a novel treatment for Ebola from Zaire. All eleven other authors were from USAMRIID, known as Fort Detrick: the largest ‘biodefense’ facility in the world, on a 490-hectare site operated by the US Armed Forces.
“Secure”? Incredibly lax.
As reported by Latham and Husseini, the Kenema laboratory was incredibly lax about biological safety regulations, even though extremely dangerous pathogens were being handled there: (15)
“In the US, working with live filoviruses requires biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) facilities where researchers wear hyperbaric suits. But in Kenema (…) biosafety precautions include goggles, gloves, and masks.” The Reuters article quotes scientist Matt Boisen, another VHFC member: “Certainly we have less security, less safeguards,” he concedes, “but we can do a lot more in the same amount of time.”
Other observers confirmed hair-raising negligence. In the 2014 outbreak, the nonprofit medical organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) was the first responder to be called in because of their extensive prior Ebola experience. MSF’s emergency coordinator, Anja Wolz, confessed to the Associated Press agency: “I didn’t go to the lab (…) I refused because I’ve already seen enough.” A CDC official, Austin Demby, who later came to the investigation was sent came to similar conclusions: “The potential for cross-contamination is enormous and frankly unacceptable.”
Apparently, Sierra Leone’s government had good reason to suspect Ebola came from the Kenema lab from the start. On July 23, 2014, amid the outbreak, the Department of Health and Sanitation issued a series of orders. One of them was that the treatment center in Kenema could no longer accept new patients. Tulane University – Robert Garry’s home institution – was also ordered to evacuate the Kenema lab. “Ebola tests were no longer allowed to be carried out there during the current outbreak.”
This statement confirms that the lab was indeed researching Ebola. Amid a catastrophic epidemic, wasn’t it counterproductive to shut down a key international testing and treatment facility? It would make sense if this institution itself were the originator.
Shortly after that, on August 7, 2014, the US government announced a similar decision amid the outbreak. She did not extend the expiring five-year contract with Kenema, and no further funding was available.
Just two months later, on October 17, 2014, the White House imposed a “funding freeze on new studies involving certain gain-of-function experiments involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses.” If this stop had been consistently maintained and extended to this day: the corona pandemic would probably never have happened.
“Experts” in the twilight
Oddly enough, a number of people and institutions that played a prominent role in the Ebola epidemic also made a prominent appearance in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 – here and there as rebuffs, as pathfinders, and smoke candle throwers. Fabian Leendertz, the inventor of the Ebola myth, was part of the World Health Organization team that, in spring 2021, after minimal research but maximum bowing to Beijing’s opaque disease control regime, quickly rejected the laboratory hypothesis regarding the Covid 19 pathogen. Robert Garry and Kristian Andersen, the two working employees of the Kenema laboratory operator VHFC, were among the co-authors of one of the most cited articles in the early days of the corona pandemic, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV2”; Based solely on questionable computer models (16), they declared a natural origin of the virus to be highly probable, providing fact-checkers with welcome ammunition against “conspiracy theorists.”
Garry? Andersen? These two were among the illustrious circle of virologists invited to consult by the almost all-powerful White House Health Eminence, Anthony Fauci, as evidence of an artificial origin of COVID-19 mounted. “Members of this group,” Latham and Husseini point out, “not only primarily argued against the Laboratory origin theory but also adopted many of the same scientific and phylogenetic misdirection strategies and tactics (already used in Ebola) to quell the Laboratory origin speculation to suppress COVID-19.”
What expertise did Garry and Andersen bring with them? According to the standard database Google Scholar, “The pair had never written a single piece of work on coronavirus before joining the group. So is it possible that when Anthony Fauci chose his secret circle when Covid-19 broke out in Wuhan, he didn’t have scientific expertise in mind, but rather researchers who are familiar with the scientific and political challenges of a potential laboratory outbreak?”
Is it difficult to empathize with Latham and Husseini’s skepticism? “The unacknowledged extreme contrast between the standard account and the body of evidence forces us to question whether there was not at some level a concerted scientific effort to divert attention from the VHFC and its laboratory at Kenema.”
For the two authors, “The link between Ebola 2014 and Covid-19 raises a final question: To what extent is the Covid-19 outbreak, which probably originated in a laboratory, a repeat case? Is Covid-19 the price we must pay for not conducting open, thorough, and forensic investigations into virus outbreaks and instead leaving these tasks at the mercy of researchers with the greatest conflicts of interest?”
Against “conspiracy theories”: A propaganda tool called ChatGPT
The currently celebrated dialogue system ChatGPT provides a foretaste of how ministries of truth could misuse artificial intelligence in a Brave New World. Those who control such AI will soon have the power to monopolize real and alleged world knowledge. When asked: “Is there any evidence that Ebola originated in a biological laboratory?” (Posted on April 2, 2023.), ChatGPT dutifully follows the line of governments, military and intelligence agencies: “Currently, there is no credible evidence that Ebola originated in a laboratory or was intentionally created or released. The most common theory is that Ebola is a zoonotic virus, meaning it originally spread from animals to humans. (…) While there are some conspiracy theories that Ebola was intentionally created or released in a laboratory, these claims have been largely debunked by the scientific community and have not been able to be backed up by credible evidence. (…) The current scientific consensus is that it is a naturally occurring virus.” (Italics added by the author.) There is an absolute risk of being sanctioned by Facebook & Co. with warnings, shadow bans, and account deletions for such posts, certainly not.
Mad toward the apocalypse
Latham and Husseini’s argument for a laboratory leak is based on a wealth of weighty, painstakingly assembled evidence. They gain additional weight because there is no evidence of a zoonotic origin – a parallel to SARS-CoV-2. Not only the journalist Chernoh Bah finds it “difficult not to interpret the representation of the ‘zoonotic origin of the West African Ebola epidemic’ represented by Fabian Leendertz and his team as part of a cover-up or concealment of the actual chain of events that laid the foundation for the West African Ebola outbreak.”
The madness of gain-of-function research needs to stop now. As long as it lasts, it threatens humanity existentially, much more violently than all nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons in the world.
(Harald Wiesendanger)
Remarks
1 Almudena M. Saéz u.a.: “Investigating the zoonotic origin of the West African Ebola epidemic”, EMBO Molecular Medicine 7/2015, S. 17-23, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25550396/, https://doi.org/10.15252/emmm.201404792
2 H. Feldmann/T.W. Geisbert: “Ebola haemorrhagic fever,” Lancet 337/2011, S. 849-862, http://www.sciepub.com/reference/70867
3 Daily Mail 3. November 2022, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11383611/Ebola-leaked-biofacility-causing-2014-West-Africa-outbreak-scientists-claim.html
4 Independent Science News 25. Oktober 2022, https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/did-west-africas-ebola-outbreak-of-2014-have-a-lab-origin/
5 S. K. Gire u.a.: “Genomic surveillance elucidates Ebola virus origin and transmission during the 2014 outbreak “, science 345(6202) 2014, S. 1369-1372, https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1259657.
6 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6557442/; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6478230/
7 EcoHealth 13/2016, S. 18-25, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10393-015-1053-0
8 Zur Technik der seriellen Passage, die vermutlich auch bei SARS-CoV-2 Anwendung fand, siehe H. Wiesendanger: Corona-Rätsel (2020), S. 100 f., 192 f.
9 Independent Science News 25. Oktober 2022, https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/did-west-africas-ebola-outbreak-of-2014-have-a-lab-origin/
10 Reuters 14. February 2011, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bioterror-africa/u-s-anti-terror-outpost-tackles-rat-borne-virus-idUSTRE71D49820110214
11 PNAS 10. November 2022, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2214427119
12 Twitter Nicholson Baker 12. März 2023, https://twitter.com/nicholsonbaker8/status/1634914764878118912
13 Nature 454/2008, S. 177-182, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07082; PLOS 12. September 2013, https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0002430; PNAS 111(48), 17. November 2014, S. 17182-17187, https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1414164111; Cell 19. Februar 2018, https://www.cell.com/biophysj/pdf/S0006-3495(17)32767-4.pdf; Cell Host & Microbe 24 (2), 8. August 2018, S. 221-233.e5, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1931312818303792; Nature Communications 17. August 2020; 11 article number 4131, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17994-9
14 PLOS 12. September 2013, https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0002430
15 Independent Science News October 25, 2022, https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/did-west-africas-ebola-outbreak-of-2014-have-a-lab-origin/
16 https://www.klartext-online.info/post/zuviel-versprochen
17 Gestellt am 2. April 2023.
Photo credits
Ebola cases_up to_inclusive_2020: Documented outbreaks of Ebola fever in Africa (1976–2020): By Gregor Rom – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75444645
Ebola_Epidemie_2014: Ebola epidemic 2014/15 in West Africa between April 2014 and July 2015 (including suspected cases) Diseases Deaths . By Leopoldo Martin R – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33768799
Ebola_Map_Guinea_Liberia_Sierra_Leone_2014-08-25_animated: Regional distribution of the confirmed and suspected cases of disease in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, depiction from August 25 to October 12, 2014 (thereafter different, non-transferable classification).[132] Von A doubt – Eigenes WerkMap: File:Ebola-CDC-Case-Map.svg by VeggiesData: WHO Situation Reports http://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/situation-reports/archive/en/, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37068119
Ebola Viruses Under the Microscope: Ebola_Virus Wiki: From CDC – http://phil.cdc.gov/phil (ID #1836), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16885965
Ebola_virus_virion : By CDC/Cynthia Goldsmith – Public Health Image Library, #10816This media comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Public Health Image Library (PHIL), with identification number #10816.Note: Not all PHIL images are public-domain; be sure to check copyright status and credit authors and content providers.العربية | German | Deutsch | macedonian | slovenščina | +/−, public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16504278