Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) President and CEO Mary Holland today hosted Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CHD’s chairman on leave, on CHD.TV, where the two discussed Kennedy’s latest book, “The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race.”
“The Wuhan Cover-Up” will be available Dec. 5 and can be pre-ordered from the publisher, Skyhorse Publishing, or from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other booksellers.
In the interview, Kennedy traced the history of the U.S. bioweapons program — from its origins, when the U.S. brought Nazi and Japanese scientists here after World War II to today’s biodefense research being conducted under the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the NIAID for 39 years until he retired last year, later offshored some of that research to China.
Suggesting SARS-CoV-2 likely originated from gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — research funded in part by the U.S. government — Kennedy called for an end to the risky research to prevent future lab leaks. He said there should be transparency among nations conducting such research, and that it should be criminalized.
Kennedy told Holland he sees “pandemic preparedness” as a driver of authoritarian government control that threatens civil liberties, and hopes that “The Wuhan Cover-Up” can help us understand the failures that brought us to this point so we can protect our fundamental rights in the future.
By 1969, U.S. bioweapons programs had achieved ‘nuclear equivalence’
The idea for “The Wuhan Cover-Up” emerged as Kennedy was finishing his previous book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.” Kennedy said he was overwhelmed with the volume of information coming forth on gain-of-function research and the origins of COVID-19.
That information pointed to the CIA, which Kennedy said “was deeply involved in it from the beginning,” going back to its first mission, Operation Paperclip in 1947. That project involved smuggling into the U.S. more than 1,600 Nazi scientists who had worked on developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and missile systems.
“A lot of them ended up in Fort Detrick [or] down in Galveston or one of the Navy labs,” he told Holland, “and that was the beginning of the United States bioweapons program.”
But during World War II, Japan did “more than anybody to develop bioweapons,” Kennedy said, describing how Japanese scientists performed horrific experiments, including live vivisections, mostly on Chinese citizens after giving them various diseases.
Because the U.S. intelligence agencies and the military wanted to start their own bioweapons programs, Kennedy said, “They exonerated those groups and they brought them over to the United States,” where we “inherited not just the cultures and the techniques, but also the kind of moral bankruptcy of the Nazi and Japanese scientists.”
By 1969, the U.S. had achieved “nuclear equivalence” with its bioweapons programs, Kennedy said, meaning “we could kill people with bioweapons as effectively as we could with nuclear weapons.”
Nixon halted bioweapons programs
In 1969, President Richard Nixon surprised everyone by unilaterally terminating the U.S. bioweapons programs and later pushing through the global Biological Weapons Convention to stop all research, stockpiling and use of bioweapons, Kennedy told Holland.
That decision left many in the intelligence agencies, military and private industry “seething for many years,” Kennedy said — until the anthrax attacks in 2001, a week after 9/11, led to “the very hasty passage of the Patriot Act.” The USA Patriot Act, which shielded bioweapons researchers from prosecution, “effectively relaunched the bioweapons arms race.”
Because the Pentagon was reluctant to openly conduct bioweapons research — which had been a hanging offense under the Geneva Conventions, Kennedy pointed out — “they sent the research over to Anthony Fauci’s shop, to NIAID.”
When Holland asked how bioweapons research ended up at a health agency, Kennedy said, “Because bioweapons research is always done coterminously with vaccine research. Every offensive bioweapon program requires a vaccine. So vaccines are actually part of offensive bioweapons.”
Unlike chemical weapons, Kennedy said the use of bioweapons always includes “blowback, 100% of the time.” He explained that any effort to infect an enemy with a bioweapon will invariably infect one’s own troops, “and so you cannot launch a bioweapon unless you first have the antidote” and have “inoculated all of your group.”
Under the bioweapons treaty, vaccine development was legal, but bioweapons research was not, Kennedy said.
Vaccine development then became the rationale for developing “more pathogenic, more virulent, more deadly” viruses — “classic gain-of-function research” — Kennedy said. The military tapped Fauci for the job and gave him a 68% pay raise, he said.
Obama halted bioweapons research — but Fauci never stopped
In 2014, after several U.S. bioweapons labs experienced leaks of pathogens, 300 scientists issued a statement calling for gain of function research to be “curtailed until there has been a quantitative, objective and credible assessment of the risks, potential benefits, and opportunities for risk mitigation,” and warning that the research could start a global pandemic.
After Obama issued a moratorium on the research, Fauci “moved the research offshore where he would be out of the oversight of these troublesome scientists” and White House oversight, Kennedy said.
The sites included Ukraine, the former Soviet state of Georgia, and the lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, run by the Chinese military.
Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina developed two key techniques that were taught to scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said Kennedy: a technique for cloning the furin cleavage site to more effectively dock to the ACE-2 receptors in the human lung and thus “make the virus more deadly,” Kennedy said, and the “seamless ligation” or “no-see-um” technique that would make “the evidence of human tampering invisible.”
Kennedy suggested these techniques, designed to make viruses more dangerous, point to the Wuhan research being intended for bioweapons rather than beneficial public health outcomes.
After the outbreak of SARS in China in the early 2000s, which the Chinese suspected was a U.S.-made bioweapon, Kennedy said, the Chinese were extremely interested in pursuing gain-of-function research.
As China ramped up its research, U.S. intelligence agencies and the U.S. Department of Defense “were deeply interested in having eyeballs in China,” Kennedy said, which led to the CIA, the Pentagon, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies funding research at the Wuhan lab.
Kennedy and Holland covered the development of SARS-CoV-2 as a bioweapon, the emergence of totalitarian government actions during the pandemic, the loss of civil liberties, the new “forever war” of “pandemic preparedness and response,” the creeping authority of the World Health Organization, censorship and surveillance, and steps Kennedy recommends for ending bioweapons research globally.
Watch Mary Holland’s interview with RFK Jr.:
The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy, who is on leave from CHD and is running as an independent for president of the U.S.
