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From ... in Biology —

Why Is Protecting COVID-19's Origin so Important?

STORY AT-A-GLANCE Dr.

Why Is Protecting COVID-19's Origin so Important?

Meryl Nass is a physician in Ellsworth, Maine, who in previous interviews has helped us understand the unforeseen consequences of mass vaccination — consequences that could end up impacting public health in a very negative way. Here, she discusses what she's been working on for decades, and how it relates to this current pandemic. An outspoken supporter of health freedom, Nass provided scientifically referenced testimony to the Massachusetts legislature, December 3, 2019, when it was considering

legislation to eliminate the religious vaccine exemption. This is now more relevant than ever, considering there is talk, worldwide, about implementing more or less mandatory vaccination against COVID-19. In that testimony, reported online in detail by Health Impact News, Nass pointed out that:

“There is no crisis (no epidemic of deaths or disabilities) from infectiousdiseases caused by lack of vaccinations ... The elephant in the auditorium todayis Pharma profits ...The pharmaceutical industry has undertaken a very ambitious campaign tolegislate away vaccine exemptions in the United States and Canada. France,Italy and Germany have rescinded vaccine exemptions too, suggesting thecampaign is worldwide ...It has been claimed that vaccines are, by nature, extremely safe. Yet vaccinesare usually injected, bypassing all the body's natural barriers. Even minutecontamination or inadequate microbial inactivation can maim or kill ... Vaccineshave caused many autoimmune disorders, from Guillain-Barre syndrome tonarcolepsy ...Vaccines appear safe because the immediate side effects are usually mild andtemporary. Serious vaccine side effects often take weeks or months to surface,and by then it is dificult to know what caused them ...A 2009 European swine fiu vaccine (GSK's Pandemrix) caused over 1,300 casesof severe narcolepsy, mostly in adolescents. This vaccine was linked tonarcolepsy because 15 times the usual number of narcolepsy cases suddenlyappeared in clinics ...It should be apparent, but isn't: Government waivers of vaccine liabilitydiscourage manufacturers from ensuring that the vaccines they sell are as safeand effective as possible.
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The removal of vaccine exemptions, combined with liability waivers for vaccineside effects and recently loosened standards for licensing vaccines, create ahighly toxic mix.”

Nass goes on to cite statistics showing why the claim that draconian laws are required to control the “crisis” of vaccine-preventable diseases is false. She also points out that:

“The bedrock expectation of medical ethics is that patients must give informedconsent for all medical procedures, including vaccines. Informed consentmeans that patients must be informed about the procedure, have the right torefuse, and may not be coerced to accept it.Isn't withholding an education an extreme form of coercion? Without anydiscussion of its moral or ethical dimensions by media, medical societies orgovernment oficials, the requirement for informed consent for medicalprocedures, including vaccinations, vanishes in the blink of an eye whenpatients are not allowed the right to refuse.”

Anthrax

In 1992, Nass published a paper identifying the 1978-1980 Zimbabwe anthrax outbreak as a case of biological warfare. In 2011, I also interviewed her about the 2001 false fiag anthrax attack in the U.S., on the heels of 9/11, and the dangers of the anthrax vaccine. That manufactured crisis initiated the PATRIOT Act, one of the most severe compromises of our personal freedoms up to that point. Now, it appears they're using the COVID-19 pandemic to take away even more freedoms. There's strong evidence that this is precisely what's going on. Early in the interview, Nass summarizes our earlier discussion about the anthrax attack, so for a refresher, listen to the interview or read through the transcript. That attack, however, is also what allowed government funds to be allocated toward even more biological warfare research. She explains:

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“Congress appropriated a lot of money for bio-terrorism, which is conjoinedwith pandemic planning. So, the same pot of money that goes into pandemicsgoes into Biological Defense. Much of it is duly used for research performed inhigh containment, BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs.We don't call it biological warfare, but when you're designing pathogens to bemore virulent than the originals in nature ... essentially biological warfareresearch gets done. Things are called biological warfare if the intent is to createa weapon. It's called biological defense if the intent is to design a bad bug soyou can come up with defenses against that bug.What has happened is that a lot of money was spent to develop new highcontainment labs — many, many more high containment labs ... about $6.5billion a year since 2001 has been designated for this biodefense. So, what wewound up with is hundreds of biodefense labs that have to be used andthousands, possibly 15,000, newly trained bio-defense researchers.So, now we have cadres of people who are experts in coronaviruses or avian fiuviruses, Ebola, Lassa, et cetera. And what most of that money ... has been spenton, has been researching these pathogens. Even though the money wassupposed to be spent on developing countermeasures and stockpilingcountermeasures, to a great extent that did not happen ...As a result, we know a lot about highly virulent coronaviruses that have beencreated in labs around the world as well as in the U.S. and China, and we haveabsolutely no countermeasures that have been developed for coronavirus.”

Where Did SARS-CoV-2 Originate?

“Like everybody else, I wondered whether this was a natural jump from a bat or some other animal to humans and scratched my head about it,” Nass says. While she's not a virologist, she does have a three-decade background in biological warfare and is aware of what's been created in the past, what it takes, where they may be made, and how it has been done.

“So, I remained curious. Then on February 19 online, and in the March 7 printedition, a group of scientists had a "Correspondence" published in The Lancet,and it was a very curious piece to me. It didn't make sense.And these were very prominent signatories, including the former head of theNational Science Foundation, one of the former top people at CDC, the directorof the Wellcome Trust, coronavirus researchers and funders, and otherprominent people.What they said is, ‘We need to quash the rumors that this came from a lab. Thatis a conspiracy theory and we need to get rid of it. They wrote:‘The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now beingthreatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We standtogether to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19does not have a natural origin.'So, what this group was doing, in a very short, less than a page-long letter, wascalling the possibility that SARS-2 might have come from a lab a conspiracytheory, and confiating any consideration of this possibility with threatening"transparent sharing of data" with China. And we couldn't interfere with thatbecause we need to work with China to fight the coronavirus ...A couple of weeks later, an article came out in Nature Medicine, which said,‘Here we have the scientific proof that this did not come from a lab' ...And this second paper talked about the two things that have been identified byothers as the most problematic new genetic segments on SARS-CoV-2 — twosites on the spike RNA, which seem to enhance the tropism and thebinding/entry, so it makes it easier for the virus to get into human cells andexpands the range of cell types the virus can enter.
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And the Nature Medicine authors took these two regions and said: ‘Look, thesemutations that are found in the new CoV-2 virus, which are not seen in any ofthe other coronaviruses anywhere near it genetically, must have come from thewild because these weren't created in the ways that we virologists would havechosen to create them.'They said, 'We already have ways to create these mutations that would leave alab signature, but there is no lab signature. And furthermore, we decided thatbased on computer modeling, the receptor binding domain did not use the idealformulation we predicted. If a geneticist, a virologist, was doing this, they wouldhave used our computer model. They didn't, and therefore this must have comefrom the wild.'Well, that was a really odd argument because it didn't make any scientificsense. The authors did a lot of hand-waving, but failed to consider that othertechniques could have been used to create this virus. Nor did the authorsexplain how such a virus, so ideally adapted to humans, could have developedin wildlife.We should understand that those were two highly virulent and surprisingmutations that could well have been added to a preexisting coronavirus, by avariety of techniques, including the old passage technique, still used today,which is what Louis Pasteur used to create the first live, attenuated rabiesvaccine in 1885.If you passage a virus through multiple human tissue cultures, or mice thatcontain, for example, humanized lung tissue, you force the virus to developmutations that adapt it better and better to the new tissue. If the currentcoronavirus, as claimed by some scientists and seems borne out clinically, isbetter adapted to binding to the human ACE-2 receptor than to all known animalACE-2 receptors, then it either:

1) mutated that way by jumping from wildlife to humans long ago, subsequently optimizing its ACE-2 receptor for humans over a prolonged period of time, or 2) was genetically engineered in a lab to do so, or 3) was passaged through cells with human ACE-2 receptors in order to accumulate the mutations that made it most virulent to humans.

I believe the same argument holds for the second unique coronavirus mutation,the addition of four amino acids to form a furin (polybasic) cleavage site. Thissite takes advantage of the human furin enzyme present intra- andextracellularly, which enhances viral entry into human cells and might conveyother advantages to the virus.There is absolutely no evidence to support the first hypothesis, that this virushas been circulating in humans for years. Thus, we are left with hypotheses 2and 3: Each requires the human hand, only differing by the technique used. Inmy opinion, it is likely that both techniques (genetic engineering and serialpassage) were used to produce the SARS-2 coronavirus, or its laboratoryprogenitors.”

We Absolutely Have the Know-How to Create SARS-CoV-2

Nass countered Nature Medicine's narrative in a March 26, 2020, blog post, and again in an April 2, 2020, post, in which she wrote:

“Why are some of the U.S.' top scientists making a specious argument about thenatural origin of SARS-CoV-2? ... Prior to genetic engineering techniques beingdeveloped (1973) and widely used (since late 1970s), more ‘primitive' means ofcausing mutations, with the intention of developing biological weapons, wereemployed ...They resulted in biological weapons that were tested, well-described, and insome cases, used ... These methods can result in biowarfare agents that lackthe identifiable signature of a microbial agent constructed in a lab from knownRNA or DNA sequences.
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In fact, it would be desirable to produce such agents, since it would be dificultto prove they were deliberately constructed in a lab. Here are just a fewpossibilities for how one might create new, virulent mutants:

1. Exposing microorganisms to chemical or radiological agents that cause high mutation rates and selecting for desired characteristics 2. Passaging virus through a number of lab animals or tissue cultures 3. Mixing viruses together and seeking recombinants with a new mix of virulence factors”

Why Is Protecting the Narrative so Important?

Nass believes the old technique of passage is a likely candidate here. According to Nass, if you take viruses that are ill adapted to the human ACE-2 receptor but are adapted to another animal's ACE-2 inhibitor, and then passage them in human tissue culture with the human ACE-2 receptor, over time, the viruses will develop improved receptor binding.

“It's a likely way that this coronavirus might have been produced,”

she says.

“Anyway, I read that article and I said, ‘This is complete nonsense. I can't believeNature Medicine published it.' And the two groups of authors, the group fromThe Lancet and the group from Nature Medicine, have consistently referred toeach other as they've been interviewed since.Science Magazine did a short piece on The Lancet article. USA Today did apiece on the Nature of Medicine article. And then the head of the NationalInstitutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, Tony Fauci's boss, wrote a blog post (orsomebody wrote it for him) about the spurious Nature Medicine article.He stated, ‘Now we have the scientific answer. This article in Nature Medicinehas put to rest any thoughts that this could be a lab construct. That's aconspiracy theory. We have no room for conspiracy theories. This is the end ofthe discussion' ...Now, the first thing I thought about the Nature Medicine article was, ‘Did theseauthors actually write it?' Because it's such a piece of scientific nonsense thanany real scientist reading it, if you can read the language, would not accept it,would dismiss it out of hand. Many other scientists have said exactly this,subsequently.So, were the Nature Medicine authors asked to place their names on a piece ofjunk science in order to get it into a high impact journal and create this smokescreen — that "the science proves" (but only to the scientifically illiterate) this isa naturally occurring coronavirus?There were five authors. I know of a couple of them. One was a virologistnamed Robert Garry, who I have had some interactions with over the last 22years, another one was Ian Lipkin. Garry and coauthor Kristian Andersen bothworked in Sierra Leone during the Ebola epidemic.Garry was principal investigator for a project in Kenema, Sierra Leone before theoutbreak started. Ian Lipkin's group at Columbia University claimed, just lastyear, to have finally found a bat in west Africa carrying Ebola virus; in otherwords, this Nature Medicine coauthor's group produced the long-soughtevidence for a natural origin of west Africa's Ebola epidemic.I happened to show the Nature Medicine article to a friend of mine, Ed Hooper,who wrote a well-known book called, ‘The River,' about the origin of AIDS: Howdid AIDS jump from monkeys into the human population?Although many claim that it's due to Africans eating bush meat (from monkeys),Ed makes a very strong case that HIV made the species jump via oral poliovaccines that were prepared locally, in the Belgian Congo, from the kidneys ofvarious types of monkeys that were locally caught. The vaccine was designedby Hilary Koprowski in the U.S., and given to millions of Africans.
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Ed Hooper has put out additional evidence in the intervening 20-plus yearssince he wrote ‘The River,' that it's much more likely that the jump into humansoccurred because the oral polio vaccine grown on monkey kidneys wascontaminated by monkey viruses, and that those monkey kidneys probablycontained the precursor to HIV.Interestingly, three of these Nature Medicine authors had challenged him on hisAIDS origin theory about two decades ago, and now they're challenging thecoronavirus origin theory, which made me wonder, ‘Are these five NatureMedicine authors ... repeatedly trotted out by the political medicalestablishment to try to push false narratives that are politically desirable?"

Compelling Evidence SARS-CoV-2 Is a Lab Creation

May 19, 2020, I reviewed evidence presented in a Medium article written by Yuri Deigin, as well as a video presentation of this evidence done by Chris Martenson, Ph.D. If you missed “The Smoking Gun Proving SARS-CoV-2 Is an Engineered Virus,” you may want to review it after you're done with Nass' interview. Both sources go into great scientific depth, explaining why SARS-CoV-2 cannot be the result of a natural mutation. Deigin doesn't actually suggest that it is manmade, but provides strong evidence that one needs to consider before coming to the conclusion that it's of natural origin. Nass comments on Deigin's work:

“[Deigin] did his own research and published a massive discussion of all thecoronavirus research that has gone on since 1999 that is relevant to SARS-CoV-2, and he particularly discusses these two mutations: One, the furin cleavagesite and the other is the receptor binding area.He talks about all the research that's been done on coronaviruses, the differentways you can make these changes, and how changes like what we're seeingnow have in fact been created by coronavirus researchers over the past 20
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years. And he analyzes everything very, very finely. It's like Ed Hooper's book. Hegoes in and out and around and discusses every aspect.When you finish reading that article, you are convinced that it's almost certainthat these two mutations were put there deliberately.Whether they were done by passage, whether they were done by CRISPR orwhether another method was used, scientists did know the implications, interms of increasing virulence, of both of these mutations. So, I invite you toread that piece.”

Many Nations Funded 'Gain of Function' Coronavirus Research

We now know that the National Institutes of Health, under Fauci's leadership, funded gain-of-function research, or research on how to increase the virulence of pathogens, with coronaviruses for about two decades. When the White House temporarily suspended U.S. government funding for that kind of research for MERS, SARS and avian fiu in 2014, some work may have shifted over to the Wuhan Virology Institute in China and continued anyway. Other similar research, such as Ralph Baric's at UNC, was given special permission to continue despite the temporary suspension. The funding ban was lifted in 2017. Nass weighs in:

“Coronavirus research, including gain-of-function research over the last 20years, has been done in many countries in Europe, in many labs in the U.S., inJapan, Singapore, China, Australia and probably other places. And it has oftenbeen funded by multiple countries.So, funders have included the Australian government, different branches of NIH,but primarily Fauci's NIAID, the National Science Foundation and USAID —surprising because you would think USAID is an aid agency.There have also been organizations like the EcoHealth Alliance, which haveserved as pass-throughs for the funding. The NIAID or USAID would give moneyto the EcoHealth Alliance and then EcoHealth Alliance would dole it out to theBSL-4 lab in Wuhan and other places and would participate with them inresearch.Most of the most prominent researchers have worked in multiple countries'labs, along with foreign colleagues. It's very complicated. There's a lot of backand forth. Europe has funded this research too.So, Dr. Zhengli Shi has worked in the United States and our researchers haveworked in China. Nature Medicine coauthor Ian Lipkin has a post in China, andhe was an expert who advised the Saudis on MERS, which is a cousin of SARS,and advised the Chinese on the 2003 SARS. He is afiliated with EcoHealthAlliance too.He was over in China at the beginning of this SARS-2 pandemic. Ed Holmes, acoauthor of the Nature Medicine article, is an evolutionary biologist at SydneyUniversity who also holds a position in China. So, these people work together,and ... the Chinese, the Australians, the Europeans and the Americans fund allthis work ... Some of this research is funded by five different institutes fromthree or four different countries.Gain-of-function research has been controversial since it started being openlydiscussed. In 2014, in the United States, there was a pause on U.S. governmentfunding of gain-of-function research, but only for three organisms: MERS, SARSand avian fiu.Probably this occurred because researchers announced success in creatinglethal avian fiu viruses that had gained the ability to spread via aerosol. Andbecause, at the same time, there was widespread media reporting on labaccidents in the U.S., especially at CDC's, NIH's and the Army's highcontainment labs. These accidents had exposed workers at CDC and over 100other labs to live anthrax spores and live avian fiu.There was a lot of controversy in the scientific literature over gain-of-function.However, even though about 20 research projects were initially paused in 2014,seven were given special permission to continue. Here is what U.S. governmentscientists wrote about this in 2015:‘The recent safety lapses at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention andthe NIH that could have resulted in exposure to anthrax and smallpox,respectively, have diminished public confidence in the ability of even high-containment laboratories to mitigate the risk of accidental release of pathogensof potential harm ... public tolerance of that risk may be the ultimatedeterminant of what types of research are allowed to proceed.... ‘As recent lapses at high profile laboratories have illustrated, there remainsthe potential that bacterial and viral strains can escape even the most secureenvironments.'At the end of 2017, the pause was removed, new guidelines were issued but notmade mandatory, and everybody was allowed to go back and do whatever gain-of-function research they wanted.”

Nass on Mikovits Retrovirus Hypothesis

In another investigation, I interviewed Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., a cellular and molecular biologist who suspects SARS-CoV-2 isn't the actual or sole cause of COVID-19. Rather, she believes the illness is a coinfection of SARS-CoV-2 with a preexisting XMRV gamma retrovirus infection. One possibility she has raised is that SARS-CoV-2 activates this underlying, latent infection. She supports this thesis with the fact that the cytokine storm signature of COVID-19 is inconsistent with coronavirus, but very consistent with the gamma retrovirus infections she studied.

“What she says is very interesting,”

Nass says.

“Some of it I think is incorrectand some of it is correct, and there's so much of it that it's very hard to separate
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... Even though she says coronaviruses don't do X, Y and Z, this is a very newcoronavirus. It has some unique features.What we've talked about so far is only relevant to the spike protein, which isonly 13% of the genome. We haven't even begun to explore changes that mayhave occurred in the rest of the genome. So, I don't think we have the evidenceyet to say that this coronavirus alone can't do what it seems to be doing ...Some people are saying there are two, three or four small, six to 10 amino acidsegments that look like bits of HIV, and they're inserted in different places. Theymay have effects on the immune response. I don't know. I think that informationwill gradually appear ... I think I've got to read her book [‘Plague of Corruption']... and see what the data show ...In my own research, I have found Anthony Fauci to be a hypocritical fraud, whopretends he knows nothing about coronaviruses, [yet] he's funded over $100million of coronavirus research out of NIAID. He looks so gentle and he doesn'tgive you any details about anything, but he knows a lot of details. So, I hope sheconfirms my suspicions about Fauci.”

Potential COVID-19 Vaccine Dangers

As discussed in “Fast-Tracked COVID-19 Vaccine — What Could Go Wrong?” COVID-19 vaccines were fast-tracked, eliminating animal trials and going straight to human trials. Speaking of Fauci, Moderna's fast-tracked designation for its mRNA-1273 vaccine was granted in May 2020 by the FDA. This vaccine is sponsored by Fauci's NIAID, which, echoing Bill Gates' edicts, has been calling for social distancing and other lockdown measures until a vaccine becomes available. Nass says:

“They're doing human trials of at least two vaccines in the U.S. now. So, I'll tellyou what I know. First of all, the Moderna is an mRNA vaccine. We haven't hadan mRNA vaccine before, so we don't know what that's going to do in people.
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Therefore, it seems unconscionable to give it to people before you test it inanimals, so that you can at least have some idea what the side effects might be...There [have also been] many [experimental coronavirus vaccines in the past],not just the trials at Galveston with Peter Hotez, where four different types ofvaccines against coronaviruses all failed. There have been other vaccineplatforms attempted for coronaviruses that also failed.”

In one such study, discussed in my interview above with Robert Kennedy Jr., ferrets showed an extraordinary good serological antibody response to the vaccine, but when the animals were then exposed to the wild virus, they were overtaken by a cytokine storm response, now known as “paradoxical immune enhancement.” In at least one trial, all the ferrets died.

“Hotez [has stated that] in their animal experiments, the vaccinated animalsfared worse when they were exposed to the disease than if they had not gottenthe vaccine,”

Nass says.

“[In] experiments done in the 1960s, an RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) vaccine[Editor's note: RSV is similar to coronavirus] ... was given to children. Several ofthe children died — again, with this same cytokine storm problem arising. So, Ithink this is a vaccine you should tread very lightly with, and it should neverhave been given to people before it was given to animals.”

COVID-19 Vaccine — Global Experiment Without Precedent

Nass also addresses the issue of how human trials are done, and warns people about joining them without being fully informed about the potential risks. This is particularly pertinent for COVID-19 vaccine trials, considering the lethal failures of such vaccines in the past. You also need to understand that when you participate in a trial, you are not eligible to receive compensation for any injuries you sustain. As for taking the vaccine once it becomes publicly available, Nass says:

“I'll just point out that Ralph Baric, the top coronavirus researcher in the UnitedStates, at the University of North Carolina, said himself in an interview a couplemonths ago that vaccines aren't going to work in the older population for whichthis disease is most risky ...Having dealt with many people who've died or developed chronic illnesses, allsorts of terrible complications from anthrax vaccine and smallpox vaccine, andsometimes other vaccines, I try to do a careful risk-benefit analysis beforerecommending a vaccine to any patient.Sometimes I think it makes sense for people to be vaccinated, but their ownsituation, where they live, their age group, who they're exposed to, where they'retraveling to are all important factors that would help you to formulate that risk-benefit assessment. And I don't think vaccines should be looked on as risk-free.They're clearly not risk-free. Medical interventions should be done thoughtfully...Another problem ... on the FDA website,

there is a page that talks about the

problem of growing vaccines in cells that may have oncogenes or cancercausing viruses in them, and what research FDA is trying to do to deal with this.So, the FDA acknowledges this serious potential risk from some vaccines... onthe FDA website.”

Level 3 and 4 Biosafety Labs Pose Severe Risk to Human Health

The map below was published in the journal Science in 2007 and reprinted in Asia Times April 6, 2020, showing the proliferation of high-containment labs in the U.S. A USA Today investigation published in 2015 put the number of BSL 3 and 4 labs in the U.S. around 200, and Boyle estimates there are about 400 worldwide.

11121314151617

In closing, Nass points out there have been many accidental leaks from BSL 3 and 4 labs, causing many deaths. Improperly inactivated vaccines have also claimed many lives.

“Thirty years ago when I was writing papers about the potential risks ofbiological defense research we had a lot less biological defense research goingon. And the risks were significant. Everybody agrees that these labs leak.I told you there were maybe 600 or more BSL-3s in the United States andhundreds of others around the world. There are about 200 reports of labaccidents, mostly exposures of lab personnel to pathogens, in the high-containment labs in the U.S., yearly.So, let me actually give you a few examples from a paper by Martin Furmanski,a physician who wrote about lab escapes.He pointed out a lab in England. There were several smallpox escapes from thatlab to a room below. Two people died. After the second escape happened, I
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think it was around 1980, the lab director killed himself.There were huge outbreaks of Venezuelan equine encephalitis. Thousands andthousands of animals and people [were affected] in Latin America, and it turnedout to be due to improperly inactivated vaccines. So, the disease they werevaccinating all these livestock for was actually giving them the disease andgiving it to humans also. You don't hear about that.He points out that the worldwide 1977 H1N1 outbreak ... started in China orRussia, probably from long-frozen virus that had been thawed, because thatparticular strain, H1N1, had not circulated in the world for 21 years, andgenetically it looked almost identical to the strains that were around in the late'40s and 1950s, early '50s. So that worldwide 1977 fiu pandemic was due to alab escape.And Furmanski postulates that the reason the virus was thawed was to dovaccine research because of the fear, in the U.S. in 1976-77, that a deadly swineinfiuenza pandemic might occur ... leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Butfortunately, the virus that circulated was much less deadly than the feared 1918strain.[The U.S. government] began a swine fiu vaccine program in 1976 after onesoldier died at Fort Dix in 1976 of a unique swine fiu strain. Frightened that ascenario like the 1918 fiu pandemic might emerge, the United States publichealth agencies got together with the U.S. vaccine manufacturers to create,very rapidly, a swine fiu vaccine to save the United States. It was an abysmalfailure.As things progressed, the manufacturers refused to produce vaccine unless thegovernment gave them a waiver of liability for possible vaccine injuries. Thisthey received.First of all, there was no outbreak. The virus had stopped circulating anddisappeared. Had the people at the CDC and HHS been honest with theAmerican public, they would have told them, ‘Hey, there's no outbreak. We're justgoing to cancel the vaccine program. We don't need it.' But the vaccine programhad developed a life of its own.Harvey Fineberg co-authored a wonderful book [‘The Swine Flu Affair: Decision-Making on a Slippery Slope'

] about the vaccine program, for the National

Academy of Sciences, which the subsequent DHHS (then HEW) Secretary,Joseph Califano, had requested.I recommend it. It's a fabulous read because Fineberg was working under theSecretary of Health and Human Services, so he was able to interview everybodyinvolved in government who had been part of the program.He tells you the inside story of what went on during that year. All the infighting,all the different reasons why a vaccine was made for a disease that didn't exist.And then, [after the vaccine was] given to 45 million Americans, [it was] found tocause Guillain-Barre syndrome, about 30 people died and 4,000 people appliedfor damages from the federal government.This was the first time the government gave a liability waiver to vaccinemanufacturers. And I think it was what gave them the idea that in the futurethey could get liability waivers for all their vaccines.”

You can download a free PDF copy of “ The Swine Flu Affair ” on The National Academies of Sciences website. You can also learn more about the failed 1977 swine fiu vaccination campaign in "How Does COVID-19 Compare to Spanish Flu?"

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