05 May 2010 By Sherwood Ross
Giving priority to bioweapons research at NIH, started
under the Bush Administration and continuing under
President Obama, “diverts resources from critical
public-health and scientific objectives,” says Richard
Ebright, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. “The
negative impact has been most severe in bacteriology,
in which NIH research priorities have been
catastrophically re-ordered---with research on
bacterial bioweapons receiving more support than
research on the top five bacterial causes of death
combined---and in which non-bioweapons research has
suffered catastrophic losses in resources and
personnel,” Ebright said.
Ebright cited the examples of research into two
bacterial pathogens: “Streptococcus pneumoniae and
Staphylococcus aureus, which claim 40,000 and 20,000
U.S. lives each year, respectively. Each kills more
Americans than HIV-AIDS (15,000 U.S. lives) “but
neither of these bacterial pathogens is on the list of
NIAID Priority Pathogens,” Ebright pointed out. (NIAID,
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, is the subdivision of NIH responsible for
infectious-disease research.)
“These two killer bacterial pathogens are not in
NIAID’s ‘Category A’, with the anthrax bacterium and
the smallpox virus, or even in NIAID’s ‘Category B’ or
‘Category C,’" Ebright says. “Something is
wrong---very wrong---when NIAID fails to prioritize
the top infectious cause of U.S. death,” he said in an
email to this reporter. Other
top bacterial causes of U.S. deaths include
Enterococcus faecium/faecalis, Clostridium difficile,
Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Mycobacterium
tuberculosis. “Of these, only the last is on the NIAID
Priority Pathogens list and this pathogen is only in
Category C,” Ebright said.
Asked “What is the mood of the scientific life
sciences community at this time toward the
Administration?” Ebright responded, “Hopeful
expectation” but “growing concern that, thus far,
there has been more continuity [from the Bush
Administration] than change.” The
scope of the government’s involvement in bioweapons
research, may be gauged from its estimated expenditure
of $70 billion since 9/11 and the fact that, according
to Ebright, more than 400 U.S. institutions are
engaged in such work.
Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the
University of Illinois, Champaign, said that in
constant dollars the $70 billion “is twice what they
spent on the Manhattan Project to develop the
A-bomb---ergo, this is a weapons program.”
Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons
Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 for the U.S., said
President Bush “turned the NIH into a front
organization for biowarfare work,” and “(President)
Obama is simply continuing the Bush policies” and is
“now even exporting biowarfare capabilities to Third
World Countries.” Asked
about the scope of the nation’s biowarfare activities,
Boyle estimated there are “about 13,000 death
scientists involved…(so) Dr. (Josef) Mengele has
arrived on American campuses all over and the
universities’ Institutional Review Boards (to review
biowarfare research programs) are a joke and a fraud,
too.” (Mengele was a German SS officer and physician
who, during WWII, performed diabolical experiments on
prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp
in Poland.) Boyle
said, “There is so much money involved that
universities simply are not going to turn down these
proposals no matter how reprehensible they might
read…” At
his own University of Illinois, Boyle said, previous
biowarfare research and development contracts with the
Pentagon clearly stated: “We have selected pigs (to
gas with biowarfare agents) because they have a
circulatory system and a respiratory system similar to
human beings.” Boyle
said, “I am sure similar type biowarfare contracts
that are clearly anti-human, anti-ethical, illegal and
criminal on their face alone have been approved all
over (at) American universities by now. Money talks.
Ethics walks.”
(Sherwood Ross formerly worked for the Chicago Daily
News and contributed regular columns to Reuters and
UPI. His articles on biowarfare have been published
in The Humanist and other magazines. Reach him at
sherwoodross10@gmail.com ) Comments 💬 التعليقات |