Deadly pathogens

In June, the Reuters news agency exposed covert operations by the United States Department of Defense to discredit China’s vaccine against the deadly coronavirus disease, which had killed more than 6 million people.

The investigative report said it was Washington’s payback for Beijing’s effort to blame the United States for the pandemic.

The United States and China have been blaming each other for starting the Covid-19 pandemic.

The US said the virus came from a biological warfare laboratory in Wuhan, but China countered that it had originated from a US Army laboratory.

It was difficult to determine whether the pandemic could be traced to an American or a Chinese biological warfare laboratory.

The virus could have originated from animals and moved to human hosts.

However, it only proved one thing – the world’s two powerful militaries have been developing biological weapons, a severe threat to mankind.

Francis Boyle, an American human rights lawyer and a professor at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Urbana, has been warning against the Pentagon’s deadly biological warfare laboratories.

Boyle, the author of the 1989 Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act in the US Congress, said the US has a $100-billion program to create strains of killer germs resistant to vaccines.

Boyle said the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency “are ready and can start a biological war at an appropriate time in their interests.”

He claimed the US has 13,000 scientists working in more than 400 secret laboratories in the US and abroad to develop deadly pathogens.

Some of these laboratories working on deadly pathogens were moved outside the United States and relocated to Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America, and Eastern Europe.

For instance, in 1977, when a deadly fever outbreak occurred in Egypt, affecting 2 million people.

It happened when the US Navy’s biological warfare laboratory was opened in Cairo.

Health experts believed the fever outbreak was man-made and pointed to the US involvement in spreading the disease.

Zhao Lijian, a Chinese diplomat, also accused the United States of blocking the verification mechanism under the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological and Toxin Weapons and their Destruction.

He said the United States, under former president Barack Obama, adopted in 2009 a policy – National Strategy Countering Biological Threats – that strengthened US refusal from verification under the UN Convention.

The 2009 policy locked US biological warfare laboratories around the world from UN inspection, concealing the weapons development.

The UN makes sure no countries will develop and stockpile deadly pathogens as weapons of mass destruction.

However, the US is protected from such inspection by several domestic laws, including the USA Patriot Act in 2001, which lifted restrictions on handling deadly pathogens as authorized by the US government.

Washington’s top competitors – Moscow and Beijing – feared the US has already deployed biological warfare laboratories near their borders.

There were reports that the US had 46 secret laboratories dealing with deadly pathogens in Ukraine before the conflict broke out.

In 2023, former deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland had acknowledged the existence of a biological program in Ukraine, expressing fears that some information and materials from secret laboratories may fall into Russian hands due to the conflict.

Recently, Boyle provided an affidavit in a court case in Florida to compel Governor Ron DeSantis to prohibit the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines and for the attorney general to seize the vials because the mRNA nanoparticle injections are considered biological and technological weapons.

An emergency petition for writ of mandamus was filed before the Florida Supreme Court in March 2024 and was transferred to a circuit court in Leon County.

A month later, the court dismissed the case. However, an appeal was filed in May.

Boyle lent his voice to the case as an expert in biological weapons.

Experts believe the discovery of the RNA interference mechanism in 1998 by US scientists Andrew Fire and Craig Mello could enhance the development of biological weapons. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2006.

The possibility of using RNA interference mechanisms in the development of weapons was mentioned by the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).

The RNA can manipulate genes and develop weapons for a specific ethnic or racial group that could be exposed to severe illness.

The Philippines should not be a party to these experiments of deadly pathogens.

In 2020, the US Department of Defense, working with the local Department of Agricuture, opened a laboratory in Tarlac to fight the African Swine Fever (ASF) that had decimated the hog population in Luzon.

However, four years after the Pentagon-funded laboratory was opened, no vaccines against ASF were developed and the problem still persisted.

The Makabayan bloc filed a resolution in 2022 to investigate the US-funded animal laboratory.

Nothing has come out from the House resolution.

Meanwhile, the US is expanding its biological laboratories to the Visayas and Mindanao.

The government must remain vigilant and must not allow the US to develop deadly pathogens as weapons.

There must be full disclosure of US biological activities in all Philippine laboratories.

The Philippines, being a responsible member of the international community, should refrain from participating in any US-led military biological projects that can threaten the life and health of Filipinos.