The societal costs of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the U.S. are projected to reach $589 billion per year by 2030, $1.36 trillion per year by 2040 and $5.54 trillion per year by 2060 if steps are not taken to prevent the disorder, according to a study published last month.

The paper, “Autism Tsunami: The Impact of Rising Prevalence on the Societal Cost of Autism in the United States,” was first published in 2021, in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (JADD). It was retracted almost two years later by the publisher and editor, citing “concerns” with methodology and the authors’ “non-financial interests.”

Last month, Science, Public Health Policy and the Law peer-reviewed and republished the study — the first to project present and future costs of ASD that links rising costs to the increasing prevalence of the disorder.

The authors found that previous studies, which didn’t account for increasing prevalence, tended to overestimate current costs — because they assumed prevalence rates among adults are the same as rates among children — and underestimate future costs associated with a growing autistic population with shifting care needs.

Researchers Mark Blaxill, Cynthia Nevison, Ph.D., and Toby Rogers, Ph.D., projected future ASD costs in three scenarios: a base case scenario assuming the continuation of existing trends; a low scenario providing a conservative estimate of future costs; and a prevention scenario exploring possibility of future mitigation of environmental causes.

But these two premises of the paper — that prevalence is increasing and that environmental intervention is possible — made a straightforward modeling paper controversial and were the basis of the “concerns” raised that led to its retraction.

Those premises ran counter to the deeply held assumptions of the autism research and treatment industry, which continues to sidestep the issue of increasing prevalence and holds that autism is primarily a genetic and not an environmental disease.

U.S. could surpass 6% rates of ASD in children in 2024, 7% in 2032

To build their model, the researchers estimated four key parameters: the historic and future prevalence of ASD, the future size of the ASD population, the cost per individual over the course of a lifetime, and inflation projections.

Prevalence projections were based on the California Department of Developmental Services caseload data from 1931 to 2016. The researchers used U.S. Census Bureau population predictions to translate prevalence into actual numbers of people with autism. They multiplied those by different cost categories partitioned by age group and severity of ASD and applied an inflation index to their projections.

Nevison told The Defender this approach to calculating future costs was built on previous models that similarly identified cost categories and multiplied them by autism populations in each age group.

[…]

Their ASD prevalence model showed that based on current trends, the U.S. could surpass 6% rates of ASD in children in 2024 and 7% in 2032, and then would likely rise more slowly after that. This differed from previous models, which predicted continuous exponential growth.

Costs associated with ASD included “non-medical services” like community care and day programs, individual and parent productivity losses, estimated special education costs, early and behavioral intervention and medical costs.

Rising prevalence itself makes costs go up, the study showed, but so does the fact that the mix of costs changes over time as the autism population ages and has different care needs.

As people age, their needs change, Blaxill told The Defender, “You’re dealing with education and parental loss productivity in the early years, and you’re dealing with residential services and medical care and lost adult productivity of disabled people. So it’s a whole different profile.”

As the first generation of parents of children of the autism epidemic, who shouldered much of the burden of care-taking, begin to die around 2040, according to the study, costs of care that had been borne by them will shift onto state and federal governments.

The cost increase, Blaxill said, “is radical, it will cost $5 trillion a year.”

Nevison told The Defender that for their “prevention” scenario they looked to an existing example with good data where ASD rates had gone down.

She and a colleague published that research in JADD in 2020, showing that while ASD rates, which had increased for all U.S. children across birth years 1993-2000, either plateaued or declined among white families living in wealthy counties, suggesting those families made changes that lowered their children’s risk of ASD.

[…]

The paper does not indicate what those changes may have been, but Blaxill told The Defender they hypothesized the changes happened among families who followed alternative vaccination schedules and other lifestyle changes.

Even in the prevention scenario, the paper found, the cost of ASD will skyrocket to $3.7 ± 0.8 trillion annually by 2060 because it still needs to account for the demographic momentum of the large ASD population born over the last three decades.

The authors concluded that rising autism rates must be taken seriously as a public health and economic policy issue.

A ‘digital scarlet letter for eternity’

After the paper “sailed through peer review” at JADD, and became one of the journal’s most downloaded papers, there was immediate pushback, particularly in articles posted on the Spectrum News website (now The Transmitter). Former JADD Editor-in-Chief Fred Volkmar launched an investigation into the study based on concerns raised.

One article on Spectrum even included a Twitter post that implied the authors’ idea of prevention was “eugenics,” an accusation the authors told The Defender was extremely shocking and hurtful and clearly an attempt to “cancel” them.

Rogers told The Defender, and detailed in a Substack post, that they had expected some negative response from gatekeepers, “because we broke new ground and the autism debate is always fraught in this country.”

But, he said, he and his co-authors were surprised when they were informed that Volkmar solicited new critical reviews and gave them one week to respond.

Rogers said in retrospect they realized “the die was cast at that point” and a decision had been made to undermine the article. However, the researchers “naively believed” they could provide rigorous responses to the reviews, which offered “nothing substantive” and the publication would stand.

The retraction statement indicated there were methodological concerns along with concerns that the authors, Blaxill, editor-at-large for Age of Autism and chief financial officer of the Holland Center, Nevison, a former board member of SafeMinds, and Rogers, who writes the uTobian Substack and according to Spectrum had “written for the Children’s Health Defense Fund,” had not revealed their “non-financial” conflicts of interest.

According to Spectrum News these “undeclared conflicts” were the authors’ “anti-vaccine” views. Blaxill and Nevison had both previously published papers in JADD, with no similar concerns raised.

The authors noted in their response to reviewers, that the concerns enumerated by Volkmar mirrored those in Spectrum’s “hostile blog post.”

Spectrum News is fully funded by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI), from which Volkmar has received millions in research funding.

SFARI has a budget of over $100 million per year and since 2003 has dedicated almost $1 billion to autism research. That funding is largely dedicated to research focusing on the genetic basis for autism.

Rogers wrote, “The Simons Foundation has largely captured the field of autism research and they have hundreds of academics who are dependent on their largesse.”

[…]

The authors also noted that no researcher in the history of JADD had listed a personal belief as an “undisclosed non-financial conflict of interest,” and that their premise that the rise in autism numbers is real and is primarily driven by environmental factors is a legitimate scientific viewpoint shared by others.

The authors also responded in detail to what they deemed to be minor comments by three reviewers.

Yet, the journal decided to retract the article, attaching what Rogers described as “a digital scarlet letter for eternity, ‘RETRACTED!’”

[…]

Study predictions proving true

Since “Autism Tsunami” was first published, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network, which conducts biannual surveillance of ASD prevalence, has issued two reports confirming a continued rise in ASD rates.

When the CDC first began collecting data in 2000, rates were 1 in 150 children diagnosed with ASD. In the 2021 report, the ADDM found that 1 in 44 or 2.27% of American 8-year-olds had ASD and in the 2023 report, it found that 1 in 36 (2.8%) 8-year-old children — 4% of boys and 1% of girls have ASD.

ADDM also reported that autism prevalence was higher among Black, Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander children than among white and biracial children.

Yet the CDC continues to suggest that the numbers “might reflect improved screening, awareness and access to services” rather than actual growing rates.

Nevison told The Defender that given these growing rates, she is very concerned about the future of those living with ASD, especially given that it is already apparent that public services are unable to keep up with the needs of children on the autistic spectrum.

In her own school district, there is a critical shortage of educators who could serve children with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs), many of whom have ASD.

Data from the U.S. Department of Education indicate this is a national problem — 42 states and Washington, D.C., have fewer special education teachers than schools need. Many children in special education are diagnosed with ASD.

Shortage of adult facilities already a reality in Massachusetts

“Autism Tsunami” pointed to the fact that the growing numbers of children diagnosed with ASD over the last few decades are or will be soon entering adulthood and will need different, and expensive, services from those provided by the already stretched Department of Education, such as residential care.

A new investigation on residential care for people with ASD published last week by the Boston Globe reported that the numbers predicted by “Autism Tsunami” are already materializing in Massachusetts.

[…]

The Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services, which licenses and runs group homes, last year informed the legislature that it has an “extremely limited” capacity to provide housing to autistic adults who have different needs than their typical clients.

The Globe investigation also found that many hundreds of children and adults with autism in residential schools have been physically assaulted or neglected at residences with low-paid and poorly trained caregivers.

The newspaper provided several examples of serious assaults on non-verbal residents by caregivers.

Massachusetts group homes for adults have more than 4,000 vacancies for direct care staff, which is more than one-quarter of the necessary workforce.

And “while federal law guarantees special education services for disabled children, adult services are largely dependent on eligibility criteria and funding,” according to The Globe, leading to a lot of uncertainty for the aging parents of autistic young adults.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/autism-tsunami-epidemic-future-cases-cost/

By  Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.

In an interview with investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, biodefense official Dr. Robert Kadlec alleged that key officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci and virologists who wrote the “Proximal Origin” paper knew COVID-19 likely originated in a lab but used classic “information operations” tactics to protect their careers and funding.

In an interview with investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, Dr. Robert Kadlec suggested that Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other government officials and key virologists have been engaged in “denial and deception” about the virus’ origins.

Kadlec was assistant secretary for preparedness and response when the COVID-19 pandemic began, directing the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR). He later directed a Senate committee that, in October 2022, released an interim report on the pandemic’s origin that strongly favored the “lab-leak theory.”

Separately, Thacker, in a Dec. 22, 2023, post on The Disinformation Chronicle, analyzed new documents released earlier in the month by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK).

According to USRTK, these documents indicate that “American researchers concealed their intention to conduct high-risk coronavirus research in Wuhan under lax safety standards from the Pentagon the year before the COVID-19 pandemic.”

In an interview with The Defender, Thacker said that these documents aren’t, in and of themselves, evidence that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, but are evidence that those involved with controversial gain-of-function research at that laboratory have been dishonest.

“It’s another example showing that these people are lying,” Thacker said. “And the strongest evidence of a lab accident in Wuhan are all the examples of the researchers lying about what they were doing in Wuhan. That’s the evidence.”

Thacker wrote this was “just the latest example of scientific malfeasance.” In his Dec. 22, 2023 post, Thacker said that such malfeasance was aided by science writers in the media.

[…]

Fauci, others involved in ‘information operation’ 

According to Thacker, “Kadlec has worked to counter biological weapons for an alphabet soup of various agencies” for 30-plus years.

The interim U.S. Senate report that was released under his watch in October 2022 “became a controversial exclusive by ProPublica/Vanity Fair, with a 2700 word editor’s note later added,” Thacker wrote.

According to the report, published Oct. 28, 2022, in ProPublica, “The Wuhan lab at the center of suspicions about the pandemic’s onset was far more troubled than known.”

Criticism then followed from parts of the scientific community, resulting in ProPublica publishing its editor’s note on Nov. 30, 2022, stating that “Scientists, China observers and others questioned the Senate team’s findings and our reporting about them.”

ProPublica’s editors “added additional context” to the story and “also identified two factual errors inconsequential to the premise of the story” which were corrected.

[…]

According to Thacker, Kadlec — previously “operating mostly in the background” — has now emerged from the bureaucracy to assert that “federal scientists and the virologists they funded have misdirected the public and helped to cover up evidence that the pandemic began in a Wuhan lab — a lab funded with American money.”

Kadlec told Thacker that figures Fauci and Collins wanted to protect their reputations and federal funding for the research, even in the face of mounting evidence that such research could have led to the development and release of COVID-19.

[…]

To accomplish this objective, Kadlec said that “misdirection” was employed which attempted to downplay and shift public attention away from the lab-leak theory.

[…]

Kadlec noted that as early as February 2020, Fauci and key virologists were privately acknowledging, in emails between them, “that this could have been a laboratory incident.”

He also referred to one of the authors of the now-infamous “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” (“Proximal Origin”) paper in Nature Medicine in March 2020, Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., professor of immunology and microbiology at the California-based Scripps Research Institute.

According to a July 2023 U.S. House report, the “Proximal Origin” paper was used to “downplay the lab-leak hypothesis” and label as “conspiracy theorists” anyone who suggested the virus may have leaked from a lab. The report indicated Fauci and Collins were personally involved in the conceptualization, drafting and publication of the paper.

Kadlec told Thacker that Fauci and some scientists who co-authored that paper, including Andersen, appeared to privately acknowledge that COVID-19 could have been engineered, in a set of emails and calls they exchanged on Feb. 1, 2020, which Kadlec also received.

Noting that Fauci’s public statements denied a connection between COVID-19 and a lab leak, Kadlec said, “If anything, Fauci had information that probably said the other way.”

“Fauci got this other group, with Jeremy Farrar [then-head of the Wellcome Trust] and his buddies. And this group privately says they have concerns, and then publicly say there’s no way a lab accident could happen,” he said.

[…]

Fauci is scheduled to appear before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Jan. 8 and Jan. 9 for a two-day transcribed interview regarding “the numerous controversies that have arisen during and after the pandemic.”

He will testify publicly before the subcommittee later this year.

Collins played ‘even more prominent role’

According to Kadlec, though, Collins played an even more prominent role than Fauci.

“As much as you would like to think Fauci is behind this, I think Collins may be the guy,” Kadlec said. “Collins is still working in the White House. Still an advisor to the President.”

Kadlec said that Collins had even tried to stop him and ASPR from working with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine “to look at what the genetic sequence [of SARS-Cov-2] showed in January 2020.”

[…]

Kadlec said that scientists like Andersen “got funding from NIH to do gain-of-function research, some of it with the Chinese,” and that evidence indicating a potential lab leak had begun emerging early during the pandemic.

Kadlec said one of the first people to issue a patent for a vaccine against COVID-19 was Chinese People’s Liberation Army scientist Zhou Yusen, who was also a vaccinologist.

“When you look at the patent and what he published on that COVID vaccine, you quickly realized that he had to start very early … he had to start working with the COVID virus around November, or as early as October,” he said.

“We think the outbreak occurred … [in] late October, November — and he’s doing animal studies with mice, likely at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Kadlec said. “He published a paper in collaboration with the WIV in November of 2019. Lo and behold, this outbreak happens in Wuhan.”

[…]

“The evidence I have is from George Gao, the guy who was the director of the Chinese CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], who published serially that this virus was not from the market.”

When asked why some scientists continue to promote the zoonotic or “wet market” theory, Kadlec called it “a red herring” that “even the Chinese relented from,” and said such messaging “looks like an information operation.”

[…]

Getting answers from government, agencies like ‘pulling teeth’

Kadlec said that he was a recipient of the Feb. 1, 2020, email which included Fauci, Collins, Andersen, Farrar and others but did not recall reading it.

[…]

His agency at the time, ASPR, did ask the National Academies “to look at the genetic sequence [of SARS-CoV-2] to truncate some of the more wild speculation out there,” but their response was that they “needed more information.”

Kadlec said that later, when he was leading the Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) committee investigating COVID-19’s origins, “We could not link what we believe happened in Wuhan directly to NIH funding.”

[…]

Noting that public health agencies such as the NIH and the CDC were not involved in trying to figure out the origins of COVID-19, Kadlec said, “It really has little to do with NIH and CDC. … There was this idea that, between the intelligence community and the scientific community, there had to be someone who would take the responsibility for leading efforts to conduct attribution.”

[…]

He added his view that getting answers from entities like the NIH, Democratic Party politicians, the House or the Senate Intelligence Committee was like “pulling teeth.”

New evidence of government-funded gain-of-function research

According to Kadlec, such coronavirus research was in progress long before the emergence of COVID-19.

“A paper [letter] came out in 2015 in Nature, and they put out two corrections on it. It’s a Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli paper … funded by Fauci’s institute at the NIH, and the corrigendum adds that there was also funding from USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development], the PREDICT program.”

The letter, titled “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence” had an editor’s note added to it in March 2020, stating: “We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.”

Thacker wrote that a similar example emerged last month as part of the release of the USRTK documents, which he said show U.S. “virologists and Wuhan researchers attempted to mislead the Defense Department’s DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] program about dangerous virus research in a 2018 grant called DEFUSE.”

[…]

Thacker also noted that “In early drafts of the DEFUSE proposal, Peter Daszak commented to UNC’s Ralph Baric and Wuhan’s Shi Zhengli that some of the work to engineer chimeric SARS viruses would be done in Wuhan,” but later tried to “downplay” the link to Wuhan and Zhengli.

Subsequently, journalists such as Science Magazine’s Jon Cohen publicly attempted to refute any connection between the DEFUSE research and the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. According to Thacker, Cohen once publicly accused him on Twitter of promoting “disinformation” about his questions about the DEFUSE study and its funders.

In another instance, Thacker said Science Magazine’s ditor-in-chief H. Holden Thorpe “misled the entire scientific community” by claiming in an editorial that the DEFUSE experiments “hardly posed a threat” and could not have occurred at Wuhan because it was UNC scientists involved with that work.

“Thorpe came from UNC where he was once chancellor, overseeing the university’s research, including Ralph Baric’s. Thorpe resigned from the chancellorship after the UNC was caught in widespread academic fraud,” Thacker wrote.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/bioweapons-official-fauci-denial-deception-covid-origins/

Between 2000 and 2021 at least 16 pathogens reportedly escaped from research laboratories, according to a new study published in The Lancet Microbe — but the study authors said their findings may “only represent the tip of the iceberg” in terms of numbers due to a lack of standard reporting requirements.

A team of researchers surveyed peer-reviewed articles and online reports in English, Chinese and German, looking for all indications that a pathogen accidentally “escaped” from a lab or that an infection was determined to be “laboratory-acquired” during the study period.

In addition to the 16 episodes of pathogenic “escape,” the researchers found 309 instances of lab-acquired infections caused by 51 different pathogens.

Seventy-seven percent of those infections were caused by bacterial pathogens, 13.9% were caused by viruses, 7.1% by parasites, 1.6% by fungi and less than 1% by a prion agent.

Eight of the cases were fatal, and six of those deaths were caused by bacteria, such as Yersinia pestis, which causes plague, or Neisseria meningitidis. One death was caused by Ebola virus.

The vast majority of infections occurred as an outcome of “procedural errors,” breaches of biosafety or risk mitigation procedures, which included using the wrong personal protective equipment, having inadequate training or mishandling samples.

Needlestick injuries, spills, splashes, open vials, animal bites or “unknown reasons” caused the remainder of the infections.

Most illnesses occurred in North America, Europe and Asia with the U.S. accounting for more than three-quarters of the infections. The majority of pathogen escapes were “internal,” meaning they were confined to the lab, but a few escaped into the broader community.

Some of the more well-known examples of external escapes discussed in the report included a large-scale outbreak of Brucella in 2019, which leaked from a biopharmaceutical plant where the Chinese state produced animal brucellosis vaccines in Lanzou, China.

The factory had been using expired disinfectants and sanitizers, resulting in poor sanitization of the waste gas from its fermentation vats. The gas contained aerosolized Brucella, which the wind carried southeast toward the Veterinary Research Institute and nearby communities.

Initial brucellosis infections were identified at the research institute in November 2019 and the factory was shut down, but the spread could not be contained.

By November 2020, more than 10,000 people were infected with brucellosis, which causes fevers and muscular pain that can last from weeks to years.

In another highly-publicized incident of lab escape documented in the paper, a West Nile virus researcher — who had only 20 minutes of training in a P3 lab (or Biosafety Level 3, BSL3 lab) in Singapore — became infected in 2003 with the first SARS virus while working. The researcher exposed 84 contacts and risked reigniting the 2002-2004 SARS epidemic there, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Another SARS lab escape happened in the Taiwan Military Institute of Preventative Research of the National Defence University, a P4 (BSL4) lab, in 2003. In this case, a researcher was careless in cleanup because “he was in a hurry,” and contracted SARS.

In an interview with The Defender, University of Illinois international law professor Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, said:

“Generally speaking these lab leaks indicate that the respective labs are engaged in the research, development, testing and stockpiling of their respective offensive biological warfare weapons in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention and, here in the U.S., in violation of my Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.”

Boyle said that all BSL3 and BSL4 labs globally “must be shut down immediately before we have another COVID-19 pandemic.” He said he believes the pandemic  originated as an offensive biological warfare weapon with gain-of-function properties that leaked out of the Wuhan BSL4, in cooperation with the University of North Carolina’s BSL3.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new book, “The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race,” provides “definitive proof in support of that proposition,” he added.

A brief history of high-profile lab infections and escapes

Lab-acquired infections were first recorded as early as 1915, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported, when a survey identified 47 infections largely occurring because researchers used their mouths to suck pathogenic material into pipettes.

But there also have been several likely or confirmed laboratory escapes of high-consequence pathogens resulting in transmission beyond laboratory personnel, according to medical historian Dr. Martin Furmanski.

For example, H1N1 swine influenza — which was considered to be extinct in 1957 — broke out at Fort Dix in New Jersey in 1976, resulting in 13 soldiers being hospitalized and one death. An effort was made to vaccinate all Americans against the virus, although the immunization program was halted after 25 people died from the vaccine and no pandemic broke out.

The human H1N1 virus appeared in the Russia and China in 1977. Researchers determined in 2010 that it had been a lab-released strain, likely from a lab attempting to make an attenuated H1N1 vaccine in response to the U.S. swine flu pandemic concerns.

H1N1 spread rapidly worldwide, although it affected only people under 20, according to Furmanski.

A leak in an anthrax production facility in Sverdlovsk, USSR, in 1979 caused the deaths of about 60 people, Dr. Meryl Nass reported on Substack.

Between 1963 and 1978 in the United Kingdom, there were 80 cases of smallpox and three deaths that were the results of three escapees from two different accredited research institutions.

In 1995, a severe outbreak of Venezuelan equine encephalitis, which was hypothesized to have come from a lab, infected 85,000 people in Venezuela and Colombia, killed 300, injured 3,000 and resulted in 10 miscarriages.

A foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in the U.K. in 2007 that led to the culling of nearly 2,000 cows began four kilometers from a BSL4 lab, Furmanski reported, and was found to be carried into the broader community in contaminated mud stuck on construction vehicles.

Journalist and historian Chernoh Bah, journalist Sam Husseini and virologist Jonathan Latham have also argued that substantial evidence indicates the 2014-2016 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa may also have come from a BSL4 lab leak, U.S. Right to Know reported.

Recently researchers hypothesized that the 2022 Monkeypox outbreak came from a lab.

And of course, the long controversy over the lab origins of COVID-19 has been raging for the last several years and is covered in detail in Kennedy’s book.

CDC labs have some of the ‘worst regulatory histories in the country’

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) jointly administer the Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP), which is meant to regulate work with dangerous and deadly pathogens.

Facilities from the public and private sector that work with 68 select agents and toxins must register with FSAP to be monitored, primarily through self-reporting and agency site visits.

Its website includes an annual report, which, among other things, includes a list of reported thefts, losses (failure to account for) and releases (infections/escapes). The 2022 report, for example, reports no thefts, six losses and 170 releases.

Since the program was created in 2003, there have been no thefts, deaths or cases of illness in the general public caused by the reporting entities, according to the website. But their reports do indicate that many people in the labs have required medical treatment.

Nass, a bioterrorism and anthrax expert and member of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) scientific advisory committee, told The Defender there was a high incentive for countries and labs to cover up any outbreaks because the costs of revealing an outbreak are high — countries lose investment or must spend a lot of money on remediation and labs can be shut down.

Nass also raised concerns to The Defender about the CDC as the regulatory agency, given that Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests showed the agency itself had its permits secretly suspended for serious safety violations while working with bioterror pathogens.

Its own labs have been referred six times since 2003 to the Office of the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which handles enforcement actions for select agent violations.

Examples of CDC violations included high-profile safety incidents at the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta that involved anthrax, Ebola and a deadly strain of influenza in the mid-2010s

[…]

In the history of the Selective Agent Program, only five labs have been suspended and another five faced repeated referrals for enforcement, the CDC reported to Congress.

The CDC’s own labs were part of this very small group, yet that information was kept hidden.

]…[

The authors of the Lancet study warned that the numbers of infections and escapes in their own study should be “interpreted with caution due to potential biases in voluntary reporting.”

“Without globalised formal reporting requirements, the data summarised here could only represent the tip of the iceberg,” they wrote.

They added that lab-acquired infections may be underreported because it can be difficult to discriminate between them and infections present in the community.

[…]

NIH director doubles down on commitment to gain-of-function research

The Lancet Microbe study release, which coincides with global concern over the possible “lab leak” origin of COVID-19, has raised growing awareness about gain-of-function research and public concern about biosecurity issues, with calls to end risky gain-of-function research becoming increasingly common.

U.S. health agencies, particularly the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its sub-agencies – like the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — have come under intense scrutiny as research has revealed that since 9/11 they have directed massive funding into dangerous gain-of-function research both in and outside of the country.

During this period, a plan was put in motion “to transform NIAID, under the direction of Dr. Anthony Fauci, into a de facto Defense Department agency,” Kennedy detailed in “The Wuhan Cover-Up.”

Yet, U.S. health officials have continually downplayed risks associated with gain-of-function research.

Dr. Monica M. Bertagnolli, the new director of the NIH — the position formerly held by Dr. Francis Collins — recently told The New York Times she had no plans to change course on funding gain-of-function research.

Responding to a reporter’s question about whether, given concerns raised by experts about the risky research, she planned to make any changes in NIH’s strategy, she said:

“The gain-of-function research that you’re specifically referring to is modifications that are done of potential pandemic pathogens, right? What if we can develop a vaccine way before we ever have to see a new virus that’s going to be another Covid-19 virus? That would be a huge benefit.

“But if we’re going to do that kind of research, we have to make sure that the risks are absolutely minimized and always be mindful that the benefits justify the risks.”

Boyle told The Defender this response was the “standard propaganda for these death scientists.”

He added:

“We all know that gain-of-function is a euphemism for offensive biological warfare weapons work, like Covid-19. All gain of function must be terminated.

“She made it clear that NIH will go full steam ahead on gain-of-function. The alleged pretext she uses is that we could use a vaccine against the next Covid-19, which is offensive biowarfare work with gain-of-function that leaked out of the Wuhan BSL4 — China’s Fort Detrick — in cooperation with UNC’s BSL3.”

The whole framework of her argument is deceptive, Boyle said, because “They use gain-of-function to develop the offensive biological warfare weapon in the first place, then reverse engineer it to develop a ‘vaccine’ in the event of blowback.”

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/infections-pathogens-escape-laboratory-accidents/?utm_id=20240104