Robert Garry
Aug, 2014: According to Constantine Nana (p25), the government of the United States decided not to renew this funding (to the Consortium) in August 2014, during the Ebola crisis, without stating the motivation for the decision.
No evidence is evidence. If you’re so keen to study Ebola to fight the bioterrorists, why cut off funding to the main organization on-the-ground researching it in the middle of an outbreak? Wouldn't that be deserting Sierra Leone, the country that was good enough to host your bio-weapons defense lab, in its moment of need?
Again, the implication is that something went wrong, NIH got nervous and pulled the plug. This appears to have caused a scramble for funds by Garry:
Garry, Aug 29: I would be going back (to Kenema) except that there are things that are needed that I can't do over there like be in communication with people who are funding the work and trying to get more funding. .. I would love to be over there with my colleagues and staff (6 of whom died), but it's much more difficult to communicate with the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and many of the other entities that we need to deal with to keep the program going and to rebuild it. I'm the project leader and so I have to get the money, is the way that works.
Despite the setback of NIH money being withdrawn, the Consortium has managed to continue as an organization until this day, describing itself as a partnership of academic and industry scientists. The partners listed on VHFC website are: Kenema Govt Hospital, Tulane, Scripps, La Jolla Institute, Harvard, University of Texas, Center for Viral Systems Biology, ACE GID, Zalgen Labs (Garry's company) and Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Immunotherapeutic Consortium.
They're all interesting, and put them together you've got a decent independent funding base, but the last one, VHFIC (different from VHFC), lists its funders as Wellcome Trust, CDC and NIH. So although NIH may have pulled the plug on direct funding for VHFC, they were still receiving money through this backdoor. The fact Wellcome is in there as well is no surprise - it shows a long-standing relationship between Farrar (Wellcome Director) and the Garry and Andersen.
A page on the VHFIC website lists the groups collaborators - they include Garry and Andersen, but also the controversial GoF scientist Yoshihiro Kawaoka.
Science: In 2011, Fouchier and Kawaoka alarmed the world by revealing they had separately modified the deadly avian H5N1 influenza virus so that it spread between ferrets.
Then there's ACE GID, an Nigeria based organization supported by the World Bank.
ACE GID (Academy Center of Excellence Genomics of Infectious Diseases) website: ACEGID’s international partners include Harvard University, Tulane University, the University of Cambridge, the Wellcome Trust, and the U.S. Department of Defence.
ACE GID LinkedIn: Established in 2013 and supported by the World Bank and the US National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) H3Africa consortium (Wellcome Trust/NIH), the ACEGID platform is building genomics pipelines.
That's interesting. H3A, a controversial Wellcome/NIH collaboration to collect genomic data from African populations, was criticized for its helicopter approach and the misuse of subjects' personal genomic data.
So although Garry's Consortium may have been stripped of direct NIH funding in Aug 2014, several of it's umbrella groups are funded by the US Government, including the Dept of Defense and NIH - as well as Wellcome Trust.
Finally, in 2015, the Tekmira/Wellcome/US Dept Defense drug trial was cancelled when it came to a statistical endpoint. Had a great ride on the stockmarket before that though if you were a shrewd investor. Tekmira dropped all interest in researching Ebola from 2015 on.
You could call this a strange set of coincidences, but Dr. Cyril Broderick, Liberian scientist didn't:
DoD gave a contract worth $140 million dollars to Tekmira .. to conduct Ebola research. This research work involved injecting and infusing healthy humans with the deadly Ebola virus. The DoD is listed as a collaborator in a ‘First in Human Ebola clinical trial’ (NCT02041715), which started in January 2014 shortly before an Ebola epidemic was declared in West Africa in March.
I'm not sure that's true. I know it was a rumour going around. The Jan 2014 event was a Phase 1 trial. It had already been pre-clinically trialed on macaques in a biosafety-level-4 biocontainment at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease. Lancet published a paper on it:
Lancet/Tekmira, Post exposure protection of nonhuman primates against a lethal Ebola virus challenge with RNA interference:
The monkeys were then placed in primate jackets, returned to their cages, and tethered. After 7 days, the animals were inoculated intramuscularly with a target dose .. of ZEBOV (Kikwit strain)
I wonder if people haven't got this trial confused with what happened in Sierra Leone.
I'm not easily shocked but i would be if they were injecting and infusing healthy humans with the deadly Ebola virus. Surely Tekmira was only testing tolerability. Details of the trial are scant though. It is also odd why Tekmira would go to Sierra Leone to test an Ebola drug - if it's only about tolerability. Sierra Leone had never had an Ebola outbreak.
Dr. Cyril Broderick: Disturbingly .. the US government has a viral fever bioterrorism research laboratory in Kenema, a town at the epicentre of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
Bob & Kristian's outfit. Near the epicentre. Kenema is 100km roughly from the Guinea border.
The US government funding of Ebola trials on healthy humans comes amid warnings by top scientists in Harvard and Yale that such virus experiments risk triggering a worldwide pandemic.
African countries and people should .. seek damages from these countries, some corporations, and the United Nations. Evidence seems abundant against Tulane University, and suits should start there.
Prof Broderick was half-right. We got the worldwide pandemic - but no law suits - that hasn’t happened - not yet - not so much as a proper investigation.
In fact the opposite happened - same way it did after Antrhax - a funding explosion.
NIH grants since Covid:
Robert Garry: $ 54.64 million):
Andersen: $ 23,233,450
Scripps: over $ 6 Billion (Consortium partner, home of Andersen)
(credit Arun on Twitter)