Keeping the Fire Burning
With Australian Aborigines, it was someone’s, a woman’s job, to carry/nurture a smouldering stick when you moved camp - so you wouldn’t have to do the friction trick every time.
If that stick was the embers of scientific spirit, then Richard Ebright/Simon Wain Hobson have kept the fire alive. They were warning, way back since the Anthrax-inspired funding boom, that reckless GoFx$ would cause - a catastrophic pandemic -
Then there’s your DRASTIC collective - including @billybostickson - they smelled a rat with Covid - pursued it - persisted. That’s the important bit.
Plus others - including not-scientists - normal people - more than real scientists - a sign that science-culture has lost its way?
But it wasn’t:
the fairies that came along in the night
It was netizens working hard/fast/for free.
Nor was it the guilty parties coming clean of their own volition.
Corruption never stops by itself. Ever
With Genomic Surveillance, Yves Moreau has been the stick carrier - through the Wellcome/Thermo Scientific/BGI/CCP/Western Academic typhoons - he kept it going - used that ember to shine a light on the truth.
Sadly, he's very much in the minority so far as the scientific community goes - which makes his work more valuable.
Let's take a look at what he reported...
Yves Moreau: (Dec 2019) In Xinjiang, police collected biometric information (including blood samples, finger-prints and eye scans) from nearly 19 million people in 2017, in a programme called ‘Physicals for All’. This was part of a suite of measures that are being used by the Chinese government to control the Uyghur ethnic group.
Other nations are building massive DNA databases or considering doing so. In 2015, Kuwait passed a law mandating DNA profiling of its entire population .. (while) Kenya passed a law that would have .. required all citizens to submit biometric information, including DNA profiles, to a national database.
Moreau gleaned some of his info from publications by DNA evangelists, such as Tim Schellberg, president of Gordon Thomas Honeywell - a law firm (!) connected to Thermo Fisher.
Schellberg cheerfully predicts: the development of civil-DNA databases (for all) is inevitable. (go.nature.com/337pjce (copy-paste it)).
Schellberg: Significant Hurdles: Open and public parliamentary process, Culture of being influenced by opposition and protests.
To leap these hurdles, he trumpets the following success stories:
Schellberg: Missing Persons: Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s aggressive DNA missing person’s program is key reason for success.
He also points out that whereas “fingerprints do not work for small children” - DNA collection does!
Facilitating this east-meets-west DNA-grab is Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Yves Moreau: The deployment of DNA-surveillance infrastructure in Xinjiang, for example, was enabled by the Chinese government buying products from — and working with — the US company Thermo Fisher Scientific.
The firm is currently the global leading supplier of DNA-profiling technology in law enforcement. Thermo Fisher Scientific researchers have worked with China’s Ministry of Justice, and with researchers at the People’s Public Security University of China, which falls directly under the Ministry of Public Security, to tailor the technology specifically for use in Tibetan and Uyghur populations.
Thermo Fisher Scientific, along with Wellcome, under Sir Jeremy Farrar, are serial offenders in the mis-use of collected DNA.
Genome Web: In April 2018, four researchers sent a complaint to the Wellcome Trust, which provides Sanger's funding, about the institute's $2.2 million deal with Thermo Fisher Scientific to develop microarray chips based on African genetic data it had collected through a number of collaborations.
Which is where lawyers come in handy. The whistleblowers were subsequently fired. Now it’s onward and upward.
Thermo Fisher website: Imagine what can happen when DNA testing takes only minutes, instead of days, weeks, or even months. The compact, easy-to-use Applied Biosystems RapidHIT ID System generates forensic DNA profiles in virtually any setting in as little as 90 minutes—and no technical expertise is required.
Safer communities are within reach. Rapid DNA helps solve crimes today and prevent victims tomorrow.
Collecting DNA from duped subjects in Africa and using it for your own money-hungry purposes is a crime - against humanity.
As is supplying technology to a totalitarian regime to oppress Uyghurs and Tibetans.
You don’t even need a compact, easy-to-use RapidHIT ID System to solve that crime - a modicum of uncorrupted political will should do the trick. Unfortunately, there’s no device for injecting that yet.
Yves Moreau: Restrictions .. are too weak. .. For example, US laws forbid the export of fingerprint-recognition technology to some users deemed problematic .. such as the Chinese police. But .. does not restrict the export of more-invasive DNA-profiling and facial-recognition technologies.
All of us must beware a world in which our behavioural, financial and biometric data, including our DNA profiles, or even entire genome sequences, are available to corporations — and law enforcers and political parties. Without changes .. the use of DNA for state-level surveillance could become the norm.