Ebola Lab-exit?
At the time of the outbreak, we had:
- Garry’s and Andersen’s Consortium operating from Kenema Govt Hospital with a $7 mil grant from NIH to research bioweapon detection technology for hemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola.
- Tekmira (and shortly later, Wellcome) conducting RNAi (i=interference) drug trials - backed by a $140 mil US Dept of Defense grant. Share price was booming.
Everything was going great - until it wasn't.
Blogger Jon Rappoport reported that on July 23, 2014, the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation posted a list of emergency offensive measures to tackle the Ebola outbreak. These included:
Tulane University to stop Ebola testing during the current Ebola outbreak.
He provided a link to the FB page - it's gone 404. I'm assuming it's true.
Which begs the question: Why urgently ban Garry, one of the world’s leading bioweapons countermeasure technicians from conducting tests? When you currently have the worst outbreak ever?
The inference is the Ministry of Health was aware something untoward was going on at The Consortium's Kenema Government Hospital lab in Sierra Leone. In close proximity to the original outbreak. At the same time.
There were widespread rumours in Sierra Leone that the outbreak had originated from Garry's and Andersen's Kenema lab.
Adia Benton, anthropologist, Northwestern Uni: Another origin story centered Ebola at the intersections of race, militarization, and the political economy of scientific research. Many West Africans and people of African descent questioned whether the American military–funded laboratory in Kenema, Sierra Leone, and its partners at Tulane University were to blame. They believed scientists working in the lab conducted experiments that put local populations at risk.
Indeed, these 'rumours' led to a resistance movement and a spate of violent attacks against foreign health agencies and their workers. Youth groups even enforced a DIY quarantine zone to keep foreign aid workers out.
James Fairhead, Ebola-Anthropology, 2015 (PDF, p3): June and July 2014, twenty six Kissi-speaking villages in Guéckedou Prefecture isolated themselves from Ebola response, cutting bridges and felling trees to prevent vehicle access, or stoning intruding vehicles. In Tekoulo, youth isolated themselves in farm camps in self-imposed quarantine, saying: “We don’t want any visitors.... We don’t want any contact with anyone. Wherever those people have passed (foreign health workers), the communities have been hit by illness (Nossiter 2014a).”
The then-Minister of Health was Miatta Kargbo.
A month after he FB post, this happened:
By the power vested in President Ernest Bai Koroma, he on Friday, 29th August 2014, effected changes in the Ministry of Health and Sanitation, a press release from State House states.
"His Excellency is pleased to make certain changes at the Ministry of Health as implementation of the National Ebola Response Plan gathers momentum."
The release adds that the newly-appointed Minister of Health and Sanitation is now Dr. Abu-Bakarr Fofanah while the former Minister, Miatta Kargbo has been recalled to State House in the Strategic Policy Unit until further notice. "(I)n order to create a conducive environment for the efficient handling of the Ebola outbreak in the country, it has become necessary for changes to be made in the political leadership of the Ministry of Health and Sanitation."
Oh, so it was political.
The release further informs that in the case of the international committee, in addition to the relevant Ministries, its membership will include the United Nations Resident Coordinator, the Chief Medical Officer and the World Health Organization (WHO) Representative. The reconstituted Emergency Operations Center (EOC) will be co-chaired by the WHO Representative and the Chief Medical Officer.
Yeah, very political - very like the power structure we have now.
Sierra Leone's new Minister of Health is a well-grounded, brilliant and impressive young man who also holds an Advanced Diploma in tropical medicine from the London School of Hygiene and also from the Institute of Tropical Medical in Berlin, Germany from where he further graduated with an Advanced Certificate in Vaccinology.
(Rabbit-hole alert: London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: Wind back a few months to June 29 there's this:
A major new report by researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine for the UK's influential All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health, outlines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges for the UK as a leader in global health.
The report was launched .. at Portcullis House on Monday 29 June with senior health policy makers. Speakers included George Freeman MP, Life Sciences Minister; Lord Howell, Chairman of the Royal Commonwealth Society: Peter Piot, Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust; and Lord Kakkar, UK Business Ambassador for Healthcare and Life Sciences.
Farrar: This report is superb in showing how far we have come, but we cannot be complacent. The world is facing enormous challenges, and we need strong global organisations with authority and leadership.
By 2016 Wellcome had it's own lab in Sierra Leone:
The lab at the University of Makeni (UNIMAK) – a collaboration with the University of Cambridge supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust – will be officially opened today (Friday 22 January, 2016) by Sierra Leonean Health Minister Dr Abu Bakarr Fofanah.)
Note: To further confuse matters, the ex-Minister was accused of corruption by the Commission of Inquiry report which had found Miatta Kargbo wanting for non-supply of 20 ambulances amounting to US$1.05 mil.
Aug, 2014: According to Constantine Nana (p25), the government of the United States decided not to renew this funding 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 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? (note: it appears Garry was able to raise funding from other sources and continued working in Sierra Leone)
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)