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The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses. And an official of the World Health Organization’s European operation said the body is closely monitoring the investigation into the events that took place at Baxter International’s research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria. “At this juncture we are confident in saying that public health and occupational risk is minimal at present,” medical officer Roberta Andraghetti said from Copenhagen, Denmark. “But what remains unanswered are the circumstances surrounding the incident in the Baxter facility in Orth-Donau.” The...

Idaho National Laboratory experienced a massive data breach on Sunday night, leading to the leak of employee addresses, Social Security numbers, bank account information and much more. INL media spokesperson Lori McNamara tells EastIdahoNews.com the breach is being investigated and federal law enforcement are involved. “Earlier this morning, Idaho National Laboratory determined that it was the target of a cybersecurity data breach, affecting the servers supporting its Oracle HCM system, which supports its Human Resources applications. INL has taken immediate action to protect employee data,” says McNamara. “INL has been in touch with federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI...

Thousands of vials of biological substances — including some labeled “HIV” — and a freezer marked “Ebola” were found inside a secret Chinese-owned biolab in California which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FBI initially refused to investigate, according to a House committee report released Wednesday. The illegal lab was operated in the city of Reedley, Calif., and the potential public safety risk it posed only came to light in December 2022 when Jesalyn Harper, an observant code enforcement officer, noticed a green garden hose sticking out of a hole in the side of a warehouse that was...

Republican lawmakers advanced a bill Wednesday that would ban funding of research labs controlled by North Korea, China, and other adversarial nations. Democrats say the move will put America’s national security at risk... To Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, led by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D., Conn.), these measures unravel "the hard-fought credibility and influence the United States has earned as a global leader," the lawmakers said in a press release Wednesday. "The bill threatens our national security and puts the American people and global health at risk," the Democrats added. DeLauro accused Republicans during a markup hearing Wednesday of...

EcoHealth Alliance — the nonprofit that infamously funneled taxpayer funds into the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat-based coronavirus research — was given a shocking loophole in Congress’s omnibus spending package to receive money for research in China supported by the country’s communist leadership. Why? Our government won’t tell us. Back in December, Congress inserted a clause in its omnibus appropriations act that finally defunded the Wuhan Institute of Virology and appeared to defund other similar research in China, but the latter section appears to be hollow. While EcoHealth has been barred from feeding tax dollars directly into the Wuhan...

A power failure knocked out the security system at a federal germ lab in Fort Collins for 13 hours Monday and disabled freezers housing thousands of vials of plague and other potential bioweapons. A backup generator kicked on when the power failed. But an electrical short prevented the backup power from being routed through the building, said Colorado State University spokesman Brad Bohlander. As a result, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory was without power for 13 hours, beginning at 3:07 p.m. Monday, Bohlander said. CSU owns the building and leases it to the government.No germ collections were...

The Galveston National Laboratory (GNL), part of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) and funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), focuses on “dangerous pathogens” with the “potential to be used as weapons around the world.” This same GNL signed agreements with three Chinese labs, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), that gave China the power to destroy “secret files, materials and equipment, without any backups. “The agreements applied to “all cooperation and exchange documents, data, details and materials,” were renewable every five years, and the confidentiality terms remaining in force even after termination....

While U.S. intelligence has been unable in two years to determine for sure if COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab, Congress has decided it no longer wants to take the risk of funding medical research at labs controlled by Beijing or other American adversaries.With little fanfare and in bipartisan fashion, House appropriators quietly amended the 2023 federal budget for health and science agencies on Thursday to ban any funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which U.S. intelligence fears may have been the origin point for the coronavirus pandemic, and other labs like it."None of the funds made available by...

On the menu today: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Why does it always come back to biological-research labs? No, Ukraine does not have a secret biological-weapons program — or at least there’s no proof of one. A biological-research facility and a biological-weapons-research facility are not the same thing — but even if Ukraine has no biological weapons, that doesn’t mean the stuff in the country’s various labs can’t be dangerous. And the U.S. — and the world — have good reasons to not want a bunch of hungry, young, poorly briefed Russian conscripts...

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is seeking answers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Dr. Anthony Fauci about funding that was provided for experiments on beagle puppies. Twenty-four members of the House of Representatives signed a letter to Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of NIH. The letter was prompted by the nonprofit group White Coat Waste which obtained documents under the Freedom of Information Act that appear to show NIAID spent $1.68 million in taxpayer money for experiments on beagle puppies in a lab in Tunisia. Those...

The US moratorium on gain-of-function experiments has been rescinded, but scientists are split over the benefits—and risks—of such studies. Talha Burki reports. On Dec 19, 2017, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that they would resume funding gain-of-function experiments involving influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus. A moratorium had been in place since October, 2014. At the time, the NIH had stated that the moratorium “will be effective until a robust and broad deliberative process is completed that results in the adoption of a new US Government gain-of-function research policy”. This process...

The U.S. Department of Education has requested information from the University of Alabama regarding alleged undisclosed ties between the university and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. “It appears that UA has failed to report an alleged partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China,” a letter sent to UA President Stuart Bell on Dec. 22 stated. “The WIV, owned by the Chinese government’s Academy of Sciences, includes a maximum biocontainment laboratory (“MCL”) that may be closely linked to the origin and/or spread of the Chinese COVID-19 virus,” the letter continued. The investigation was initiated in light...

I’ve written about this before … but with the release of the WIKILEAKS documents, even Wired magazine acknowledges that US troops found chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. But don’t worry; if you liberals keep telling yourself “Bush Lied”… you’ll get through this. By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But for years afterward, WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction In...

The deadly animal-borne coronavirus spreading globally may have originated in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan linked to China’s covert biological weapons program, said an Israeli biological warfare analyst. Radio Free Asia last week rebroadcast a Wuhan television report from 2015 showing China’s most advanced virus research laboratory, known the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The laboratory is the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses. Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biological warfare, said the institute is linked to Beijing’s covert bio-weapons program. “Certain laboratories in the institute have...

As moratorium lifts, oversight is put in place to assess studies on eradicated cattle virus. Research is set to resume on the rinderpest virus, the cause of a deadly cattle disease that was declared eradicated in 2011 and has been off limits for study ever since. The moratorium — part of efforts to guard against accidental or intentional release of virus that could reintroduce the disease — was lifted on 10 July and replaced by a new international oversight system for such research. In its heyday, the disease — the only one other than smallpox to be eradicated from nature...

Countless labs have reported a 100 percent positivity rate, which means every single person tested was positive. Other labs had very high positivity rates. FOX 35 News found that testing sites like one local Centra Care reported that 83 people were tested and all tested positive. Then, NCF Diagnostics in Alachua reported 88 percent of tests were positive. How could that be? FOX 35 News investigated these astronomical numbers, contacting every local location mentioned in the report. The report showed that Orlando Health had a 98 percent positivity rate. However, when FOX 35 News contacted the hospital, they confirmed errors...

China on Friday confirmed it had ordered unauthorised laboratories to destroy samples of the new coronavirus in the early stage of the outbreak, but said it was done for biosafety reasons. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has repeatedly said that Beijing declined to provide virus samples taken from patients when the contagion began in China late last year, and that Chinese authorities had destroyed early samples. Liu Dengfeng, an official with the National Health Commission’s science and education department, said this was done at unauthorised labs to “prevent the risk to laboratory biological safety and prevent secondary disasters caused...

BEIJING -- China has opened its first bio-safety level four laboratory, capable of conducting experiments with highly pathogenic microorganisms, according to the national health authority on Thursday. Wuhan national bio-safety level four lab of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Wuhan P4 lab) is part of Sino-French cooperation in prevention and control of emerging infectious diseases, said the Department of Health Science, Technology and Education with the National Health and Family Planning Commission. Level four is the highest bio-safety level, used for diagnostic work and research on easily transmitted pathogens which can cause fatal disease, including Ebola virus. The Wuhan P4...

BOSTON (AP) — A Harvard University professor has been c harged with lying about his ties to a Chinese-run recruitment program and concealing payments he received from the Chinese government for research, federal officials said Tuesday. Charles Lieber, chair of the department of chemistry and chemical biology, is accused of hiding his involvement in China’s Thousand Talents Plan, a program designed to recruit people with access to and knowledge of foreign technology and intellectual property.

The release by Julian Assange's web site Wikileaks of classified documents reveals that U.S. military intelligence discovered chemical weapons labs, encountered insurgents who were specialists in the creation of toxins, and uncovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, Washington, DC officials and the news media have ignored this information.