Vaccine passports are draconian, but they look like library cards compared to the wearable tech that companies like Google, which now owns Fitbit, want the criminal justice system, military and private companies to require for the purpose of monitoring medical treatments, diseases, moods and behavior.

 

Unlabeled genetically engineered foods turned us into unwitting lab rats, but that experiment looks ethical compared with the brave new world of human gene hacking.

What do you get when you combine digital surveillance and human gene hacking with super computers that can comb through all the data with artificial intelligence? 

The power to hack the human race.

This is the course the National Institutes of Health will be charting if President Biden can get Congress to fund his proposed ARPA-H, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to stop ARPA-H!

As Unlimited Hangout’s Whitney Webb reported in May (This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship”), the Biden Administration has requested $6.5 billion from Congress for the new agency modeled on the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

On July 13, 2021, the House Appropriations Labor-HHS-Education Subcommittee approved its 2022 spending plan, with $49.4 billion for the National Institutes of Health, a $6.5 billion increase from its current level. Of the new money, $3 billion was earmarked for ARPA-H.

Biden has already picked an ARPA-H director: Tara Schwetz, currently Associate Deputy Director at Francis Collins’ NIH and previously Chief of the Strategic Planning and Evaluation Branch in the office of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci.

Four themes emerge from the White House’s ARPA-H draft concept paper, prepared by Dr. Eric Lander, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health: 1) digital surveillance, 2) human genetic engineering, 3) mRNA vaccines (more human genetic engineering) and 4) corporate control.

Digital surveillance

Expanding government and corporate access to biometric data is a top priority of Biden’s ARPA-H. Among the new sensors and artificial-intelligence-assisted medical decision making tools that Lander and Collins propose ARPA-H invest in are:

• Small, highly accurate, inexpensive, non-intrusive, wearable 24/7 monitors (e.g., smart watches).

• Brain imaging and blood biomarkers capable of measuring synaptic loss, neuronal death, and glial inflammatory pathways.

• Regular virtual house calls.

• Smart devices for “improving” how medication is taken.

As Yasha Levine’s comprehensive history Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet reveals, the concept and creation of the internet was closely controlled by the Pentagon, starting in the Vietnam War era, as a counter-insurgency tool for use at home, as well as abroad. 

Data-mining, processing and synthesis was always key. In recent years, as Tim Hinchliffe reports in “DARPA to ‘exploit social media, messaging & blog data’ to track geopolitical influence campaigns,” DARPA has been fairly straight-forward about its counter-insurgency aims in programs like Social Media in Strategic Communication (2011) and ​​Influence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking (2020). Some of DARPA’s methods have even been privatized, according to the Washington Post article, “Technology once used to combat ISIS propaganda is enlisted by Democratic group to counter Trump’s coronavirus messaging.”

The incorporation of biological data into this project is at least two decades in the making. In 2003, DARPA published a request for proposals for LifeLog. (If you’ve never heard of this project and how it was shuttered just as Facebook was launched, check out James Corbett’s report, “The Weird DARPA/Facebook “Coincidence” You Never Heard About.”) From the DARPA’s 2003 LifeLog RFP:

LifeLog is interested in three major data categories: physical data, transactional data, and context or media data. “Anywhere/anytime” capture of physical data might be provided by hardware worn by the LifeLog user. Visual, aural, and possibly even haptic sensors capture what the user sees, hears, and feels. GPS, digital compass, and inertial sensors capture the user’s orientation and movements. Biomedical sensors capture the user’s physical state. 

* * *

LifeLog can also serve as a subsystem to support a wide variety of other applications, including personal, medical, financial, and other types of assistants, and various teaching and training tools. As increasing numbers of people acquire LifeLogs, collaborative tasks could be facilitated by the interaction of LifeLogs, and properly anonymized access to LifeLog data might support medical research and the early detection of an emerging epidemic.

The wearable monitors described here can function like lie detector tests, able to detect our deepest feelings through our biometric data, even as they track our every move.

As Yuval Noah Harari explained to the World Economic Forum in 2020, in his talk on the coming Digital Dictatorship, once biological knowledge, artificial intelligence, computing power and data are combined, those who control it will have the ability to hack humans, to create algorithms that understand us better than we understand ourselves and therefore can manipulate or replace our decision-making.

When Landers and Collins mention wearable monitors, they are clear that they’re talking about “non-intrusive” technologies, but when they talk about smart devices to improve how medication is taken, they don’t use that modifier.

In a fascinating news report from a decade ago, MIT scientist Robert Langer explained how implanted microchips could be used for remote-control drug delivery via cell-phone. (More on Langer in the section on mRNA below. He just happens to be a co-founder and member of the board of directors of Moderna, now worth $1.6 billion.)

Human genetic engineering

DNA is not destiny. Look at the differences between identical twins. Environment and behavior, including exposure to toxins, nutrition, stress levels, exercise routines, relationships, and spiritual practices, are stronger determinants of health and wellness.

Managing health by addressing these factors is effective, but it doesn’t make the pharmaceutical companies any money, so it isn’t included in the Biden Administration’s plans for ARPA-H. 

Human genetic engineering, including gene transfer and gene editing, on the other hand, has an enormous potential for profit, so it takes center stage. The global market for DNA sequencing alone is expected to grow to $35.7 billion by 2028.

“Genetic studies,” Lander and Collins write, “have discovered the genes responsible for more than six thousand rare genetic diseases, opening prospects for gene transfer or gene editing therapies.”

They propose using mRNA vaccines to prevent cancer by correcting 50 common genetic mutations that drive cancers.

Apparently, ARPA-H will not be addressing the 95 percent of cancers that aren’t genetic.

mRNA vaccines (more human genetic engineering)

In addition to mRNA vaccines to prevent cancer by correcting genetic mutations, Lander and Collins say that ARPA-H will fund projects to achieve:

• The ability to design, test, and approve a vaccine against any newly emerging human virus in 100 days.

• The ability to administer vaccines through a skin patch or oral spray, to allow rapid, massive vaccination campaigns.

By “vaccines,” Lander and Collins mean mRNA, “the injection into the body of synthetically created genetic instructions, telling cells to make viral proteins that prime the immune system.”

This isn’t your father’s vaccine. Until this year, the dictionary definition of a vaccine was, “a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease.” Lander and Collins are talking about something very different.

Moderna executives call it “hacking the software of life.”

In “Yes, some COVID vaccines use genetic engineering. Get over it.” Mark Lynas explains the mRNA vaccine this way: 

“It won’t reprogram your brain. But it does reprogram some of your cells, in a manner of speaking. And that’s not a defect — it’s intentional.”

As Whitney Webb reports in “Coronavirus Gives A Dangerous Boost To DARPA’s Darkest Agenda,” this mRNA “reprogramming” of human cells with “synthetically created genetic instructions” has been and is funded by the Pentagon.

Why would the Pentagon want to hack the software of life by reprogramming human cells with synthetically created genetic instructions?

Vaccines are not the endgame for this technology or the Department of Defense. 

They’re working on human gene editing. One way to deliver gene editing tools like CRISPR into the human body is through mRNA. 

One sign that this technology has progressed further than anyone will acknowledge publicly is that DARPA isn’t just working on using CRISPR for human gene editing. In its Safe Genes program, it has Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna figuring out how to use anti-CRISPR proteins to defend people against “unwanted gene editing activity.”

Gene editing as a bioweapon? How would that even be possible?

DARPA has a word for it: a Horizontal Environmental Genetic Alteration Agent or HEGAA, any artificially developed agent that is engineered to edit the genome of a species they infect when intentionally dispersed into the environment. 

Tiny unmanned aerial vehicles, which operate like flying micro-syringes, are one way to deliver genetic weapons, as the Center for Strategy and Technology of the Air Force’s Air War College described in an unclassified report back in 2005. That model has advanced considerably in the intervening decades with DARPA’s Insect Allies program, where live insects are used as genetic alteration agents, and DARPA has also merged the two concepts with remote-controlled cyborg insects.

This technology must be stopped before it goes too far. Michel Maharbiz, one of the scientists who figured out how to control the flight of live insects through electrical stimulation, quickly moved on to similar experiments with non-human primates under a DARPA grant with the stated aim “to uncover the mechanisms underlying neural computation and reorganization to improve modeling of the brain and our ability to interface with it.” Maharbiz is also famous for being the inventor of DARPA’s “neural dust” for the “precise wireless recording of nerve activity.”

These technologies stir concerns that DARPA will use these technologies for the remote control of human beings. A successful lawsuit revealed that the CIA implanted electrodes in brains of unsuspecting soldiers in the 1960s.

But, if gene editing were to be used as a bioweapon, wouldn’t mRNA make an even better genetic alteration agent? Especially if it were able to be delivered in an inhalable form? This is what Robert Langer, mentioned above, has been working on.

Corporate Control

The National Institutes of Health already spends billions of dollars on medical research and the discovery of health treatments each year. Why is the Biden Administration so set on a DARPA-style program?

As a DARPA-style program, it would circumvent the National Institutes of Health’s peer-reviewed grant making process, as well as its civil service hiring system and pay-scale.

DARPA is held up as the model for cutting red tape, streamlining the bureaucracy and unleashing innovation that offers great returns on investment, but in reality, people like Lander and Collins like the DARPA model because it gives corporations control over government spending, creating opportunities for graft and self-dealing.

Unsurprisingly, DARPA has been a hotbed of corruption. Former director Regina Dugan was under investigation for ​​$1.75 million in DARPA contracts to her company RedXDefense when she left DARPA in 2012 to create a DARPA-esque program for Google. In 2014, the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General released a report highlighting her ethics violations.

Eric Lander and Francis Collins want ARPA-H so that they can give corporate executives control over $6.5 billion in funding for human genetic engineering, digital surveillance and vaccines. 

What could go wrong?

If Lander and Collins’ plans for digital surveillance, human genetic engineering and corporate control isn’t concerning enough, there’s reason to speculate on what else they might do if Congress were to give them billions of dollars to start an ARPA-H.

One suggestion is to explore pre-crime sensors that can detect when people are about to turn violent. That idea, and the push for ARPA-H or HARPA, as it has been called by advocates, comes from the Susan Wright Foundation.

Another idea is to feed genetic data from millions into supercomputers. Using artificial intelligence, the machines will eventually be able to learn everything about a person, including what they look like, from a sample of their DNA. 

ARPA-H could also speed progress in creating artificial life, from transgenics and gene editing to industrial scale gene synthesis.

These are the things Chinese gene giant BGI has been working on—with the full cooperation of the US government. BGI is a US government partner on the 1000 Genomes Project, the Global Virome Project (partners include the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance) and the Earth BioGenome Project (partners include the Global Virome Project). The Earth BioGenome Project is billed as “a moonshot for biology” ”to sequence the DNA of all life on Earth in 10 years.”

In 2012, BGI bought the US company Complete Genomics. BGI is a partner of Eric Lander’s Broad Institute, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Intel, Amazon and Google.

BGI, which has labs in Wuhan, also conducts gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. BGI partnered with the WIV’s Shi Zhengli, as well as U.S. military scientists from the Naval Medical Research Center and Henry M. Jackson Foundation at Fort Detrick, on a 2013 paper, “Comparative Analysis of Bat Genomes Provides Insight into the Evolution of Flight and Immunity,” funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

As Jennifer Zeng reported in “Bio War? Gene War? Speeches by CCP Figures & Mass Data Harvesting Say It All,” BGI’s CEO Wang Jian gave a chilling speech in 2017 where he stated that his company had synthesized yeast and in 5 to 10 years would be able to synthesize any life form. He said progress in creating artificial life would move even faster than progress in creating artificial intelligence. 

“We can make a brand-new bacteria in two days,” Wang said. “We can make beneficial bacteria and we also can make terrible bacteria.”

He warned that this would usher in a new era of biological war.

This is not the time to be pouring $6.5 billion—or any money—into an ARPA-H. We shouldn’t be funding collaborations with companies like BGI and we shouldn’t be funding companies that hope to compete with China’s gene giant.

We should ban the mass collection of genetic data from the public, whether that’s through genetic screening tests like BGI’s NIFTY tests for pregnant women or ancestry tests like 23andMe. 

No entity, whether public or private, commercial or non-profit, should be allowed to hold stores of human genetic data beyond the limited single use for which the individual has shared it.

If you agree, tell Congress to stop ARPA-H!

Congress has consistently prevented federal funding from being used for research in which a human embryo is intentionally created or modified to include a heritable genetic modification.

If Congress is serious about that, it must dismantle the science, technology and infrastructure that are making human genetic modification inevitable.

It must stop ARPA-H.