Yoshihiro Kawaoka: Weaponizing Bird Flu Since 1990, Funded By Fauci & Gates

The state of Wisconsin is home to the most notorious virologist on the planet doing the most dangerous lab work in the world.

Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin at Madison creates diseases far more deadly than COVID-19. His experiments (and lab safety breaches) have been so scary that they triggered an Obama Administration moratorium. Since the Trump Administration lifted the moratorium, Kawaoka has resumed the very same work.

As Sam Husseini reports in “Wisconsin Bill Would Stop Lab Work that Could Cause Catastrophic Pandemic,” the state legislature might try to shut it down again with Senate Bill 401 which would prohibit institutions of higher education from conducting gain-of-function research on potentially pandemic pathogens.

Who is Yoshihiro Kawaoka?

Kawaoka was hand-picked by Anthony Fauci to take pathogens that only infect animals and use genetic engineering and synthetic biology to create pathogens that make humans sick. Since 1990, Fauci has funded Kawaoka under grants with titles including “Influenza Virus Assembly.” 

Highly pathogenic bird flu didn’t cause disease in humans until this potential had been studied by a lab for several years. Then, it happened in Hong Kong in 1997, in the midst of what the British call the “Hong Kong handover,” when sovereignty over Hong Kong was transferred from the U.K. to China. It was during this “politically sensitive” year that the World Health Organization’s reference laboratory at the University of Hong Kong, confirmed human cases of H5N1 that infected 18 people and killed six.

Chillingly, the 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 virus had regions that were identical to portions of an avian virus that struck Pennsylvania chicken farms in 1983—a virus Kawaoka had studied. 

Prior to the outbreak, Kawaoka was conducting gain-of-function bird flu research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Every year, Kawaoka’s mentor there, Robert G. Webster, spent three months working and publishing at the University of Hong Kong, according to this profile of Webster which mentions Kawaoka as his protege. Robert G. Webster was one of the first scientists outside of Hong Kong to receive samples of the 1997 H5N1 flu.

Was the 1997 H5N1 flu a lab-created biological weapon?

Kawaoka is of the post-Biological Weapons Convention era where the weaponization of pathogens is euphemistically called “gain-of-function” research, but his older colleague Webster came of age prior to 1972 and his mentor, Frank Macfarlane Burnet was of the pre-Biological Weapons Convention era when virologists knowingly and openly engineered viruses for military purposes.

Burnet served on the Australian Department of Defence’s New Weapons and Equipment Development Committee in the 1940s and 50s. The Federation of American Scientists lists some of the most chilling things Burnet recommended:

Burnet … said Australia should develop biological weapons that would work in tropical Asia without spreading to Australia’s more temperate population centres.

“Specifically to the Australian situation, the most effective counter-offensive to threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic countries would be directed towards the destruction by biological or chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of infectious disease capable of spreading in tropical but not under Australian conditions.”

… Burnet argued that Australia’s temperate climate could give it a significant military advantage.

“The main contribution of local research so far as Australia is concerned might be to study intensively the possibilities of biological warfare in the tropics against troops and civil populations at a relatively low level of hygiene and with correspondingly high resistance to the common infectious diseases.”

[In] Note on War from a Biological Angle suggesting that biological warfare could be a powerful weapon to help defend a sparsely populated Australia… [he] urged the government to encourage Australian universities to research areas of biological science of relevance to biological weapons.

“The main strategic use of biological warfare may well be to administer the coup de grace to a virtually defeated enemy and compel surrender in the same way that the atomic bomb served in 1945. Its use has the tremendous advantage of not destroying the enemy’s industrial potential which can then be taken over intact. Overt biological warfare might be used to enforce surrender by psychological rather than direct destructive measures.”

***

In a report … Burnet concluded that “In a country of low sanitation the introduction of an exotic intestinal pathogen, e.g. by water contamination, might initiate widespread dissemination.”

“Introduction of yellow fever into a country with appropriate mosquito vectors might build up into a disabling epidemic before control measures were established.”

[And] …”the possibilities of an attack on the food supplies of S-E Asia and Indonesia using B.W. agents should be considered by a small study group”.

In 1997, Fauci rewarded Kawaoka’s team for their work on the H5N1 outbreak by creating and funding the St. Jude Center of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance which continues to operate today in the U.S., Canada, Bangladesh, China, Colombia, and Egypt.

In February 2006, Fauci convened a one-day in-house “NIAID Influenza Research Summit” to identify influenza research priorities. In September, he opened up the topic to a 35-member “Blue Ribbon Panel on Influenza Research” that included Kawaoka. The Blue Ribbon panel’s report didn’t mention gain-of-function experiments, but that’s what Fauci decided to do.

He commissioned Kawaoka’s now infamous gain-of-function research showing that, through lab manipulation, H5N1 could be altered to become highly transmissible among humans via airborne infection. Bill Gates chipped in, too, with grants 48339 and OPPGH5383 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

In 2012, he met Fauci’s goal of turning the avian flu, which is very deadly but rarely transmissible, into a highly contagious airborne virus, prompting the New York Times to warn of “An Engineered Doomsday.”

In 2014, he used genetic engineering techniques to resurrect the deadly Spanish flu.

That was also the year these controversies caused his work to be halted for several years, but Kawaoka resumed his bird flu work in 2018 under the same grant that was paused in 2014, and returned to creating variants that can be transmitted via respiratory droplets.

Shortly thereafter there was a lab incident which set off alarms at the National Institutes of Health. As USAToday reporter Alison Young describes the incident in her book Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk, a lab trainee became disconnected from an air-purifying respirator that supplied safe, filtered air while handling ferrets exposed to Kawaoka’s genetically engineered, hyper-transmissible, highly pathogenic bird flu. 

This could have caused a laboratory-acquired infection with a uniquely deadly and contagious lab-created virus. That didn’t happen, but the disaster was averted due to luck rather than lab-safety.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Your State Legislators to Ban Gain-of-Function Research

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