Attempted Murder at Fort Detrick Bio-Lab Halts Operations

Sabotage, negligence, and a ridiculous management contract

Ever since the anthrax letter attacks on September 18, 2001, the U.S. Bio-Lab at Fort Detrick has struck me as emblematic of U.S. government recklessness and unaccountability.

Recall that, on that day, letters containing anthrax spores arrived at news media offices and at the offices of senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, who were leading opposition to the Patriot Act.

These attacks killed five people and infected seventeen others. The result of the attacks was that the U.S. military’s anthrax vaccine program—which had been halted the previous June due to safety concerns—was resuscitated, and on June 28, 2002, all military personnel were again required to receive the vaccine.

The attacks were staged to appear to be the work of either Iraqi agents or Islamic terrorists. However, FBI quickly ascertained that they weren’t the work of a foreign adversary, but had most likely been committed by someone working in U.S. bio-security.

After years of dithering and obfuscation, the FBI finally announced (in 2008) they’d been perpetrated by Bruce Edwards Ivins, a scientist working at Fort Detrick’s biodefense lab.

Ivins was angry and desperate because the anthrax vaccine program to which he’d dedicated his life’s work was cancelled in June 2001. And so, he took it upon himself to “show” the U.S. government and American people just how much they needed his vaccine.

What is especially perfidious about this incident is that—although the FBI knew the attacks were not the work of a foreign adversary—the DoD still used the attacks as a pretext for resuscitating the anthrax vaccine program, thereby enabling Ivins’s gambit to succeed.

Congress used the attacks as a pretext for passing the 2002 Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act, with additional funds allocated for vaccine development. Indeed, the anthrax attacks played a decisive role in creating the atmosphere of fear that led to the passage of the 2005 PREP Act, which paved the way for all of the liability free abuse and fraud of the 2020 pandemic response.

It was only revealed in 2008 that the biggest bioterrorism attack in U.S. history was committed by a senior Department of Defense researcher. By then, the American people had moved on from all of the trauma the U.S. government had inflicted on them in “Islamic Terror” years of 2001—2008.

A presidential election and financial crisis were brewing, and it seems that few Americans noticed all of the tricks that had been pulled by their awful government in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Now comes that the news that NIH Director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, has halted operations of the BSL-4 lab at Fort Detrick, following a reports of attempted murder by sabotage and negligence. Director Bhattacharya announced the news on his X account.

Adding to the controversy is the revelation—posted by Dr. Richard Ebright on X—that Fort Detrick’s bio-lab operations are managed by Laulima Government Solutions, a Native Hawaiian LLC based in an office park in Orlando, Florida under a $116 million minority-set-aside contract.

Note that, already in 2017, Dr. Ebright warned about bio-lab safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other labs. In his post on Fort Detrick, he made the following observation:

These are the kinds of decisions— and the kinds of people making them—who are allegedly “protecting” us from dangerous pathogens.

Shut it down. We the People are tired of the U.S. government and DoD doing all of this stupid, wasteful, and reckless nonsense with our tax dollars.

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