Uncle Sam the Bioterrorist

From the anthrax letter attacks in 2001 to aerosolized Ebola in 2015 to the development of SARS-CoV-2 in years 2014-2019, the culprit was never a dangerous foreigner, but the US “biosecurity state.”

In the 2020 HBO psychological thriller miniseries The Undoing, Hugh Grant plays Dr. Jonathan Fraser, a pediatric oncologist who seems to have it all—a great medical practice and family—is undone when an artist named Elena Alves is brutally murdered. The unfolding drama reveals that he—despite his convincing veneer of education, medical professionalism, compassion, and civility—is the killer.

As a true crime author, I have studied and even investigated multiple cases of individuals who are not what they seem to be. The most striking example was a forensic doctor in Innsbruck, Austria who ingratiated himself with the desperate parents of a young man who had died under mysterious circumstances. The doctor pretended to be their compassionate friend while playing a decisive role in covering up of the true cause and manner of their son’s death. He initially took me in as well, and because I found him sympathetic, I was slow to recognize the signs that he was a ruthless deceiver.

In the same way, most Americans (it seems to me) have been slow to realize that it is NOT dangerous foreigners, but the US government that poses the greatest threat to our safety, peace, and prosperity.

For the last couple of years, I have had a persistent thought that initially struck me as exaggerated, but that I now believe to be factually accurate—namely, Uncle Sam is a bioterrorist.

To be precise, the DoD and NIAID, with their history of sponsoring Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) have repeatedly threatened and terrorized the country and the world. The modern era of US bioterrorism began with the anthrax letter attacks of September 2021. As I recounted this incident in my recent book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions:

On September 18, 2001, the American people were presented with what appeared to be a new threat to the homeland—not invading soldiers that one can see and kill, but invisible pathogens that spread silently and insidiously, making everyone sick. On that day, letters containing anthrax spores arrived at news media offices and at the offices of senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. These attacks killed five people and infected seventeen others. The attacks resuscitated the military’s anthrax vaccine program, which had been heavily restricted to a few select personnel on June 5, 2001.^[i] A year later, on June 28, 2002, all military personnel were again required to receive the shot.

Though the anthrax attacks were staged to appear to be the work of either Iraqi agents or Islamic terrorists, the FBI suspected that the perpetrator was someone working within the American biodefense industry. Suspicion ultimately fell on Bruce Edwards Ivins, a scientist working at Fort Detrick’s biodefense lab. As author Scott R. Decker described the suspect in the book Recounting the Anthrax Attacks:

Ivins was a senior member of the US Army’s Bacteriology Division at USAMRIID and had been instrumental in anthrax vaccine development and production. Until recently, the army had viewed his vaccine work as critical. In December 1997, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen went so far as to mandate that all US soldiers, sailors, and airmen receive the inoculation. However, claims of the vaccine being connected to Gulf War Syndrome . . . made Cohen’s directive controversial. . . . Also in year 2000, Ivins had coauthored a patent application for a new generation of vaccine developed through genetic engineering, which Ivins clearly hoped would replace the decades-old, controversial BioPort product.^[ii]

According to Decker, Ivins feared that his life’s work was imperiled, and therefore decided to show the US government and media just how much the country needed his anthrax vaccine by attacking both establishments with anthrax spores. Even though the FBI quickly concluded the attacks were not the action of a hostile foreign agent, Ivins’s gambit initially worked as he intended. In June 2002, the DoD reinstated the anthrax vaccine mandate for US service personnel and Congress passed the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act with additional funds allocated for vaccine development.^[iii]

However, due to ongoing safety concerns, the anthrax vaccine mandate for US soldiers was again challenged in court, and protracted litigation ensued that lasted until 2008, when a federal judge upheld an earlier ruling that it was “a violation of federal law for military personnel to be subjected to involuntary AVA inoculation because the vaccine was neither the subject of a presidential waiver nor licensed for use against inhalation anthrax.”^[iv]

Ivins was a person of interest for six years, but the investigation of him intensified only after the DoD lost the legal battle in March 2008. On July 29, 2008, he purportedly committed suicide by overdosing on acetaminophen after he learned that he was probably going to be arrested. On August 6, 2008, federal prosecutors declared Ivins the sole perpetrator.^[v] In other words, according to the FBI, the anthrax bioterrorism attack of 2001 that seemingly justified the DoD’s controversial anthrax vaccine mandate for US service personnel was committed by a senior DoD scientist.

Some of his Ivins’s colleagues and others in the field who knew him are not convinced he was the culprit. Suspicions have also arisen that the true culprit was someone who wanted to pin the attacks on Iraq to justify US military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The FBI never found evidence that Iraqi agents or Islamic terrorists mailed the anthrax contaminated letters. If it wasn’t Bruce Ivins, it was likely someone else within the US or Israeli national security state. Reviewing the record of US biodefense blunders over the last twenty-five years, one may reasonably conclude that the biggest threat to the American people is not hostile foreign actors or emerging infectious diseases, but the US bio-pharmaceutical complex and its laboratories stocked with dangerous infectious agents and its obsession with creating experimental vaccines against them.

Now comes the news that Fauci’s NIAID Funded Aerosolized-Ebola Experiments That Left 80% of Vaccinated Primates DEAD. The experiments were performed at the Fort Detrick biodefense lab.

The ostensible purpose of developing this fantastically dangerous agent was—you guessed it—to create a vaccine against it. Create a bioweapon that threatens the lives, peace, and prosperity of all humanity in order to develop a vaccine against it—a vaccine that would be of immense commercial value if (God forbid) the pathogen gets out of the lab. What could go wrong?

Anthrax, Ebola, SARS-CoV-2—what other dangerous pathogens is Uncle Sam tinkering around with in labs at home and abroad?

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^[i] Thomas E. White, Secretary of the Army, Memorandum: Slowdown of the Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program (AVIP), June 8, 2001.

^[ii] Decker, R. Scott. Recounting the Anthrax Attacks: Terror, the Amerithrax Task Force, and the Evolution of Forensics in the FBI: Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

^[iii] H.R.3448 - Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, 06/12/2002 Became Public Law No: 107-188. https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/3448

^[iv] UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA THOMAS L. REMPFER, et al., Plaintiffs, v. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AIR FORCE BOARD FOR CORRECTION OF MILITARY RECORDS, et al., Defendants. pp. 18-19. https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2005cv2350-31

^[v] NBC NEWS, U.S. officials: Scientist was anthrax killer, Aug. 6, 2008. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna26054859