Tag: biological warfare

NIH Ends Gain-Of-Function Research, Implementing Trump’s Executive Order

The National Institute of Health (NIH) announced the end of gain-of-function research in a June 18 statement. The institute’s update said the move is in compliance with President Donald Trump’s executive order on the topic. 

The president’s order was issued on May 5 of this year to improve the “safety and security of biological research.” 

The agency is also suspending or terminating the awards that have supported this research, as the order requires. The awardees are required to review their research portfolios by June 30 to ensure the projects are terminated.

“NIH is requiring all NIH awardees to review their research portfolios to identify NIH funding and other support for projects meeting the definition of dangerous gain-of-function research,” the June 18 statement said

Trump’s Order 

Trump’s May executive order concludes: “Dangerous gain-of-function research on biological agents and pathogens has the potential to significantly endanger the lives of American citizens.” Additionally, the order allowed for research agencies to find and end federal funding for other biological research that “could pose a threat to American public health, public safety, or national security.”

It also ended federal funding for gain-of-function research in countries of concern, such as China and Iran, and prohibited funding from moving to foreign research that would likely cause another pandemic. 

According to the White House fact sheet, the order was given because “these measures will drastically reduce the potential for lab-related incidents involving gain-of-function research, like that conducted on bat coronaviruses in China by the EcoHealth Alliance and Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

The president’s order paused U.S. research that used infectious pathogens and toxins, citing possible danger to American citizens, until a time when a safer and more transparent plan can be implemented. 

Both COVID-19 and the 1977 Russian flu were used as illustrations of the possible outcome of underregulated research with dangerous pathogens.

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South Korea Lab Makes Bird Flu 100% Lethal in Mammals: ‘Virology Journal’

South Korean scientists have conducted a lab experiment that made a purported wild avian influenza “bird flu” virus 100% lethal in mammals, achieving total death in infected mice by enabling the virus to adapt inside their bodies and spread to others.

The dangerous move comes as the U.S. develops a “next-generation” universal vaccine platform called ‘Generation Gold Standard’ that will focus on avian influenza jab creation, signaling a coordinated international push to engineer and preemptively vaccinate against lab-enhanced bird flu strains with pandemic potential—despite worldwide fallout from similar COVID-era strategies.

Published June 2025 in Virology Journal, the study describes how researchers at Konkuk University infected mice with a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza strain—one that already contained a small percentage (4%) of a mammalian-adaptive mutation known as PB2-E627K.

That tiny minority of mutant virus was enough to take over and kill every infected host.

“All challenged mice died by 8 dpc. Transmission through direct-contact occurred in 100% of cases, and all contact mice died within 12 days.”

This was not an accidental discovery.

Researchers intentionally infected mammals with a virus they knew contained a mutation that helps bird flu spread and replicate more effectively in mammals, including humans.

Once inside the mice, the mutation exploded to near-total dominance—not just in the lungs, but in the brain, where it caused seizures, ataxia, and fatal neurological damage.

“The PB2-E627K variant, initially present at 4% in the virus stock, was selected and reached near-fixation (~ 100%) in the lungs and brains by 6 days post-challenge and was subsequently transmitted.”

“In dead direct-contact mice, the E627K mutation in PB2 was found at a proportion of 99.8–100% in both the lungs and brains.”

The virus became neurotropic—targeting the brain—and caused seizures and other neurological symptoms before death.

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Third Chinese scientist charged with smuggling illegal biological pathogen into US from Wuhan

A third Chinese scientist has been charged with smuggling biological materials into the United States after a University of Michigan student and her boyfriend were caught last week.

Chengxuan Han was arrested on Sunday at Detroit Metropolitan airport and charged with smuggling goods into the US.

Police allege Han sent four packages which ‘contained biological material related to round worms’ from China to the US.

The packages were sent between September 2024 and March 2025 and addressed to people linked to the laboratory at the University of Michigan. 

Han initially denied sending the packages at all, according to court documents. She later insisted they contained plastic cups, rather than petri dishes. 

According to the documents, she ultimately admitted sending the samples, which she had collected during her research as a Ph.D. student in Wuhan, China.

The charges come less than a week after University of Michigan postdoctoral fellow Yunqing Jian, 33, was charged alongside Zunyong Liu, 34, for attempting to smuggle a weapon of ‘agroterrorism’ into the United States in a sinister plot allegedly tied to the Chinese Communist Party.

Liu arrived in the United States from China in July 2024 carrying four small baggies of Fusarium graminearum – a product responsible for causing billions of dollars worth of damage to livestock, wheat, barley, maize and rice globally each year.

All three of the accused have links to the same university laboratory.

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COVID cover-up probes focus on early military intel that virus was man-made, escaped Wuhan lab

An elite unit of scientists working for the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded three months after the pandemic began that COVID-19 likely was genetically manufactured and escaped a Chinese lab rather than evolving in nature as Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed, a bombshell revelation now at the heart of ongoing investigations into a possible U.S. intelligence cover-up.

“SARS-CoV-2 Spike Appears to be a Chimera,” a slide from the DIA National Center for Medical Intelligence’s June 25, 2020 presentation declared, using the scientific terms for the COVID-19 virus and the “chimera’ term for a genetically engineered pathogen that is a combination of pieces from two separate viruses.

The study – using complex genome analysis – also traced the process used for creating the new virus to an earlier manuscript that the Wuhan Institute of Virology published a decade prior. “Break points align with those identified by WIV Scientists in 2008,” the presentation said.

“The molecular biology capabilities of WIV and the genome assessment are consistent with the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was a lab-engineered virus that was part of a bank of chimeric viruses … at WIV that escaped from containment,” the study concluded.

You can read the full presentation here.

File

6-20200625-SARS-CoV-2-Genome-Analysis (2).pdf

Report suppressed for years

The long-hidden study was only recently released under the Freedom of Information Act by U.S. intelligence agencies, a bombshell now at the center of ongoing investigations.

At least four whistleblowers have been interviewed in recent months by the Intelligence Community Inspector General’s office, the DIA’s internal watchdog and the FBI about the early findings from DIA’s National Center for Medical Intelligence and whether there was an effort to keep those genetic sleuths from communicating their evidence to other intelligence agencies, government officials told Just the News.

One area of focus is whether intelligence agencies sought to suppress the DIA research from a highly public release by President Joe Biden’s Director of National Intelligence Office in 2021 that assessed that COVID was “equally likely” to have come from nature or a lab accident, the officials said. That analysis – dubbed the 90-day sprint – made no overt reference to the detailed analysis DIA had offered a year earlier.

Efforts by the DIA scientists to insert their data into the 90-day document were snubbed and their edits were deleted, officials told Just the News.

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‘Coming for us’: Expert sounds alarm on CCP’s mission to ‘kill Americans’ after FBI makes shocking arrests

Following news that two Chinese nationals were charged with allegedly smuggling a “dangerous biological pathogen” into the U.S. to study at an American university, Fox News Digital spoke to an expert on China who said the arrests should be a wake-up call to the country.

“I was entirely unsurprised, which is a sad commentary, but it speaks to the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP wants to kill Americans,” Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute focusing on U.S. and China relations, told Fox News Digital after FBI Director Kash Patel announced the arrests of the two Chinese nationals.

“Look at what they’ve done with smuggling fentanyl precursors into our country to kill Americans, look at the effects of them failing to stop the spread of COVID-19,” Sobolik said. “Dead Americans. The fact that they want to target Americans here within the United States with pathogens and with bioweapons. This is the Chinese Communist Party. This is what they do. They’re in a cold war with the United States. They want to become the most powerful nation in the world and they wanna make the world safe for their tyranny and unsafe for freedom. And they’re coming for us here at home.”

The couple are accused of smuggling a fungus called Fusarium graminearum, which scientific literature classifies as a “potential agroterrorism weapon,” according to the Justice Department. Federal prosecutors note that the noxious fungus causes “head blight,” a disease of wheat, barley, maize and rice, and “is responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year.”

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Chinese couple were part of years-long plot to smuggle biological pathogen into US – even once snuck dangerous material in shoe

A Chinese researcher accused of plotting with her boyfriend to smuggle a weapon of ‘agroterrorism’ into the United States may have successfully hidden pathogens in her shoe on a previous trip.

University of Michigan postdoctoral fellow Yunqing Jian, 33, has been charged alongside Zunyong Liu, 34, for the sinister plot allegedly tied to the Chinese Communist Party.

Liu arrived in the United States from China in July 2024 carrying four small baggies of Fusarium graminearum – a product responsible for causing billions of dollars worth of damage to livestock, wheat, barley, maize and rice globally each year.

FBI boss Kash Patel issued a chilling warning after the first pictures emerged of Jian on Tuesday evening.

‘This case is a sobering reminder that the CCP[Chinese Communist Party] is working around the clock to deploy operatives and researchers to infiltrate American institutions and target our food supply,’ he said.

If successful, the plot ‘would have grave consequences… putting American lives and our economy at serious risk.’

The duo have been charged with conspiracy, smuggling, making false statements and visa fraud.

In a horrifying twist, the criminal complaint reveals that Jian may have been successful in smuggling pathogens into the United States years earlier.

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FBI’s Bongino Says Agency Probing COVID-19 Origin Cover-Up as New Strain Drives Cases

The FBI is investigating the alleged cover-up of the origins of COVID-19, the agency’s deputy director, Dan Bongino, said on May 29, as a new strain of the virus has started to circulate in some parts of the world.

“As we read and process reports of a new COVID strain emerging, I want you to know that we are actively investigating, in multiple field offices, the cover-up of the origin of the COVID virus, along with associated matters requiring our attention,” Bongino wrote in a post on social media platform X. “You deserve answers.”

Bongino did not state which field offices are probing the origins of the virus or which individuals are involved in the alleged cover-up. The FBI has not issued an official statement on the investigation.

The Epoch Times has contacted the FBI for further comment.

In April, the Trump administration changed a White House COVID-19 page to say that the virus likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, in 2019.

The page also criticizes former White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, who stepped down as chief medical adviser under the Biden administration in 2022, and other individuals it says repeatedly sought to discredit the lab leak theory.

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Medical journal ‘cartel’ that demonized lab-leak, hydroxychloroquine shown the door by Kennedy

The legitimacy of prestigious medical and scientific journals is under siege as the Trump administration threatens to take federal research elsewhere and scrutiny falls on their alleged coziness with regulators, interest groups and drugmakers, with perhaps the most serious consequences in the integrity of COVID-19 origin research.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called out the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet as “corrupt,” on The Ultimate Human podcast Tuesday.

The National Institutes of Health will “probably” stop publishing its scientists’ research there, and each institute will set up its own journal “unless these journals change dramatically,” he said.

One obvious target for publishing is the new Journal of the Academy of Public Health, established in part by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary shortly before they were tapped for the new administration.

HHS also plans to devote “probably 20% of NIH’s budget to replication” to address the longstanding irreproducibility crisis, he said. “Every study has to be replicated.”

Asked which medical journals weren’t on Kennedy’s blacklist, an HHS spokesperson told Just the News its “top priority is to ensure scientific research remains rigorous, transparent, and accessible to the American people. The secretary urges leading medical journals to increase transparency and reduce editorial bias.”

It’s just one of many big changes in the federal public health agencies, with Kennedy and his Argentine counterpart announcing they are creating an “alternative international health system” to the World Health Organization in the wake of WHO’s first-ever pandemic treaty.

HHS also pared back COVID vaccine recommendations and cut Moderna’s $700 million bird flu vaccine contract.

Kennedy alleged the pharmaceutical industry and “medical cartel” have captured and transformed NIH, FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid into “essentially sock puppets for the industry and profit centers” that “commoditized the American public and turned us all into patients.”

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DOJ Can Dig Up Even More Evidence U.S. Taxpayers Funded Lab Creation Of Covid-19

Employees at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) walked out as their new boss, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, spoke this week on truths that remain to be sought out about Covid-19. As a lead on the October 2020 Great Barrington Declaration that sought to shift sweeping societal shutdowns to “focused protection” on the vulnerable, Bhattacharya is no newcomer to speaking the truth about Covid or being vilified for doing so. Fortunately, an unheralded investigation by the Department of Justice of an obscure nonprofit company has the potential to reveal five years of hidden truths.

Bhattacharya’s words that sparked the walkout were straightforward: “It’s possible that the pandemic was caused by research conducted by human beings, and it’s also possible that the NIH partly sponsored that research.” Seeking the possible amongst the plausible is the backbone of the scientific approach. In the case of the Wuhan lab leak theory, “possible” looks increasingly “plausible” as more evidence slowly — and as the NIH walkout demonstrates —grudgingly comes to light. 

The possibility of long-delayed revelation lies in an ongoing DOJ investigation involving EcoHealth Alliance. Both the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on Covid-19’s 500-page pandemic report and the recently published book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee repeatedly put EcoHealth Alliance at the crossroads of pandemic controversy — from funding, to research, to reporting on the virus’s origins and the CCP’s initial efforts to combat the pandemic. 

The press release accompanying the subcommittee’s report states: Covid-19 “most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” that “a lab-related incident involving gain-of-function research is most likely the origin of COVID-19,” that EcoHealth “under the leadership of Dr. Peter Daszak used U.S. taxpayer dollars to facilitate dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan,” and that NIH contributed to the catastrophe with “procedures for funding and overseeing potentially dangerous research” which are “deficient, unreliable, and pose a serious threat to both public health and national security.”

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Harrowing confrontation between contractors led to Fort Detrick bio-lab shutdown, NIH boss reveals

National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya said poor safety culture, and a feud between employees that risked the leak of an unknown pathogen, prompted him to temporarily shutter the high-level biosafety laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. 

Bhattacharya, who was confirmed by the Senate in late March, had only just taken the helm at the agency which was at the center of much COVID-19-era controversy when he received a report about the high-security laboratory that caused his “blood to chill,” he told the Just the News, No Noise TV show on Monday.  

He said the lab reported that one researcher slashed a hole in a containment suit of another researcher, potentially exposing them to a pathogen. 

A lovers’ spat turns potentially deadly

“About three weeks in, I got a report that there was a lab—a BSL four lab, that is a high-security lab that deals with, like, really nasty bugs, you know, Ebola, whole bunch of other bugs—that there had been a safety incident…[that] involved a contractor cutting a hole in the bio containment suit of another worker with the intention of that, getting that worker sick with some nasty bug and potentially spreading it outside of the lab itself,” Bhattacharya said, confirming an incident first reported by Fox News earlier this month. 

Fox News also reported that the incident between the two contractors was sparked by a lover’s spat, according to an anonymous official from the Department of Health and Human Services. 

“I mean, I have not been scared by anything…in this job so far, except for that. When I heard that, my blood just chilled,” Bhattacharya said. 

The incident, which raised significant safety concerns at the high-security laboratory, was the catalyst for the temporary closure, which halted work at the facility. Work at the Biosaftey Level 4 laboratory was halted on March 29, shortly after Bhattacharya took the helm at NIH.

The lab is equipped to handle research on highly infectious and lethal diseases like Anthrax bacteria, COVID-19, the Ebola virus, and the lesser-known but deadly Marburg and Nipah viruses, among others.

“I ordered immediately, as soon as I heard about this incident, that there’s an operational pause of all, all experiments at this lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and that we’re not going to reopen it until, until I’m satisfied that we have a group that can run it with safety first,” the director told Just the News of his decision. 

“This is really, really dangerous stuff, and if we’re going to play around with these kinds of experiments, it better be at a 100% secure lab where the safety culture says that it’s more important to get the safety right than to have the science go forward,” he added. 

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