In the late 1990s, President Bill Clinton was so paranoid about bioweapons scenarios like the one depicted in The Cobra Event thriller novel by Richard Preston that he asked then-Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre about the plausibility of an unstoppable plague created with designer pathogens. In a paper by USAF Colonel Michael J. Ainscough of the Air War College, the author of Next Generation Bioweapons (PDF)talks about genetically engineered vectors and the potential for weaponizing pathogens. The paper suggests designer pathogens may already be stockpiled. And since 9/11, billions have been earmarked for so-called “biodefense.”

The Russian Defense Ministry has just published materials that may reveal the implementation of U.S. military biological projects in Ukraine. Through captured documents and ongoing investigations, the ministry seems poised to release what are grievous infractions of international law and convention. The deeper implication is that the United States has been involved in creating a battery of bioweapons labs deployed in or surrounding the territories of perceived enemies. If the Russians have uncovered such evidence, this would go a long way toward explaining the unprecedented media and policy frenzies aimed at the Ukraine affair.

One of the scariest revelations from these Russian allegations is a study of the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus and its transmission routes; otherwise known as the Flu-Fly-Way project, carried out right on Russia’s border at the Kharkiv Institute of Veterinary Medicine. This research looked into wild birds as vectors for the transfer of the avian virus. While looking at this U.S. study, Russia’s Ministry of Defense was also curious about the fact there was a sharp increase in 2018 cases of tuberculosis caused by new strains among citizens living in the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics of eastern Ukraine.

The Russian Federation has repeatedly called for the disclosure of data on the military-biological activities of the Pentagon on the territory of third countries, but the collective West, led by the United States has consistently blocked this initiative. Russian officials say the United States has preferred to conduct research bypassing international obligations “by proxy.” The Russian officials say that since 2016, when these biomedical projects were launched, the United States and Ukraine failed to abide by the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxin Weapons.

Member states are obliged to submit to the UN information on objects and ongoing biological activities such as those undertaken with the support of the United States, “despite their obvious military-biological orientation.” According to the Russians, this kind of secrecy is what has given the Russian Federation pause as to the true goals of the Pentagon in Ukraine. Does this fit in frame with the latest U.S. military bioweapons strategies? From the Russian perspective, what if the United States, out of some kind of deterrence strategy, created some kind of bioweapons shield around Russia?

Documents received by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation seem to show that research in this area has been systemic and ongoing since at least 2009. The documents also indicate that these experiments were conducted under the direct supervision of specialists from the United States within the framework of projects P-382, P-444, and P-568 specifically. The report also reveals that one of the curators of this activity was the head of the DTRA office at the US Embassy in Kyiv, Joanna Wintrall.

The specifics of this release from the Russian Federation Ministry of Defense are detailed and extensive, too detailed for my report. The Russians seem to have verifiable evidence that U.S. funds ($32 million) that were supposedly going to scientists in the normal health fields, actually ended up at the laboratories of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, located in Kyiv, Odessa, Lviv, and Kharkiv. These documents shed light on studies that seemed to aim for creating disease outbreaks that could be disguised as natural outbreaks. But the research went beyond simple flu to highly specialized and localized pathogens like Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever, leptospirosis, and hantaviruses. The Russians believe that the U.S. Department of Defense’s involvement was to essentially plant bioweapons storehouses on or near Russian territory. So, when even the deadliest diseases known (or unknown) to humankind broke out, no one could point the finger at the United States.

The real bombshell hidden in all this may surface from studying documents from a project designated P-781. This research involved studying ways of transmitting diseases to humans through bats. Conducted in the lab in Kharkiv, along with the notorious Lugar Center in Tbilisi, these studies bear close scrutiny because of the COVID-19 pandemic’s still nebulous origins. The big question (fear) arises, “Did the U.S. government have anything to do with the supposed origination of COVID-19 in Wuhan? Or, did the U.S. Department of Defense create the COVID-19 pandemic? Many have speculated that this virus was manufactured and spread like some kind of reset strategy. The “Cobra” virus in the famous novel was a genetic fusion of the incurable and highly contagious common cold with one of the world’s most virulent diseases, smallpox. And as we are experiencing, COVID-19 seems to be less deadly than smallpox, but almost as incurable as a cold. And look at the effects.

The bat carrier research carried out in both Ukraine and Georgia is strange in the extreme, and not only because both nations border the Russian Federation. The wording of the documents pertaining to P-781. This passage is just creepy if you think about how these researchers must have carried out their experiment:

“The project will focus to detect and determine the geographic range of {coronaviruses, filoviruses… and others} and bacterial agents circulating in bat populations…”

I have bolded coronaviruses for obvious reasons. This Intercept story goes on record about the National Institutes of Health (NIH) subsidiary National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) led by Dr. Anthony Fauci giving millions in grants to research how to make coronaviruses more transmissible in humans. $600,000 of that funding was given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to the report. What’s startling is the conjoining of agencies, names, geography, and the current boiling over crises in this affair. So, is there another U.S. project similar to Project Bacchus, Project Clear Vision, and Project Jefferson, which were uncovered in the late 1990s? I am not the only one concerned about the research by DTRA, and the probability the U.S. has, in fact, developed offensive biological weapons. Jonathan B. Tucker, echoed similar concerns in “Biological Threat Assessment: Is the Cure Worse Than the Disease?”

“…by blurring the already hazy line between offensive and defensive biological R&D, science-based threat assessment raises suspicions about U.S. compliance with the BWC and fosters a “biological security dilemma” that could lead to a new biological arms race. At the same time, the novel pathogens and related know-how generated by threat-assessment work could be stolen or diverted for malicious purposes, exacerbating the threat of bioterrorism.”

At a time when a pandemic has obliterated lives and economies, and in a moment unprecedented in west-east detente, massive corporations leverage insurmountable media campaigns churning this horrible stew we all live in. And we are asked to believe that the U.S. The Department of Defense is involved in laboratories like these, without so much as a casual thought toward weaponizing germs against Russia, China, Iran, or other competing nations? Are we really that naive, that stupid? If secret research like that conducted in Project Jefferson lay hidden, what other classified work is going on now? Does our leadership just rely on our stupidity, or our apathy, to do what is “deemed” best for us?

An earlier version of this report appeared at my Medium Blog

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https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-03-18/did-america-created-real-cobra-event-scenario-russia