Fort Detrick

Fort Detrick   (BSL4 facility)
A Maryland BSL-4 facility that the FBI concluded was the origin of the anthrax used in the Amerithrax attacks originally blamed on Al Qaeda.

Fort Detrick is a United States Army Medical Command installation 50 miles from Washington D.C. in the Maryland town of Frederick where it is the largest employer. It was the centre of the US Biological Weapon Testing program from 1943-1969, and houses a BSL-4 facility that some have suggested was the original source of the COVID-19 virus.

History

As of the early 2010s, Fort Detrick's campus supports a multi-governmental community that conducts biomedical research and development, medical materiel management, global medical communications and the study of foreign plant pathogens. It is home to the United States Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC), with its bio-defence agency, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Fort Detrick also hosts the National Cancer Institute-Frederick (NCI-Frederick) and is home to the National Interagency Confederation for Biological Research (NICBR) and National Interagency Biodefence Campus (NIBC).

Amerithrax

Full article: Amerithrax

After 9-11, highly weaponised anthrax spores were mailed to US senators who were querying the Patriot Act. The commercially-controlled media initially blamed Al-Qaeda. However, it quickly emerged that the anthrax was of the Ames strain, unavailable outside of the US and a few close allies. The FBI later concluded that it originated from Fort Detrick, and pointed the finger at a "lone nut" researcher, Bruce Ivins. The nominal head of the FBI investigation, Richard Lambert, blew the whistle to alert his superiors that evidence indicative of Ivins' innocence had been covered up, which only emerged years later after he took more legal action.

Shutdowns

2009

"In 2009, research at the institute in Fort Detrick was suspended because it was storing pathogens not listed in its database."

August 2019 "cease and desist order"

On 7 August 2019 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued Fort Detrick a “cease and desist order” to halt the research there because it did not have “sufficient systems in place to decontaminate wastewater.” In the statement, the CDC cited “national security reasons” as the rationale for not releasing information about its decision. It was reopened in December 2019.

 

Related Quotation

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Philip Zack	“An internal Army inquiry in 1992 would reveal that one employee, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, had been caught on camera secretly entering the lab to conduct “unauthorized research, apparently involving anthrax,” the Hartford Courant would later report. Despite this, Zack would continue to do infectious disease research for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and would collaborate with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) throughout the 1990s. The Courant had also noted that: “A numerical counter on a piece of lab equipment had been rolled back to hide work done by the mystery researcher [later revealed to be Zack], who left the misspelled label ‘antrax’ in the machine’s electronic memory.” The Courant’s report further detailed the extremely lax security controls and chaotic disorganization that then characterized the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) lab in Fort Detrick.”	Philip Zack Whitney Webb	1 April 2020

 

Group

Group	Description
National Center for Medical Intelligence	ABC News cited 4 anonymous sources that the NCMI warned the White House that "a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region" in late November 2019. The NCMI denied this.

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:All Roads Lead to Dark Winter	report	1 April 2020	Whitney Webb
Document:COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US	Article	4 March 2020	Larry Romanoff	The varieties of COVID-19 in Iran and Italy have been sequenced and declared to have no part of the variety that infected China and must, by definition, have originated elsewhere.
Document:Logistical and Technical Exploration into the Origins of the COVID-19 virus	report	31 January 2020	Jonathan Jay Couey	Report of a thorough investigation into the origins of the virus that caused the pandemic. Whilst the author is circumspect, the evidence presented points clearly to the virus being the product of laboratory engineering.

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References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 15 March 2020.
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