Biological warfare – Wikipedia

Use of strategically designed biological weapons

Biological warfare, also known as germ warfare, is the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, insects, and fungi with the intent to kill, harm or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war. Biological weapons (often termed "bio-weapons", "biological threat agents", or "bio-agents") are living organisms or replicating entities (i.e.viruses, which are not universally considered "alive"). Entomological (insect) warfare is a subtype of biological warfare.

Offensive biological warfare is prohibited under customary international humanitarian law and several international treaties.[1][2] In particular, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) bans the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological weapons.[3] Therefore, the use of biological agents in armed conflict is a war crime.[4] In contrast, defensive biological research for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes is not prohibited by the BWC.[5]

Biological warfare is distinct from warfare involving other types of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including nuclear warfare, chemical warfare, and radiological warfare. None of these are considered conventional weapons, which are deployed primarily for their explosive, kinetic, or incendiary potential.

Biological weapons may be employed in various ways to gain a strategic or tactical advantage over the enemy, either by threats or by actual deployments. Like some chemical weapons, biological weapons may also be useful as area denial weapons. These agents may be lethal or non-lethal, and may be targeted against a single individual, a group of people, or even an entire population. They may be developed, acquired, stockpiled or deployed by nation states or by non-national groups. In the latter case, or if a nation-state uses it clandestinely, it may also be considered bioterrorism.[6]

Biological warfare and chemical warfare overlap to an extent, as the use of toxins produced by some living organisms is considered under the provisions of both the BWC and the Chemical Weapons Convention. Toxins and psychochemical weapons are often referred to as midspectrum agents. Unlike bioweapons, these midspectrum agents do not reproduce in their host and are typically characterized by shorter incubation periods.[7]

A biological attack could conceivably result in large numbers of civilian casualties and cause severe disruption to economic and societal infrastructure.[8]

A nation or group that can pose a credible threat of mass casualty has the ability to alter the terms under which other nations or groups interact with it. When indexed to weapon mass and cost of development and storage, biological weapons possess destructive potential and loss of life far in excess of nuclear, chemical or conventional weapons. Accordingly, biological agents are potentially useful as strategic deterrents, in addition to their utility as offensive weapons on the battlefield.[9]

As a tactical weapon for military use, a significant problem with biological warfare is that it would take days to be effective, and therefore might not immediately stop an opposing force. Some biological agents (smallpox, pneumonic plague) have the capability of person-to-person transmission via aerosolized respiratory droplets. This feature can be undesirable, as the agent(s) may be transmitted by this mechanism to unintended populations, including neutral or even friendly forces. Worse still, such a weapon could "escape" the laboratory where it was developed, even if there was no intent to use it for example by infecting a researcher who then transmits it to the outside world before realizing that they were infected. Several cases are known of researchers becoming infected and dying of Ebola,[10][11] which they had been working with in the lab (though nobody else was infected in those cases) while there is no evidence that their work was directed towards biological warfare, it demonstrates the potential for accidental infection even of careful researchers fully aware of the dangers. While containment of biological warfare is less of a concern for certain criminal or terrorist organizations, it remains a significant concern for the military and civilian populations of virtually all nations.

Rudimentary forms of biological warfare have been practiced since antiquity.[12] The earliest documented incident of the intention to use biological weapons is recorded in Hittite texts of 15001200 BCE, in which victims of tularemia were driven into enemy lands, causing an epidemic.[13] The Assyrians poisoned enemy wells with the fungus ergot, though with unknown results. Scythian archers dipped their arrows and Roman soldiers their swords into excrements and cadavers victims were commonly infected by tetanus as result.[14] In 1346, the bodies of Mongol warriors of the Golden Horde who had died of plague were thrown over the walls of the besieged Crimean city of Kaffa. Specialists disagree about whether this operation was responsible for the spread of the Black Death into Europe, Near East and North Africa, resulting in the deaths of approximately 25 million Europeans.[15][16][17][18]

Biological agents were extensively used in many parts of Africa from the sixteenth century AD, most of the time in the form of poisoned arrows, or powder spread on the war front as well as poisoning of horses and water supply of the enemy forces.[19][20] In Borgu, there were specific mixtures to kill, hypnotize, make the enemy bold, and to act as an antidote against the poison of the enemy as well. The creation of biologicals was reserved for a specific and professional class of medicine-men.[20]

During the French and Indian War, in June 1763 a group of Native Americans laid siege to British-held Fort Pitt.[21][22] The commander of Fort Pitt, Simeon Ecuyer, ordered his men to take smallpox-infested blankets from the infirmary and give it to a Lenape delegation during the siege.[23][24][25] A reported outbreak that began the spring before left as many as one hundred Native Americans dead in Ohio Country from 1763 to 1764. It is not clear whether the smallpox was a result of the Fort Pitt incident or the virus was already present among the Delaware people as outbreaks happened on their own every dozen or so years[26] and the delegates were met again later and seemingly had not contracted smallpox.[27][28][29] During the American Revolutionary War, Continental Army officer George Washington mentioned to the Continental Congress that he had heard a rumor from a sailor that his opponent during the Siege of Boston, General William Howe, had deliberately sent civilians out of the city in the hopes of spreading the ongoing smallpox epidemic to American lines; Washington, remaining unconvinced, wrote that he "could hardly give credit to" the claim. Washington had already inoculated his soldiers, diminishing the effect of the epidemic.[30][31] Some historians have claimed that a detachment of the Corps of Royal Marines stationed in New South Wales, Australia deliberately used smallpox there in 1789.[32] Dr Seth Carus states: "Ultimately, we have a strong circumstantial case supporting the theory that someone deliberately introduced smallpox in the Aboriginal population."[33][34]

By 1900 the germ theory and advances in bacteriology brought a new level of sophistication to the techniques for possible use of bio-agents in war. Biological sabotage in the form of anthrax and glanders was undertaken on behalf of the Imperial German government during World War I (19141918), with indifferent results.[35] The Geneva Protocol of 1925 prohibited the use of chemical and biological weapons.[36]

With the onset of World War II, the Ministry of Supply in the United Kingdom established a biological warfare program at Porton Down, headed by the microbiologist Paul Fildes. The research was championed by Winston Churchill and soon tularemia, anthrax, brucellosis, and botulism toxins had been effectively weaponized. In particular, Gruinard Island in Scotland, was contaminated with anthrax during a series of extensive tests for the next 56 years. Although the UK never offensively used the biological weapons it developed, its program was the first to successfully weaponize a variety of deadly pathogens and bring them into industrial production.[37] Other nations, notably France and Japan, had begun their own biological weapons programs.[38]

When the United States entered the war, Allied resources were pooled at the request of the British. The U.S. then established a large research program and industrial complex at Fort Detrick, Maryland in 1942 under the direction of George W. Merck.[39] The biological and chemical weapons developed during that period were tested at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. Soon there were facilities for the mass production of anthrax spores, brucellosis, and botulism toxins, although the war was over before these weapons could be of much operational use.[40]

The most notorious program of the period was run by the secret Imperial Japanese Army Unit 731 during the war, based at Pingfan in Manchuria and commanded by Lieutenant General Shir Ishii. This biological warfare research unit conducted often fatal human experiments on prisoners, and produced biological weapons for combat use.[41] Although the Japanese effort lacked the technological sophistication of the American or British programs, it far outstripped them in its widespread application and indiscriminate brutality. Biological weapons were used against Chinese soldiers and civilians in several military campaigns.[42] In 1940, the Japanese Army Air Force bombed Ningbo with ceramic bombs full of fleas carrying the bubonic plague.[43] Many of these operations were ineffective due to inefficient delivery systems,[41] although up to 400,000 people may have died.[44] During the Zhejiang-Jiangxi Campaign in 1942, around 1,700 Japanese troops died out of a total 10,000 Japanese soldiers who fell ill with disease when their own biological weapons attack rebounded on their own forces.[45][46]

During the final months of World War II, Japan planned to use plague as a biological weapon against U.S. civilians in San Diego, California, during Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night. The plan was set to launch on 22 September 1945, but it was not executed because of Japan's surrender on 15 August 1945.[47][48][49][50]

In Britain, the 1950s saw the weaponization of plague, brucellosis, tularemia and later equine encephalomyelitis and vaccinia viruses, but the programme was unilaterally cancelled in 1956. The United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories weaponized anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, Q-fever and others.[51]

In 1969, US President Richard Nixon decided to unilaterally terminate the offensive biological weapons program of the US, allowing only scientific research for defensive measures.[52] This decision increased the momentum of the negotiations for a ban on biological warfare, which took place from 1969 to 1972 in the United Nation's Conference of the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva.[53] These negotiations resulted in the Biological Weapons Convention, which was opened for signature on 10 April 1972 and entered into force on 26 March 1975 after its ratification by 22 states.[53]

Despite being a party and depositary to the BWC, the Soviet Union continued and expanded its massive offensive biological weapons program, under the leadership of the allegedly civilian institution Biopreparat.[54] The Soviet Union attracted international suspicion after the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax leak killed approximately 65 to 100 people.[55]

International restrictions on biological warfare began with the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibits the use but not the possession or development of biological and chemical weapons.[36][57] Upon ratification of the Geneva Protocol, several countries made reservations regarding its applicability and use in retaliation.[58] Due to these reservations, it was in practice a "no-first-use" agreement only.[59]

The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) supplements the Geneva Protocol by prohibiting the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological weapons.[3] Having entered into force on 26 March 1975, the BWC was the first multilateral disarmament treaty to ban the production of an entire category of weapons of mass destruction.[3] As of March 2021, 183 states have become party to the treaty.[60] The BWC is considered to have established a strong global norm against biological weapons,[61] which is reflected in the treaty's preamble, stating that the use of biological weapons would be "repugnant to the conscience of mankind".[62] The BWC's effectiveness has been limited due to insufficient institutional support and the absence of any formal verification regime to monitor compliance.[63]

In 1985, the Australia Group was established, a multilateral export control regime of 43 countries aiming to prevent the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons.[64]

In 2004, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1540, which obligates all UN Member States to develop and enforce appropriate legal and regulatory measures against the proliferation of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons and their means of delivery, in particular, to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction to non-state actors.[65]

Biological weapons are difficult to detect, economical and easy to use, making them appealing to terrorists. The cost of a biological weapon is estimated to be about 0.05 percent the cost of a conventional weapon in order to produce similar numbers of mass casualties per kilometer square.[66] Moreover, their production is very easy as common technology can be used to produce biological warfare agents, like that used in production of vaccines, foods, spray devices, beverages and antibiotics. A major factor in biological warfare that attracts terrorists is that they can easily escape before the government agencies or secret agencies have even started their investigation. This is because the potential organism has an incubation period of 3 to 7 days, after which the results begin to appear, thereby giving terrorists a lead.

A technique called Clustered, Regularly Interspaced, Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR-Cas9) is now so cheap and widely available that scientists fear that amateurs will start experimenting with them. In this technique, a DNA sequence is cut off and replaced with a new sequence, e.g. one that codes for a particular protein, with the intent of modifying an organism's traits. Concerns have emerged regarding do-it-yourself biology research organizations due to their associated risk that a rogue amateur DIY researcher could attempt to develop dangerous bioweapons using genome editing technology.[67]

In 2002, when CNN went through Al-Qaeda's (AQ's) experiments with crude poisons, they found out that AQ had begun planning ricin and cyanide attacks with the help of a loose association of terrorist cells.[68] The associates had infiltrated many countries like Turkey, Italy, Spain, France and others. In 2015, to combat the threat of bioterrorism, a National Blueprint for Biodefense was issued by the Blue-Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense.[69] Also, 233 potential exposures of select biological agents outside of the primary barriers of the biocontainment in the US were described by the annual report of the Federal Select Agent Program.[70]

Though a verification system can reduce bioterrorism, an employee, or a lone terrorist having adequate knowledge of a bio-technology company's facilities, can cause potential danger by utilizing, without proper oversight and supervision, that company's resources. Moreover, it has been found that about 95% of accidents that have occurred due to low security have been done by employees or those who had a security clearance.[71]

Entomological warfare (EW) is a type of biological warfare that uses insects to attack the enemy. The concept has existed for centuries and research and development have continued into the modern era. EW has been used in battle by Japan and several other nations have developed and been accused of using an entomological warfare program. EW may employ insects in a direct attack or as vectors to deliver a biological agent, such as plague. Essentially, EW exists in three varieties. One type of EW involves infecting insects with a pathogen and then dispersing the insects over target areas.[72] The insects then act as a vector, infecting any person or animal they might bite. Another type of EW is a direct insect attack against crops; the insect may not be infected with any pathogen but instead represents a threat to agriculture. The final method uses uninfected insects, such as bees or wasps, to directly attack the enemy.[73]

Theoretically, novel approaches in biotechnology, such as synthetic biology could be used in the future to design novel types of biological warfare agents.[74][75][76][77]

Most of the biosecurity concerns in synthetic biology are focused on the role of DNA synthesis and the risk of producing genetic material of lethal viruses (e.g. 1918 Spanish flu, polio) in the lab.[78][79][80] Recently, the CRISPR/Cas system has emerged as a promising technique for gene editing. It was hailed by The Washington Post as "the most important innovation in the synthetic biology space in nearly 30 years."[81] While other methods take months or years to edit gene sequences, CRISPR speeds that time up to weeks.[3] Due to its ease of use and accessibility, it has raised a number of ethical concerns, especially surrounding its use in the biohacking space.[81][82][83]

Ideal characteristics of a biological agent to be used as a weapon against humans are high infectivity, high virulence, non-availability of vaccines and availability of an effective and efficient delivery system. Stability of the weaponized agent (the ability of the agent to retain its infectivity and virulence after a prolonged period of storage) may also be desirable, particularly for military applications, and the ease of creating one is often considered. Control of the spread of the agent may be another desired characteristic.

The primary difficulty is not the production of the biological agent, as many biological agents used in weapons can be manufactured relatively quickly, cheaply and easily. Rather, it is the weaponization, storage, and delivery in an effective vehicle to a vulnerable target that pose significant problems.

For example, Bacillus anthracis is considered an effective agent for several reasons. First, it forms hardy spores, perfect for dispersal aerosols. Second, this organism is not considered transmissible from person to person, and thus rarely if ever causes secondary infections. A pulmonary anthrax infection starts with ordinary influenza-like symptoms and progresses to a lethal hemorrhagic mediastinitis within 37 days, with a fatality rate that is 90% or higher in untreated patients.[84] Finally, friendly personnel and civilians can be protected with suitable antibiotics.

Agents considered for weaponization, or known to be weaponized, include bacteria such as Bacillus anthracis, Brucella spp., Burkholderia mallei, Burkholderia pseudomallei, Chlamydophila psittaci, Coxiella burnetii, Francisella tularensis, some of the Rickettsiaceae (especially Rickettsia prowazekii and Rickettsia rickettsii), Shigella spp., Vibrio cholerae, and Yersinia pestis. Many viral agents have been studied and/or weaponized, including some of the Bunyaviridae (especially Rift Valley fever virus), Ebolavirus, many of the Flaviviridae (especially Japanese encephalitis virus), Machupo virus, Coronaviruses (especially SARS-Cov-2 that causes COVID-19), Marburg virus, Variola virus, and yellow fever virus. Fungal agents that have been studied include Coccidioides spp.[54][85]

Toxins that can be used as weapons include ricin, staphylococcal enterotoxin B, botulinum toxin, saxitoxin, and many mycotoxins. These toxins and the organisms that produce them are sometimes referred to as select agents. In the United States, their possession, use, and transfer are regulated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Select Agent Program.

The former US biological warfare program categorized its weaponized anti-personnel bio-agents as either Lethal Agents (Bacillus anthracis, Francisella tularensis, Botulinum toxin) or Incapacitating Agents (Brucella suis, Coxiella burnetii, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, Staphylococcal enterotoxin B).

The United States developed an anti-crop capability during the Cold War that used plant diseases (bioherbicides, or mycoherbicides) for destroying enemy agriculture. Biological weapons also target fisheries as well as water-based vegetation. It was believed that the destruction of enemy agriculture on a strategic scale could thwart Sino-Soviet aggression in a general war. Diseases such as wheat blast and rice blast were weaponized in aerial spray tanks and cluster bombs for delivery to enemy watersheds in agricultural regions to initiate epiphytotic (epidemics among plants). On the other hand, some sources report that these agents were stockpiled but never weaponized.[86] When the United States renounced its offensive biological warfare program in 1969 and 1970, the vast majority of its biological arsenal was composed of these plant diseases.[87] Enterotoxins and Mycotoxins were not affected by Nixon's order.

Though herbicides are chemicals, they are often grouped with biological warfare and chemical warfare because they may work in a similar manner as biotoxins or bioregulators. The Army Biological Laboratory tested each agent and the Army's Technical Escort Unit was responsible for the transport of all chemical, biological, radiological (nuclear) materials.

Biological warfare can also specifically target plants to destroy crops or defoliate vegetation. The United States and Britain discovered plant growth regulators (i.e., herbicides) during the Second World War, which were then used by the UK in the counterinsurgency operations of the Malayan Emergency. Inspired by the use in Malaysia, the US military effort in the Vietnam War included a mass dispersal of a variety of herbicides, famously Agent Orange, with the aim of destroying farmland and defoliating forests used as cover by the Viet Cong.[88] Sri Lanka deployed military defoliants in its prosecution of the Eelam War against Tamil insurgents.[89]

During World War I, German saboteurs used anthrax and glanders to sicken cavalry horses in U.S. and France, sheep in Romania, and livestock in Argentina intended for the Entente forces.[90] One of these German saboteurs was Anton Dilger. Also, Germany itself became a victim of similar attacks horses bound for Germany were infected with Burkholderia by French operatives in Switzerland.[91]

During World War II, the U.S. and Canada secretly investigated the use of rinderpest, a highly lethal disease of cattle, as a bioweapon.[90][92]

In the 1980s Soviet Ministry of Agriculture had successfully developed variants of foot-and-mouth disease, and rinderpest against cows, African swine fever for pigs, and psittacosis to kill the chicken. These agents were prepared to spray them down from tanks attached to airplanes over hundreds of miles. The secret program was code-named "Ecology".[54]

During the Mau Mau Uprising in 1952, the poisonous latex of the African milk bush was used to kill cattle.[93]

In 2010 at The Meeting of the States Parties to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and Their Destruction in Geneva[94]the sanitary epidemiological reconnaissance was suggested as well-tested means for enhancing the monitoring of infections and parasitic agents, for the practical implementation of the International Health Regulations (2005). The aim was to prevent and minimize the consequences of natural outbreaks of dangerous infectious diseases as well as the threat of alleged use of biological weapons against BTWC States Parties.

Many countries require their active-duty military personnel to get vaccinated for certain diseases that may potentially be used as a bioweapon such as anthrax.[95]

It is important to note that most classical and modern biological weapons' pathogens can be obtained from a plant or an animal which is naturally infected.[96]

In the largest biological weapons accident knownthe anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in the Soviet Union in 1979sheep became ill with anthrax as far as 200 kilometers from the release point of the organism from a military facility in the southeastern portion of the city and still off-limits to visitors today, (see Sverdlovsk Anthrax leak).[97]

Thus, a robust surveillance system involving human clinicians and veterinarians may identify a bioweapons attack early in the course of an epidemic, permitting the prophylaxis of disease in the vast majority of people (and/or animals) exposed but not yet ill.[98]

For example, in the case of anthrax, it is likely that by 2436 hours after an attack, some small percentage of individuals (those with the compromised immune system or who had received a large dose of the organism due to proximity to the release point) will become ill with classical symptoms and signs (including a virtually unique chest X-ray finding, often recognized by public health officials if they receive timely reports).[99] The incubation period for humans is estimated to be about 11.8 days to 12.1 days. This suggested period is the first model that is independently consistent with data from the largest known human outbreak. These projections refine previous estimates of the distribution of early-onset cases after a release and support a recommended 60-day course of prophylactic antibiotic treatment for individuals exposed to low doses of anthrax.[100] By making these data available to local public health officials in real time, most models of anthrax epidemics indicate that more than 80% of an exposed population can receive antibiotic treatment before becoming symptomatic, and thus avoid the moderately high mortality of the disease.[99]

From most specific to least specific:[101]

The goal of biodefense is to integrate the sustained efforts of the national and homeland security, medical, public health, intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement communities. Health care providers and public health officers are among the first lines of defense. In some countries private, local, and provincial (state) capabilities are being augmented by and coordinated with federal assets, to provide layered defenses against biological weapon attacks. During the first Gulf War the United Nations activated a biological and chemical response team, Task Force Scorpio, to respond to any potential use of weapons of mass destruction on civilians.

The traditional approach toward protecting agriculture, food, and water: focusing on the natural or unintentional introduction of a disease is being strengthened by focused efforts to address current and anticipated future biological weapons threats that may be deliberate, multiple, and repetitive.

The growing threat of biowarfare agents and bioterrorism has led to the development of specific field tools that perform on-the-spot analysis and identification of encountered suspect materials. One such technology, being developed by researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), employs a "sandwich immunoassay", in which fluorescent dye-labeled antibodies aimed at specific pathogens are attached to silver and gold nanowires.[102]

In the Netherlands, the company TNO has designed Bioaerosol Single Particle Recognition eQuipment (BiosparQ). This system would be implemented into the national response plan for bioweapon attacks in the Netherlands.[103]

Researchers at Ben Gurion University in Israel are developing a different device called the BioPen, essentially a "Lab-in-a-Pen", which can detect known biological agents in under 20 minutes using an adaptation of the ELISA, a similar widely employed immunological technique, that in this case incorporates fiber optics.[104]

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Biological warfare - Wikipedia

History of biological warfare – Wikipedia

Before the 20th century, the use of biological agents took three major forms:

In the 20th century, sophisticated bacteriological and virological techniques allowed the production of significant stockpiles of weaponized bio-agents:

The earliest documented incident of the intention to use biological weapons is possibly recorded in Hittite texts of 15001200 BC, in which victims of tularemia were driven into enemy lands, causing an epidemic.[1] Although the Assyrians knew of ergot, a parasitic fungus of rye which produces ergotism when ingested, there is no evidence that they poisoned enemy wells with the fungus, as has been claimed.

According to Homer's epic poems about the legendary Trojan War, the Iliad and the Odyssey, spears and arrows were tipped with poison. During the First Sacred War in Greece, in about 590 BC, Athens and the Amphictionic League poisoned the water supply of the besieged town of Kirrha (near Delphi) with the toxic plant hellebore.[2] According to Herodotus, during the 4th century BC Scythian archers dipped their arrow tips into decomposing cadavers of humans and snakes[3] or in blood mixed with manure,[4] supposedly making them contaminated with dangerous bacterial agents like Clostridium perfringens and Clostridium tetani, and snake venom.[5]

In a naval battle against King Eumenes of Pergamon in 184 BC, Hannibal of Carthage had clay pots filled with venomous snakes and instructed his sailors to throw them onto the decks of enemy ships.[6] The Roman commander Manius Aquillius poisoned the wells of besieged enemy cities in about 130 BC. In about AD 198, the Parthian city of Hatra (near Mosul, Iraq) repulsed the Roman army led by Septimius Severus by hurling clay pots filled with live scorpions at them.[7] Like Scythian archers, Roman soldiers dipped their swords into excrements and cadavers too victims were commonly infected by tetanus as result.[8]

There are numerous other instances of the use of plant toxins, venoms, and other poisonous substances to create biological weapons in antiquity.[9]

The Mongol Empire established commercial and political connections between the Eastern and Western areas of the world, through the most mobile army ever seen. The armies, composed of the most rapidly moving travelers who had ever moved between the steppes of East Asia (where bubonic plague was and remains endemic among small rodents), managed to keep the chain of infection without a break until they reached, and infected, peoples and rodents who had never encountered it. The ensuing Black Death may have killed up to 25 million total, including China and roughly a third of the population of Europe and in the next decades, changing the course of Asian and European history.

Biologicals were extensively used in many parts of Africa from the sixteenth century AD, most of the time in the form of poisoned arrows, or powder spread on the war front as well as poisoning of horses and water supply of the enemy forces.[10][11] In Borgu, there were specific mixtures to kill, hypnotize, make the enemy bold, and to act as an antidote against the poison of the enemy as well. The creation of biologicals was reserved for a specific and professional class of medicine-men.[11] In South Sudan, the people of the Koalit Hills kept their country free of Arab invasions by using tsetse flies as a weapon of war.[12] Several accounts can give an idea of the efficiency of the biologicals. For example, Mockley-Ferryman in 1892 commented on the Dahomean invasion of Borgu, stating that "their (Borgawa) poisoned arrows enabled them to hold their own with the forces of Dahomey notwithstanding the latter's muskets."[11] The same scenario happened to Portuguese raiders in Senegambia when they were defeated by Mali's Gambian forces, and to John Hawkins in Sierra Leone where he lost a number of his men to poisoned arrows.[13]

During the Middle Ages, victims of the bubonic plague were used for biological attacks, often by flinging fomites such as infected corpses and excrement over castle walls using catapults. Bodies would be tied along with cannonballs and shot towards the city area. In 1346, during the siege of Caffa (now Feodossia, Crimea) the attacking Tartar Forces (subjugated by the Mongol empire under Genghis Khan more than a century earlier), used the bodies of Mongol warriors of the Golden Horde who had died of plague, as weapons. It has been speculated that this operation may have been responsible for the advent of the Black Death in Europe. At the time, the attackers thought that the stench was enough to kill them, though it was the disease that was deadly.[14][15]

At the siege of Thun-l'vque in 1340, during the Hundred Years' War, the attackers catapulted decomposing animals into the besieged area.[16]

In 1422, during the siege of Karlstein Castle in Bohemia, Hussite attackers used catapults to throw dead (but not plague-infected) bodies and 2000 carriage-loads of dung over the walls.[17]

English Longbowmen usually did not draw their arrows from a quiver; rather, they stuck their arrows into the ground in front of them. This allowed them to nock the arrows faster and the dirt and soil was likely to stick to the arrowheads, thus making the wounds much more likely to become infected.

The last known incident of using plague corpses for biological warfare may have occurred in 1710, when Russian forces attacked Swedish troops by flinging plague-infected corpses over the city walls of Reval (Tallinn) (although this is disputed).[18][19][20] However, during the 1785 siege of La Calle, Tunisian forces flung diseased clothing into the city.[17]

During Pontiac's Rebellion, in June 1763 a group of Native Americans laid siege to British-held Fort Pitt.[21][22] During a parley in the middle of the siege on June 24, Captain Simeon Ecuyer gave representatives of the besieging Delawares, including Turtleheart, two blankets and a handkerchief enclosed in small metal boxes that had been exposed to smallpox, in an attempt to spread the disease to the besieging Native warriors in order to end the siege.[23] William Trent, the trader turned militia commander who had come up with the plan, sent an invoice to the British colonial authorities in North America indicating that the purpose of giving the blankets was "to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians." The invoice was approved by General Thomas Gage, then serving as Commander-in-Chief, North America.[24] A reported outbreak that began the spring before left as many as one hundred Native Americans dead in Ohio Country from 1763 to 1764. It is not clear whether the smallpox was a result of the Fort Pitt incident or the virus was already present among the Delaware people as outbreaks happened on their own every dozen or so years[25] and the delegates were met again later and seemingly had not contracted smallpox.[26][27][28] Trade and combat also provided ample opportunity for transmission of the disease.[29]

A month later, Colonel Henry Bouquet, who was leading a relief attempt towards Fort Pitt, wrote to his superior Sir Jeffery Amherst to discuss the possibility of using smallpox-infested blankets to spread smallpox amongst Natives. Amherst wrote to Bouquet that: "Could it not be contrived to send the small pox among the disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them." Bouquet replied in a latter, writing that "I will try to inocculate [sic] the Indians by means of Blankets that may fall in their hands, taking care however not to get the disease myself. As it is pity to oppose good men against them, I wish we could make use of the Spaniard's Method, and hunt them with English Dogs. Supported by Rangers, and some Light Horse, who would I think effectively extirpate or remove that Vermine." After receiving Bouquet's response, Amherst wrote back to him, stating that "You will Do well to try to Innoculate [sic] the Indians by means of Blankets, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. I should be very glad your Scheme for Hunting them Down by Dogs could take Effect, but England is at too great a Distance to think of that at present."[30][31][21]

Many Aboriginal Australians have claimed that smallpox outbreaks in Australia were a deliberate result of European colonisation,[32] though this possibility has only been raised by historians from the 1980s onwards, when Dr. Noel Butlin suggested "there are some possibilities that... disease could have been used deliberately as an exterminating agent."[33]

In 1997, scholar David Day claimed there "remains considerable circumstantial evidence to suggest that officers other than Phillip, or perhaps convicts or soldiers... deliberately spread smallpox among aborigines",[34] and in 2000, Dr. John Lambert argued that "strong circumstantial evidence suggests the smallpox epidemic which ravaged Aborigines in 1789, may have resulted from deliberate infection."[35]

Judy Campbell argued in 2002 that it is highly improbable that the First Fleet was the source of the epidemic as "smallpox had not occurred in any members of the First Fleet"; the only possible source of infection from the Fleet being exposure to variolous matter imported for the purposes of inoculation against smallpox. Campbell argued that, while there has been considerable speculation about a hypothetical exposure to the First Fleet's variolous matter, there was no evidence that Aboriginal people were ever actually exposed to it. She pointed to regular contact between fishing fleets from the Indonesia archipelago, where smallpox was always present, and Aboriginal people in Australia's North as a more likely source for the introduction of smallpox. She notes that while these fishermen are generally referred to as 'Macassans', referring to the port of Macassar on the island of Sulawesi from which most of the fishermen originated, "some travelled from islands as distant as New Guinea". She noted that there is little disagreement that the smallpox epidemic of the 1860s was contracted from Macassan fishermen and spread through the Aboriginal population by Aborigines fleeing outbreaks and also via their traditional social, kinship and trading networks. She argued that the 178990 epidemic followed the same pattern.[36]

These claims are controversial as it is argued that any smallpox virus brought to New South Wales probably would have been sterilised by heat and humidity encountered during the voyage of the First Fleet from England and incapable of biological warfare. However, in 2007, Christopher Warren demonstrated that any smallpox which might have been carried onboard the First Fleet may have been still viable upon landing in Australia.[37] Since them, some scholars have argued that smallpox in Australia was deliberately spread by the inhabitants of the British penal colony at Port Jackson in 1789.[38][39]

In 2013, Warren reviewed the issue and argued that smallpox did not spread across Australia before 1824 and showed that there was no smallpox at Macassar that could have caused the outbreak at Sydney. Warren, however, did not address the issue of persons who joined the Macassan fleet from other islands and from parts of Sulawesi other than the port of Macassar. Warren concluded that the British were "the most likely candidates to have released smallpox" near Sydney Cove in 1789. Warren proposed that the British had no choice as they were confronted with dire circumstances when, among other factors, they ran out of ammunition for their muskets; he also used Aboriginal oral tradition and archaeological records from indigenous gravesites to analyse the cause and effect of the spread of smallpox in 1789.[40]

Prior to the publication of Warren's article (2013), a professor of physiology John Carmody argued that the epidemic was an outbreak of chickenpox which took a drastic toll on an Aboriginal population without immunological resistance.[41] With regard to how smallpox might have reached the Sydney region, Dr Carmody said: "There is absolutely no evidence to support any of the theories and some of them are fanciful and far-fetched.."[42][43] Warren argued against the chickenpox theory at endnote 3 of Smallpox at Sydney Cove Who, When, Why?.[44] However, in a 2014 joint paper on historic Aboriginal demography, Carmody and the Australian National University's Boyd Hunter argued that the recorded behavior of the epidemic ruled out smallpox and indicated chickenpox.[45]

By the turn of the 20th century, advances in microbiology had made thinking about "germ warfare" part of the zeitgeist. Jack London, in his short story '"Yah! Yah! Yah!"' (1909), described a punitive European expedition to a South Pacific island deliberately exposing the Polynesian population to measles, of which many of them died. London wrote another science fiction tale the following year, "The Unparalleled Invasion" (1910), in which the Western nations wipe out all of China with a biological attack.

During the First World War (19141918), the Empire of Germany made some early attempts at anti-agriculture biological warfare. Those attempts were made by special sabotage group headed by Rudolf Nadolny. Using diplomatic pouches and couriers, the German General Staff supplied small teams of saboteurs in the Russian Duchy of Finland, and in the then-neutral countries of Romania, the United States, and Argentina.[46] In Finland, saboteurs mounted on reindeer placed ampoules of anthrax in stables of Russian horses in 1916.[47] Anthrax was also supplied to the German military attach in Bucharest, as was glanders, which was employed against livestock destined for Allied service. German intelligence officer and US citizen Dr. Anton Casimir Dilger established a secret lab in the basement of his sister's home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, that produced glanders which was used to infect livestock in ports and inland collection points including, at least, Newport News, Norfolk, Baltimore, and New York City, and probably St. Louis and Covington, Kentucky. In Argentina, German agents also employed glanders in the port of Buenos Aires and also tried to ruin wheat harvests with a destructive fungus. Also, Germany itself became a victim of similar attacks horses bound for Germany were infected with Burkholderia by French operatives in Switzerland.[48]

The Geneva Protocol of 1925 prohibited the use of chemical weapons and biological weapons, but said nothing about experimentation, production, storage, or transfer; later treaties did cover these aspects. Twentieth-century advances in microbiology enabled the first pure-culture biological agents to be developed by World War II.

In the interwar period, little research was done in biological warfare in both Britain and the United States at first. In the United Kingdom the preoccupation was mainly in withstanding the anticipated conventional bombing attacks that would be unleashed in the event of war with Germany. As tensions increased, Sir Frederick Banting began lobbying the British government to establish a research program into the research and development of biological weapons to effectively deter the Germans from launching a biological attack. Banting proposed a number of innovative schemes for the dissemination of pathogens, including aerial-spray attacks and germs distributed through the mail system.

With the onset of hostilities, the Ministry of Supply finally established a biological weapons programme at Porton Down, headed by the microbiologist Paul Fildes. The research was championed by Winston Churchill and soon tularemia, anthrax, brucellosis, and botulism toxins had been effectively weaponized. In particular, Gruinard Island in Scotland, during a series of extensive tests, was contaminated with anthrax for the next 48 years. Although Britain never offensively used the biological weapons it developed, its program was the first to successfully weaponize a variety of deadly pathogens and bring them into industrial production.[49] Other nations, notably France and Japan, had begun their own biological-weapons programs.[50]

When the United States entered the war, mounting British pressure for the creation of a similar research program for an Allied pooling of resources led to the creation of a large industrial complex at Fort Detrick, Maryland in 1942 under the direction of George W. Merck.[51] The biological and chemical weapons developed during that period were tested at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. Soon there were facilities for the mass production of anthrax spores, brucellosis, and botulism toxins, although the war was over before these weapons could be of much operational use.[52]

However, the most notorious program of the period was run by the secret Imperial Japanese Army Unit 731 during the war, based at Pingfan in Manchuria and commanded by Lieutenant General Shir Ishii. This unit did research on BW, conducted often fatal human experiments on prisoners, and produced biological weapons for combat use.[53] Although the Japanese effort lacked the technological sophistication of the American or British programs, it far outstripped them in its widespread application and indiscriminate brutality. Biological weapons were used against both Chinese soldiers and civilians in several military campaigns. Three veterans of Unit 731 testified in a 1989 interview to the Asahi Shimbun that they contaminated the Horustein river with typhoid near the Soviet troops during the Battle of Khalkhin Gol.[54] In 1940, the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force bombed Ningbo with ceramic bombs full of fleas carrying the bubonic plague.[55] A film showing this operation was seen by the imperial princes Tsuneyoshi Takeda and Takahito Mikasa during a screening made by mastermind Shiro Ishii.[56] During the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials the accused, such as Major General Kiyashi Kawashima, testified that as early as 1941 some 40 members of Unit 731 air-dropped plague-contaminated fleas on Changde. These operations caused epidemic plague outbreaks.[57]

Many of these operations were ineffective due to inefficient delivery systems, using disease-bearing insects rather than dispersing the agent as a bioaerosol cloud.[53]

Ban Shigeo, a technician at the Japanese Army's 9th Technical Research Institute, left an account of the activities at the Institute which was published in "The Truth About the Army Noborito Institute".[58] Ban included an account of his trip to Nanking in 1941 to participate in the testing of poisons on Chinese prisoners.[58] His testimony tied the Noborito Institute to the infamous Unit 731, which participated in biomedical research.[58]

During the final months of World War II, Japan planned to utilize plague as a biological weapon against U.S. civilians in San Diego, California, during Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night. They hoped that it would kill tens of thousands of U.S. civilians and thereby dissuade America from attacking Japan. The plan was set to launch on September 22, 1945, at night, but it never came into fruition due to Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945.[59][60][61][62]

When the war ended, the US Army quietly enlisted certain members of Noborito in its efforts against the communist camp in the early years of the Cold War.[58] The head of Unit 731, Shiro Ishii, was granted immunity from war crimes prosecution in exchange for providing information to the United States on the Unit's activities.[63] Allegations were made that a "chemical section" of a US clandestine unit hidden within Yokosuka naval base was operational during the Korean War, and then worked on unspecified projects inside the United States from 1955 to 1959, before returning to Japan to enter the private sector.[58][64]

Some of the Unit 731 personnel were imprisoned by the Soviets[citation needed], and may have been a potential source of information on Japanese weaponization.

Considerable research into BW was undertaken throughout the Cold War era by the US, UK and USSR, and probably other major nations as well, although it is generally believed that such weapons were never used.

In Britain, the 1950s saw the weaponization of plague, brucellosis, tularemia and later equine encephalomyelitis and vaccinia viruses. Trial tests at sea were carried out including Operation Cauldron off Stornoway in 1952. The programme was cancelled in 1956, when the British government unilaterally renounced the use of biological and chemical weapons.

The United States initiated its weaponization efforts with disease vectors in 1953, focused on Plague-fleas, EEE-mosquitoes, and yellow fever mosquitoes (OJ-AP).[citation needed] However, US medical scientists in occupied Japan undertook extensive research on insect vectors, with the assistance of former Unit 731 staff, as early as 1946.[63]

The United States Army Chemical Corps then initiated a crash program to weaponize anthrax (N) in the E61 1/2-lb hour-glass bomblet. Though the program was successful in meeting its development goals, the lack of validation on the infectivity of anthrax stalled standardization.[citation needed] The United States Air Force was also unsatisfied with the operational qualities of the M114/US bursting bomblet and labeled it an interim item until the Chemical Corps could deliver a superior weapon.[citation needed]

Around 1950 the Chemical Corps also initiated a program to weaponize tularemia (UL). Shortly after the E61/N failed to make standardization, tularemia was standardized in the 3.4" M143 bursting spherical bomblet. This was intended for delivery by the MGM-29 Sergeant missile warhead and could produce 50% infection over a 7-square-mile (18km2) area.[65] Although tularemia is treatable by antibiotics, treatment does not shorten the course of the disease. US conscientious objectors were used as consenting test subjects for tularemia in a program known as Operation Whitecoat.[66] There were also many unpublicized tests carried out in public places with bio-agent simulants during the Cold War.[67]

In addition to the use of bursting bomblets for creating biological aerosols, the Chemical Corps started investigating aerosol-generating bomblets in the 1950s. The E99 was the first workable design, but was too complex to be manufactured. By the late 1950s the 4.5" E120 spraying spherical bomblet was developed; a B-47 bomber with a SUU-24/A dispenser could infect 50% or more of the population of a 16-square-mile (41km2) area with tularemia with the E120.[68] The E120 was later superseded by dry-type agents.

Dry-type biologicals resemble talcum powder, and can be disseminated as aerosols using gas expulsion devices instead of a burster or complex sprayer.[citation needed] The Chemical Corps developed Flettner rotor bomblets and later triangular bomblets for wider coverage due to improved glide angles over Magnus-lift spherical bomblets.[69] Weapons of this type were in advanced development by the time the program ended.[69]

From January 1962, Rocky Mountain Arsenal "grew, purified and biodemilitarized" plant pathogen Wheat Stem Rust (Agent TX), Puccinia graminis, var. tritici, for the Air Force biological anti-crop program. TX-treated grain was grown at the Arsenal from 19621968 in Sections 2326. Unprocessed TX was also transported from Beale AFB for purification, storage, and disposal.[70] Trichothecenes Mycotoxin is a toxin that can be extracted from Wheat Stem Rust and Rice Blast and can kill or incapacitate depending on the concentration used. The "red mold disease" of wheat and barley in Japan is prevalent in the region that faces the Pacific Ocean. Toxic trichothecenes, including nivalenol, deoxynivalenol, and monoace tylnivalenol (fusarenon- X) from Fusarium nivale, can be isolated from moldy grains. In the suburbs of Tokyo, an illness similar to "red mold disease" was described in an outbreak of a food borne disease, as a result of the consumption of Fusarium- infected rice. Ingestion of moldy grains that are contaminated with trichothecenes has been associated with mycotoxicosis.[71]

Although there is no evidence that biological weapons were used by the United States, China and North Korea accused the US of large-scale field testing of BW against them during the Korean War (19501953). At the time of the Korean War the United States had only weaponized one agent, brucellosis ("Agent US"), which is caused by Brucella suis. The original weaponized form used the M114 bursting bomblet in M33 cluster bombs. While the specific form of the biological bomb was classified until some years after the Korean War, in the various exhibits of biological weapons that Korea alleged were dropped on their country nothing resembled an M114 bomblet. There were ceramic containers that had some similarity to Japanese weapons used against the Chinese in World War II, developed by Unit 731.[53][72]

Cuba also accused the United States of spreading human and animal disease on their island nation.[73][74]

During the 1948 19471949 Palestine war, International Red Cross reports raised suspicion that the Israeli Haganah militia had released Salmonella typhi bacteria into the water supply for the city of Acre, causing an outbreak of typhoid among the inhabitants. Egyptian troops later claimed to have captured disguised Haganah soldiers near wells in Gaza, whom they executed for allegedly attempting another attack. Israel denies these allegations.[75][76]

In mid-1969, the UK and the Warsaw Pact, separately, introduced proposals to the UN to ban biological weapons, which would lead to the signing of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in 1972. United States President Richard Nixon signed an executive order in November 1969, which stopped production of biological weapons in the United States and allowed only scientific research of lethal biological agents and defensive measures such as immunization and biosafety. The biological munition stockpiles were destroyed, and approximately 2,200 researchers became redundant.[77]

Special munitions for the United States Special Forces and the CIA and the Big Five Weapons for the military were destroyed in accordance with Nixon's executive order to end the offensive program. The CIA maintained its collection of biologicals well into 1975 when it became the subject of the senate Church Committee.

The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention was signed by the US, UK, USSR and other nations, as a ban on "development, production and stockpiling of microbes or their poisonous products except in amounts necessary for protective and peaceful research" in 1972. The convention bound its signatories to a far more stringent set of regulations than had been envisioned by the 1925 Geneva Protocols. By 1996, 137 countries had signed the treaty; however it is believed that since the signing of the Convention the number of countries capable of producing such weapons has increased.

The Soviet Union continued research and production of offensive biological weapons in a program called Biopreparat, despite having signed the convention. The United States had no solid proof of this program until Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik defected in 1989, and Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, the first deputy director of Biopreparat defected in 1992. Pathogens developed by the organization would be used in open-air trials. It is known that Vozrozhdeniye Island, located in the Aral Sea, was used as a testing site.[78] In 1971, such testing led to the accidental aerosol release of smallpox over the Aral Sea and a subsequent smallpox epidemic.[79]

During the closing stages of the Rhodesian Bush War, the Rhodesian government resorted to use chemical and biological warfare agents. Watercourses at several sites inside the Mozambique border were deliberately contaminated with cholera. These biological attacks had little overall impact on the fighting capability of ZANLA, but resulted in at least 809 recorded deaths of insurgents. It also caused considerable distress to the local population. The Rhodesians also experimented with several other pathogens and toxins for use in their counterinsurgency.[80]

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq admitted to the United Nations inspection team to having produced 19,000 liters of concentrated botulinum toxin, of which approximately 10,000 L were loaded into military weapons; the 19,000 liters have never been fully accounted for. This is approximately three times the amount needed to kill the entire current human population by inhalation,[81]although in practice it would be impossible to distribute it so efficiently, and, unless it is protected from oxygen, it deteriorates in storage.[82]

According to the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment 8 countries were generally reported as having undeclared offensive biological warfare programs in 1995: China, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, North Korea, Syria and Taiwan. Five countries had admitted to having had offensive weapon or development programs in the past: United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada.[83] Offensive BW programs in Iraq were dismantled by Coalition Forces and the UN after the first Gulf War (199091), although an Iraqi military BW program was covertly maintained in defiance of international agreements until it was apparently abandoned during 1995 and 1996.[84]

On September 18, 2001, and for a few days thereafter, several letters were received by members of the U.S. Congress and American media outlets which contained intentionally prepared anthrax spores; the attack sickened at least 22 people of whom five died. The identity of the bioterrorist remained unknown until 2008, when an official suspect, who had committed suicide, was named. (See 2001 anthrax attacks.)

Suspicions of an ongoing Iraqi biological warfare program were not substantiated in the wake of the March 2003 invasion of that country. Later that year, however, Muammar Gaddafi was persuaded to terminate Libya's biological warfare program. In 2008, according to a U.S. Congressional Research Service report, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Syria and Taiwan are considered, with varying degrees of certainty, to have some BW capability.[85] According to the same 2008 report by the U.S. Congressional Research Service, "Developments in biotechnology, including genetic engineering, mayproduce a wide variety of live agents and toxins that are difficult todetect and counter; and new chemical warfare agents and mixtures of chemical weapons andbiowarfare agents are being developed . . . Countries are using the natural overlap between weapons andcivilian applications of chemical and biological materials to concealchemical weapon and bioweapon production." By 2011, 165 countries had officially joined the BWC and pledged to disavow biological weapons.[86]

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Smallpox in Canada | The Canadian Encyclopedia

A woman with smallpox in Prince Edward Island, c. 1909.

Smallpox is an infectious disease most commonly caused by the variola major virus. Its symptoms include fever, headache, vomiting, mouth sores and an extensive skin rash. The rash blistersand scabs, leaving pitted scars or pocks. Smallpox can cause pneumonia, blindness, and infection in joints and bones. There is also a less virulent form of smallpox called alastrim, caused by the variola minor virus.

Smallpox spreads in saliva droplets and through contact with the infectious rash. It can be passed between people and from contaminated objects to people. The rate of death from variola major is 30 per cent but from variola minor it is 1 per cent or less.

Smallpox crossed the Atlantic Ocean when European empires began to expand in the 16th century. The disease had long decimated populations and caused terror. It was first reported in New France in 1616 near Tadoussac, the colonys first fur-trading post. The budding fur trade repeatedlyexposed nearbyInnu and Algonquin communities to the disease. Many fell ill and died due to their lackof immunity. The disease spread into the Maritime,James Bay and Great Lakes regions.

Between 1634 and 1640, Jesuit priests introduced smallpox into Wendake (Huronia),west of Lake Simcoe and south of Georgian Bay. Priests insisted on baptizing sick and dyingHuron-Wendat.However,the priests presence contributed to the spread of the disease. Due to smallpox and other infectious diseases, the Huron-Wendat population declined by roughly 60 per cent by 1640.

Smallpox played a large role in the struggles between the French, British and Americans to control the St. Lawrence region. In 173233, a smallpox epidemic swept through Louisbourg, a French settlement in what is now Nova Scotia. It killed at least 150 people, including people the French had enslaved and brought to the colony. Another epidemic hit Louisbourg in 1755. This was the worst epidemic in New France. It was part of a larger epidemic that swept acrossNorth America between 1755 and 1782. During the Seven Years War, an outbreak forced de Vaudreuil,the French commander, to delay his invasion of Fort Oswego in what is now New York State. In 1763, the British under Jeffrey Amherst used blankets exposedto smallpox as germ warfare in an attempt to subdue the First Nations resistance led byObwandiyag (Pontiac). In 1775, during theAmerican Revolution,American troops besiegingQuebec City were stricken with smallpox.

As European fur-trading posts moved west, so did the virus. From 1779 to 1783, smallpox spread to areas that now form parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Some communities of Plains Indigenous peoples lost 75 per centor more of their members. It is estimated that more than half of First Nations people living along the Saskatchewan River(territory of the Nehiyawak, Saulteaux, Assiniboine and Niitsitapi) died of smallpox orepidemic-related starvation.

In 1838, a second smallpox epidemic struck the Prairies. The epidemic began with an infected person aboard an American Fur Company steamship on the Missouri River. The captain refusedto halt or quarantine the ship. The virus eventually reached Forts Union and McKenzie, in what is now North Dakota and Montana. Traders representing various nations, including the Assiniboine and Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), frequented the affected American trading posts.

Hudsons Bay Company employees started giving inoculations and teaching the technique to others after the two Prairie epidemics. Smallpox changed power structures andalliances, as well as land use and occupancy. Some distinct cultural groups disappeared as almost all of their members died. Survivors sometimes joined other ethnic groups.

Mtis communities in what is now central Alberta experienced a smallpox outbreak in 1870. St. Alberts Mtis populationdeclined by roughly 37 per cent that year.

Smallpox first reached the Pacific Northwest in the late 18th century. In the late 1770s, the disease killed many members of Tlingit, Haida,Kwakwakawakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, Salish and Ktunaxacommunities. In 1782, roughly two-thirds of the St:l population died after contracting smallpox.

In 1862, a person infected with smallpox arrived in Victoria aboard a steamship travelling from San Francisco. The disease spread to an encampment north of the city, where tradersfrom many First Nations stayed. The few efforts colonists made to control the disease were disorganized. Some demanded the eviction of Indigenous people from colonial communities to protect themselves from the disease. When the residents of the north encampment left for their homelands, the disease spread across the colonies of Vancouver Islandand British Columbia. The disease had devastating impacts on many peoples, including the nations of Kwakwakawakw, Tlingit, Heiltsuk, Haida, Tsimshianand Tilhqotin, as well as some Coast Salish and Interior Salish nations. On the coast alone, some 14,000 Indigenous people died, representing a loss of roughly half of the regions population.

The1862 epidemic left mass gravesites, empty settlements and grieving survivors. It also impacted governance in some nations. Stories, knowledge and skills were lost with those who carried them. The massive population decline paved the way for coloniststo move further into Indigenous lands without establishing treaty relations. Fear ofsmallpox was one cause of the Chilcotin War of 1864 (see Tilhqotin).

Beginning in 1768, arm-to-arm variolation, an inoculation using the live smallpox virus, became more widely practised in North America and helped limit the spread of the disease. Reverend John Clinch introduced a safer vaccine in North America in 1798.After Confederation, the provinces made it mandatory to vaccinate schoolchildren. They also passed laws allowing municipalities and townships to carry out general vaccinationwhen an epidemic threatened. However, many people opposed mandatory vaccination. Anti-vaccinationists were critical of the unclean administration of vaccines and viewed vaccines asa way for public health units to avoid more costly sanitary measures. Some believed that vaccines would cause illness and suffering. Anti-vaccinationists also viewed mandatoryvaccination as a breach of individual rights. Many French Canadians in Montreal opposed vaccination during a major smallpox outbreak in 1885.Riots broke out in the city, in part as a response to officials attempts to enforce control measures.

Modern smallpox vaccine production began in Canada in 1916. Nevertheless, a notable outbreak occurred in Windsor, Ontarioin 1924. Sixty-seven unvaccinated people contracted the disease and thirty-two died. Smallpox persisted in Canada until 1946, when vaccination campaigns eliminated it. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared it globally eradicated in 1979 aftera 10-year campaign in South America, Africa and Asia. Smallpox is the first major disease to have been wiped out by public health measures.

Canadian scientists played a key role in the eradication. Connaught Laboratories, based in Palmerston, Ontario, consulted on vaccine production across the Americas.Between 1980 and 2001, Connaught and its successors kept smallpox samples in a deep-freeze in case the vaccine was needed in the future. After 9/11, in the context of new fearsof bioterrorism, pharmaceutical company Aventis Pasteur retrieved the stocks to create a new stockpile of the vaccine.

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Allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War – Wikipedia

Allegations of US biological warfare

Allegations that the United States military used biological weapons in the Korean War (June 1950 July 1953) were raised by the governments of People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. The claims were first raised in 1951. The story was covered by the worldwide press and led to a highly publicized international investigation in 1952. Secretary of State Dean Acheson and other American and allied government officials denounced the allegations as a hoax. Subsequent scholars are split about the truth of the claims.

Until the end of World War II, Japan operated a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit called Unit 731 in Harbin (now China). The unit's activities, including human experimentation, were documented by the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials conducted by the Soviet Union in December 1949. However, at that time, the US government described the Khabarovsk trials as "vicious and unfounded propaganda".[1] It was later revealed that the accusations made against the Japanese military were correct. The US government had taken over the research at the end of the war and had then covered up the program.[2] Leaders of Unit 731 were exempted from war crimes prosecution by the United States and then placed on the payroll of the US.[3]

On 30 June 1950, soon after the outbreak of the Korean War, the US Defense Secretary George Marshall received the Report of the Committee on Chemical, Biological and Radiological Warfare and Recommendations, which advocated urgent development of a biological weapons program.[4] The biological weapons research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland was expanded, and a new one in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, was developed.[5]

During 1951, as the war turned against the United States, the Chinese and North Koreans made vague allegations of biological warfare, but these were not pursued.[6][7][8] General Matthew Ridgway, United Nations Commander in Korea, denounced the initial charges as early as May 1951. He accused the communists of spreading "deliberate lies". A few days later, Vice Admiral Charles Turner Joy repeated the denials.[8]

On 28 January 1952, the Chinese People's Volunteer Army headquarters received a report of a smallpox outbreak southeast of Incheon. From February to March 1952, more bulletins reported disease outbreaks in the area of Chorwon, Pyongyang, Kimhwa and even Manchuria.[9] The Chinese soon became concerned when 13 Korean and 16 Chinese soldiers contracted cholera and the plague, while another 44 recently deceased were tested positive for meningitis.[10] Although the Chinese and the North Koreans did not know exactly how the soldiers contracted the diseases, the suspicions soon fell on the Americans.[9]

On 22 February 1952, the North Korean Foreign Minister, Bak Hon Yon, made a formal allegation that American planes had been dropping infected insects onto North Korea. He added that the Americans were "openly collaborating with the Japanese bacteriological war criminals, the former jackals of the Japanese militarists whose crimes are attested to by irrefutable evidence. Among the Japanese war criminals sent to Korea were Shiro Ishii, Jiro Wakamatsu and Masajo Kitano."[11][unreliable source] Bak's accusations were immediately denied by the US government. The accusation was supported by eye-witness accounts by the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett and others.[12][13]

In June 1952 the United States proposed to the United Nations Security Council that the Council request the International Red Cross investigate the allegations. The Soviet Union vetoed the American resolution due to extensive US influence inside the Red Cross, and, along with its allies, continued to insist on the veracity of the biological warfare accusations.[8]

In February 1953, China and North Korea produced two captured US Marine Corps pilots to support the allegations. Colonel Frank Schwable was reported to have stated that: "The basic objective was at that time to get under field conditions various elements of bacteriological warfare and possibly expand field tests at a later date into an element of regular combat operations."[8] Schwable's statement said that B-29s flew biological warfare missions to Korea from airfields in American-occupied Okinawa starting in November 1951.[14] Schwable's statement was obtained following months of torture and abuse at the hands of his captors, according to the US military.[15] Other captured Americans such as Colonel Walker "Bud" Mahurin made similar statements.[8][15]

Upon release the prisoners of war repudiated their confessions which they said had been extracted by torture.[16] However, the retractions happened in front of military cameras after the United States government threatened to charge the POWs with treason for cooperating with their captors.[citation needed] When Kenneth Enoch, one of the former POWs who retracted his confession, was tracked down in 2010 by Al Jazeera reporters he denied being ill-treated or indoctrinated by the North Korean or Chinese guards.[17]

When the International Red Cross and the World Health Organization ruled out biological warfare, the Chinese government denounced them as being biased by the influence of US, and arranged an investigation by the Soviet-affiliated World Peace Council.[18][19] The World Peace Council set up the "International Scientific Commission for the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in China and Korea" (ISC). This commission had several distinguished scientists and doctors from France, Italy, Sweden, Brazil and Soviet Union, including renowned British biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham. The commission's findings included dozens of eyewitnesses, testimonies from doctors, medical samples from the deceased, bomb casings as well as four American Korean War prisoners who confirmed the US use of biological warfare.[20][21][18] On 15 September 1952, the final report was signed, stating that the US was experimenting with biological weapons in Korea.[20][22]

The report suggested a link to the World War II Japanese germ warfare Unit 731.[20][23] Former Unit 731 members Shir Ishii, Masaji Kitano, and Ryoichi Naito, and other Japanese biological warfare experts were often named in the allegations.[8] Former members of Unit 731 were linked initially, by a Communist news agency, to a freighter that allegedly carried them and all equipment necessary to mount a biological warfare campaign to Korea in 1951.[8] The commission placed credence on allegations that Ishii made two visits to South Korea in early 1952, and another one in March 1953.[8] The official consensus in China was that biological weapons created from an American-Japanese collaboration were used in the Korean episode.[24][8] Citing the claims Ishii had visited South Korea, the report stated: "Whether occupation authorities in Japan had fostered his activities, and whether the American Far Eastern Command was engaged in making use of methods essentially Japanese, were questions which could hardly have been absent from the minds of members of the Commission."[25]

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) publicized these claims in its 1952 "Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea",[26] as did US journalist John W. Powell.[27]

The Communists also alleged that US Brigadier General Crawford Sams had carried out a secret mission behind their lines at Wonsan in March 1951, testing biological weapons.[28] The US government said that he had actually been investigating a reported outbreak of bubonic plague in North Korea, but had determined it was hemorrhagic smallpox. Sams' mission had been launched from the US Navy's LCI(L)-1091, which had been converted to a laboratory ship in 1951.[29] During its time in Korea, the ship was assigned as an epidemiological control ship[30] for Fleet Epidemic Disease Control Unit No. 1, a part of the US effort to combat malaria in Korea.[31] After covert missions in North Korea, from October to September 1951, LSIL-1091 was at Koje-do testing residents and refugees for malaria.[32]

Some authors have emphasized Sams' relationship with biological warfare actors, which both China and North Korea found suspicious. According to Japanese historian, Takemae Eiji, Sams had a relationship with the former members of Imperial Japan's biological warfare department, Unit 731. Appointed by General MacArthur as the head of the post-war Occupation government's Public Health & Welfare Section, Sams was instrumental in founding Japan's National Institute of Health, whose first deputy director, Kojima Sabur, was an Ishii associate. Sabur then recruited other former former Unit 731 personnel for the new Institute. According to Eiji, "Sams and others in PH&W not only knew of these men's sordid pasts but actively solicited their cooperation to further PH&W goals.... Sams and his staff became, in effect, co-conspirators after the fact in those wartime crimes".[33]

The US and its allies responded by describing the allegations as a hoax.[12] The US government declared the IADL to be a Communist front organization since 1950, and charged Powell with sedition.[27][34][35] In a highly publicized 1959 trial, Powell was indicted on 13 counts of sedition for reporting on the allegations, while two of his editors were indicted on one count of sedition each. All charges were dropped after the trial ended in mistrial after five years. However, Powell was then blacklisted and thereafter unable to secure work as a journalist for the rest of his life.[27]

According to news reports during the trial, the U.S. Attorney in the case, James B. Schnake, submitted an affidavit in which he stated the U.S. government was prepared to stipulate "that during the period Jan. 1, 1949, through July 27, 1953, the United States Army had a capability to wage both chemical and biological warfare offensively and defensively.... Responsible officials in the Department of Defense have determined the revelations of detailed records on this subject would be highly detrimental to the national security."[36]

American authorities long denied the charges of postwar Japanese-United States cooperation in biological warfare developments, despite later incontrovertible proof that the US pardoned Unit 731 in exchange for their research, according to Sheldon H. Harris.[8] But in December 1998, in a letter from Department of Justice official Eli Rosenbaum to Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a U.S. government official admitted that the U.S. had made an amnesty agreement with Shiro Ishii and personnel from Unit 731, despite known crimes committed by Ishii and associates concerning illegal human experimentation. The letter wasn't made public until published by Jeffrey Kaye in May 2017.[37][unreliable source]

Australian journalist, Denis Warner, suggested that the story was concocted by Wilfred Burchett as part of his alleged role as a KGB agent of influence. Warner pointed out the similarity of the allegations to a science fiction story by Jack London, a favorite author of Burchett's.[38] However, the notion that Burchett originated the "hoax" has been decisively refuted by one of his most trenchant critics, Tibor Mray.[39] Mray worked as a correspondent for the Hungarian People's Republic during the war but fled the country after the abortive Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Now a staunch anti-Communist, he has confirmed that he saw clusters of flies crawling on ice.[40] Mray has argued the evidence was the result of an elaborate conspiracy: "Now somehow or other these flies must have been brought there... the work must have been carried out by a large network covering the whole of North Korea."[41]

Recent research has indicated that, regardless of the accuracy of the allegations, the Chinese acted as if they were true.[9] After learning of the outbreaks, Mao Zedong immediately requested Soviet assistance on disease preventions, while the Chinese People's Liberation Army General Logistics Department was mobilized for anti-bacteriological warfare.[42] On the Korean battlefield, four anti-bacteriological warfare research centers were soon set up, while about 5.8 million doses of vaccine and 200,000 gas masks were delivered to the front.[43] Within China, 66 quarantine stations were also set up along the Chinese borders, while about 5 million Chinese in Manchuria were inoculated.[42] The Chinese government also initiated the "Patriotic Health and Epidemic Prevention Campaign" and directed every citizen to kill flies, mosquitoes and fleas.[42] These disease prevention measures soon resulted in an improvement of health for Communist soldiers on the Korean battlefield.[43] Tibor Mray provided eyewitness account of North Korea conducting an "unprecedented campaign of public health" during the allegation.[44]

Some historians have offered other explanations to the disease outbreaks during the spring of 1952. For example, it has been noted that spring time is usually a period of epidemics within China and North Korea,[42] and years of warfare had also caused a breakdown in the Korean health care system. US military historians have argued that under these circumstances, diseases could easily spread throughout the entire military and civilian populations within Korea.[45][46]

In 1986, Australian historian Gavan McCormack argued that the claim of US biological warfare use was "far from inherently implausible", pointing out that one of the POWs who confessed, Walker Mahurin, was in fact associated with Fort Detrick.[47] He also pointed out that, as the deployment of nuclear and chemical weapons was considered, there is no reason to believe that ethical principles would have overruled the resort to biological warfare.[48] He also suggested that the outbreak in 1951 of viral haemorrhagic fever, which had previously been unknown in Korea, was linked to biological warfare.[49] However, by 2004, McCormack had changed his mind. In a book about North Korea, he wrote that the alleged Soviet archival documents published by Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg in 1998 (see discussion in section on "Endicott and Hagerman" below) had provided a fragmentary, but persuasive, explanation of what had actually happened in relation to the germ warfare charges. According to McCormack, Analysis of these documents makes it seem almost certain that there was a vigorous, complex, contrived, and fraudulent international campaign on the part of the North Koreans, the Chinese, and the Russians a gigantic fraud.[50]

In a 1988 book Korea: The Unknown War, historians Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings also suggested the claims might be true.[51][52] They questioned whether the North Koreans and the Chinese could have "mounted a spectacular piece of fraudulent theater, involving the mobilization of thousands", getting scores of Chinese doctors, scientists, and senior officials "to fake evidence, lie and invent medical fraud", allocating much of their already stretched logistical resource to defend against biological warfare, all for a propaganda campaign against US.[52]

In 1989, a British study of Unit 731 strongly supported the theory of United StatesJapanese biological warfare culpability in Korea.[8]

In 1995, using available Chinese documents, historian Shu Guang Zhang of the University of Maryland[53] stated that there is little, if any information that currently exists on the Chinese side which explains how the Chinese scientists came up with the conclusion of US biological warfare during the disease outbreak in the spring of 1952. Zhang further theorized that the allegation was caused by unfounded rumors and scientific investigations on the allegation was purposely ignored on the Chinese side for the sake of domestic and international propaganda.[54]

Published in Japan in 2001, the book Rikugun Noborito Kenkyujo no shinjitsu or The Truth About the Army Noborito Institute stated that members of Japan's Unit 731 also worked for the "chemical section" of a US clandestine unit hidden within Yokosuka Naval Base during the Korean War as well as on projects inside the United States from 1955 to 1959.[55]

According to Jeffrey Kaye's interpretation of a "Memorandum of Conversation" from the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) dated 6 July 1953 (and declassified and released by the CIA in 2006),[56] the US protestations at the United Nations did not mean the US was serious about conducting any investigation into biological warfare charges, despite what the government said publicly. The reason the US didn't want any investigation was because an "actual investigation" would reveal military operations, "which, if revealed, could do us psychological as well as military damage". The memorandum, which had been sent to CIA director Allen Dulles, specifically stated as an example of what could be revealed "Eighth Army preparations or operations (e.g. chemical warfare)."[57][unreliable source?]

Investigative journalist Simon Winchester concluded in 2008 that Soviet intelligence was sceptical of the allegation, but that North Korea leader Kim Il Sung believed it.[58] Winchester said the question "has still not been satisfactorily answered".[59]

Entomologist Jeffrey A. Lockwood wrote in 2009 that the biological warfare program at Ft. Detrick began to research the use of insects as disease vectors going back to World War II and also employed German and Japanese scientists after the war who had experimented on human subjects among POWs and concentration camp inmates. Scientists used or attempted to use a wide variety of insects in their biowar plans, including fleas, ticks, ants, lice and mosquitoes especially mosquitoes that carried the yellow fever virus. They also tested these in the United States. Lockwood thinks that it is very likely that the US did use insects dropped from aircraft during the Korean War to spread diseases, and that the Chinese and North Koreans were not simply engaged in a propaganda campaign when they made these allegations, since the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense had approved their use in the fall of 1950 at the "earliest practicable time". At that time, it had five biowarfare agents ready for use, three of which were spread by insect vectors.[60]

In March 2010, the allegations were investigated by the Al Jazeera English news program People & Power.[61] In this program, Professor Mori Masataka investigated historical artifacts in the form of bomb casings from US biological weapons, contemporary documentary evidence and eyewitness testimonies. The program also uncovered a crucial document in the US National Archives which showed that in September 1951, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued orders to start "large scale field tests ... to determine the effectiveness of specific BW [bacteriological warfare] agents under operational conditions".[61] Masataka concluded that: "Use of germ weapons in war is in breach of the Geneva Convention. I think that's why the Americans are refusing to admit the allegations. But I have no doubt. I'm absolutely sure that this happened.[61] The program concluded by noting that no conclusive evidence of the US's innocence or culpability has ever been presented.[61]

Yanhuang Chunqiu, a liberal monthly journal in China, published an account in 2013 allegedly from Wu Zhili, the former surgeon general of Chinese People's Voluntary Army Logistic Department, which said that the bio warfare allegation was a false alarm, and that he had been forced to fabricate evidence.[62][63][64] This account was published after the author's death in 2008. Its authenticity subsequently has been called into question by the Chinese Memorial of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea as unverifiable, because every single figure involved in the alleged private conversations and insider events from the account who could testify otherwise, had died before the date of publication.[65] The museum also refuted the account's claim that "not one casualty resulted from events associated with biological warfare" as there are many clear records of such casualties, and claimed that it's implausible for a meager medical officer back then to have the technical knowledge to fool dozens of international medical experts signing the ISC report.[65]

In 2019, the Pyongyang Times repeated the allegation, and said that the US government was continuing to develop biological warfare capabilities to use against North Korea.[66]

In 1998, Canadian researchers and historians Stephen L. Endicott and Edward Hagerman of York University made the case that the accusations were true in their book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea.[67] Shanghai-born Endicott, a Communist sympathizer, was the son of clergyman James Gareth Endicott, a prominent member of the Soviet-affiliated World Peace Council.[citation needed]

The book received mostly positive reviews, but with some negative criticism, with a US Military Academy professor calling the book an example of "bad history"[68] and with another review in The New York Times calling the book's lack of direct evidence "appalling",[69] although neither of these two negative reviews considers either the admissions that the US deployed chemical and biological weapons by Colonels Schwable and Mahurin, or the US chemical and biological weapons caches at locations such as Camp Detrick.

Many other reviews praised the research, with the director of East Asian studies at University of Pennsylvania saying "Endicott and Hagerman is far and away the most authoritative work on the subject", a review in Korean Quarterly calling it "a fascinating work of serious scholarship...presenting a compelling argument that the United States did, in fact, secretly experiment with biological weapons during the Korean War", and a review in The Nation calling it "the most impressive, expertly researched and, as far as the official files allow, the best-documented case for the prosecution yet made".[68] A staff writer at state-owned China Daily noted that their book was the only one to have combined research across United States, Japan, Canada, Europe and China, as they were "the first foreigners to be given access to classified documents in the Chinese Central Archives".[68]

In response, Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center released a cache of Soviet and Chinese documents in 1998 that they said revealed the allegations to have been an elaborate disinformation campaign.[70] The handcopied documents are purportedly from Russian Presidential Archive, discovered by a Japanese reporter Yasuo Naito of Sankei Shimbun, a major conservative anti-communist Japanese national newspaper. Weathersby admitted that due to the way the documents are collected, there is no way to confirm their authenticity as seals, stamps or signature are missing, but due to their complexity and interwoven content, they are "extremely difficult to forge" and thus credible sources.[70] They said that North Korea's health minister traveled in 1952 to the remote Manchurian city of Mukden where he procured a culture of plague bacilli which was used to infect condemned criminals as part of an elaborate disinformation scheme. Tissue samples were then used to fool the international investigators. The papers included telegrams and reports of meetings among Soviet and Chinese leaders, including Mao Zedong. A report to Lavrenti Beria, head of Soviet intelligence, for example, stated: "False plague regions were created, burials... were organized, measures were taken to receive the plague and cholera bacillus." These documents revealed that only after Stalin's death the following year did the Soviet Union halt the disinformation campaign.[71] Weathersby and Leitenberg consider their evidence to be conclusivethat the allegations were disinformation and no biological warfare use occurred.[72][73][74] In 2001, anti-communist writer Herbert Romerstein supported Weathersby and Leitenberg's position while criticizing Endicott's research on the basis that it is based on accounts provided by the Chinese government.[75]

In turn, Endicott and Hagerman responded to Weathersby and Leitenberg, noting that the documents are in fact handwritten copies and "the original source is not disclosed, the name of the collection is not identified, nor is there a volume number which would allow other scholars to locate and check the documents". They claimed that even if genuine the documents do not prove the United States did not use biological weapons, and they pointed out various errors and inconsistencies in Weathersby and Leitenberg's analysis.[76] According to Australian author and judge, Michael Pembroke, the documents associated with Beria (published by Weathersby and Leitenberg) were mostly created during the time of the power struggle after Stalin's death and are therefore questionable.[77] In 2018, he concluded that: "It seems likely that the full story of the United States' involvement in biological warfare in Korea has not yet been told."[78]

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Allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War - Wikipedia

GERM WARFARE: Boston University claims to have developed new covid …

GERM WARFARE: Boston University claims to have developed new covid strain that kills eight out of 10 victims

Are the powers that be planning to unleash another more deadly strain of the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19)? New research out of Boston University seems to suggest so.

Scientists there claim to have just developed a new Omicron-S spike protein virus that upon infection kills 80 percent of its victims. Such a bioweapon, assuming it really exists, is far worse than what was announced in late 2019 and early 2020.

Researchers claim they had to conduct this dangerous research to figure out what makes the Omicron, or Moronic, variant of the Fauci Flu as transmissible as it allegedly is. Tony Faucis National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) helped fund the project, as did the National Institutes of Health (NIH). (Related: Remember when the Moronic variant was suspected to be the solution to covid?)

We are told that this new-and-improved death virus is five times more infectious than the original Moronic variant. Here is what a pre-print of the study states:

The Omicron spike (S) protein, with an unusually large number of mutations, is considered the major driver of these phenotypes. We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant.

You might be asking yourself at this point in time how a new alleged covid virus was able to be created in the United States if not for the use of gain of function technology, which is illegal? And more importantly, why is the NIAID and NIH funding it?

We continue to be told that gain of function research was not taking place in communist China where the original Chinese Virus originated, let alone right here in one of Americas old cities. What is really going on here?

How many times did virologists say they were not making chimeric SARS viruses more deadly? How many??? asked Paul D. Thacker on Twitter.

Latest preprint shows they made a chimeric SARS-CoV-2 w / Omicron S gene and ancestral SARS-CoV-2 backbone that showed 80% mortality in humanised mice.

We know from the paper itself, which has not been peer reviewed, that the spike protein in this new chimeric virus is not only highly infectious but also changes to other parts of its structure, which accounts for its deadliness.

Compared to the original Moronic strain, this newest Moronic strain produces five times more viral particles, we are told.

In in vitro infection assays, the Omicron spike-bearing ancestral SARS-CoV-2 (Omi-S) exhibits much higher replication efficiency compared with Omicron, the paper further explains.

Similarly, in K18-hACE2 mice, Omi-S contrasts with non-fatal Omicron and causes a severe disease leading to around 80% mortality. This suggests that mutations outside of spike are major determinants of the attenuated pathogenicity of Omicron in K18-hACE2 mice. Further studies are needed to identify those mutations and decipher their mechanisms of action.

The claim is that, despite its deadliness in mice, the new Omi-S strain of Chinese Germs is unlikely to be this deadly in humans.

Researchers at Boston University need to be locked up for violating national and international law by experimenting with bioweapons, noted a commenter on a story about the new research.

The death cult is not satisfied with the current mortality rate, responded another.

The latest news about the never-ending Chinese Virus merry-go-round of mass deception can be found at Pandemic.news.

Sources for this article include:

ZeroHedge.com

NaturalNews.com

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GERM WARFARE: Boston University claims to have developed new covid ...

Terrorists will wage terrifying new biowar as Wuhan lab leak chaos shows they could get away with mur… – The Sun

TERRORISTS will wage war on the world with catastrophic bioweapons after the Wuhan "lab leak" chaos showed how they could get away with murder, experts have warned.

Evidence of a Covid lab leak has been piling up over the last year as scientists, researchers and governments hunt for answers - but US intelligence agencies fear they might never be able to uncover the true origins of the pandemic.

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Although questions continue to rage over whether the deadly virus could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, investigations into the shady lab have been "easily" shut down by China.

But genetic engineering expert Alina Chan and renowned science writer Matt Ridley have warned that "ignoring or dismissing" the possibility of a lab leak will have "serious implications" for the world.

Chan and Ridley said terrorists who are considering using bioweapons will have noted how quickly China was able to dismiss the idea of a lab leak - and avoid scrutiny.

It means militants will now know how easily they can "get away" with the release of a cataclysmic bioweapon, knowing the source of the attack will likely never be found.

In their new book, Viral, Chan and Ridley said: "Regimes around the world that are carrying out military-civilian, dual-use pathogen research, and terrorists who are also considering the use of bioweapons, are paying attention to what has happened.

"Not only will they have noticed the vast scale of disruption caused by an epidemic; they will also have noticed how easily the Chinese authorities dismissed a lab leak and neutered an international investigation, with the willing help of many scientific experts worldwide.

Exclusive

"Nefarious actors may have learned that they can easily get away with the creation and release of dangerous pathogens - with an unpredictably large impact on their target populations."

In a chilling warning, the World Health Organisation said the risk of deadly pathogens being used in a terror attack is increasing.

Biological agents, such as anthrax, botulinum toxin and plague, can cause a huge number of deaths in a short amount of time - and the outbreak would be difficult to contain once unleashed on the world.

There have been warnings that terrorist groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram, or rogue states such as North Korea, could access biological weapons - like Ebola or Zika - and use them to create weapons of mass destruction.

ISIS is already known to have used Iraqi prisoners as human test subjects in experiments with chemical and possibly biological weapons between 2014 and 2016.

The UN investigators shed a terrifying new light on the terrorist groups forays into making a weapon of mass destruction.

"Evidence already secured indicates that ISIL tested biological and chemical agents and conducted experiments on prisoners as part of this program, causing death," the report said.

"Weaponized vesicants, nerve agents and toxic industrial compounds are suspected to have been considered under the program."

And there have already been ISIS-linked terror plots foiled in Europe.

In 2018, suspected Islamist extremist Sief Allah Hammami, a 29-year-old Tunisian,was arrested in Germany after planning a "biological weapon attack" using the poison ricin.

The terrifying plot was described as "the biggest potential threat ever found in Europe".

Prosecutors confirmed the suspect "had contacts with people on the jihadist spectrum".

In a briefing to the European Parliament, analyst Beatrix Immenkamp urged members of the public to take the threat of bioterrorism from terrorists more seriously.

She said: "European citizens are not seriously contemplating the possibility that extremist groups might use chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear materials during attacks in Europe."

And experts have grimly warned al-Qaeda could also unleash bioweapons on the world in future terror attacks.

US spy chiefs have already said the terror group could rekindle its former terrorist training camps in Afghanistan to plot atrocities against Britain and America within two years as the jihadis regroup.

With the Taliban back in charge following the withdrawal of US led forces, al-Qaeda is said to be returning to the war-torn country.

Dr Zeno Leoni, from the Defence Studies Department of King's College London, said the terror group could "absolutely" use bioweapons in a future attack considering its previous attempts.

He pointed to the allegedbioterrorismplot to attack theLondon Underground with ricin by the suspected al-Qaeda operative Kamel Bourgass.

Dr Leoni told The Sun Online: "I think bioterrorism could be very basic, such as when anthrax was used in the US after 9/11. Or, it could involve the more sophisticated use of genetically engineered organisms."

But he added: "It is difficult not to imagine the involvement of states should a sophisticated attack happen."

Al-Qaeda has reportedly already experimented with producing poison from nicotine.

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It's not just terrorists who could be emboldened by the stifled investigation into the origins of the Covid pandemic.

China is also feared to have spent decades illicitly researching biological weapons at dozens of secretive sites ahead of a potential apocalyptic World War 3.

The vast country is home to at least 50 covert labs where state scientists are thought to have manufactured deadly "bacteria bombs", stockpiled deadly pathogens such as anthrax, and even probedweaponising coronaviruses.

High profile defector Wei Jingsheng claimed China once carried out Nazi-style bioweapons and nuclear experiments on "human Guinea pigs".

China is alleged to have developed its germ warfare unit after World War 2 after being subjected to biowarfare by Japan - with the military academy being set up in 1951.

Documents obtained by the US show the People's Liberation Army commanders believed future battles could be fought with bioweapons.

And bombshell evidence from scientists and researchers suggestsCovid may have been tinkered with - but China denies all allegations of wrongdoing over the pandemic.

US intelligence reports and analysts have also highlighted startling concerns about bioweapon programmes in North Korea and Russia.

A US State Department reportpublished in 2017 said Russia has not "sufficiently documented" whether its Soviet bioweapons have been destroyed.

And a 2001 report from the South Korean government said North Korea was believed to have a stockpile of 2,500 to 5,000 tonnes of chemical and biological weapons - such as anthrax.

Analysts believe Pyongyang has made "major strides" in all technical areas needed for the production of bioweapons.

Andrew C. Weber, a Pentagon official in charge of nuclear, chemical and biological defense programmes under President Obama, told the New York Times: "North Korea is far more likely to use biological weapons than nuclear ones.

"The program is advanced, underestimated and highly lethal."

And according to NATO consultant Dr Jill Dekker, Syria has also worked with several pathogens, including anthrax, plague, smallpox, and cholera - some of which came from Russia, North Korea, IranandIraq.

Former PM Tony Blair has warned terrorists could wage war on the West with grim bioweapons after seeing the catastrophe caused by Covid.

Hesaid it was no longer "the realm of science fiction" that Islamist extremists could attack with bugs.

In a speech at the RUSI think tank marking 20 years since the 9/11 attacks, he said: "Covid 19 has taught us about deadly pathogens.

"Bio-terror possibilities may seem like the realm of science fiction. But we would be wise now to prepare for their potential use by non-state actors.

"Islamism, both the ideology and the violence, is a first order security threat; and, unchecked, it will come to us, even if centred far from us, as 9/11 demonstrated."

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Terrorists will wage terrifying new biowar as Wuhan lab leak chaos shows they could get away with mur... - The Sun

Microorganisms as potent biological weapons The National – The National

MEDICAL SCIENCEA schematic of Ebola virus. Red blood cell stream outbreak, a potential biological weapon.

By GELINDE NAREKINEWORDS or phrases such as biological weapons, bioweapons, biological warfare, biowarfare, germ warfare, biological terrorism, or bioterrorism could send chills down ones spine.This is because few threats have the capacity of killing so many so fast as does biological terrorism. For years we lived under the fear of nuclear winter wiping out the human race. Now there is a similar threat from biological weapons and bioterrorism.Bioweapons involve the use of toxins or infectious agents that are biological in origin. This can include bacteria, viruses, parasites or fungi. These agents can be used to injure or kill people, animals, or plants, as part of an obvious or secretive war effort.According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), bioterrorism is the intentional release of viruses, bacteria, or other germs that can sicken or kill people, livestock, or crops.This can be achieved in a number of ways, such as via aerosol sprays, in explosive devices, via food or water, or absorbed or injected into skin. Because some pathogens are less robust than others, the type of pathogen used will depend on how it can be deployed. Utilising such weapons holds a certain appeal to terrorism. When compared with nuclear-powered warheads, missiles, or other more hi-tech equipment, the attraction is simple: Bioweapons are inexpensive to make, require materials, equipment, and expertise that are easy to procure, and, for the most part, involve biological agents that are readily available. As an added feature, bioweapons have the potential to cause great harm.The threat of bioterrorism has risen progressively in the world, particular over the last four or five decades. Unfortunately, the global reality of the difficult social, economic, and political environment has created conducive conditions for such threats to rise. With mounting religious fundamentalism in some countries, disillusioned nationalistic goals in others, economic deprivation in many, and, in the industrial West, the increased desperation of violent far-right groups, there has been a worldwide rise in terrorism in general. The combination of this increase, with a heightened appreciation of the evil attractiveness of bioweapons is what makes the current global situation so critical, and somewhat frightening.Although biological weapons are as old as human history, modern technology brings new worries. Some experts are concerned about recent advances in genetic engineering and gene editing technology. When utilised for good, the latest tools can work wonders. However, as with most cutting-edge technology, there is always the potential for misuse. The technology allows researchers to edit genes, thereby easily modifying DNA sequences to alter gene function.In the right hands, this tool has the potential to correct genetic defects and treat disease. However, when in the hands of those with alternate agenda, it has the potential for evil use. Thus, in 2016, gene editing was featured in a list of weapons of mass destruction and proliferation, as highlighted in World Threat Assessment, a report by the US Intelligence Community.Given the broad distribution, low cost, and accelerated pace of development of this dual-use technology, its deliberate or unintentional misuse might lead to far-reaching economic and national security implications. Advances in genome editing, have compelled groups of high-profile American and European biologists to question in 2015, the unregulated editing of the human germline (cells that are relevant for reproduction), which might lead to creation of inheritable genetic changes.

With futuristic next generation technologies, and an advanced knowledge of genetics, there would be no theoretical end to the misery that could be caused. There is potential to create drug-resistant strains of microorganisms, or pesticide-protected bugs, capable of wiping out a countrys staple crop.The Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention (Convention on the prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of bacteriological weapons and their destruction) was signed in 1972 by 109 states (with notable exceptions). This treaty prohibits development or use of such weapons. Despite the existence of this international agreement and global understanding, within boundaries of some countries (also signatories to this treaty), there is reason to believe ongoing production of biological weapons. Such practices create avenues for dishonesty and deception, making efforts to maintain the integrity of such multinational treaties for goodwill and peace not only difficult, but also unrealistic.In the event of a medical emergency of pandemic scale, medical professionals are always on the frontline. Their responsibility with regard to bioterrorism goes beyond detecting an episode and treating its victims. They play an important duty to continue to institutionalize the scorn associated with the use of bioweapons.Furthermore, the medical profession plays an ethical role in relation to bioweapons, because this technology represents the ultimate perversion of biomedical research. Indeed, with the help of the rapidly growing field of bioengineering, the possibility exists of constructing new, doomsday organisms.Medical experts shudder at the thought of combining the contagiousness of common cold or even smallpox with the pathogenicity of Ebola virus. Using gene editing techniques, genomes of viruses can easily be manipulated for use as potent biological weapons.There are numerous historical accounts, from the ancient times to the most recent years that show use of biological agents for potential warfare purposes, causing panic and terror among civil populations. Nevertheless, their true frequency of use and impact remain very difficult to appreciate, because: (1) data are largely lacking; (2) reality was (and is) often hidden and manipulated, as the truth may not be openly disseminated, given its intrinsically non-ethical nature and therefore, rendered classified, and (3) the passage of time adds an additional layer of complexity by distorting facts. Addressing such impediments would pave way for better understanding of the true nature of production and the extent to which biological weapons are being used.Biological terrorism and smaller-scale atrocities involving microorganisms indeed constitute a reality a reality not void of myths, cover-ups, denial, controversies, and conspiracies.Regardless of all these, the use of microorganisms as potent biological weapons of bioterrorism still remain an undeniable reality. In light of all these, the question now should not whether it will occur, but rather, when will it occur. Or should we wait for another incident of catastrophic magnitude to solidify our resolve.I am indebted to the authors of following literatures for use of information on this article:

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Microorganisms as potent biological weapons The National - The National

Biological weapons and bioterrorism: Past, present, and future

Biological weapons. The phrase alone could send chills down the spine. But what are they? How do they work? And are we really at risk? In this Spotlight, we survey their history and potential future.

Sometimes known as germ warfare, biological weapons involve the use of toxins or infectious agents that are biological in origin. This can include bacteria, viruses, or fungi.

These agents are used to incapacitate or kill humans, animals, or plants as part of a war effort.

In effect, biological warfare is using non-human life to disrupt or end human life. Because living organisms can be unpredictable and incredibly resilient, biological weapons are difficult to control, potentially devastating on a global scale, and prohibited globally under numerous treaties.

Of course, treaties and international laws are one thing and humanitys ability to find innovative ways of killing each other is another.

The history of biological warfare is a long one, which makes sense; its deployment can be a lo-fi affair, so there is no need for electrical components, nuclear fusion, or rocket grade titanium, for instance.

An early example takes us back more than 2 and a half millennia: Assyrians infected their enemys wells with a rye ergot fungus, which contains chemicals related to LSD. Consuming the tainted water produced a confused mental state, hallucinations, and, in some cases, death.

In the 1300s, Tartar (Mongol) warriors besieged the Crimean city of Kaffa. During the siege, many Tartars died at the hands of plague, and their lifeless, infected bodies were hurled over the city walls.

Some researchers believe that this tactic may have been responsible for the spread of Black Death plague into Europe. If so, this early use of biological warfare caused the eventual deaths of around 25 million Europeans.

This is a prime example of biological warfares potential scope, unpredictability, and terrifying simplicity.

Moving forward to 1763, the British Army attmped to use smallpox as a weapon against Native Americans at the Siege of Fort Pitt. In an attempt to spread the disease to the locals, the Brits presented blankets from a smallpox hospital as gifts.

Although we now know that this would be a relatively ineffective way to transmit smallpox, the intent was there.

During World War II, many of the parties involved looked into biological warfare with great interest. The Allies built facilities capable of mass producing anthrax spores, brucellosis, and botulism toxins. Thankfully, the war ended before they were used.

It was the Japanese who made the most use of biological weapons during World War II, as among other terrifyingly indiscriminate attacks, the Japanese Army Air Force dropped ceramic bombs full of fleas carrying the bubonic plague on Ningbo, China.

The following quote comes from a paper on the history of biological warfare.

[T]he Japanese army poisoned more than 1,000 water wells in Chinese villages to study cholera and typhus outbreaks. [] Some of the epidemics they caused persisted for years and continued to kill more than 30,000 people in 1947, long after the Japanese had surrendered.

Dr. Friedrich Frischknecht, professor of integrative parasitology, Heidelberg University, Germany

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) define bioterrorism as the intentional release of viruses, bacteria, or other germs that can sicken or kill people, livestock, or crops.

This can be achieved in a number of ways, such as: via aerosol sprays; in explosive devices; via food or water; or absorbed or injected into skin.

Because some pathogens are less robust than others, the type of pathogen used will define how it can be deployed.

Utilizing such weapons holds a certain appeal to terrorists; they have the potential to cause great harm, of course, but they are also fairly cheap to produce when compared with missiles or other more hi-tech equipment.

Also, they can be detonated, and, due to the long time that it takes for them to spread and take effect, there is plenty of time for the perpetrator to escape undetected.

Biological weapons can be difficult to control or predict in a battlefield situation, since there is a substantial risk that troops on both sides will be affected. However, if a terrorist is interested in attacking a distant target as a lone operant, bioterrorism carries much less risk to the person.

Experts believe that today, the most likely organism to be used in a bioterrorism attack would be Bacillus anthracis, the bacteria that causes anthrax.

It is widely found in nature, easily produced in the laboratory, and survives for a long time in the environment. Also, it is versatile and can be released in powders, sprays, water, or food.

Anthrax has been used before. In 2001, anthrax spores were sent through the United States postal system. In all, 22 people contracted anthrax five of whom died. And, the guilty party was never caught.

Another potential agent of bioterrorism is smallpox, which, unlike anthrax, can spread from person to person. Smallpox is no longer a disease of concern in the natural world because concerted vaccination efforts stamped it out and the last naturally spread case occurred in 1977.

However, if someone were to gain access to the smallpox virus (it is still kept in two laboratories one in the U.S. and one in Russia), it could be an effective weapon, spreading quickly and easily between people.

We have already mentioned the Tartars use of the plague, Yersinia pestis, hundreds of years ago, but some believe that it could be used in the modern world, too. Y. pestis is passed to humans through the bite of a flea that has fed on infected rodents.

Once a human is infected, the resulting disease can either develop into bubonic plague, which is difficult to transmit among humans and fairly easy to treat with antibiotics, or if the infection spreads to the lungs it becomes pneumonic plague, which develops rapidly and does not respond well to antibiotics.

A paper written on the plague and its potential for use in biological terrorism says:

Given the presence and availability of plague around the world, the capacity for mass production and aerosol dissemination, the high fatality rate of pneumonic plague, and the potential for rapid secondary spread, the potential use of plague as a biological weapon is of great concern.

Dr. Stefan Riedel, Department of Pathology, Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, TX

As a potentially severe and sometimes deadly gastrointestinal disease, cholera has the potential to be used in bioterrorism. It does not spread easily from person to person, so for it to be effective, it would need to be liberally added to a major water source.

In the past, the bacteria responsible for cholera, Vibrio cholerae, has been weaponized by the U.S., Japan, South Africa, and Iraq, among others.

Some consider tularemia, an infection caused by the Francisella tularensis bacterium, as a potential bioweapon. It causes fever, ulcerations, swelling of lymph glands, and, sometimes, pneumonia.

The bacterium can cause infection by entering through breaks in the skin or by being breathed into the lungs. It is particularly infectious, and only a very small number of organisms (as few as 10) need to enter the body to set off a serious bout of tularemia.

Studied by the Japanese during World War II and stockpiled by the U.S. in the 1960s, F. tularensis is hardy, capable of withstanding low temperatures in water, hay, decaying carcasses, and moist soil for many weeks.

According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness, Aerosol dissemination of F. tularensis in a populated area would be expected to result in the abrupt onset of large numbers of cases of acute, non-specific, febrile illness beginning 3 to 5 days later [], with pleuropneumonitis developing in a significant proportion of cases.

Without antibiotic treatment, the clinical course could progress to respiratory failure, shock, and death.

Those pathogens are an abbreviated selection, of course. Others considered to have potential as biological weapons include brucellosis, Q fever, monkeypox, arboviral encephalitides, viral hemorrhagic fevers, and staphylococcal enterotoxin B.

Although biological weapons are as old as the hills (if not older), modern technology brings new worries. Some experts are concerned about recent advances in gene editing technology.

When utilized for good, the latest tools can work wonders. However as with most cutting-edge technology there is always the potential for misuse.

A gene editing technology called CRISPR has set off alarm bells in the defense community; the technology allows researchers to edit genomes, thereby easily modifying DNA sequences to alter gene function.

In the right hands, this tool has the potential to correct genetic defects and treat disease. In the wrong hands, however, it has the potential for evil.

CRISPR technology is becoming cheaper to run and therefore more accessible to individuals bent on bioterrorism.

A report titled Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, written by James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, was published in February 2016. In it, gene editing features in a list of weapons of mass destruction and proliferation.

Given the broad distribution, low cost, and accelerated pace of development of this dual-use technology, he explains, its deliberate or unintentional misuse might lead to far-reaching economic and national security implications.

Advances in genome editing in 2015, he continues, have compelled groups of high-profile U.S. and European biologists to question unregulated editing of the human germline (cells that are relevant for reproduction), which might create inheritable genetic changes.

With future generations of CRISPR-like technology and an advanced knowledge of genetics, there would be no theoretical end to the misery that could be caused. Theres potential to create drug-resistant strains of diseases, for instance, or pesticide-protected bugs, capable of wiping out a countrys staple crop.

For now, however, other methods of bioterrorism are much easier and closer to hand, so this is likely to be of little concern for the foreseeable future.

In fact, to lighten the mood at the end of a somewhat heavy article, just remember that anyone who lives in the U.S. today is much more likely to be killed in an animal attack than a terrorist attack biological or otherwise.

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Biological weapons and bioterrorism: Past, present, and future

Allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War …

Allegations of US biological warfare

Allegations that the United States military used biological weapons in the Korean War (June 1950 July 1953) were raised by the governments of People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. The claims were first raised in 1951. The story was covered by the worldwide press and led to a highly publicized international investigation in 1952. Secretary of State Dean Acheson and other American and allied government officials denounced the allegations as a hoax. Subsequent scholars are split about the truth of the claims.

Until the end of World War II, Japan operated a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit called Unit 731 in Harbin (now China). The unit's activities, including human experimentation, were documented by the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials conducted by the Soviet Union in December 1949. However, at that time, the US government described the Khabarovsk trials as "vicious and unfounded propaganda".[1] It was later revealed that the accusations made against the Japanese military were correct. The US government had taken over the research at the end of the war and had then covered up the program.[2] Leaders of Unit 731 were exempted from war crimes prosecution by the United States and then placed on the payroll of the US.[3]

On 30 June 1950, soon after the outbreak of the Korean War, the US Defense Secretary George Marshall received the Report of the Committee on Chemical, Biological and Radiological Warfare and Recommendations, which advocated urgent development of a biological weapons program.[4] The biological weapons research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland was expanded, and a new one in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, was developed.[5]

During 1951, as the war turned against the United States, the Chinese and North Koreans made vague allegations of biological warfare, but these were not pursued.[6][7][8] General Matthew Ridgway, United Nations Commander in Korea, denounced the initial charges as early as May 1951. He accused the communists of spreading "deliberate lies". A few days later, Vice Admiral Charles Turner Joy repeated the denials.[8]

On 28 January 1952, the Chinese People's Volunteer Army headquarters received a report of a smallpox outbreak southeast of Incheon. From February to March 1952, more bulletins reported disease outbreaks in the area of Chorwon, Pyongyang, Kimhwa and even Manchuria.[9] The Chinese soon became concerned when 13 Korean and 16 Chinese soldiers contracted cholera and the plague, while another 44 recently deceased were tested positive for meningitis.[10] Although the Chinese and the North Koreans did not know exactly how the soldiers contracted the diseases, the suspicions soon fell on the Americans.[9]

On 22 February 1952, the North Korean Foreign Minister, Bak Hon Yon, made a formal allegation that American planes had been dropping infected insects onto North Korea. He added that the Americans were "openly collaborating with the Japanese bacteriological war criminals, the former jackals of the Japanese militarists whose crimes are attested to by irrefutable evidence. Among the Japanese war criminals sent to Korea were Shiro Ishii, Jiro Wakamatsu and Masajo Kitano."[11] Bak's accusations were immediately denied by the US government. The accusation was supported by eye-witness accounts by the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett and others.[12][13]

In June 1952 the United States proposed to the United Nations Security Council that the Council request the International Red Cross investigate the allegations. The Soviet Union vetoed the American resolution due to extensive US influence inside the Red Cross, and, along with its allies, continued to insist on the veracity of the biological warfare accusations.[8]

In February 1953, China and North Korea produced two captured US Marine Corps pilots to support the allegations. Colonel Frank Schwable was reported to have stated that: "The basic objective was at that time to get under field conditions various elements of bacteriological warfare and possibly expand field tests at a later date into an element of regular combat operations."[8] Schwable's statement said that B-29s flew biological warfare missions to Korea from airfields in American-occupied Okinawa starting in November 1951.[14] Schwable's statement was obtained following months of torture and abuse at the hands of his captors, according to the US military.[15] Other captured Americans such as Colonel Walker "Bud" Mahurin made similar statements.[8][15]

Upon release the prisoners of war repudiated their confessions which they said had been extracted by torture.[16] However, the retractions happened in front of military cameras after the United States government threatened to charge the POWs with treason for cooperating with their captors.[citation needed]

When the International Red Cross and the World Health Organization ruled out biological warfare, the Chinese government denounced them as being biased by the influence of US, and arranged an investigation by the Soviet-affiliated World Peace Council.[17] The World Peace Council set up the "International Scientific Commission for the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in China and Korea" (ISC). This commission had several distinguished scientists and doctors from France, Italy, Sweden, Brazil and Soviet Union, including renowned British biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham. The commission's findings included dozens of eyewitnesses, testimonies from doctors, medical samples from the deceased, bomb casings as well as four American Korean War prisoners who confirmed the US use of biological warfare.[18][19][17] On 15 September 1952, the final report was signed, stating that the US was experimenting with biological weapons in Korea.[18][20]

The full ISC report, including all appendices, was posted for the first time online in downloadable PDF format in February 2018 by Jeffrey Kaye of INSURGE Intelligence.[18][19]

The report suggested a link to the World War II Japanese germ warfare Unit 731.[18][21] Former Unit 731 members Shir Ishii, Masaji Kitano, and Ryoichi Naito, and other Japanese biological warfare experts were often named in the allegations.[8] Former members of Unit 731 were linked initially, by a Communist news agency, to a freighter that allegedly carried them and all equipment necessary to mount a biological warfare campaign to Korea in 1951.[8] The commission placed credence on allegations that Ishii made two visits to South Korea in early 1952, and another one in March 1953.[8] The official consensus in China was that biological weapons created from an American-Japanese collaboration were used in the Korean episode.[22][8] Citing the claims Ishii had visited South Korea, the report stated: "Whether occupation authorities in Japan had fostered his activities, and whether the American Far Eastern Command was engaged in making use of methods essentially Japanese, were questions which could hardly have been absent from the minds of members of the Commission."[23]

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) publicized these claims in its 1952 "Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea",[24] as did US journalist John W. Powell.[25]

The Communists also alleged that US Brigadier General Crawford Sams had carried out a secret mission behind their lines at Wonsan in March 1951, testing biological weapons.[26] The US government said that he had actually been investigating a reported outbreak of bubonic plague in North Korea, but had determined it was hemorrhagic smallpox. Sams' mission had been launched from the US Navy's LCI(L)-1091, which had been converted to a laboratory ship in 1951.[27] During its time in Korea, the ship was assigned as an epidemiological control ship[28] for Fleet Epidemic Disease Control Unit No. 1, a part of the US effort to combat malaria in Korea.[29] After covert missions in North Korea, from October to September 1951, LSIL-1091 was at Koje-do testing residents and refugees for malaria.[30]

Some authors have emphasized Sams' relationship with biological warfare actors, which both China and North Korea found suspicious. According to Japanese historian, Takemae Eiji, Sams had a relationship with the former members of Imperial Japan's biological warfare department, Unit 731. Appointed by General MacArthur as the head of the post-war Occupation government's Public Health & Welfare Section, Sams was instrumental in founding Japan's National Institute of Health, whose first Deputy Director, Kojima Sabur, was an Ishii associate. Sabur then recruited other former former Unit 731 personnel for the new Institute. According to Eiji, "Sams and others in PH&W not only knew of these men's sordid pasts but actively solicited their cooperation to further PH&W goals.... Sams and his staff became, in effect, co-conspirators after the fact in those wartime crimes".[31]

The US and its allies responded by describing the allegations as a hoax.[12] The US government declared the IADL to be a Communist front organization since 1950, and charged Powell with sedition.[25][32][33] In a highly publicized 1959 trial, Powell was indicted on 13 counts of sedition for reporting on the allegations, while two of his editors were indicted on one count of sedition each. All charges were dropped after the trial ended in mistrial after five years. However, Powell was then blacklisted and thereafter unable to secure work as a journalist for the rest of his life.[25]

Intriguingly, according to news reports during the trial, the U.S. Attorney in the case, James B. Schnake, submitted an affidavit in which he stated the U.S. government was prepared to stipulate "that during the period Jan. 1, 1949, through July 27, 1953, the United States Army had a capability to wage both chemical and biological warfare offensively and defensively.... Responsible officials in the Department of Defense have determined the revelations of detailed records on this subject would be highly detrimental to the national security."[34]

American authorities long denied the charges of postwar Japanese-United States cooperation in biological warfare developments, despite later incontrovertible proof that the US pardoned Unit 731 in exchange for their research, according to Sheldon H. Harris.[8] But in December 1998, in a letter from Department of Justice official Eli Rosenbaum to Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a U.S. government official admitted that the U.S. had made an amnesty agreement with Shiro Ishii and personnel from Unit 731, despite known crimes committed by Ishii and associates concerning illegal human experimentation. The letter wasn't made public until published by Jeffrey Kaye in May 2017.[35]

Australian journalist, Denis Warner, suggested that the story was concocted by Wilfred Burchett as part of his alleged role as a KGB agent of influence. Warner pointed out the similarity of the allegations to a science fiction story by Jack London, a favorite author of Burchett's.[36] However, the notion that Burchett originated the "hoax" has been decisively refuted by one of his most trenchant critics, Tibor Mray.[37] Mray worked as a correspondent for the Hungarian People's Republic during the war but fled the country after the abortive Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Now a staunch anti-Communist, he has confirmed that he saw clusters of flies crawling on ice.[38] Mray has argued the evidence was the result of an elaborate conspiracy: "Now somehow or other these flies must have been brought there... the work must have been carried out by a large network covering the whole of North Korea."[39]

Recent research has indicated that, regardless of the accuracy of the allegations, the Chinese acted as if they were true.[9] After learning of the outbreaks, Mao Zedong immediately requested Soviet assistance on disease preventions, while the Chinese People's Liberation Army General Logistics Department was mobilized for anti-bacteriological warfare.[40] On the Korean battlefield, four anti-bacteriological warfare research centers were soon set up, while about 5.8 million doses of vaccine and 200,000 gas masks were delivered to the front.[41] Within China, 66 quarantine stations were also set up along the Chinese borders, while about 5 million Chinese in Manchuria were inoculated.[40] The Chinese government also initiated the "Patriotic Health and Epidemic Prevention Campaign" and directed every citizen to kill flies, mosquitoes and fleas.[40] These disease prevention measures soon resulted in an improvement of health for Communist soldiers on the Korean battlefield.[41] Tibor Mray provided eyewitness account of North Korea conducting an "unprecedented campaign of public health" during the allegation.[42]

Some historians have offered other explanations to the disease outbreaks during the spring of 1952. For example, it has been noted that spring time is usually a period of epidemics within China and North Korea,[40] and years of warfare had also caused a breakdown in the Korean health care system. US military historians have argued that under these circumstances, diseases could easily spread throughout the entire military and civilian populations within Korea.[43][44]

In 1986, Australian historian Gavan McCormack argued that the claim of US biological warfare use was "far from inherently implausible", pointing out that one of the POWs who confessed, Walker Mahurin, was in fact associated with Fort Detrick.[45] He also pointed out that, as the deployment of nuclear and chemical weapons was considered, there is no reason to believe that ethical principles would have overruled the resort to biological warfare.[46] He also suggested that the outbreak in 1951 of viral haemorrhagic fever, which had previously been unknown in Korea, was linked to biological warfare.[47] However, by 2004, McCormack had changed his mind. In a book about North Korea, he wrote that the alleged Soviet archival documents published by Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg in 1998 (see discussion in section on "Endicott and Hagerman" below) had provided a fragmentary, but persuasive, explanation of what had actually happened in relation to the germ warfare charges. According to McCormack, Analysis of these documents makes it seem almost certain that there was a vigorous, complex, contrived, and fraudulent international campaign on the part of the North Koreans, the Chinese, and the Russians a gigantic fraud.[48]

In a 1988 book Korea: The Unknown War, historians Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings also suggested the claims might be true.[49][50] They questioned whether the North Koreans and the Chinese could have "mounted a spectacular piece of fraudulent theater, involving the mobilization of thousands", getting scores of Chinese doctors, scientists, and senior officials "to fake evidence, lie and invent medical fraud", allocating much of their already stretched logistical resource to defend against biological warfare, all for a propaganda campaign against US.[50]

In 1989, a British study of Unit 731 strongly supported the theory of United StatesJapanese biological warfare culpability in Korea.[8]

In 1995, using available Chinese documents, historian Shu Guang Zhang of University of Maryland[51] stated that there is little, if any information that currently exists on the Chinese side which explains how the Chinese scientists came up with the conclusion of US biological warfare during the disease outbreak in the spring of 1952. Zhang further theorized that the allegation was caused by unfounded rumors and scientific investigations on the allegation was purposely ignored on the Chinese side for the sake of domestic and international propaganda.[52]

Published in Japan in 2001, the book Rikugun Noborito Kenkyujo no shinjitsu or The Truth About the Army Noborito Institute stated that members of Japan's Unit 731 also worked for the "chemical section" of a US clandestine unit hidden within Yokosuka Naval Base during the Korean War as well as on projects inside the United States from 1955 to 1959.[53]

According to Jeffrey Kaye's interpretation of a "Memorandum of Conversation" from the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) dated 6 July 1953 (and declassified and released by the CIA in 2006),[54] the US protestations at the United Nations did not mean the US was serious about conducting any investigation into biological warfare charges, despite what the government said publicly. The reason the US didn't want any investigation was because an "actual investigation" would reveal military operations, "which, if revealed, could do us psychological as well as military damage". The memorandum, which had been sent to CIA director Allen Dulles, specifically stated as an example of what could be revealed "Eighth Army preparations or operations (e.g. chemical warfare)."[55][unreliable source?]

Investigative journalist Simon Winchester concluded in 2008 that Soviet intelligence was sceptical of the allegation, but that North Korea leader Kim Il Sung believed it.[56] Winchester said the question "has still not been satisfactorily answered".[57]

Entomologist Jeffrey A. Lockwood wrote in 2009 that the biological warfare program at Ft. Detrick began to research the use of insects as disease vectors going back to World War II and also employed German and Japanese scientists after the war who had experimented on human subjects among POWs and concentration camp inmates. Scientists used or attempted to use a wide variety of insects in their biowar plans, including fleas, ticks, ants, lice and mosquitoes especially mosquitoes that carried the yellow fever virus. They also tested these in the United States. Lockwood thinks that it is very likely that the US did use insects dropped from aircraft during the Korean War to spread diseases, and that the Chinese and North Koreans were not simply engaged in a propaganda campaign when they made these allegations, since the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense had approved their use in the fall of 1950 at the "earliest practicable time". At that time, it had five biowarfare agents ready for use, three of which were spread by insect vectors.[58]

In March 2010, the allegations were investigated by the Al Jazeera English news program People & Power.[59] In this program, Professor Mori Masataka investigated historical artifacts in the form of bomb casings from US biological weapons, contemporary documentary evidence and eyewitness testimonies. The program also uncovered a crucial document in the US National Archives which showed that in September 1951, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued orders to start "large scale field tests ... to determine the effectiveness of specific BW [bacteriological warfare] agents under operational conditions".[59] Masataka concluded that: "Use of germ weapons in war is in breach of the Geneva Convention. I think that's why the Americans are refusing to admit the allegations. But I have no doubt. I'm absolutely sure that this happened.[59] The program concluded by noting that no conclusive evidence of the US's innocence or culpability has ever been presented.[59]

Yanhuang Chunqiu, a liberal monthly journal in China, published an account in 2013 allegedly from Wu Zhili, the former surgeon general of Chinese People's Voluntary Army Logistic Department, which said that the bio warfare allegation was a false alarm, and that he had been forced to fabricate evidence.[60][61][62] This account was published after the author's death in 2008. Its authenticity subsequently has been called into question by the Chinese Memorial of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea as unverifiable, because every single figure involved in the alleged private conversations and insider events from the account who could testify otherwise, had died before the date of publication.[63] The museum also refuted the account's claim that "not one casualty resulted from events associated with biological warfare" as there are many clear records of such casualties, and claimed that it's implausible for a meager medical officer back then to have the technical knowledge to fool dozens of international medical experts signing the ISC report.[63]

In 2019, the Pyongyang Times repeated the allegation, and said that the US government was continuing to develop biological warfare capabilities to use against North Korea.[64]

In 1998, Canadian researchers and historians Stephen L. Endicott and Edward Hagerman of York University made the case that the accusations were true in their book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea.[65]

The book received mostly positive reviews, but with some negative criticism, with a US Military Academy professor calling the book an example of "bad history"[66] and with another review in The New York Times calling the book's lack of direct evidence "appalling",[67] although neither of these two negative reviews considers either the admissions that the US deployed chemical and biological weapons by Colonels Schwable and Mahurin, or the US chemical and biological weapons caches at locations such as Camp Detrick.

Many other reviews praised the research, with the director of East Asian studies at University of Pennsylvania saying "Endicott and Hagerman is far and away the most authoritative work on the subject", a review in Korean Quarterly calling it "a fascinating work of serious scholarship...presenting a compelling argument that the United States did, in fact, secretly experiment with biological weapons during the Korean War", and a review in The Nation calling it "the most impressive, expertly researched and, as far as the official files allow, the best-documented case for the prosecution yet made".[66] A staff writer at state-owned China Daily noted that their book was the only one to have combined research across United States, Japan, Canada, Europe and China, as they were "the first foreigners to be given access to classified documents in the Chinese Central Archives".[66]

In response, Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center released a cache of Soviet and Chinese documents in 1998 that they said revealed the allegations to have been an elaborate disinformation campaign.[68] The handcopied documents are purportedly from Russian Presidential Archive, discovered by a Japanese reporter Yasuo Naito of Sankei Shimbun, a major conservative anti-communist Japanese national newspaper. Weathersby admitted that due to the way the documents are collected, there is no way to confirm their authenticity as seals, stamps or signature are missing, but due to their complexity and interwoven content, they are "extremely difficult to forge" and thus credible sources.[68] They said that North Korea's health minister traveled in 1952 to the remote Manchurian city of Mukden where he procured a culture of plague bacilli which was used to infect condemned criminals as part of an elaborate disinformation scheme. Tissue samples were then used to fool the international investigators. The papers included telegrams and reports of meetings among Soviet and Chinese leaders, including Mao Zedong. A report to Lavrenti Beria, head of Soviet intelligence, for example, stated: "False plague regions were created, burials... were organized, measures were taken to receive the plague and cholera bacillus." These documents revealed that only after Stalin's death the following year did the Soviet Union halt the disinformation campaign.[69] Weathersby and Leitenberg consider their evidence to be conclusivethat the allegations were disinformation and no biological warfare use occurred.[70][71][72] In 2001, anti-communist writer Herbert Romerstein supported Weathersby and Leitenberg's position while criticizing Endicott's research on the basis that it is based on accounts provided by the Chinese government.[73]

In turn, Endicott and Hagerman responded to Weathersby and Leitenberg, noting that the documents are in fact handwritten copies and "the original source is not disclosed, the name of the collection is not identified, nor is there a volume number which would allow other scholars to locate and check the documents". They claimed that even if genuine the documents do not prove the United States did not use biological weapons, and they pointed out various errors and inconsistencies in Weathersby and Leitenberg's analysis.[74] According to Australian author and judge, Michael Pembroke, the documents associated with Beria (published by Weathersby and Leitenberg) were mostly created during the time of the power struggle after Stalin's death and are therefore questionable.[75] In 2018, he concluded that: "It seems likely that the full story of the United States' involvement in biological warfare in Korea has not yet been told."[76]

In September 2020, Jeffrey Kaye, who posted a few dozen CIA communications intelligence [COMINT] reports detailing germ warfare attacks by U.S. planes, has said[77] the cache of CIA documents helps disprove the Weathersby/Leitenberg Soviet documents by showing that many of the claims in them are demonstratively false. Kaye wrote, "The information from the COMINT data corroborates charges that North Korea and China were under bacteriological attack in 1952, and disconfirms some of the evidence offered suggesting the attacks were really a hoax or an exaggerated response to presumed, but more innocent attack."

As one example of the disproof of assertions by Leitenberg and Weathersby, he states that the latter two authors support for the Soviet archival documents claim that the Soviet Union, China and North Korea all ceased making biological weapons charges in early 1953. But both newspaper records and CIA source documents show that such claims continued throughout 1953 and thereafter.[78][79][80] Even more, Kaye states that the CIA documents included with his article corroborate other accounts of germ warfare by both China and North Korea's government, and hundreds of witnesses interviewed over the years, including by IACL and ISC investigators, Al Jazeera, and British investigators Peter Williams and David Wallace.[81]

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Allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War ...

Chemical and Biological Weapons Status at a Glance | Arms …

BIOLOGICAL WEAPONSCHEMICAL WEAPONSALBANIA

State declaration: Although it joined the CWC in 1994, Albania did not acknowledge its possession of 16 metric tons of mustard agent (as well as small quantities of lewisite and other chemicals) until 2003. The OPCW declared Albanias destruction complete in July 2007.

State Declaration: China states that it is in compliance with its BWC obligations and that it has never had an active BW program.

Allegations: According to the United States, Chinas BW activities have been extensive, and a 1993 State Department Compliance Report alleged that activities continued after China joined the BWC. The 2019 State Department Report on Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments indicates that China is engaged in biological research with potential dual-use applications. According to the report, the United States does not have sufficient information to determine whether China eliminated its assessed biological warfare (BW) program.

State Declaration: China states that it is in compliance with the CWC. China declared in 1997 that it had a small offensive CW program that has now been dismantled, which has been verified by over 400 inspections by the OPCW as of 2016.

Allegations: The U.S. alleged in 2003 that China has an advanced chemical weapons research and development program. However, these allegations have decreased in magnitude in recent years and the State Departments 2019 report on compliance with the CWC cited no such concerns.

Other Information: Approximately 350,000 chemical munitions were left on Chinese soil by Japan during the Second World War. Work with Japan to dispose of these is ongoing.

State declaration: Cuba denies any BW research efforts.

Allegations: A 2003 State Department Compliance Report indicated that Cuba had at least a limited developmental offensive biological warfare research and development effort. The 2010 report claimed that available information did not indicate Cubas dual-use activities during the reporting period involved activities prohibited by the BWC. The 2017 report did not mention any problems with Cubas compliance with BWC.

Allegations of BW programs have been made by Cuban defectors in the past.

Other information: Cuba has a relatively advanced biotechnology industrial capabilities.

State declaration: A vague statement alluding to a BW capability was reportedly made by President al-Sadat in 1970, but Egypt has not officially declared a biological weapons stockpile.

Allegations: There have been various allegations that Egypt possesses biological weapons. Some argue that Egypts reluctance to ratify the BWC signals that it does possess biological weapons. The United States alleged that Egypt had developed a biological weapons stockpile by 1972. The 2014 State Department compliance report notes that Egypt has "continued to improve its biotechnology infrastructure" over the past three years, including through research and development activities involving genetic engineering, as of 2013's end, "available information did not indicate that Egypt is engaged in activities prohibited by the BWC."

Allegations: There is strong evidence that Egypt employed bombs and artillery shells filled with phosgene and mustard agents during the Yemen Civil War from (1963 1967) but it is unclear if Egypt currently possesses chemical weapons. In 1989, the United States and Switzerland alleged that Egypt was producing chemical weapons in a plant north of Cairo. As a non-party to the CWC, Egypt has not had to issue any formal declarations about CW programs and capabilities.

State declaration: India declared in June 1997 that it possessed a CW stockpile of 1,044 metric tons of mustard agent. India completed destruction of its stockpile in 2009.

State declaration: Iran has publicly denounced BW.

Allegations:The Defense Intelligence Agency alleged in 2009 that Irans BW efforts may have evolved beyond agent R&D, and we believe Iran likely has the capability to produce small quantities of BW agents but may only have a limited ability to weaponize them. In the 2019 State Department compliance report, the United States alleged that Iran has not abandoned its intention to conduct research and development of biological agents and toxins for offensive purposes, and accused Iran of conducing BW research under pharmaceutical auspices including by constructing a plant for pharmaceutical botulinum toxin.

State declaration: Iran has denounced the possession and use of CW in international forums.

Allegations: Pre-2003 U.S. intelligence assessments alleged that Iran had a stockpile of CW. This stockpile is thought to have included blister, blood, and choking agents and probably nerve agents. The United States accused Iran in 2019 of non-compliance with the CWC for an incomplete stockpile and facilities declaration and alleged concern that Iran may be pursuing pharmaceutical-based agents for a military purpose.

Other information: Iran suffered tens of thousands of casualties from Iraqi use of chemical weapons during the1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. Irans CW program is believed to have been started after Iraqi CW use. There are no known credible allegations that Iran used any chemical weapons against Iraq in response.

State declaration: Iraq admitted to testing and stockpiling BW in the mid-1990s. These stockpiles appear to have been destroyed prior to the 2003 invasion. There have been no declarations about BW after 2003.

State declaration: Iraq had an extensive chemical weapons program before the Persian Gulf War dating back to the 1960s under which it produced and stockpiled mustard, tabun, sarin, and VX. Iraq delivered chemical agents against Iranian forces during the Iran-Iraq War using aerial bombs, artillery, rocket launchers, tactical rockets, and helicopter-mounted sprayers and it also used chemical weapons against its Kurdish population in 1988. Its program was largely dismantled by United Nations weapons inspectors in the 1990s.

Iraq declared in August 1998 that it had dismantled all of its chemical weapons in partnership with the UN Special Commission established for that purpose.

Iraq then submitted an additional declaration to the OPCW of an unknown quantity of chemical weapons remnants contained in two storage bunkers in March 2009. Destruction activities were delayed due to an unstable security situation, but began in 2017. On March 13, 2018, the OPCW announced that all of Iraq's chemical weapons had been destroyed.

State declaration: Israel has revealed little in terms of its biological weapons capabilities or programs.

Allegations: There is belief that Israel has had an offensive BW program in the past. It is unclear if this is still the case.

Allegations: Some allege that Israel had an offensive CW program in the past. It is unclear if Israel maintains an ongoing program.

State declaration: Libya announced in December 2003 that it would eliminate its BW program.

Allegations: Between 1982 and 2003 there were many allegations of a Libyan biological weapons program, although later inspections failed to reveal any evidence to support these claims.

State declaration: In 2003, Libya announced it would be abandoning its CW program and in 2004 it declared possession of chemical agents and facilities. Libya declared 24.7 metric tons of mustard agent in bulk containers. In addition, it declared one inactivated chemical weapons production facility, two chemical weapons storage sites, 1,300 metric tons of precursor chemicals, and 3,563 unfilled aerial bombs. Libya completed the destruction of its Category 1 chemical weapons in January 2014. With assistance from the OPCW and other member states, Libya removed all of the remaining chemical weapons from its territory for destruction in August 2016. In January 2018, the OPCW declared that Libya's entire chemical weapons arsenal had been destroyed.

For more information on Libya's disarmament see Chronology of Libya's Disarmament and Relations with the United States.

Allegations: In a 2012 Ministry of National Defense White Paper, South Korea asserted that North Korea likely has the capability to produce[] anthrax, smallpox, pest, francisella tularensis, and hemorrhagic fever viruses. The United States cited continued intelligence reporting indicators of an ongoing North Korean BW program intended to counter the United States and South Korea, in its 2019 compliance report.

Allegations: North Korea is widely believed to possess a large chemical stockpile including nerve, blister, choking, and blood agents. The 2012 unclassified intelligence assessment provided to Congress states that North Korea has a "long standing CW program" and "possesses a large stockpile of agents." In February 2017, North Korean agents used VX, a nerve agent, to assassinate Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of Kim Jong Un in Malaysia.

State declaration: In January 1992, Boris Yeltsin acknowledged that the Soviet Union had pursued an extensive and offensive BW program throughout the 1970s and 1980s. However, since joining the BWC in 1992, Russia has repeatedly expressed its commitment to the destruction of its biological weapons.

Allegations: The Soviet Unions extensive offensive germ program included weaponized tularemia, typhus, Q fever, smallpox, plague, anthrax, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, glanders, brucellosis, and Marburg. The Soviet Union also researched numerous other agents and toxins that can attack humans, plants, and livestock.

The United States has repeatedly expressed concern about Russias inherited biological weapons program and uncertainty about Russias compliance with the BWC.

The 2010 State Department report on compliance with the BWC details that Russia continues to engage in dual-use biological research activities, yet there is no evidence that such work is inconsistent with BWC obligations. It assesses that it remains unclear whether Russia has fulfilled its obligations under Article I of the convention. The 2017 report states that Russias annual BWC CBM submissions since 1992 have not satisfactorily documented whether the BW items under these programs were destroyed or diverted to peaceful purposes, as required by Article II of the BWC.

In its 2019 compliance report, the United States concluded that available information does not allow the United States to conclude that Russia has fulfilled its Article II obligation to destroy or to divert to peaceful purposes BW items specified under Article I of its past BW program.

State declaration: Russia possessed the worlds largest chemical weapons stockpile: approximately 40,000 metric tons of chemical agent, including VX, sarin, soman, mustard, lewisite, mustard-lewisite mixtures, and phosgene.

Russia has declared its arsenal to the OPCW and commenced destruction. Along with the United States, Russia received an extension when it was unable to complete destruction by the 2012 deadline imposed by the CWC. A 2016 OPCW report indicated that as of 2015, Russia had destroyed about 92 percent of its stockpile (around 36,7500 metric tons). On September 27, 2017, the OPCW announced that Russia completed destruction of its chemical weapons arsenal.

Allegations: The UK accused Russia of assassinating a former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, in the UK using the chemical agent Novichok on March 4, 2018. In a 2019 State Department report on compliance with the CWC, the United States accused Russia of non-compliance with the CWC for its alleged use of Novichok. The report also noted that The United States cannot certify that Russia has met its obligations under the Convention, and asserted that Russia had not made a complete declaration of its stockpile.

State declaration: South Korea declared a chemical weapons stockpile of unspecified agents when it joined the CWC in 1997 and completed destruction of its declared arsenal on July 10, 2008. It does not admit publically that it possessed chemical weapons and was noted in OPCW materials as a state party.

State declaration: After acceding to the CWC in 1999, Sudan declared only a small selection of unspecified riot control agents.

Allegations: There are unconfirmed reports that Sudan developed and used CW in the past. The U.S. bombed an alleged CW factory in 1998. There have been no serious allegations in recent years. Sudan was not included in the 2017 State Department report on compliance with the CWC.

State declaration: In July 2012, a spokesman for the Syrian Foreign Ministry confirmed that the country possesses biological warfare materials, but little is known about the extent of the arsenal. On July 14, 2014, Syria declared the existence of production facilities and stockpiles of purified ricin, although little is known about the continued existence of such facilities in 2017.

State declaration: On September 20, 2013, Syria submitted a declaration of its chemical weapons and facilities to the OPCW after years of denying the program's existence. The OPCW announced that the entirety of Syrias declared stockpile of 1,308 metric tons of sulfur mustard agent and precursor chemicals had been destroyed in January 2016. However, reports continue to surface of chemical weapon use in Syria, raising questions about the accuracy of its initial declaration.

Allegations: Syria had an extensive program producing a variety of agents, including nerve agents such as sarin and VX, and blistering agents, according to governments and media sources. There were also some allegations of deployed CWs on SCUD missiles. Several UN-OPCW Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) reports have found that the Syrian government was responsible for chemical weapons attacks in Syria, including in April 2014, March 2015, March 2016, and April 2017 and that the Islamic State was responsible for chemical weapons attacks in Syria in August 2015 and September 2016.In the 2019 State Department report on CWC compliance, the United States alleged that Syrian chemical weapons were also used in 2018.

For more information about Syrian chemical weapon use see Timeline of Syrian Chemical Weapons Activity, 2012-2018.

State declaration: Taiwan has declared that it possesses small quantities of CW for research but denies any weapons possession.

State declaration: The United States unilaterally gave up its biological weapons program in 1969. The destruction of all offensive BW agents occurred between 1971 and 1973. The United States currently conducts research as part of its biodefense program.

Allegations: According to a compliance report published by the Russian government in August 2010, the United States is undertaking research on Smallpox which is prohibited by the World Health Organization. Russia also accused the United States of undertaking BW research in order to improve defenses against bio-terror attacks which is especially questionable from the standpoint of Article I of the BTWC.

State declaration: The United States declared a large chemical arsenal of 27,770 metric tons to the OPCW after the CWC came into force in 1997. Along with Russia, the United States received an extension when it was unable to complete destruction of its chemical stockpiles by 2012. . A 2019 OPCW report declared that the United States had destroyed approximately 91.47 percent of the chemical weapons stockpile it had declared as the CWC entered into force; over 25,000 metric tons of the declared total of 27,770. The United States has destroyed all of Category 2 and Category 3 weapons and is projected to complete destruction of its Category 1 weapons by September 2023.

Allegations: The Russian government has accused the United States on multiple occasions of violating its commitments to the BWC, including by alleging in a 2010 compliance report that the United States undertook research on Smallpox, which is prohibited by the World Health Organization. Russia also accused the United States in 2018 of undertaking BW research at a series of U.S.-funded labs near Russia and China, specifically at the Richard G. Lugar Center for Public Health Research in Tbilisi, Georgia an allegation which the U.S. Department of Defense denied.

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Chemical and Biological Weapons Status at a Glance | Arms ...

Letter to Editor | Letters to the Editor – Hermann Advertiser Courier

Can we risk exterminating the human race.

What if the cure is worse than the disease, what if a hastily created vaccine is rapidly injected into every person on the planet and we find out there is a glitch, a side effect we didn't know about, most vaccines take 10 to 20 years to meet FDA approval, weather intentionally or unintentionally can we risk exterminating all human beings from the Earth.

This is a very complicated vaccine it affects a lot of things in the body, should we just take this pill no questions asked because covid is bad? Germ warfare is all too real, some people say that covid itself is a created warfare disease, escaped or actually dispersed but what if that was just a precursor to a planned chain of events leading up to actually getting people to willingly have something squirted directly into their bodies, what a great way to make sure nobody is missed than actually documenting every person as they get it.

It's not that hard to get a shot, these shots are being specially documented to every person's name. This could be a whole new game.

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Letter to Editor | Letters to the Editor - Hermann Advertiser Courier

Letter: Need to return to united, not divided states – Whidbey News-Times

Editor,

In response to Al Williams letter to the editor regarding the natural, human state of tribalism, I would like to offer a quote or two from one or two men who might be regarded as patriots:

Ulysses S. Grant, speaking to Civil War vets in 1875, speculated that if ever the nation were torn apart again, it would not be split North versus South along the infamous Mason-Dixon Line, the geographic boundary that separated free and slave states. He surmised that in the future the dividing line would be reason itself, with intelligence on one side and ignorance on the other.

Austrian philosopher Karl Popper wrote, The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism, a horrible degeneration that begins with the push of a domino the suppression of reason and truth.

I quote these entries from A Warning, by Anonymous.

Another one is: Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

That was James Madison, April 20, 1795 in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, vol. 4, p. 491 (1865)

Instead of focusing on how we are different, perhaps it is time for us to think about what we have in common as Americans and how we got to this state.

George Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address said, The unity of government is a main pillar in the edifice or your real independence.

From different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth, as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively directed.

The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.

In earlier times our rallying cry was, United we stand; divided we fall.

In my view, it needs to be again.

Marcia Nelson

Oak Harbor

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Letter: Need to return to united, not divided states - Whidbey News-Times

1887: The invasion of the rabbit – Stuff.co.nz

THE PRESS 160 YEARS is a series marking the launch of The Press newspaper in Christchurch on May 25, 1861. Between now and the anniversary, The Press will revisit stories from every year of publication.

Canterbury was preoccupied with an infestation of rabbits in the late 1880s. They were to the north of us and heading south. They were crossing the border from Otago.

It was even a talking point during an otherwise dry pre-election address by Premier Julius Vogel when he spoke at the Theatre Royal on July 19, 1887.

Stacy Squires/Stuff

This rabbit in north Canterbury is probably the distant descendant of those that preoccupied 19th century politicians.

He had been looking into this question lately, and it seemed to him that Canterbury was threatened with an invasion of rabbits which would reduce by one half the carrying capacity of the land, The Press reported.

He need only point to the examples of Southland and Otago to show the evil effects of the pest. Some years back these districts exported 46 per cent of the total value of wool for the colony. Now it had fallen to 25 per cent, and all this was due to the incursion of the rabbits which had taken place there.

READ MORE:* 1886: 'The weather here is fearful'* 1885: Temperance and the vote * New strain of virus welcomed in South Canterbury

In view of the importance of dealing with the matter without any of the delay which had taken place elsewhere, and which was to some extent responsible for the damage done, the Government had taken the responsibility of ordering netting to be brought out in anticipation of Parliament dealing with the question on an ample scale. He could only hope that they would not allow such desolation on the Canterbury Plains as had occurred in Otago and Southland.

Another idea had been floated at a Canterbury Chamber of Commerce meeting in May. How about using stoats and weasels to combat the rabbits? While some objection has been taken the evidence of a most reliable authority on the subject proves clearly that the nature and instinct of the animals will prevent them from ever becoming a nuisance in the colony.

As for germ warfare promoted by the celebrated inoculator Louis Pasteur and others, The Press urged caution in an editorial published on December 3, 1887: It is to be remembered that many diseases fatal to mankind have arisen from cognate forms in the lower animals. It is necessary to repel the invasion of the rabbit, but if the war is to be waged with microbes and sarcoptes cuniculi, the matter should be cautiously undertaken.

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1887: The invasion of the rabbit - Stuff.co.nz

Whats Keeping the Vaccine From Getting to Those Who Need it Most? – The Nation

Stanford University medical residents protest the inequitable distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine in December. (Angela Primbas)

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The week before Christmas, hundreds of medical residents at Stanford University Hospital joined an emergency Zoom call. They had been brought together by shared outrage at their administrations allocation plans for its first 5,000 doses of the newly authorized vaccine for Covid-19, the pandemic that had defined their past year. Only seven of those shots were reserved for residents, the lowest-ranking physicians, even though theyre more often exposed to patients infected with the coronavirus than other employees whose work had been almost entirely remote. But some of those employeesincluding hospital executives and dermatologists whod only seen patients virtuallywere nonetheless ahead of them in line.

For Angela Primbas, an internal medicine resident at Stanford, it was the last straw. She and her colleagues had been putting in 80-hour weeks caring for Covid patients, often missing out on their programs educational curricula to pitch in and staff wards instead. Theyd also recently gotten word that a shipment of the N95 masks theyd been using had been defective, leaving the young doctors vulnerable to exposure. They were more anxious than ever to get the vaccine, only to discover theyd been left out.

There was just a lot of emotional and physical stress that had been piling up over the course of many months, and then to be just completely excluded from participating in the one bright spotthe light at the end of the tunnelwas so upsetting, Primbas recounted by phone. She and the other residents decided to take action. The hospital wanted to kick off its vaccine rollout with a public-facing photo op, and they were going to get one.

The following morning, hundreds of residents, physicians, nurses, and other supporters staged a major protest at Stanford Medical Center, demanding that workers with the most contact with patients be first in line. Spokespeople told multiple media outlets that they took full responsibility for the problem and would right it immediately, blaming the error on a flawed algorithm for determining whod get vaccinated first.the greater good

Residents have indeed been vaccinated since their headline-grabbing demonstration, but not before hearing from friends in programs elsewhere whose experiences paralleled their own. In hospitals like University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins, physicians told me, work-from-home PhD students in their 20s were routinely offered vaccines they believed would be better off given to patients.

Snafus across the country have gone well beyond snubbed hospital residents. Since vaccines were sent rapidly out to states, high-profile screwups have dominated media coverage of the effort. Federal contracts with CVS and Walgreens to vaccinate nursing homes dragged well behind schedule. Spanish-language sections on enrollment websites spouted misinformation. Hundreds of hopeful recipients camped out at rumored distribution sites only to leave without jabs. Untold numbers of unused doses wound up in dumpsters, while vaccine targets nationwide fell millions short.

Such disasters reflect the immense challenges of implementing the largest mass vaccination program in US history, which until recently was helmed by a federal government actively hostile to it. As the Biden administration settles in and vows to ramp up coordination of and financial support, state and local efforts will scramble to make up for lost time. Their ability to do so will depend on their willingness to reach the patients that the 21st century has left behind.Current Issue

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From the early days of the global coronavirus pandemic, societies have, to varying degrees, adhered to measures like social distancing and school and business closures. The goal was to flatten the curveto slow the viruss spread to avoid overwhelming hospitals intensive care unitsin hopes that a vaccine would soon be available. And not long after, it was: largely thanks to investments of billions of dollars from the US and German governments, pharmaceutical giants Pflizer and Moderna both produced vaccines that boasted around 95 percent efficacy in clinical trials, greatly reducing symptom severity in vaccinated patients. These results clinched emergency use authorizations from the Food and Drug Administration, and the vaccines began making their way into arms less than one year after the novel pathogen arrived on American soilan absolutely astonishing timeline.

After nearly a year of incalculable losstopping 400,000 American deaths, not to mention countless hours with friends and family deferredthe vaccine is a ticket back toward normalcy. But that normalcy may elude us until upwards of 90 percent of people develop antibodies against the virus, either through vaccination or infection. Given the unknowns about how long protection from infection lasts, reaching so-called herd immunity will require getting shots into nearly everyone in the country.

Theres really no precedent for that. While mass vaccinations have played a key role in United States public health policy, theyve tended to be somewhat targeted by geography or age: Specific neighborhoods or cities were vaccinated against smallpox in response to outbreaks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a few million doses of polio vaccine were administered to grade schoolers in the 1950s and 60s, and a slate of childhood immunizations are still delivered on a routine basis today. But rolling out a vaccine to hundreds of millions of adults in a relatively short time is an entirely different situation: while children almost always have institutional relationships with schools and pediatricians, their ties to potential service providers can loosen with age and allow them to fall through the cracks. Getting adults to the right place at the right time, despite varying schedules, care responsibilities, access to healthcare, relationships with the state and levels of trust in medicine, is a formidable project.

I asked Jason Schwartz, assistant professor of health policy at the Yale University School of Public Healthan expert in vaccine policy who spends every day of his life thinking about this stuffif hed ever imagined what exactly a nationwide mass vaccination program would be like. He told me he hadnt. This is so far beyond our vaccination playbook that it explains why so much of this work is being envisioned, imagined, and implemented in real time, he said. We have so few lessons to draw on, other than imperfect analogies to other aspects of vaccination.

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Public health departments across the country have had hypothetical plans for mass vaccinations on the books for yearsa tendency that ramped up in the 21st century in response to concerns about germ warfare in the aftermath of post-9/11 anthrax attacks. But since those were written, public health department funding has been gutted; as Kaiser Health News reports, Great Recessionera austerity measures still havent been fully reversed over a decade later. Todays state and local health department budgets are 16 percent and 18 percent smaller than they were in 2008, and employ nearly 40,000 fewer people. Further compounding the problem is that these plans have rested on a reasonable assumption that simply isnt true of the Covid-19 pandemic. The plans that were developed prior to 2020 pretty much all assumed we would have federal leadership and federal financing, said Lindsay Wiley, director of health law and policy at the American University Washington School of Law. There wasnt really a plan in place where the idea was what free commercial event planning software can we use if we get zero federal leadership and support?

Wileys framing is hardly an exaggeration: Mere days after the inauguration of President Joe Biden, reports began to circulate that there was no existing federal Covid-19 vaccine distribution plan for the new administration to inherit. This punted responsibility to state and local health departments, whose long-awaited funding for vaccine distribution, passed through Congresss December stimulus bill, only just began to trickle to recipients in mid-Januarymonths after it would have been most useful. Weve been calling for fundingscreaming for fundingfor months, Claire Hannon from the Association of Immunization Managers told me by phone. Obviously, its better late than never, but its difficult to only get funding after the vaccine has been rolled out.

When I asked Hannon about how the delayed federal cash will affect the overall rollout, she said shed always been much less worried about the first stage of vaccinations than she was about the waves that come next. Phase 1amade up of the highest-priority vaccine recipients, according to the CDCwas arguably the easiest part. As states move on to Phases 1b and 1c, debates have raged over who should get shots first and why. But as it turns out, vaccine prioritization is less a philosophical question than a logistical one.

Even as the Trump administration left public health departments adrift, with no federal support or coordination for months on end, it had little hesitation about funneling resources into the private sector. Multimillion-dollar contracts were awarded to Walgreens and CVS to administer doses to the countrys 3 million nursing home residents, who along with 20 million health care workers comprised Phase 1a of vaccine allocation. But the drugstore giants lagged weeks behind schedule in state after state, with Oklahoma, Michigan, and Mississippi going so far as to beg the federal government to allow them to reassign nursing home vaccinations to other pharmacies or public health officials. Aharon Adler, a nursing home manager in Chicago, struggled to get information from CVS before they arrived to vaccinate workers and residents. Hed been prepared so inadequately for the big day that he hadnt even been told that shot recipients had to stay for observation in a socially distanced room, and the only space hed designated was too small, slowing down the process by several hours. When we talked by phone, Adler still hadnt been able to confirm with CVS when exactly theyd return for the second dose. Notably, the only state that didnt work with CVS or WalgreensWest Virginiaalso became the first to successfully vaccinate all of their nursing homes.

While CVS and Walgreens were woefully botching the nursing home rollout, high-profile incidents like Stanfords allocation algorithm began stoking outrage on social media. New Yorks Governor Cuomo endeavored to combat such unfairness by threatening stiff penalties for institutions that vaccinated anyone out of order, which reportedly spooked some hospitals into throwing unused doses in the trash instead. Meanwhile, relatively substantial numbers of people included in Phase 1a reportedly declined the vaccine, or preferred to take it later once theyd seen others do so safely.

The combined impact of these mishaps was that the early stage of the rollout underperformed projections by several million doses. Those meager numbersas well as anecdotes about undeserving recipients and overemphasized but rage-inducing images of shots piled up in garbage cansbegan fueling a backlash against what was by January being widely characterized as a disaster.

At this point, a growing chorus began chucking the baby out with the bath water. People were right to be angry at how the first month of the rollout had gone. But instead of blaming players like a callous federal government and drugstore giants whod failed to deliver on promises, many onlookers ascribed the mess to the concept of vaccine prioritization itself. Dictating what groups get the shot first, they argued, straitjackets the process, when we really need to just get shots in arms. As Phase 1a finally drew to a close, the far harder work loomed. And for Phases 1b and beyond, the argument went, public health departments ought to broaden eligibility beyond vulnerable subgroups and focus simply on speedy injections at a massive scale.

The title of an essay from bioethics think tank The Hastings Center put it succinctly: Ethics Supports Seeking Population Immunity, Not Immunizing Priority Groups. Just before Trump left office, his administration endorsed this view, stipulating that anyone over age 65 should now be eligible to receive a vaccine. Were telling states today that they should open vaccinations to all of their most vulnerable people, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said on January 12. That is the most effective way to save lives now. Several states, including Florida and Louisiana, have followed this directive. In Texas, state health officials went so far as to spike a Dallas plan to start vaccinating high-risk communities of color in favor of a broader, non prioritized program.

That shift may make intuitive sense, but it doesnt hold up to scrutiny. While its good to allow some flexibility in vaccine distribution guidelines to avoid unforced waste, prioritization schemes are far less of a limitation than the fact that states are still struggling to build up supportive infrastructure to do thisnot to mention the scarcity of doses in the first place. Adding tens of millions of people to the list of now eligible recipients doesnt make that any easierit would be like addressing long waits at the grocery checkout by doubling the number of people in line, instead of opening up more cash registers.

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After all, prioritization isnt just a matter of making a list with the power to magically summon arms in a particular orderit requires an active outreach strategy. Given how long the largest mass vaccination program in American history will takeperhaps nearly a year, per conservative estimatesit makes sense to strategize how to target both those patients most likely to die from the virus and those most likely to transmit it. Counterintuitively, doing away with prioritization in favor of speed and efficiency will actually do less to save lives, because the people most able to navigate the process of accessing the vaccine are overwhelmingly the least at risk. Figuring out how to enroll through a website or care provider, being able to take off work, and traveling to a vaccine site for two different doses are all rendered easier by class privilege.

This dynamic has already borne out starkly: in Washington, D.C., the number of early vaccine signups in a given neighborhood is directly correlated with how wealthy its residents are. In Chicago, race has proven a predictive factor. Unsurprisingly, wealth and race also correlates to employment in high-risk frontline jobs, affliction from debilitating comorbidities and residence in overcrowded housing most likely to drive infections. In other words, a passive approach of first come, first serve practically guarantees that the people who are safest from the virusricher, whiter, more connected people who work from home or can otherwise afford to hide therewill comprise the early wave of vaccination, as the people most likely to die or spread it remain unprotected. Beyond being unjust, that ensures the societal benefits of vaccination will be as minimal as possible.

But what exactly does effective outreach strategy look like? When I asked experts whos doing it right, I kept hearing the same surprising answer: Perhaps the best model for vaccine distribution in the country right now is happening in Central Falls, R.I.

Home to around 20,000 people, Central Falls is a city of superlatives: Its the most densely populated city in the state, the poorest, and the only one with a majority of residents of color. It was also the most affected by the coronavirus epidemic, with case rates per capita doubling those in hard-hit areas of New York.

Overwhelmed by his duties as the public health commissioner of Central Falls, Dr. Michael Fine began researching other countries coronavirus mitigation strategies last spring, as infections surged in his own community. When you look around the world, Fine told me by phone, its very clear that the places that have done best with coronavirus have been places that put people to work and invest in a lot more public health presence than the United States does. He set out to apply those insights, using money distributed to the city to hire 15 so-called health ambassadors from both Spanish and English-speaking communities within Central Falls to implement the citys pandemic response measures.

Since the spring, Fine told me, the health ambassadors have donned bright orange uniforms and maintained a presence at busy spots in town, like outside the Dollar Tree and City Hall. They handed out masks and talked to passers-by about why they were important, eventually driving local mask usage rates from less than 50 percent to over 90 percent. Later, they helped remind locals to get their flu shots, and helped enroll eligible participants in early vaccine trials. As Fine tells it, the health ambassadors became well-known and credible conduits for critical health information, relaying messaging within their own communities in ways officials could not.

And now, as the city rolls out the vaccine, the health ambassadors role is more important than ever. As part of a pilot program to stress test vaccine distribution, the State of Rhode Island opted to focus first on Central Fallszeroing in on a highly distressed ZIP code, and affording local officials latitude within it. To kick off the program, Fine and the vaccination teamcomplete with health ambassadors whod already been stationed thereset up a clinic at the public housing authority, knocking on doors and vaccinating everyone who accepted a shot. Both Fine and Central Falls Mayor James Diossa both got their first shots on-site, to demonstrate the vaccines safety. But Fine believes the health ambassadors helped things go as smoothly as possible: The ambassadors were there with the teams interpreting, and because of their very local presence, I think it was more comfortable for people.

Once the vaccination teams had worked through the public housing buildings, the ambassadors resumed their stations around townthis time, enrolling and teaching residents about vaccines and when and how to get one, like on one Saturday morning at the Kiwanis Club parking lot. And each morning before the start of their shifts, they have a bilingual Zoom meeting to discuss what theyre hearing about the vaccines, how to get people excited for them, how to assuage anxiety or quell rumors swirling about them. Fine encourages them to discuss their own experiences getting vaccinated to reassure their neighbors. In one meeting I was invited to, one health ambassador described how he was running into fewer and fewer people who had misgivings about the vaccine, and more and more people excited to get theirs.

The Central Falls model offers an effective strategy not only for prioritizing vulnerable people but actually reaching them. Thats whats missing from discussions about vaccine distributionas it turns out, the biggest logistical challenge of turning vaccines into vaccinations isnt maintaining extremely cold storage or even reaching consensus on who gets it first, but how to connect and coordinate with patients who are often by definition among societys hardest to reach.

Models like that used in Central Fallsactually going out into communities, and knocking on doors or setting up tables and clinicshave been successfully deployed by public health departments for diseases like tuberculosis, another deadly respiratory disease that shares Covid-19s predilection for the poor and vulnerable. For example, I once wrote about an outbreak among undocumented Chinese immigrants in 2013 and 2014. NYC public health officials were able to trace several cases to an Internet caf and karaoke bar in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and sent workers there to test regulars on site, identifying and treating several additional cases. TB caseworkers also routinely bring medicines or administer antibiotic injections to patients in their homes and workplaces, saving them the burden of traveling to the clinic and making the sometimes lengthy treatments easier to adhere to.

Devising ways of reaching people less institutionally connected to the healthcare system has been central to many public health initiatives, Nabila El-Bassel, director of the Social Intervention Group at the Columbia University School of Social Work, told me. Mass vaccination teams should draw on those lessons, she says: Im thinking about people who use drugs, people in homeless shelters, in soup kitchens, in domestic violence shelters, or in community supervision programs. If we want to get into these populations, weve got to think about nontraditional sites and strategies. We cant just wait for them to come to us.

Experts have long debated how to handle the so-called last mile problem, or the logistics of getting a vaccine from the warehouse or hospital into the arm of a patient. Sometimes, the best option is to travel the last mile for them.

After all, vaccines may be the single most life-saving invention in the history of medicine, but no disease has ever been beaten by science. Turning vaccines into vaccinations requires vast amounts of resources and labor: investment in transformative pharmaceutical research, manufacturing operations, shipping and storage, administrative coordination, public messaging, pharmacists and health care workers, clinic supplies and planning, community outreach and ways to keep them all on the same page. How those elements are marshaled, and on whose behalf, arent questions that science can answer.

Those fights happen squarely in the realm of politics: As President Bidens administration sets to work building a federal distribution plan from scratch, and the deposits from the second stimulus bill finally hit state and local health departments accounts, were finally in place to start catching up to make mass vaccination work. If we do things right, and implement strategies for meeting the most vulnerable people where they are, the amount of sorrow wrought by the coronavirus will be all but stamped out by the time we pass 300 million vaccinations. Should we fail, the outcomes will look more or less like the past yearwith sorrow and death doled out to people who deserved shots instead.

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Whats Keeping the Vaccine From Getting to Those Who Need it Most? - The Nation

Minitrue: Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the War to Resist America and Aid Korea – China Digital Times

The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online.

Cyberspace Administration of China notice:1. Regarding livestreams of the commemorative rally for the 70th anniversary of the Chinese People's Volunteer Army's War to Resist America and Aid Korea on October 23, strictly standardize sourcing, and use the video stream from the Central Broadcast and Television General Platform. It is forbidden to change headings without authorization or activate the on-screen comments function. Keep tabs on posts and comments.2. On October 23, there will be activities such as laying of wreaths at the War to Resist America and Aid Korea martyrs' cemetery in Liaoyang and monument in Dandong, Liaoning, and the Sino-Korean Friendship Pagoda and Cemetery for the Heroes of the Chinese People's Volunteer Army in Pyongyang, North Korea. Related reports should not relay information from KCNA. (October 22, 2020) [Source]

This week marks the 70th anniversary of China's intervention in the Korean War in the thinly veiled guise of People's Liberation Army units rebranded as "Chinese People's Volunteers."Xi Jinping began a week-long remembrance by visiting a memorial exhibit in Beijing on Monday.The Diplomats Shannon Tiezzi analyzed the subtext of Xis highly public visit:

In remarks at the exhibit, Xi said, The victory in the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea was a victory of justice, a victory of peace and a victory of the people. He added that the spirit forged during the war will inspire the Chinese people and the Chinese nation to overcome all difficulties and obstacles, and prevail over all enemies.

Xi did not specifically mention what enemies China might be facing today, instead focusing on the figurative battle for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. But the subtext was obvious from the literal backdrop to his remarks. The United States, that past enemy, looms large as a present villain. Its noteworthy that, amid the worst downturn in U.S.-China relations since at least 1989, and arguably since ties were established in 1979, Xi chose to highlight the one actual war between the two sides.

As Joe Renouard and Woyu Liu noted in an earlier article for The Diplomat, in Chinas official narrative the Korea conflict was not only a just war, but also a vital test for the new PRC and, ultimately, a victory against a technologically superior foe. More specifically, In China today, the Korean War stands as a universally understood symbol of national unity against American belligerence. That gives the Korean War a clear resonance for the current moment. [Source]

Similarly, from William Zheng at South China Morning Post:

Junfei Wu, deputy director of Hong Kong think tank the Tianda Institute, said Xis speech at the museum had a two-pronged message for domestic and overseas audiences.

At the beginning of the Korean war, America misjudged Chinas determination to push them back. They thought China would not send troops into the Korean peninsula. But China did. Xis speech and Beijings high-profile commemorations are clear warning signals to the US not to underestimate Beijings determination to safeguard its core interests, he said.

[] Chen Daoyin, an independent political scientist and a former Shanghai-based professor, noted that from the Communist Partys perspective, historical narratives always needed to serve current politics. Xis historical evaluation of the Korean war corresponds to the current era of the new cold war confrontation between China and the US, he said. [Source]

The Dandong war memorial, mentioned in the censorship directive above, can be seen as a bellwether of Chinese relations with the outside world. Historian Ma Zhao, quoted by The Financial Times, said that recent renovations to the memorial point to a clear flare-up of anti-American sentiment. Chaguans David Rennie traveled to Dandong and reported on how revisions to Korean War historiography reflect Chinese leaders changing world views:

The new memorial in Dandong charges America with crimes against international law in a single display panel, offering few details. A glass case offers supposed evidence: an old bomb casing, and dusty test-tubes containing bacteria-carrying insects scattered by the us forces. In reality the tale was long ago debunked, notably by documents that emerged from Soviet archives decades after the war. The papers included a resolution by the Soviet government in 1953 that called reports of American germ warfare in Korea fictitious. A study by Milton Leitenberg for the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington cites memoirs by Wu Zhili, a former head of Chinas military medical service in Korea. Wu called talk of germ warfare a false alarm that did not make sense: some alleged drop-zones were just metres from American lines, and the winter weather was far too cold for bacteriological warfare.

Cheerful souls might conclude that modern Chinas rulers are embarrassed by this old propaganda but cannot easily disown it, so are taking a middle path. Chaguan draws a different lesson from a recent visit to the memorial. The new museum may tone down its anti-Americanism, eschewing the previous memorials statements about American imperialism being exposed as a paper tiger. But in its place is something that may prove just as disruptive: a deep disdain for the West, which is portrayed as unable to match the efficiency and order of Communist Party rule. Indeed, Americas germ-warfare campaign is called a military failure, thanks to clever Chinese and North Korean anti-epidemic work. [Source]

As part of the Chinese governments campaign to revisit and rethink the Korean War, CCTV released a 20-episode documentary series on the conflict.

Although there might have been noticeably little mention of North Korea in the Chinese state-television documentary, Global Times covered North Korean leader Kim Jong-uns tribute to Mao Anying, Mao Zedongs son, who was killed in a bombing raid while serving in the Chinese army.

Chinas online nationalists criticized the ber-popular South Korean boy band BTS for eliding mention of Chinese war dead during a ceremony commemorating the war. China and South Korea fought on opposite sides of the war and although a truce has been reached the war is, technically, not over. BTS, like all South Korean K-pop groups, is banned from performing in China but nonetheless remains extremely popular. Although some Chinese netizens called for a boycott of all BTS goods, no such large-scale boycott has yet emerged. A Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson even clarified that BTS merchandise has not been banned by Chinese customs.

In Foreign Policy, S. Nathan Park wrote on the boycott that never materialized:

The PRC proved no match for ARMY. When the K-pop superstar group BTS acknowledged the shared sacrifice of Americans and Koreans as they received the Korea Societys James A. Van Fleet Award, named after a U.S. general during the Korean War, Chinese social media roiled with outrage, perceiving BTSs message to be a slight against Chinese soldiers in the war. The Global Times, Chinas state-owned tabloid, blasted the group for its one-sided attitude that negated history. Online stores began pulling BTS-related product, anticipating the kind of nationalist frenzy that has cost giant franchises like the NBA and the South Korean supermarket store Lotte hundreds of millions of dollars in the past.

But Chinas media offensive against the kings of K-pop barely lasted two days. Global Times quietly deleted some of its articles criticizing BTS, and the negativity against the group in Chinese social media also faded quickly. Some Chinese fans call for a boycott hardly made a dent on BTS, supported by their worldwide fan club ARMY (which stands for Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth, if you were wondering). Shortly after they received the Van Fleet Award, BTS became one of only five music groups in history to seize the top two spots simultaneously on Billboards Hot 100 songs chart, joining the Beatles and Bee Gees among others. Last weeks initial public offering of Big Hit Entertainment, BTSs production company, was among the most successful IPOs in the history of the Korean stock market as its share price nearly doubled on the first day. [Source]

In 1950, American President Harry Truman stationed an aircraft carrier in the Taiwan Strait, preventing a PLA invasion of Taiwan. At South China Morning Post, Minnie Chan reported on how memories of the Korean War shape mainland opinions on war with Taiwan:

After returning to Beijing in 1954, Zhang, an English translator and negotiator for the PVA, was classified as a betrayer, dismissed from the PLA and expelled by the party. It was not until 1981 that he was rehabilitated.

The struggle over Taiwan remains a central issue in his reflections of the Korean conflict.

In 2013, Zhang wrote an article, saying he felt relieved after realising the Korean war had avoided a fratricidal fight between Chinese people on the mainland and in Taiwan.

But this month, Zhang told the South China Morning Post he supported actions by the PLA to accomplish Taiwan reunification because he was angry hearing that some Taiwanese refused to recognise they were Chinese. [Source]

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. Some instructions are issued by local authorities or to specific sectors, and may not apply universally across China. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. SeeCDTs collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truthsince 2011.

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Minitrue: Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the War to Resist America and Aid Korea - China Digital Times

Letter to the Editor for Oct. 17, 2020 | Letters to the Editor – Baker City Herald

America is making progress

By Rick Rienks

We, America, have been subverted intentionally and the evidence is coming to a head. The Chinese Flu appears to be a germ warfare attack on global economies, willfully released.

As for politically socialist ideology has corrupted education for decades. I cant express the level of anger generated amongst the rational segment of our population. That remains simmering, though shows itself in firm resolve to get out the Republican vote in numbers supplemented by outspoken conservative Democrats who abandon their party as they see their beliefs transmuted to an evil caricature of that which they once believed.

For me, I am of an age that leaves me primarily an observer with a bit of commentator thrown in. I have always been an outspoken champion of the downtrodden and discriminated, just not to the point of stupidity. When I was a Cub Scout I was considered odd when I spoke out against racial discrimination and the mistreatment of minorities. Truthfully, I was unhappy with the problem of the lack of honor in our dealings with the minorities including the native peoples, the Negros, the Irish, the Jews, all those coming to America in the hopes of creating for themselves a better life.

Substantially, most of them were contributing members of society, believing in the melting pot as the path to a prosperous nation. The concept was often poorly expressed but it had substance. The path was not an easy one but it was an open path. Those who worked wisely could find a way to a reasonable standard of living within the limits of the value of their service to the community. Generally, it was understood that the way to a higher income would be found in higher education. That was the reason young men who went to war fresh out of high school came home and then tried to learn a skilled trade or went to college. Those students were older in years than the average student and much older in terms of life experience.

They had lived the realities of the war, often combat, and they knew that life has hard edges. Subsequently, their generation tried to create a higher vision of a just society. That vision was hijacked by the win by any method Democrat and Republican philosophies that became the obviously downward spiral of status-quo politics. In the mid to late 1980s I was saying, if you want to know what it is to live in a Third World country, stick around, were on that path.

Since that time, sadly, I have seen that prediction come to pass. Remember, even Third World countries have well-off components in their population. That classification relates to many aspects of life and economy.

With the election of Donald Trump we saw an amazing change. We had an elected president who hit the decks a runnin and quickly began turning the decline around. He is constrained by reason. He cannot, for example, correct everything all at once. He can and has set in motion the steps necessary to return the economy to a better place, returning jobs to America thus expanding employment and personal incomes. He has increased accountability to the bloated ranks of government employees. America First has refocused our national path in trade and defense.

All these ideas were known to the thinking citizens with a knowledge of history. Is it any wonder that history is a casualty in our schools? Much of our history, including that which I lived, is not being taught in our schools. Pride in our accomplishments has been stifled while the errors were featured as systemic.

Now you can review the complexities of our nation and its potential and start to define for yourself the best course for America. Remember, in the end it all must be defined in terms of economy and rights. A persons right to not work does not obligate society to feed them period. Society is not a bottomless piggy bank. Taxes are bondage, entitlements are slavery. I dare you to challenge that statement. If you do, you will lose.

Rick Rienks is a Baker City resident.

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Letter to the Editor for Oct. 17, 2020 | Letters to the Editor - Baker City Herald

Antimicrobial clothes claim to kill the coronavirus. But do they work? – Vox.com

Are we asking too much from our jeans? Maybe. Theyre expected to wick sweat, sculpt our behinds, and provide full-body motion for squats and lunges, all while exuding a cool-but-not-trying-too-hard vibe. And now, in these After Times, theyre also supposed to keep the coronavirus the same one that has killed more than 1 million people worldwide and sent whole economies crashing at bay. Possibly.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, but that isnt stopping denim brands such as Diesel, DL1961, and Warp + Weft from promoting jeans purported to squelch any traces of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, that presume to land on their surfaces.

Theyre in good company. Italys Albini Group, which supplies dress shirts to luxury brands like Armani and Prada, is touting new Viroformula fabrics that use silver to inhibit viruses and kill bacteria upon contact on the surface in a few minutes. In London, Vollebak wove 7 miles of copper, another purported germ slayer, to create a full metal jacket for a new era of disease on Earth. US Denim Mills, which manufactures sustainable denim clothing in Pakistan, is inoculating its antiviral collection, dubbed Safe for US, with silver, copper, and the less commonly used peppermint. Los Angeles company Lambs sells a snapback glove you can slip on when opening doors and let dangle from your belt loop when you dont need it. Its clad in a patented silver-threaded fabric that prevents virus or microbe accumulation.

None of these manifested out of thin air. Antimicrobial textile finishes, the secret sauce behind BO-blasting gym shorts and sports bras, have been targeting odor-causing bacteria for decades, though few if any made claims of killing viruses, which are a different type of microorganism altogether.

Buoyed by the cresting popularity of athleisure that blurred the lines between activewear and everyday clothing in the early 2010s, the products enjoyed a rapid ascendancy. Their foothold slipped several rungs a few years ago, however, after studies emerged that silver nanoparticles, their most common ingredient, could breach body tissues and potentially disrupt cellular processes or damage DNA. Some experts suggested at the time that encapsulating ourselves in bacteria-zapping clothing could even throw our microbiomes that is, the trillions of naturally occurring microorganisms, including those on our skin, that are essential to healthy bodily functions out of whack. Warnings also sounded that nanoscale silver, which is invisible to the human eye, could slough off during laundry, contaminating wastewater and seeping into rivers, lakes, and wetlands to kill fish and other aquatic life.

A year ago, talking to brands, a lot of them were moving away from these anti-odor treatments because they didnt see the benefits really outweighing the risks, says Martin Mulvihill, a researcher and adviser at the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry and the co-founder of Safer Made, a Connecticut venture capital fund that invests in technologies that reduce human exposure to toxic chemicals. They basically saw these things dont really work that well to prevent odor maybe a little bit for polyester on workout clothes but for the most part they couldnt justify the cost of using potentially harmful chemicals.

But Covid-19 has brought the category surging back with a vengeance, rejiggered for a new age of hypervigilance and anxiety wherein invisible dangers lurk in every grocery aisle, classroom, and public park. Though still silver-based, these new formulations incorporate macro rather than nano versions, do not alter the skins microflora, and are certified free of harmful substances by textiles-testing standard-bearers such as Bluesign and Oeko-Tex, according to their manufacturers.

But Mulvihill sees them as more of the same-old, dusted off the shelf because a marketing opportunity suddenly presented itself. I was disappointed because I saw these things kind of cycling out of the supply chain, and now theyve gotten a huge boost, he says. And whether or not theyre actually doing any good is a good question.

They might confuse people even further. Certainly consumers dont always know what to look for. In March when the lockdowns started retail intelligence platform Edited saw a 133 percent spike in the number of products described online as containing antibacterial technology compared with the month before, as safety and hygiene suddenly sprang front of mind, says Kayla Marci, an Edited market analyst. But as their names imply, antibacterial treatments target bacteria, whereas antivirals zone in on viruses meaning those products wouldnt work on SARS-CoV-2 anyway.

Antimicrobial finishes take a broad-spectrum approach, blitzing viruses, bacteria, and other pathogenic microorganisms with equal aplomb in theory, anyway. Companies sometimes promote an antibacterial treatment to an antimicrobial one by tweaking the dose of the chemical, which has to be stronger to snuff out viruses. Thats basically what Polygiene did when it launched ViralOff, its antiviral technology, in April, not long after Covid-19 graduated from burgeoning epidemic to full-fledged pandemic.

The Swedish chemicals company, whose signature stay fresh recipe infuses compression tights from Adidas, wrinkle-free Untuckit button-downs, and womens suiting from M.M.LaFleur, adapted its bacteria-inhibiting silver-chloride active ingredient to strike against SARS-CoV-2. It has now partnered with Diesel to bring the jean makers virus-fighting denim and always on technology to stores next spring. The agreement is exclusive only Diesels jeans will sport this particular treatment.

ViralOff doesnt kill the coronavirus per se. It ruptures the bubble of fatty lipid molecules that surround the pathogen, inactivating it so it cant replicate or hijack another host, thus curbing any further evildoing, says Polygienes marketing manager Niklas Brosnan. In September, Polygiene declared itself the worlds first ISO-approved commercial textiles treatment to reduce SARS-CoV-2 by more than 99 percent over two hours, which Brosnan says bodes well not only for consumers but also for shop assistants who dont have to sanitize or sequester a garment just because someone tried it on.

The treatment, which is applied to the fabric at the finishing stages of production, is rated for 20 washes without a decline in efficacy. Since any garment will inevitably shed fibers along with any protective chemical when wrung through the spin cycle, for best performance (and maximum planet-friendliness) Polygiene advises consumers to wash less frequently and only when necessary. (The sustainability angle is something the company takes pains to emphasize. The less you wash things, the better theyre going to hold up, Brosnan says. And, of course, that provides a much bigger energy savings as well.)

One downside: Consumers cant reapply ViralOff on depleted garments because the company has strict controls about the chemical saturation per weight of fabric. Once its gone, its gone.

Hoi Kwan Lam, chief marketing officer at HeiQ, the Swiss firm imbuing all new jeans from DL1961 and Warp + Weft with its Viroblock treatment, recently showed off over Zoom a sleek reapplication spray currently being validated for consumer use. (The finish has been tested to last up to 40 washes at 140 degrees Fahrenheit.) We havent shown this to press yet, she says with a tone of glee. But we plan to go to market really soon.

First developed in response to the Ebola crisis in 2013, then swiftly revalidated as soon as the first coronavirus warning signs came out of Wuhan in China, Viroblock has been tested according to ISO standards to reduce concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 and other types of viruses by 99.9 percent in 30 minutes, Lam says, making its technology especially appealing to face-mask manufacturers who have overwhelmed the company with urgent requests. A zipper manufacturer worked with HeiQ to create the worlds first antimicrobial zipper. Its even developing an antiviral mattress with Serta Simmons Bedding.

Lam describes the treatment as a silver and vesicle technology that uses globules of encapsulated fat known as liposomes to drain the viruss membrane of its cholesterol content and leave its innards vulnerable to attack by silver ions. Not that HeiQ can say any of this in the United States: Because of EPA and FDA regulations, neither HeiQ nor Polygiene nor the brands they work with can make claims, however tangentially, that might be construed as medical assertions. Companies without explicit approval to do so can be subject to legal action such as seizures or injunctions. Rather, companies are limited to either describing antimicrobial treatments as protecting the textile itself or employing euphemisms like self-sanitizing and letting customers connect the dots. We cannot talk about the transferred benefit to the users themselves, Lam says.

With apparel spending poised to shrink by as much as 30 percent this year, according to McKinsey & Company, it stands to reason that brands and retailers are desperate to do something anything to win back hearts and wallets. Denim, in particular, has ceded its supremacy to sweatpants, leggings, and other soft, elasticized bottoms as we spend increasing amounts of time at home. G-Star Raw, Lucky Brand, and True Religion filed for bankruptcy in the aftermath of the outbreak. Levis third-quarter sales tumbled 27 percent year over year because of reduced traffic due to lockdown-related store closures. Could antimicrobial jeans be partly born of desperation?

Denim losses have recovered somewhat since the depths of the pandemic; however, sales are still down compared to last year, says Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at GlobalData, a research firm and consultancy. Whether the Hail Mary works remains to be seen. Slumping consumer demand isnt because denim is seen as unsanitary but because people are going out less and dressing down more. Still, Saunders doesnt see this trend going away soon, even if we manage to get a handle on this contagion. The rise of the sterilized society will drive demand for all sorts of products claiming to reduce microbes, bacteria, and other nasties, including apparel, he says.

Diesel CEO Massimo Piombini says the brands upcoming jeans, which will not be more expensive than its untreated ones, are an important tool to offer its customers. Were already protecting ourselves from coronavirus with masks, visors, and hand sanitizer, he wrote in an email. Now we can add the latest must-have in our Covid-fighting [arsenal] with antiviral clothing. Washing, which people are doing more of, he says, takes time, is inconvenient, and more importantly, puts a huge strain on the environment. The ViralOff jeans would mitigate this need.

The HeiQ-enhanced jeans from DL1961 and Warp + Weft wont cost any extra, either, says Ryan Lombard, PR manager at DL1961 which falls under the same parent company, Pakistans Artistic Denim Mills, as Warp + Weft. This is just an added benefit to protect our customers, he says.

Even so, questions continue to swirl around the effectiveness of antimicrobial clothing as a Covid-19 defense. Antiviral face coverings might be a different matter; as far as we know, the main way the virus spreads is through respiratory droplets and aerosols spewed by talking, coughing, and sneezing, not via surfaces below the neck. Its why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urges people to practice hand hygiene, wear masks, and maintain a physical distance of 6 feet from others, rather than rely on nostrums and quick fixes. The coronavirus is also blessedly susceptible to soap. Washing clothes with regular laundry detergent and giving them a whirl in the dryer is enough to remove any SARS-CoV-2 that might have hitched a ride, however unlikely.

I worry in this situation, says Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist and assistant professor at George Mason University. Theres a lot of selling of products, based off fear, that really arent going to be effective. I would rather people be vigilant in masking, distancing, hand hygiene, cleaning and disinfection, and avoiding crowded indoor settings.

Even more worrisome than possible Covid-washing, say scientists like Mulvehill of Safer Made, is the current scorched-earth approach to germ warfare that could roll back years of efforts to tamp down the harsh chemistries weve been inflicting on our environments, often to the detriment of our overcoddled immune systems, which need good bacteria to thrive and beat off disease. It makes sense, at the peak of the coronavirus peril, to deploy maximum firepower and leave nothing to chance, yet Mulvehill isnt sure if this is the right response in the long term in all but the riskiest of environments (read: hospitals). And while the EPA and the FDA take measures to sort the quacks from the credible for most health products like, say, bogus vaccines or unregistered disinfectants clothes, he says, are much more of a Wild West.

For Ashley J. Holding, an organic chemist and principal of Circular Materials Solutions, a circular economy consultancy in Manchester, England, antimicrobial textiles could complicate existing attempts to manage the deluge of garment waste thanks, fast fashion flooding landfills every day, especially if prognostications that such treatments will become the new normal come to pass.

Though the science is scant, biocides may stymie the biodegradability of natural fibers, since microbes are responsible for breaking down organic matter. Textile recyclers, already hesitant about reintroducing materials that could threaten product safety due to uncertain chemical content, may balk at the prospect of including more additives of dubious provenance, though the reality is that we simply dont know what will happen. Its a question of scale and proportion, really, Holding says.

Its also important to note that not all antimicrobials are created equal, cautions Rachel McQueen, an associate professor at the University of Alberta who specializes in textile science. Not every technology that claims to stifle viruses will live up to its hype or translate seamlessly from sterile lab conditions to the imperfect real world, and snake oil salesmen will, unfortunately, always abound. Buying from reputable, tried-and-true companies, McQueen says, is key, though she admits her own personal selection would be fairly narrow.

Maybe I would wear a mask [with] effective antimicrobials on it, McQueen allows. Jeans, probably not.

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Antimicrobial clothes claim to kill the coronavirus. But do they work? - Vox.com

Exhibition shows new evidence of bio-warfare by Japan – Chinadaily USA

An exhibition related to the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45) kicked off at the Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by Japanese Army Unit 731 in Harbin, Heilongjiang province on Thursday. [Photo by Liu Yang/for chinadaily.com.cn]

To mark the 75th anniversary of the Chinese people's victory in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45), an exhibition related to the war kicked off at the Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by Japanese Army Unit 731 in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, on Thursday.

The museum released evidence of human experiments and crimes involving biochemical weapons by Japan, including 220 old photos, 1,810 artifacts and 51 hours of audio and video files.

The materials, which were collected from China, the United States, Japan, Russia and other countries, mainly focus on new evidence.

"This exhibition is an overall display of the academic research achievements of the museum," said Jin Chengmin, the curator. "Some of the files, including the name list of two Japanese germ warfare units Japanese Army Unit 1855 in Beijing and Japanese Army Unit 9420 in Singapore are being displayed to the public for the first time."

"The site of Japanese Army Unit 731 is a special memory left to us about the cruel war. It is also a warning to the world," said Zhang Shenghuo, 87, a descendant of a germ warfare victim. "I hope more people come to know the history and safeguard the peace."

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Exhibition shows new evidence of bio-warfare by Japan - Chinadaily USA

Unsung Heroes of Los Alamos: Rethinking Manhattan Project Spies and the Cold War – CounterPunch

high southwest view aerial of Los Alamos Los Alamos National Laboratory (left) and Los Alamos townsite (middle and right)

75 years ago before dawn on July 16, 1945, a cataclysmic explosion shook the New Mexico desert as scientists from the top-secret Manhattan Project tested their nightmarish creation: the first atom bomb, called the Gadget.

This birth of the Nuclear Age, was quickly followed a few weeks later, first on August 6 by the dropping of a U-235 atom bomb on Hiroshima, a non-military city of 225,000, and then, three days after that on Aug. 9, by the dropping of a somewhat more powerful Plutonium atom bomb on Nagasaki, another non-military city of 195,000. The resulting slaughter of some 200,000 mostly civilian Japanese men, women and children naturally leads to talk of the horrors of those weapons and to discussions about whether they should have been used on Japan instead of being demonstrated on an uninhabited target.

What goes unmentioned, however, as we mark each important anniversary of these horrific events the initial Trinity test in Alamogordo, the Little Boy bombing of Hiroshima andthe Fat Man plutonium bombing of Nagasaki is that, incredibly, in a world where nine nations possess a total of nearly 14,000 nuclear weapons,not one has been used in war to kill human beingssince the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

And thats not all. Over those same 75 years, despite seven and a half decades of intense hostility and rivalry, as well as some major proxy wars, between great powers like the US and USSR, and the US and China, no two superpower nations have gone to war against each other.

The reason for this phenomenal and almost incomprehensible absence of catastrophic conflict of the type so common throughout human history is the same in both cases: No country dares to risk the use a nuclear weapon because of the fear it could lead other nuclear nations use theirs, and no major power dares to go to war against another major power because it is obvious that any war between two such nations would very quickly go nuclear.

Things could have gone very differently, however, with the dawn of the nuclear age.

At the end of WWII, the US was the worlds unchallenged superpower. It had emerged from war with its industrial base undamaged while Europe, the Soviet Union, Japan and much of China and were all smoking ruins, their dead numberingin the tens of millions. The US also had a monopoly on a new super weapon the atom bomb a weapon capable of vaporizing a city. And the this country had demonstrated that it had no moral compunction about using its terrible new weapon of mass destruction.

Some important scientists involved in the creation of the bomb urged the sharing of its construction secrets with Americas ally in the war against the Axis powers, the Soviet Union. These scientists, many of them Nobel-winning physicists, said negotiations should begin immediately at that point to eliminate nuclear weapons for all time, just as germ and chemical weapons had already been banned (successfully as the history of WWII showed).

But military and civilian leaders in Washington balked at the idea of sharing the bombs secrets. In fact, after Bohrs visit, President Roosevelt reportedly had the FBI monitor Nobelist Nils Bohr, one of the Los Alamos scientists who directly pleaded with him to bring the Russians into the bomb project, and even considered barring him from leaving the US. The Truman administration considered deporting Leo Szilard, and after Robert Oppenheimer proposed to Truman the sharing of the bomb with the Russians, his top-secret security clearance was revoked.

Instead of sharing the bomb with the USSR, which, remember, was Americas ally in World War II, and then working for its being banned, the US began producing dozens and eventually hundreds of Nagasaki-sized atom bombs, moving quickly from hand-made devices to mass produced ones. The US also quickly started pursuing the development of a vastly more powerful bomb the thermonuclear Hydrogen bomb a weapon that theoretically has no limits to how great its destructive power could be. (A one-megaton bomb typical of some of the larger warheads in the US arsenal today is 30 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.)

Why this obsession with creating a stockpile of atomic bombs big enough to destroy not just a country but the whole earth at such a time as the end of WWII?The war was over and American scientists and intelligence analysts were predicting that the war-ravaged Soviet Union would need years and perhaps a decade to produce its own bomb, yet the US was going full tilt building an explosive arsenal that quickly dwarfed all the explosives used in the last two world wars combined.

What was the purpose of building so many bombs? One hint comes from the fact that the US also, right after the war, began mass producing the B-29 Super Fortress planes like the Enola Gay that delivered the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima and de-mothballing and refurbishing hundreds that had been built and declared surplussed right at the wars end. A B-29 could only carry one plutonium ortwo uranium bombs for any significant distance. But the US was building several thousand of them in peacetime. Why?

The answer, according to a 1987 book,To Win a Nuclear Warauthored by nuclear physicists Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, is that the US was planning to launch a devastating nuclear first strike blitz on the Soviet Union as soon as it could build and deliver the 300 nuclear bombs that Pentagon strategists believed would be needed to destroy the Soviet Union as an industrial society and its Red Army as well, eliminating any possibility of the USSR responding by sweeping over war-ravaged western Europe. And the B-29 was at the time the only plane it had which could deliver the bombs.

This genocidal nightmare envisioned by Truman and the Pentagons nuclear madmen never happened because the initial slow pace of constructing the bombs meant that the 300 weapons and the planes to deliver them would not be ready until early 1950. Meanwhile, Russias first bomb, a plutonium device that was a virtual carbon copy of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, was successfully exploded on August 29, 1949, in a test that caught the US by complete surprise.At that point the idea of a deadly first strike was dropped (or at least deferred indefinitely) by Truman and Pentagon strategists.

A new era of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) had arrived, and according to Kaku and Axelrod, just in time.

For that bit of good fortune, I suggest, we have to thank the spies who, for whatevertheir individual motives, successfully obtained and delivered the secrets of the atomic bomb and its construction to the scientists in the Soviet Union who were struggling, with limited success, to quickly come up with their own atomic bomb.

To most Americans, those spies, especially the US citizens among them like Julius Rosenberg and notably Ted Hall, the youngest scientist at the Manhattan Project, hired out of Harvard as a junior physics major at 18, were modern day Benedict Arnolds. The truth is quite different.

Hall, who was never caught, and who was not recruited to be a spy but volunteered plans for the plutonium bomb on his own initiative after searching for and finally locating a Soviet agent, and another spy, the young German Communist physicist, Klaus Fuchs, working independently of each other, both delivering critical plans for the US plutonium bomb to Moscow, clearly prevented the US from launching a nuclear holocaust.

By decisively helping the USSR develop and test its own bomb quickly by mid-1949, half a year before the US could attain a stockpile of 300 bombs, they forced the US to have to consider the unacceptable risk of retaliation. Had the Soviets taken longer to create their own atomic bomb, the US could have gone through with its criminal plans, which would have dwarfed Hitlers slaughter of the six million Jewish and Roma people. (Pentagon experts estimated that over 30-40 million Russians would be killed by a US nuclear blitz.)

Hall, in public statements made in the mid-1990s after de-encrypted Soviet spy codes became public and his name was identified in them, explained that he had acted to share the plans for the plutonium bomb because he felt that the US, coming out of WWII with a nuclear monopoly, would have been a danger to not just the Soviet Union, but to the entire world. (The Russian bomb exploded in August, 1949 was a virtual carbon copy of the Nagasaki plutonium bomb Hall had worked on in his two years at Los Alamos.)

Looking back to the US decision to use its first nuclear weapon not as a demonstration on an empty island or military base, but on two undefended civilian cities, and to catastrophic US carpet bombings using non-nuclear bombs, of North Korea and later Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, its hard disagree with Halls thinking. His concern about US nuclear intentions is further borne out by how close the US came to using its nuclear bombs in crisis after crisis during the late 40s and early 50sagainst China and North Korea during the Korean War,in support of the French expeditionary force trapped at Dien Bien Phu, by JFK in the 1961in the Berlin crisis, in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. and later when US Marines were trapped by Vietnamese troops in Khe Sanh. Each time, it was fear of the Soviets responding with their own bomb that saved the day and largely kept American bombs on the ground (actuallyin the Khe San case in 1968 atom bombs were actually delivered close to the Indochina front, but President Johnson called a halt to the militarys plans).

The truth is, if the Soviets had not had their own bomb during any of the above listed crises, it is hard to imagine that the US, with a monopoly on the bomb, wouldnot have used itto full advantage. If were honest, The MAD reality enabled by Russias Los Alamos spies proved to be a lifesaver for tens or perhaps millions of people around the world.

Americans may (and should!) decry the hundreds of billions of dollars (trillions in todays dollars) that have been poured into a massively wasteful arms race with the Soviet Union and later Russia and China money that could have done incalculable good if spent on schools, health care, environmental issues etc. need to consider what the alternative would have been to Cold War and MAD.With MAD (and considerable good luck) we have had no world wars, and no nuclear bombs dropped on human beings. Without it, with the US having a monopoly on the bomb for perhaps as long as a decade following WWII, this country would have nuked cities all over the world, almost certainly destroying the Soviet Union entirely, and the US would today be known today as the ultimate genocidal monster of history, rather than having Germany left holding that eternal badge of shame.

In reconsidering the work of Soviet atomic spies, Americans also need to know the truth about the goal of the Manhattan Project. While the push to develop the bomb began with a letter from Albert Einstein to Roosevelt warning that the Germans might develop such a weapon, by the time the program got underway, it was clear that the real target was Americas Ally in the fight against the Nazis: The USSR.

Of course we must work to ban nuclear weapons and war. Such weapons are incomparably evil and if the world agrees that germ warfare and poison gas weapons should not exist, certainly nuclear weapons a million times worse should not!But we should nonetheless, as we look back at the grim 75th anniversary of those three first nuclear bombs exploded by the US, admit a debt of gratitude to those spies at Los Alamos who kept the US from committing an atrocity that humanity would have never forgiven, and for giving us this amazing three-quarters of a century of no nuclear or world war.

Original post:

Unsung Heroes of Los Alamos: Rethinking Manhattan Project Spies and the Cold War - CounterPunch

The British Had A Plan To Drop Anthrax Laced Cattle Feed Over Germany In 1942 – The Drive

Of course, Hitler never sanctioned the use of biological warfare for reasons that have never been fully explained. Its been speculated he may have had an aversion to germ warfare based on his experience of being gassed in World War I or his phobia of microbes. The Nazis nonetheless carried out research in this area including establishing an entomological institute to study the physiology and control of insects that inflict harm to humans.

British anthrax stockpiled under Operation Vegetarian was ultimately destroyed at the end of the war all but two crates of infected cattle cakes were incinerated. Its not clear what became of the remainder, but the spores they contained were still judged to be effective as of 1955.

The defeat of Nazi Germany was not the end of British interest in biological warfare. On the contrary, with the beginning of the Cold War, the focus now turned to the Soviet Union, which had begun its own experiments in the field before World War II and which had captured a Japanese biological weapons facility in Manchuria.

The effect of the anthrax tests on the British islands was dramatic and long-lasting, including reports of livestock deaths on the Scottish mainland after an infected sheep carcass from Gruinard was washed up on a beach. According to Porton Downs official account, the mile-long island was not fully decontaminated until 1986 following a painstaking sterilization process amid mounting public pressure.

Today, Porton Down continues to play a role in biological and chemical weapons rather than developing them for potential wartime use, its now tasked with developing countermeasures. It was also a focus of attention in the wake of the poisoning by nerve agent of former Russian military officer and double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, in nearby Salisbury in March 2018.

Operation Vegetarian details of which for many years remained within classified the National Archives is clearly one of the more extreme plans hatched by the Allies during World War II, but its a clear reminder of the kind of thinking at the highest military levels during one of the darkest periods in Europes history.

Contact the author: thomas@thedrive.com

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The British Had A Plan To Drop Anthrax Laced Cattle Feed Over Germany In 1942 - The Drive