Biowarfare and "domestic violence"

Last week the body of Dr Leonid Strachunsky, described as "World Health Organization expert and head of the anti-microbe Therapy Research Institute," was found in his Moscow hotel room. He had arrived from Smolensk, en route to the United States, and died of blunt-force trauma to the head. (Some stories identify the murder weapon as a champagne bottle.) His laptop and mobile phone were missing.

According to MosNews, "some sources link Wednesday’s murder of...Strachunsky, who specialized in creating microbes resistant to biological weapons, to [a] hepatitis outbreak" which, according to the latest report, has afflicted more than 500 people in Russia's Tver region. However, a Moscow police source tells Interfax that the murder was "probably domestic violence."

There's likely no intentionality behind the hepatitis outbreak. The Tver governor is probably right; it's nothing but "tainted food," just as last winter 120 children in North Ossetia were likely accidentally poisoned by contaminated milk, and the drops of mercury that Russians have found in fruit juice and candy are presumably isolated incidents of industrial sabotage. But there should be a degree of uncertainty about such stories in every nation that conducts bioweapons research, because its purpose is to hone the kill potential of the natural world, and researchers' test subjects have often been their fellow citizens.

Americans should know this. That most still don't - or do and don't care - makes me wonder, and not merely figuratively, what they're putting in the water.

And in the air, even. In the Fall of 1999, field tests began for a vaccine developed by OraVax Corporation, under license to the Army biowarfare lab at Fort Detrick (from which the anthrax of the attacks of 2001 was sourced), to a genetically-altered Japanese encephalitis virus the Army had created. Coincidentally encephalitis, in the form of West Nile Virus, also broke out in New York City.

Leonard Horowitz, in Death in the Air: Globalism, Terrorism and Toxic Warfare, cites the conclusions of researcher Patricia Doyle that "the sudden emergence of WNV, never before a public concern, was likely a deliberate release to 'test that city's biowarfare response, and make at least one corporation a sizable profit.'" (One year before becoming the exclusive manufacturer of WNV vaccine, OraVax had been delisted by NASDAQ, and was facing insolvency.)

From Richard Jannaccio's Selling the West Nile Virus Vaccine:

The firm's track record should have disqualified them from the get go. But with a vice president such as [Colonel Tom] Monath, whose resume includes impressive stints with both the Army [former biowarfare research scientist]and federal Centers for Disease Control, the pipeline to the federal trough seems well secured. Col. Monath, who wears the hat of an unbiased advisor to Giuliani on the WNV epidemic, was also one of seven scientists who met with President Bill Clinton on April 10, 1998 to urge the stockpiling of vaccines against bioweapons - another policy from which Monath's company had hoped to profit handsomely.

While a Newsday article of September 29, 1999 wonders why WNV had "suddenly and inexplicably emerged in humans or animals in the Western Hemisphere," it also states, matter of factly, that "the virus has for decades made its home in several US research laboratories...including Rockefeller University in Manhattan and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. In fact, investigators there were the first to grow and study the WNV in the United States. the work began in the 1950s when unidentified viral samples from around the world arrived at Rockefeller University on a steady basis."

I don't know whether West Nile Virus was intentionally introduced. But if it was, it's an old story, told often. In 1977 the Senate heard that, between 1949 and 1969, 239 "populated areas had been contaminated with biological agents." And it's older than that. In `931 Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, under the aegis of the Rockefeller Institute (there's that name again), was intentionally infecting Puerto Rican subjects with cancer cells.

Perhaps the most famous American case of experimentation - and I believe that, too, is intentional - is the Tuskegee syphilis study. It's interesting to consider why this, of all the others, receives the most official acknowledgement and profuse mea culpas. Two reasons come to mind. First, the crime of Tuskegee was of omission (the withholding of care) and not of commission (the purposeful infection of patients), so the amorality does not appear to rise to the level of Nazi science, making an institutional apology on the order of "What were we thinking?" more palatable. And second, since the subjects were Black Americans, a subliminal message is sent to America's whites that they needn't themselves worry about becoming unwitting guinea pigs, even though they have been, and likely still are.

So long as biological warfare research persists, we cannot presume a natural pathology for emerging diseases. We can no longer trust nature to be merely natural.

Even if the Moscow police source is credible, and Strachunsky's killing was likely "not in any way related to the work of the anti-microbe Therapy Research Institute," biowarfare research has always been characterized by domestic violence of a sort.