Philippine Biolabs are needed to protect the food supply. So what could go wrong?

Studying pathogens that could cause pandemics in animals or humans is important. So having biolabs in a country that can identify germs that cause outbreaks killing animals is important. Once identified, stopping the spread by using vaccines or by culling infected anaimals has to be done; and often the lab, once the pathogen is identified, can make a vaccine to stop the spread.

This is basic public health, as every farmer knows.

The Philippines has such labs that monitors sick animals, and finds what is making them sick. 

For example, if you read the Hot Zone, you might have noticed the monkeys who had the Ebola Reston infection (which does not make humans sick) were bred in a Philippine farm.

ah, but did you know that the Ebola Reston virus infects pigs, and that some local pig farmers here in the Philippines caught it back in 2009? 

The presence of Ebola Reston was discovered when the local Agriculture department was investigating a pig epidemic (that turned out to be blue ear diseas), but they found some of the pigs tested positive for the Ebola Reston virus.

so why worry? Well, animal diseases affect the food supply, and some can even make people in contact with these animals sic.

For example, bird flu can make people sick if they are in close contact with the infected bird. And it only needs a mutation or two for bird flu to become a human epidemic with a high mortality similar to the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, something scientists have been worried about for years.

But the main problem is that such epidemics make the price of meat, milk and eggs soar, leading to protein malnutrition in the poor who can't afford this food. 

In recent years, we have had bird flu and African Swine flu affecting our food supply here in the Philippines, and it's only a matter of time until the latest outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease spreads here from an Indonesian outbreak.

So such labs are needed.

Yet when these labs are funded by the US Dept of Defense, the suspicion goes up.

Is the US DoD innvolved to help stop civilian farm animal epidemics, or are they investigating animal diseases to be prepared if an enemy spreads an animal disease that mustates to infect civilians, either accidentally or as a form of biowarfare?

Spreading a disease to affect the enemy's food supply is not new: The Germans spread Food and Mouth disease during the First World war.

And epicemics caused by accidental release by a lab studying a germ is not unknown, as lab leaks of SARS and Brucellosis from Chinese labs has shown.

The suspicion that the present covid epidemic was a lab leak was pooh poohed by many, including the head of the Ecolab, who just happened to have funded gain of function research on bat covid.

This is a big scandal, as is the censorship of many aspects of the covid epidemic in medical journals, the MSM and in the social media. I am not talking about censorship of self proclaimed experts who are making money by being anti vax types, but the censorship against those with PhD's or MD's who actually are qualified to question the data.

So fast forward to the present.

Ecohealth, the entity that funded bat research in Wuhan, was just granted 3 million dollars for Philippine research.

WTF?

Grant page here.

Awarding Agency

Department of Defense (DOD)

Recipient

ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE INC.

520 8TH AVE RM 1200

NEW YORK, NY 10018-4183

Congressional District: NY-12

UNITED STATES

Assistance Listings (CFDA Programs)

12.351 - SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH - COMBATING WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

Dates

 

what's it all about?

REDUCING THE THREAT OF VIRAL SPILLOVER FROM WILDLIFE IN THE PHILIPPINES

PhilStar has an article about it last month. 

MANILA, Philippines — The House Makabayan bloc has expressed concerns over the reported construction of an animal disease diagnostic laboratory in Tarlac City with funding from the United States’ Defense Threat Reduction Agency (US-DTRA).

...The Mkabayan group has been accused of being associated with the local communist party, a common accusation against leftist groups and human rights activists.

“According to the DA, the new Regional Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory (RADDL) in Barangay Paraiso, Tarlac City will provide advanced services through modern technologies to ensure a healthy and resilient animal sector in Central Luzon,” the resolution read.

 if you read the article, they are questioning that the funding came from the US Dept of Defense, not the US Dept of Agriculture.

The lawmakers warned that the US-DRTA is the official combat support agency of the US for countering weapons of mass destruction: chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high explosives.

“A civilian laboratory was constructed using funds of a foreign military agency, which has the responsibility of managing and integrating the US defense department’s chemical and biological defense science and technology programs,” the measure reads...

“Allowing the US defense department to influence civilian agricultural initiatives gives rise to reasonable suspicions on the true objectives of these projects in the Philippines,” the measure stated.

Let's put this into perspective.

When the African swine flu was killing pigs in China, the Philippines banned imports of meat products from there, since these could spread the disease to here if the pigs ate garbage with infected scraps.

And voila, infected meat from China was found, mislabled as coming from other countries or just plain smuggled into the Philippines and so many local pigs got infected.

The cause is probably corruption, but with the hostilities of China who has been slowly stealing the fish and petroleum resources from the Philippines in the West Philippine sea, you can see how easy biological warfare could destroy the country's food supply while letting the usual suspects make a profit selling or smuggling in food.

 

...But aside from the US security sector, foreign-funded biolaboratories and research are being set up by foreign-funded nonprofits such as the Ecohealth Alliance in different parts of the world, including the Philippines.

The lawmakers said the Philippines should closely look into the activities of both the US-DTRA and EcoHealth Alliance to ensure that the Philippines will not be used as launch zones for geopolitical objectives and biological threats to the world.

Translation: China could claim such labs were part of biowarfare against them, and use this as an excuse to invade the Philippines, similar to how one of Russia's excuses in invading the Ukraine was claiming similar animal biolabs there were not to stop local diseases but for biowarfare against them.. 

Being open to outsiders who can check on what's going on is the best way to monitor labs for safety lapses or for illicit experiments, such as the gain in function experiments which had been done in the Wuhan lab on bat flu.

The need for oversight of such labs is not just something that worries the left wing parties in the Philippines. 

NYPost article from July 2021:

The Defense Department doled out millions of dollars to the same nonprofit that funneled federal grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research — with most of the Pentagon money going toward murky research on countering biological weapons.

Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and lab director at the school’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, told the Post that such awards from the defense and intelligence communities are distributed “outside the normal processes” for such research, with no transparency and oversight beyond what can be provided by members of Congress.

In this shadowy, near-impenetrable world, Ebright explained, EcoHealth acts as one of many “funding subcontractors” directing money from a “blank check written by [government] program officers who often go on to be employed” by the same non-profits to whom they once doled out taxpayer cash.

I repeat: Biolabs do important work in discovering the causes of illness in animals (and humans), and in developing vaccines to stop the spread of such diseases.

But such labs should be regulated by outsiders to stop accidental lab leaks or illicit experimentation.