- Researchers with the NIH’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) infected 12 Egyptian fruit bats with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-like WIV1-coronavirus (CoV) in 2018
- The bats came from the Catoctin Wildlife Preserve (CWP) in Thurmont, Maryland, a roadside zoo with numerous animal welfare violations and a curator with NIH ties
- The WIV1-coronavirus came from the lab in Wuhan, China, that may have caused the COVID-19 pandemic
- The research took place at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana — a biolevel 4 facility — under the direction of Dr. Anthony Fauci
- Rocky Mountain Laboratories also has a Lyme disease connection, as evidence suggests it may be a biological weapon gone rogue
(Mercola)—In 2018, researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana — a biolevel 4 facility — experimented with a SARS-like coronavirus to see if it would infect bats.1 The revelation came from a resurfaced study published by the group, which was flagged by activist group DRASTIC.
The White Coat Waste Project, which aims to stop taxpayer-funded experiments on animals, is also using the Freedom of Information Act to find out more about the research, noting:2
“We’ve uncovered new details about how a shady roadside zoo whose curator was an NIH animal experimenter shipped off bats to a deadly government virus superlab to be infected with a coronavirus obtained from the notorious Wuhan lab that experts believe caused COVID.”
Fauci’s US Lab Experimented With Wuhan COVID Virus Before Pandemic
Researchers with the NIH’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — formerly run by Dr. Anthony Fauci — and colleagues, including gain-of-function (GOF) researcher Ralph Baric, Ph.D., at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, infected 12 Egyptian fruit bats with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-like WIV1-coronavirus (CoV) in 2018 to see what would happen.3
The bats came from the Catoctin Wildlife Preserve (CWP) in Thurmont, Maryland, a roadside zoo with numerous animal welfare violations. In addition to confining 523 federally regulated animals — 241 of them bats — the zoo’s curator has ties to NIH. According to the White Coat Waste Project:4
“We’ve uncovered how the person who is the zoo’s curator and in charge of the animals’ well-being, CWP’s “Director of Animal Health,” worked at the in-house animal testing labs at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 2003-2012! … under their supervision, CWP shipped animals to an NIH in-house lab, then run by Dr. Anthony Fauci, for cruel and deadly experiments!”
What’s more, the WIV1-coronavirus came from the lab in Wuhan, China, that may have caused the COVID-19 pandemic.5 The study found WIV1-CoV did not cause a robust infection in the bats,6 but once again highlights the taxpayer-funded coronavirus experiments with ties to the Wuhan lab.
Did Lyme Disease Also Originate in the Montana Lab?
“OK, so look, I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, tweeted, “but it looks like Covid may have actually been made in the same military lab where the Pentagon created Lyme disease.”7
He’s referring to evidence presented in Kris Newby’s book “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons,” which suggests U.S. bioweapons researchers used ticks as biological weapons and may have created Lyme disease for this purpose.8
In an interview with investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, Newby describes being at a party where a former CIA agent bragged about a Cold War operation that involved dropping infected ticks on Cuba. “At that point, I knew I wasn’t done with the story,” she told Thacker. “This CIA guy was a little bit in his cups, but what he said rang true. I started doing some research, interviewed him several times, and found that it was a verifiable story.”9
She also filmed Willy Burgdorfer, who discovered Lyme disease. Burgdorfer worked at Rocky Mountain Labs in Montana — the same lab that tested the WIV1-coronavirus on bats prior to the pandemic. Thacker says:10
“Rocky Mountain Lab, run by the National Institutes of Health, shows up in documents as collaborating on coronavirus research with Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. This is the scientist who was working with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology where the pandemic may have started.
So Rocky Mountain Labs are now part of the investigation into how the current pandemic started—they are involved in this coronavirus bat research.”
Burgdorfer was retired at the time of the filming, and Newby and her team flew out to his house for the interview, as no one from the NIH or the CDC agreed to be filmed. Someone from Rocky Mountain Labs showed up at the filming to try and intervene. She told Thacker:11
“We were setting up our lights and cameras for about 45 minutes. And then there was a pounding on the door; it was one of the people from Rocky Mountain Labs where he had worked his whole career. The visitor said he was told to sit in on the interview by someone at NIH. And we said, ‘No, we’re not going to let you sit in.’
It was a stressful confrontation — frightening. But he finally left and then Willy said things he might not have said otherwise. He said the NIH knows Lyme disease is chronically disabling. It’s more neurologically damaging to children who have developing neurological systems. And then at the end of the interview — with this evil little smile — he said, ‘I didn’t tell you everything.’”
While most of the evidence is circumstantial, when taken together, it forms a highly suspect picture that Lyme disease may be a biological weapon gone rogue. Newby continued:12
“The official story is that Willy Burgdorfer was sent to Lyme, Connecticut, and Long Island to research this crazy epidemic. In 1980, he discovered the Lyme spirochete and he said, ‘This is what’s causing the disease.’ … I did an animation of the outbreak, and the point source for the beginning of the epidemic was the mouth of the Connecticut River, near Long Island.
When I drew a 50-mile radius around that point, there were three new, highly virulent tick-borne diseases that showed up at that same time, in the late ’60s. This was 13 years before the Lyme bacterium was declared the cause of ‘Lyme disease’ in 1981.
I started looking through military records to see if the outbreak could be tied to any bioweapons accidents. And that’s when I discovered this massive bug-borne weapons program, as well as a program where germs were sprayed from airplanes over large areas, called Project 112. Some of those germs were tick-borne diseases that they freeze-dried and aerosolized for spraying.”
Montana Bat Tests Were a Joint Venture With Baric
China’s GOF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has been at the center of concerns that COVID-19 may have originated in a lab. The 2018 study was a joint venture with Baric, who developed humanized mice used in GOF research by WIV.13
Baric worked closely with Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., the director of WIV’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases. Also known as “bat woman,” Zhengli was involved with research using genetic engineering to create a “new bat SARS-like virus … that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans.” According to Peter Gøtzsche with the Institute for Scientific Freedom:14
“Their work focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to ‘examine the emergence potential.’ In 2015, they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the SARS virus replacing its spike protein with one from another bat virus known as SHC014-CoV.15 This manufactured virus was able to infect a lab culture of cells from the human airways.
They wrote that scientific review panels might deem their research too risky to pursue but argued that it had the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks. However, the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the COVID-19 pandemic was negative, as this research highly likely created the pandemic.”
February 26, 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Energy Department had revised its assessment of the origin of SARS-CoV-2, concluding the pandemic “most likely arose from a laboratory leak.”16
In March 2023, FBI Director Christopher Wray also acknowledged that the lab-leak theory has likely been right all along, stating in an interview with Fox News that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan … You’re talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans, and that’s precisely what that capability was designed for.”17
Yet, this doesn’t show the full picture, as evidence continues to emerge about US-funded GOF research with ties to the Wuhan lab. I first raised the lab leak theory February 4, 2020, but it wasn’t until June 2021 that Facebook finally reversed its censorship policy on this topic, stating, “In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”18
Virus-Hunting Project Quietly Shut Down
Millions of U.S. tax dollars have been sent overseas for experiments aimed at identifying new viruses in animals that could trigger the next pandemic,19 despite growing concerns that such experiments may have been involved in the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Although critics have raised concerns over the potentially catastrophic risks of such virus hunting activities, hundreds of millions of dollars in unabated funding have symbolized a commitment to the effort,” investigative journalist David Willman wrote in the BMJ.20
In 2021, the U.S. also launched a five-year project intended to hunt for viruses in wildlife in South East Asia, Africa and Latin America. The program, named DEEP VZN — for Discovery & Exploration of Emerging Pathogens–Viral Zoonoses — was run by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the US State Department.
DEEP VZN succeeded the earlier USAID PREDICT program, which funded laboratory equipment for the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China through grants to the EcoHealth Alliance. Zhengli, the top coronavirus researcher at the WIV, also worked with PREDICT.21
Washington State University officials, who were hired to administer DEEP VZN, intended to collect about 480,000 wildlife samples to identify potential pandemic threats, with plans to characterize up to 12,000 new viruses. At least for now, however, a potential catastrophe may have been avoided, as DEEP VZN was quietly shut down in 2023. Willman reported:22
“The previously unpublicized decision by USAID to terminate DEEP VZN comes amid heightened concerns over the many risks of working with exotic viruses — including unresolved questions about whether a research mishap or a naturally occurring spillover of virus from an animal species to humans caused the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
… In the wake of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic others have raised additional concerns, saying that the risks of collecting animal-to-animal transmitted viruses should not be dismissed lightly. Such research typically entails collecting biological specimens — such as excrement, blood, or saliva from bats dwelling in caves or tree groves — followed by shipments of the samples to one or more labs for analysis.
A mishap at any stage of the work would, some experts warn, invite the risk of an outbreak or a pandemic … In May of this year three leaders of the Republican controlled House Energy and Commerce Committee asked the Government Accountability Office to open a scientific audit to ‘assess the benefits and risks of conducting predictive field research programs for viruses.’
The members cited research funded over the past decade by both USAID and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an arm of NIH.
Although such research, including USAID’S PREDICT program (DEEP VZN’s predecessor), had ‘identified thousands of new viruses,’ wrote the House members, ‘some researchers have questioned whether collecting and characterizing viruses found in animals can accurately predict those that may infect humans, or what the effect would be if and when humans are subsequently infected.’”
- 1, 5 Daily Mail October 31, 2023
- 2, 4 White Coat Waste Project October 30, 2023
- 3, 6 Viruses. 2018 Dec; 10(12): 727
- 7 Twitter, Mike Benz November 1, 2023
- 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 JoSPI March 11, 2023
- 13 YouTube June 29, 2021
- 14 Scientific Freedom May 19, 2021
- 15 Nature Medicine volume 21, pages1508–1513(2015)
- 16 Wall Street Journal February 26, 2023 (Archived)
- 17 CNN February 28, 2023
- 18 Reason June 4, 2021
- 19 Daily Mail August 12, 2023
- 20, 22 BMJ 2023;382:p2002
- 21 USRTK March 16, 2022
Five Things New “Preppers” Forget When Getting Ready for Bad Times Ahead
The preparedness community is growing faster than it has in decades. Even during peak times such as Y2K, the economic downturn of 2008, and Covid, the vast majority of Americans made sure they had plenty of toilet paper but didn’t really stockpile anything else.
Things have changed. There’s a growing anxiety in this presidential election year that has prompted more Americans to get prepared for crazy events in the future. Some of it is being driven by fearmongers, but there are valid concerns with the economy, food supply, pharmaceuticals, the energy grid, and mass rioting that have pushed average Americans into “prepper” mode.
There are degrees of preparedness. One does not have to be a full-blown “doomsday prepper” living off-grid in a secure Montana bunker in order to be ahead of the curve. In many ways, preparedness isn’t about being able to perfectly handle every conceivable situation. It’s about being less dependent on government for as long as possible. Those who have proper “preps” will not be waiting for FEMA to distribute emergency supplies to the desperate masses.
Below are five things people new to preparedness (and sometimes even those with experience) often forget as they get ready. All five are common sense notions that do not rely on doomsday in order to be useful. It may be nice to own a tank during the apocalypse but there’s not much you can do with it until things get really crazy. The recommendations below can have places in the lives of average Americans whether doomsday comes or not.
Note: The information provided by this publication or any related communications is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. We do not provide personalized investment, financial, or legal advice.
Secured Wealth
Whether in the bank or held in a retirement account, most Americans feel that their life’s savings is relatively secure. At least they did until the last couple of years when de-banking, geopolitical turmoil, and the threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies reared their ugly heads.
It behooves Americans to diversify their holdings. If there’s a triggering event or series of events that cripple the financial systems or devalue the U.S. Dollar, wealth can evaporate quickly. To hedge against potential turmoil, many Americans are looking in two directions: Crypto and physical precious metals.
There are huge advantages to cryptocurrencies, but there are also inherent risks because “virtual” money can become challenging to spend. Add in the push by central banks and governments to regulate or even replace cryptocurrencies with their own versions they control and the risks amplify. There’s nothing wrong with cryptocurrencies today but things can change rapidly.
As for physical precious metals, many Americans pay cash to keep plenty on hand in their safe. Rolling over or transferring retirement accounts into self-directed IRAs is also a popular option, but there are caveats. It can often take weeks or even months to get the gold and silver shipped if the owner chooses to close their account. This is why Genesis Gold Group stands out. Their relationship with the depositories allows for rapid closure and shipping, often in less than 10 days from the time the account holder makes their move. This can come in handy if things appear to be heading south.
Lots of Potable Water
One of the biggest shocks that hit new preppers is understanding how much potable water they need in order to survive. Experts claim one gallon of water per person per day is necessary. Even the most conservative estimates put it at over half-a-gallon. That means that for a family of four, they’ll need around 120 gallons of water to survive for a month if the taps turn off and the stores empty out.
Being near a fresh water source, whether it’s a river, lake, or well, is a best practice among experienced preppers. It’s necessary to have a water filter as well, even if the taps are still working. Many refuse to drink tap water even when there is no emergency. Berkey was our previous favorite but they’re under attack from regulators so the Alexapure systems are solid replacements.
For those in the city or away from fresh water sources, storage is the best option. This can be challenging because proper water storage containers take up a lot of room and are difficult to move if the need arises. For “bug in” situations, having a larger container that stores hundreds or even thousands of gallons is better than stacking 1-5 gallon containers. Unfortunately, they won’t be easily transportable and they can cost a lot to install.
Water is critical. If chaos erupts and water infrastructure is compromised, having a large backup supply can be lifesaving.
Pharmaceuticals and Medical Supplies
There are multiple threats specific to the medical supply chain. With Chinese and Indian imports accounting for over 90% of pharmaceutical ingredients in the United States, deteriorating relations could make it impossible to get the medicines and antibiotics many of us need.
Stocking up many prescription medications can be hard. Doctors generally do not like to prescribe large batches of drugs even if they are shelf-stable for extended periods of time. It is a best practice to ask your doctor if they can prescribe a larger amount. Today, some are sympathetic to concerns about pharmacies running out or becoming inaccessible. Tell them your concerns. It’s worth a shot. The worst they can do is say no.
If your doctor is unwilling to help you stock up on medicines, then Jase Medical is a good alternative. Through telehealth, they can prescribe daily meds or antibiotics that are shipped to your door. As proponents of medical freedom, they empathize with those who want to have enough medical supplies on hand in case things go wrong.
Energy Sources
The vast majority of Americans are locked into the grid. This has proven to be a massive liability when the grid goes down. Unfortunately, there are no inexpensive remedies.
Those living off-grid had to either spend a lot of money or effort (or both) to get their alternative energy sources like solar set up. For those who do not want to go so far, it’s still a best practice to have backup power sources. Diesel generators and portable solar panels are the two most popular, and while they’re not inexpensive they are not out of reach of most Americans who are concerned about being without power for extended periods of time.
Natural gas is another necessity for many, but that’s far more challenging to replace. Having alternatives for heating and cooking that can be powered if gas and electric grids go down is important. Have a backup for items that require power such as manual can openers. If you’re stuck eating canned foods for a while and all you have is an electric opener, you’ll have problems.
Don’t Forget the Protein
When most think about “prepping,” they think about their food supply. More Americans are turning to gardening and homesteading as ways to produce their own food. Others are working with local farmers and ranchers to purchase directly from the sources. This is a good idea whether doomsday comes or not, but it’s particularly important if the food supply chain is broken.
Most grocery stores have about one to two weeks worth of food, as do most American households. Grocers rely heavily on truckers to receive their ongoing shipments. In a crisis, the current process can fail. It behooves Americans for multiple reasons to localize their food purchases as much as possible.
Long-term storage is another popular option. Canned foods, MREs, and freeze dried meals are selling out quickly even as prices rise. But one component that is conspicuously absent in shelf-stable food is high-quality protein. Most survival food companies offer low quality “protein buckets” or cans of meat, but they are often barely edible.
Prepper All-Naturals offers premium cuts of steak that have been cooked sous vide and freeze dried to give them a 25-year shelf life. They offer Ribeye, NY Strip, and Tenderloin among others.
Having buckets of beans and rice is a good start, but keeping a solid supply of high-quality protein isn’t just healthier. It can help a family maintain normalcy through crises.
Prepare Without Fear
With all the challenges we face as Americans today, it can be emotionally draining. Citizens are scared and there’s nothing irrational about their concerns. Being prepared and making lifestyle changes to secure necessities can go a long way toward overcoming the fears that plague us. We should hope and pray for the best but prepare for the worst. And if the worst does come, then knowing we did what we could to be ready for it will help us face those challenges with confidence.
