Lessons Lost to History: the Tragically Unheeded 2008 Warning of Biolab Threat

We ignore prescient warnings in the present at the peril of our future selves.

This one comes from a decade and a half ago, a full twelve years before the course of world history was literally changed forever for the worse by forced lockdowns, masking, and medical mandates unimaginable prior to 2020.

Via Scientific American, 2008:

In an opinion that echoes those of several public health scientists, Keith Rhodes, the Government Accountability Office’s chief technologist, told a congressional hearing in October 2007 that “we are at greater risk today” than before of an infectious disease epidemic because of the great increase in biolaboratories and the absence of oversight they receive.

Nevertheless, Michael Kurilla, NIAID’s director of extramural research, says that “we’re much better off” having spent $41 billion on bioterror research since 2002.

The study’s author, John Dudley Miller, offered his unheeded warning in the context of the anthrax score of the aughts.

Note how often these biomedical security state threads lead back to, and intertwine with, the post-9/11 War on Terror waged by the Bush Administration and continued by its predecessor.

In many ways, this is all one continuous, ever-evolving permanent emergency. The referent objects and threats (real or manufactured) change, but all of the unending crises that we are subjected serve to justify increased national security powers in some form.

The overarching message I wish to convey when discussing AI developers or virologists tinkering with forces beyond their control in a lab is: these people do not know what they are doing.

They disrespect nature. They don’t respect God, whose image is reflected in nature (they don’t believe in any transcendent force aside from themselves). Nothing is sacred to them.

What they know is that engineering new pathogens is potentially profitable beyond belief — and it facilitates new social control powers previously beyond imagination.

Whether the agenda is climate lockdowns or COVID-19 lockdowns, it’s a despot’s holy grail, simple yet brilliant: turn human activity and humanity itself into something dirty and dangerous, an existential threat to be contained, and then securitize around it.

Once it’s established that humans are immoral and bad and their immorality and badness are contagious, nothing is off-limits.

What this sort of ideological narrative fosters is the anti-human ethos of The Matrix: the machine (or human) overlords provide themselves a moral justification to enslave humanity if it serves some utility (as batteries in The Matrix, for example). If they can’t find any use to put humanity to, then they have the moral justification to exterminate it.

Regarding “climate change,” if the narrative is promulgated that carbon is the enemy, not only can they shut down every technological product or service that relies on fossil fuels — gas-powered cars, gas stoves, the electrical grid itself in most cases — they can also justifiably snuff out carbon-based human life itself.

It’s an exceedingly simple calculation but one with profound implications: humans are carbon à carbon is bad à humans are bad.

Tying this back to biolab pathogen research, supposing you have been conditioned to accept this transhumanist calculation. If you then find yourself in a position to concoct a virus in a lab — in your role as the director of the U.S. NIAID, for instance — that will wipe them out, why not?

And if you can piggyback experimentation with mRNA modification on the back of a pandemic and make a killing through government contracts and mandates doing it, all the better.