Monkeypox Update

Monkeypox Update

Clayton Baker

The Biological Weapons Convention, which every major nation has signed, “prohibits the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological and toxin weapons.” As a result, gain-of-function research – the process of taking viruses and other pathogens found in nature and making them more transmissible and dangerous in humans – must be justified by defining it as something other than what it really is – namely, the creation of biological weapons and countermeasures for those weapons.

The grand deception – the big lie – used to justify gain-of-function research goes something like this: “We need to alter pathogens in the lab to anticipate the mutations that just might occur in nature, and to promote the production of vaccines to protect humanity from these theoretical superbugs.”

In truth, there is no legitimate reason to create superbugs in the laboratory. One does not save Tokyo by creating Godzilla. Unfortunately, science can be both complicated and confusing, especially when the “experts” are intentionally untruthful. This grand deception has therefore worked for decades, and a gigantic, profitable, and frankly terrifying pandemic preparedness industry involving governments, non-governmental organizations, Big Pharma, and universities has grown as a result.

Monkeypox virus is back in the news in 2024, as one of the pandemic industrial complex’s leading candidates for the so-called “Disease X” about which the World Health Organization has been sounding its relentless alarm. (Of course, this is the second time monkeypox has been trotted out in recent years, after the 2022 monkeypox fear porn campaign in the United States that ultimately fizzled out.)

In 2003, through exotic pet importation, 35 people in six US states were confirmed to have been infected with the clade II type of the monkeypox virus. The humans contracted the disease from infected prairie dogs, kept as pets, that had themselves been exposed to either contaminated imported animals or other individuals infected with the virus. All human cases made a full recovery without lasting effects. 

This outbreak was an odd, self-limited, and entirely incidental occurrence of a rare and essentially non-lethal virus finding its way to the US by specific and preventable circumstances. In a world of sensible and ethical public health practices, this event should have prompted a reasonable, proportionate response, such as increased precautions regarding the exotic animal trade.

Instead, this incident opened the floodgates to dangerous research by scientists who sought to identify a strain of monkeypox that could easily be passed to humans by way of aerosol transmission. 

In 2009, Christina Hutson and her team at the CDC collaborated with Jorge Osorio at the University of Wisconsin to investigate the transmissibility of monkeypox. Again, in 2012, Hutson teamed with other universities to test and compare the transmissibility of the monkeypox virus in rodents, ultimately determining in those experiments that “transmission of viruses from each of the MPXV clade was minimal via respiratory transmission.”

Again, in a sensible and ethical world, these findings might have shut the door on ill-advised research on monkeypox. As we shall see, that was not the case.

In 2015, AnthonFauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) covertly approved a dangerous gain-of-function experiment that would genetically manipulate the monkeypox virus to create a more virulent and transmissible pathogen that would potentially pose a grave threat to humans. 

What is known is that there was no legitimate reason to conduct such experiments, and that those involved knew this, as they hid the project from their overseers. The only logical assumption about the intent of the research is that it was to create a weaponized version of monkeypox. 

The House Committee’s conclusions on Fauci’s NIAID as a whole are damning:

The primary conclusion drawn at this point in the investigation is that NIAID cannot be trusted to oversee its own research of pathogens responsibly. It cannot be trusted to determine whether an experiment on a potential pandemic pathogen or enhanced potential pandemic pathogen poses unacceptable biosafety risk or a serious public health threat. Lastly, NIAID cannot be trusted to honestly communicate with Congress and the public about controversial GOFROC experiments. (page 8)

To summarize: in nature, monkeypox disease is a relatively rare, usually mild viral illness transmitted through behaviorally modifiable forms of close contact such as sexual intercourse and the hunting and eating of bushmeat. The infectious agent is a very large, complex DNA virus that transmits poorly from person to person and is much less prone to mutation than numerous other viruses. 

Once one realizes all this, it becomes frankly preposterous to attempt to justify gain-of-function research on such a pathogen for any legitimate purpose. The only plausible reason to do such research on monkeypox is to create a bioweapon – a weaponized virus – and to also create and profit from its countermeasure – a proprietary vaccine.