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by Anthony Gucciardi
December 22, 2011
So far the editor of Science has
agreed to withhold some data under the circumstance that the
government sets up a medium to provide the withheld data to
scientists around the world who 'need' it.
Rare in humans, the 5 mutations performed by Fouchier may allow for the deadly virus to transfer freely from human to human similar to the seasonal flu.
What is quite different than the seasonal flu, however, is the fact that since 1997 the H5N1 bird flu virus has killed more than 1 in every 2 people that it infected.
This is an extremely fatal virus that if weaponized and released on the public could create a major pandemic taking millions of lives.
Amazingly, the very individual who released the bioweapon would not even be able to fully control the outcome.
Paul Keim, chair of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, explained how volatile of a weapon the mutated bird flu could become:
If the entirety of the study data is released, it is simply a waiting game to see if a bioweapon is developed as a result.
The most concerning part of the potential release is the fact that the individuals pushing for complete data dumping will have indirectly facilitated a large-scale pandemic that could threaten the lives of millions worldwide.
Also, groups
dedicated to large-scale destruction and chaos would be able to go
incognito with their release of the heavily mutated and weaponized
virus, as the results are available to the public.
Create Bioweapon
from
NaturalSociety Website
It sounds like something out of a bizarre science fiction comic book, but scientists have weaponized the H5N1 bird flu virus, and are actually considering releasing the research.
The experiments, which involved mutating the virus a total of 5 times, made the strain highly contagious between ferrets - the very animal model used to study human flu infection.
Of course many scientists are now
warning that if such research was made public it could result in the
construction of deadly bioweapons.
The reason that it has not become an epidemic is due to the fact that affected humans are usually not very contagious.
Therefore, altering the virus to become highly contagious is quite possibly the deadliest tweak which could be done. It seems that these scientists are just asking for the new weaponized bird flu virus to infect the public.
So far no scientific journal has published the findings, and Inglesby hopes that none of them will.
Virologist Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands is responsible for weaponizing the virus and presenting the findings at a flu conference held in Malta.
He has recently come under attack by an
organization known as the National Science Advisory Board for
Biosecurity, a committee of independent experts on biological
research.
It seems apparent that these scientists
have zero regard for public health.
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