Engineering Contagion- UPMC, Corona-thrax and “the Darkest Winter”

The Last American Vagabond by Whitney Webb - September 25, 2020

Researchers at a BSL-3 lab tied to the organizers of the 2001 Dark Winter simulation, DARPA, and the post-9/11 biodefense industrial complex are genetically modifying anthrax to express Covid-19 components, according to FOIA documents.

Soon after having been fired from his post as secretary of the treasury in December 2002, after a policy clash with the president, Paul O’Neill became a trustee of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Despite having just worked under and clashed with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it wasn’t until O’Neill began answering to UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff as a member of the Center’s board that he chose to publicly denounce a superior as “evil.”

“He wants to destroy competition. He wants to be the only game in town,” O’Neill would later state of Romoff, adding that “after 18 months I quit [the UPMC board] in disgust” due to Romoff’s “absolute control” over the board’s actions. O’Neill subsequently noted that UPMC “board members who have wealth of hundreds of millions of dollars are not willing to take this guy on.” When pressed by a local reporter, O’Neill further elaborated that he had been told by other board members that they were “afraid” of Romoff because Romoff might “harm them in some way.”

Romoff took over stating at one 1995 UPMC meeting that his “vision” for the future of American health care was “the conversion of health care from social good to a commodity.” Motivated by profit above all else, Romoff aggressively expanded UPMC, gobbling up community hospitals, surgery centers, and private practices to create a “health-care network” that has expanded throughout much of Pennsylvania and even abroad to other countries, including China.

Under Romoff, UPMC has also expanded into the health-insurance business, with 40 percent of the medical claims it pays out going straight back into places of care that are owned by UPMC—meaning UPMC is essentially paying itself.

In addition, since UPMC is officially a “charitable nonprofit corporation,” it is exempt from property taxes and has special access to the tax-exempt municipal bond market. UPMC can also solicit tax-deductible grants from private individuals and organizations, as well as governments. These grants totaled over $1 billion dollars between 2005 and 2017.

before the state of Pennsylvania had a single case of Covid-19, UPMC formed a “coronavirus task force,” which was initially focused on lobbying the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC to obtain samples of live SARS-CoV-2 for research purposes. That research was to be conducted at the Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL) housed within UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research.¹⁾

University of Pittsburgh To Begin Work on Novel Coronavirus Vaccine PittWire Thursday, February 13, 2020 The University of Pittsburgh, whose legacy of medical breakthroughs includes the polio vaccine, is in the process of obtaining samples of the novel coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2, that will allow its researchers to begin work toward developing a vaccine against the disease. As of Feb. 13, the outbreak has killed more than 1,300 people and sickened more than 60,000 worldwide, including 13 cases in the U.S.

Duprex said the Pitt center formed a coronavirus task force a few weeks ago and is pursuing the live virus from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop disease models that will support vaccine development. Pitt’s Center for Vaccine Research is one of the few labs nationwide qualified to handle pathogens like SARS-CoV-2, which stands for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus. The virus was recently found to be related to the species that caused the 2002-03 SARS outbreak. ²⁾

==== TLAV FOIA - University of Pittsburgh Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) Meeting Minutes ³⁾