Quote:Little-known scientific team behind new assessment on covid-19 origins (WaPo, February 27, 2023)

Small shift in favor of ‘lab leak’ theory was prompted by new data and group of weapons-lab scientists

An analysis by experts from the U.S. national laboratory complex — including members of a storied team known as Z-Division — prompted the Energy Department to change its view earlier this year about the likely cause of the 2019 coronavirus outbreak, the officials said. Though initially undecided about covid-19’s origins, Energy officials concluded as part of a new government-wide intelligence assessment that a lab accident was most likely the triggering event for the world’s worst pandemic in a century.

“The bottom line remains the same: Basically no one really knows,” one of the officials said.

“‘Lab’ does not equal ‘man-made,’ the official said. “Even if it was a leak from a lab, they still think it would be a naturally occurring virus.”
Among the nine intelligence entities involved in the assessment, only the FBI had previously concluded, with “moderate” confidence, that covid-19 started with a lab accident. The Energy Department was the only agency that changed its view, while the CIA and one other agency remained undecided, lacking enough compelling evidence to support one conclusion over the other, officials said.

The labs were established as part of the U.S. nuclear weapons program and operate largely in the classified realm. The department’s cadre of technical experts includes members of the Energy Department’s Z-Division, which since the 1960s has been involved in secretive investigations of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons threats by U.S. adversaries, including China and Russia.

Quote:EXCLUSIVE: Classified study found COVID-19 could have originated in Chinese lab (May 3, 2021)

A classified study of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 conducted a year ago by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Department of Energy’s premier biodefense research institution, concluded the novel coronavirus at the heart of the current pandemic may have originated in a laboratory in China, Sinclair has learned.

Researchers at Livermore’s “Z Division,” the lab’s intelligence unit, issued the report May 27, 2020, classified “Top Secret.” Its existence is previously undisclosed. The Z Division report assessed that both the lab-origin theory and the zoonotic theory were plausible and warranted further investigation. Sinclair has not reviewed the report but confirmed its contents through interviews with multiple sources who read it or were briefed on its contents.
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Asked about the Z Division report, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), ranking member on the House foreign affairs committee, declined to comment on classified material but emphasized the need for further study. “From what I have seen and read, you absolutely cannot dismiss the notion that the WIV lab is a potential source of the virus,” McCaul said in a statement to Sinclair. “And if you listen to the leaders in the previous and current administrations, they have said exactly the same thing.”

Quote:People familiar with the study said that it was prepared by Lawrence Livermore’s “Z Division,” which is its intelligence arm. Lawrence Livermore has considerable expertise on biological issues. Its assessment drew on genomic analysis of the SARS-COV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, they said.

U.S. Report Found It Plausible Covid-19 Leaked From Wuhan Lab (WSJ, June 8, 2021)

(02-28-2023, 10:15 PM)Ninurta Wrote: Never. The US is too busy shoveling money and giving away our weapons stockpile to a civil war in the Ukraine that has nothing to do with us and is certainly no threat to us at all to do the hard work of defending American citizens from actual CCP threats. It would not surprise me at all to discover that the current regime is in collusion with globalists and the CCP to take America down, and is merely using the Ukraine war to misdirect attention, as a distraction to prevent citizens from seeing what is actually occurring..

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Quote:The War on Bugs (2013)

Michael V. Callahan, M.D., DTM&H (U.K.), M.S.P.H., doesn't wear a military uniform, but he plays a crucial role in keeping Americans safe by beefing up the nation's defenses against disease.

For the past seven years, Callahan, a 1995 School of Medicine graduate, has been a program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the American military’s secretive R&D center. Callahan was recruited while working overseas “to work on fast-paced solutions to health threats,” he says. His biggest mission: Create a government-funded drug research and production capability focused strictly on national priorities, such as defense and pandemic preparedness, rather than profits. The Department of Defense had no idea how to make drugs, but they knew they had to learn, Callahan recalls.

Rush Request

“The military is most concerned about diseases of the tropics and diseases of bioterrorism, but these are rare globally,” Callahan says. “Though you might have 170,000 deaths per year from yellow fever, that’s not going to be a money maker for a drug company, so they aren’t interested.”

Callahan’s solution involved a special forces approach. His team identified promising work in U.S. labs, offering researchers the funding and equipment they needed to turn their discoveries into patient-ready treatments. In 28 months, DARPA-funded projects created six new vaccines, leveraging taxpayer dollars into economic payback at a ratio of up to 11:1. “It’s been wildly successful,” Callahan says.

Callahan also developed a “twinning” strategy, searching for treatment approaches for related diseases that would interest the military or government (such as bird flu, with its potential to cause a pandemic) as well as drug companies and venture capitalists (the regular flu). These players could then help fund development costs needed to bring the products to market.
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Meanwhile, Callahan is excited to see how techniques and strategies he initiated at DARPA can be adapted far beyond infectious diseases. The White House and the National Institutes of Health are both interested in the models, Callahan says. “The technology is cool,” he says, “but the experimental business strategy they allowed me to try will have implications across government.”

Quote:Blackstone Defaults On $562MM CMBS As It Keeps Blocking Investor Withdrawals From $71BN REIT (Mar 2, 2023)

Now that soaring rates have burst the commercial real estate bubble, the carnage is coming fast and furious.

This morning Bloomberg reports that Wall Street's largest commercial real estate landlord, private equity giant Blackstone, has defaulted on a €531 million ($562 million) bond backed by a portfolio of offices and stores owned by Sponda Oy, a Finnish landlord it acquired in 2018.