The FBI closed its investigation after its leading suspect, a vaccinologist, Dr. Bruce Ivins, who ran the US Army lab at Fort Detrick, allegedly took his own life. A multitude of critics of the shoddy and haphazard FBI investigation complained that Ivins was the victim of a ham-handed FBI frame. According to the FBI’s former lead investigator, Richard Lambert, the FBI team hid a “mountain” of evidence that would have exonerated Ivins.60
In 2008, following Ivins’s untimely “suicide,” Department of Justice civil attorneys in Florida, defending a claim by the widow of anthrax victim Robert Stevens, publicly challenged the FBI’s assertions that Ivins had been the culprit and instead pointedly “suggested that a private laboratory in Ohio” managed by Battelle and linked to the El-Hibris “could have been involved in the attacks.”61 DOJ headquarters quickly had its Florida attorneys rewrite their brief, omitting this claim.
An Italian publication, Il Manifesto, reported in its October 2001 issue that the FBI had placed the El-Hibris on its suspects list for sending the anthrax spores through the US mail.62
Cui Bono
Since 1995, Kadlec had been frothing about bioterrorism to war college students and urging the creation of a Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) to warehouse vaccines and other countermeasures. In 2004, with Kadlec now working for Secretary Rumsfeld at the Bush White House, Congress passed the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness Act—which Kadlec drafted—directing the secretary of HHS to maintain a “Strategic National Stockpile (SNS)” managed jointly by DHS and HHS.63
The same week, Congress passed the Project BioShield Act—which Kadlec also helped draft—launching the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), a government-operated investment bank that would germinate new technologies for Kadlec’s stockpile. With Kadlec’s guidance, BARDA would become a federal ATM machine for Big Pharma, biodefense contractors, and gain-of-function researchers. Along with Dr. Fauci’s NIAID and the Pentagon’s DARPA, BARDA would be the other big-league funder for experiments to create pandemic superbugs in Wuhan and elsewhere. Kadlec’s statute authorized the purchase of $5 billion of matériel—including vaccines—for the stockpile, creating a gold mine, as we shall see, for Kadlec’s friends the El-Hibris.
Another conspicuous beneficiary of the Stockpile was then-Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, and Kadlec’s boss, who made a killing during the 2004 fake bird flu pandemic, which Tony Fauci ginned up—with his confederate, an ambitious young British physician and Wellcome Trust researcher, Jeremy Farrar. Sixteen years later, as Director of Wellcome Trust, Farrar would play a key role in the 2020 Wuhan cover-up. The Pentagon, in 200464 and 2005, in response to Farrar’s concocted contagion, stockpiled 80 million doses of Gilead’s flu remedy Tamiflu. Secretary Rumsfeld had served on the board of Gilead from 1988 to 2001 and was its chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration as defense secretary. He retained stock in the pharmaceutical company, which netted him a $5 million profit from the Tamiflu run-up. George Shultz, another PNAC war hawk, also hit the jackpot, cashing in $7 million of Gilead stock during the Tamiflu run-up.65
The biggest winners, however, were the El-Hibris: the anthrax attacks brought them exoneration, salvation, and extravagant windfalls.
BioPort’s Rebirth and Reinvention as Emergent BioSolutions
Anthrax arrived just in time for the El-Hibris. BioPort was by then on the ropes. The El-Hibris’ anthrax vaccine facility was facing bankruptcy and the loss of its operating license. BioPort’s Pentagon contract expired in August 2001, with a host of outstanding accounting mysteries impeding its renewal. The Pentagon had given BioPort millions to renovate its factory, but much of that money instead financed senior management bonuses and an opulent makeover for the El-Hibris’ executive offices. Millions more simply “disappeared,” according to journalist Whitney Webb. In 2000, not long after receiving its first Pentagon bailout, BioPort contracted none other than Battelle Memorial Institute to cultivate its anthrax seed stock.
Kadlec’s boss, Donald Rumsfeld, told aides that his biosecurity priority after the incidents of anthrax sent through the mail was rescuing BioPort: “We’re going to try to save it, and try to fashion some sort of an arrangement whereby we give one more crack at getting the job done with that outfit. It’s the only outfit in this country that has anything under way, and it’s not very well under way, as you point out.”66
Gold Rush
In the summer of 2001, two months before the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, the Department of Defense officially launched its drive to revive bioweapons research by sending a report to Congress, authored by Kadlec, pleading that the military’s system for developing vaccines to protect troops from anthrax, smallpox, and other exotic bioweapons “is insufficient and will fail.”67
Beginning with the 9/11 attack, the War on Terror triggered a tectonic shift in global security priorities and elephantine ripples in defense spending patterns across the globe as open democracies began shifting to a security state footing. The revival of US government interest in germ warfare opened new opportunities. The US biodefense budget went from $137 million in 1997 to $14.5 billion for 2001–2004.68 Every agency with a colorable claim to a National Security function paddled out frantically to barrel the money tsunami. Between 2001 and 2014, the United States spent around $80 billion on biodefense. Since germ weaponry was still illegal, vaccines became a critical euphemism for the revival of the multibillion-dollar bioweapons industry. Pentagon sources told Science Magazine that the military was applying for “a sweeping overhaul of how the federal government develops vaccines to protect both the military and civilians.”69 The Pentagon’s assault on the vaccine space was both an opportunity and threat to Dr. Fauci and NIAID.
US Vice President Cheney and his PNAC confederates found some convenient loopholes in the Geneva Convention through which they drove a fortyfold expansion in spending in biological weapons research.
The Department of Defense had strict systems in place to ensure compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention. Those restrictions limited the Pentagon’s freedom to undertake new research programs, particularly those referred to as “the leading edge of biodefense.” Cheney’s response, recalls Professor Richard Ebright, “was to transfer this research from the Department of Defense to the National Institutes of Health, specifically to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). By about 2004, this transfer was complete, and NIAID had been transformed into an arm of the defense sector.”70 This made the NIAID Director Anthony Fauci a major player in biodefense and germ warfare.