The CIA officially made its open debut in the biosecurity racket in 2004, with its launch of Argus, a project that monitors biological, terrorist, and pandemic threats in 178 nations.83 CIA operative and pediatrician Jim Wilson set up the program at Georgetown University with funding from DHS and the Intelligence Innovation Center to create and implement global foreign biological event detection and tracking capability, capable of assessing millions of pieces of information about social behavior daily and to train government officials in pandemic preparedness.84 One of the key figures in this global surveillance effort was CIA officer Dr. Michael Callahan.
Dr. Michael Callahan is one of the biggest names in bioweapons research. Dr. Callahan ran a biosecurity program for the former CIA surrogate USAID before serving as Director of DARPA’s bioweapons research program. At DARPA, he competed to outdo NIH in laundering money through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance to perform bioweapons research, including at the Wuhan lab.85
And as DARPA director, Callahan launched the PREDICT project in 2009 following Jeremy Farrar’s fake bird flu pandemic. PREDICT appeared to be a reincarnation of the CIA’s Argus project under the cover of USAID. PREDICT is the largest single source of funding to Daszak, with a $3.4 million subgrant routed through the University of California (2015–2020). PREDICT became the largest funder of gain-of-function studies and served as the principal funding vehicle through which the gain-of-function cartel evaded Barack Obama’s 2014 presidential moratorium.86
When, during the height of the presidential gain-of-function moratorium, Ralph Baric and the UTMB lab’s Vineet Menachery brazenly published their alarming 2015 study—describing their reckless experiments to breed pandemic bat coronaviruses that could spread via respiratory droplets in humanized mice—they omitted mentioning, in their initial online version of the article, that one of the funding sources was USAID-EPT-PREDICT. Apparently hoping to cover its tracks, PREDICT had laundered its grant through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.
USAID’s PREDICT program boasts that it has identified almost a thousand new viruses, including a new strain of Ebola, and trained some 5,000 people. In October 2019, not long before COVID-19 emerged, USAID abruptly ceased funding PREDICT, a decision bemoaned by Daszak in the New York Times as “definitely a loss.”87
Callahan had a chummy relationship with Daszak, with whom he coauthored several articles—including throughout the gain-of-function moratorium. In April 2015, for example, the names of Michael V. Callahan and Peter Daszak appeared as coauthors on a paper published in the Virology Journal and titled “Diversity of Coronavirus in Bats from Eastern Thailand.”88
Callahan was well aware that he and his confederates were toying with fire. In 2005, Callahan testified before Congress as he was moving into his new office at DARPA. He concluded the hearing with a chilling warning about the nation’s new commitment to Janus-faced gain-of-function science that Drs. Fauci, Robert Kadlec, Callahan himself, and many others would proceed to blithely ignore:
the dark science of biological weapon design and manufacture parallels that of the health sciences and the cross mixed disciplines of modern technology. Potential advances in biological weapon lethality will in part be the byproduct of peaceful scientific progress. So, until the time when there are no more terrorists, the US Government and the American people will depend on the scientific leaders of their field to identify any potential dark side aspect to every achievement.89
Even after leaving DARPA and USAID, Callahan periodically boasted of his continuing influence over US pandemic response policies at the highest levels of government. He alluded to his confidence in these mysterious connections in 2012: “I still have federal responsibilities to The White House for pandemic preparedness and exotic disease outbreak which will continue for the near future.”90
On January 4, 2020, Callahan called Dr. Robert Malone from China just as the coronavirus began taking its first wave of casualties. Malone, a former contractor to the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and the chief medical officer at Alchem Laboratories, is the inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology platform. Malone first met Callahan in 2009 through Malone’s sometime business partner, Daryl Galloway, a CIA officer who formerly served in the US Navy and at one point held the post of director of JSTO in the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. To Malone, Galloway introduced Callahan as a fellow CIA officer. During his January 4 phone call, Callahan told Malone that he was just outside Wuhan. Malone assumed that Callahan was visiting China under cover of his Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital appointments. Callahan told Malone that he had been treating “hundreds” of COVID-19 patients. Callahan subsequently described to National Geographic how he had pored through thousands of case studies at the outbreak’s epicenter. He giddily reported his amazement at the virus’s “magnificent infectivity,” and its capacity to explode “like a silent smart bomb in your community.”91 Callahan later confessed to Malone that he lacked authority to be in Wuhan and had escaped by boat when the government imposed its quarantine. Callahan repeated parts of this story to Brendan Borrell, a writer for Science. Later, DTRA scientist Davis Hone, a GS15 officer, warned Malone to stop talking about Callahan, saying that “We had no military personnel in Wuhan at the time of the outbreak and Michael was lying about his presence.” Malone told me, “That would mean that Michael also lied to Brendan Borrell.” On leaving China, Callahan returned to Washington to brief federal officials and then went directly to work as a “special adviser” to Robert Kadlec, managing the government’s response to the coronavirus.
Robert Kadlec as “Bad Santa”: The El-Hibris Cash In
By 2011, BioPort was already profiting handsomely in the bioweapons/vaccine space. After 9/11, President Bush—presumably at the urging of Secretary Rumsfeld, Robert Kadlec, and Dr. Fauci, whose advice he valued—had placed BioPort’s Michigan lab under protection “in the national interest.”92 El-Hibri and his son, gnawing on gristle prior to 10/4, began fattening themselves on NIAID and BARDA contracts. With friends like Fauci and Kadlec in high places, BioPort, which changed its name to Emergent BioSolutions in 2004 to escape its checkered past, was enjoying the first bright days of the charmed journey that would place the El-Hibris among the elite army of COVID-19 nouveaux-billionaires in 2021.93