Dr. Karl Sirotkin's Letter to the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic

Given that there's some exciting interviews happening next week, made sense to get everything on the record and in black-and-white so that no one can ever plead ignorance or say we didn't try.

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Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic:

In late January of 2020 one of my son’s childhood friends, Jason Shell, passed our original whitepaper covering the likely laboratory engineered origins of this pandemic on to the National Security Council. At the time I understood that Jason was the Director of National Intelligence Programs, a rather prestigious title that we knew came with a fair amount of influence, as both my son formerly held TS/SCI clearance while working as a counterterrorism analyst for the NSA, and I previously held a Q clearance. That whitepaper formed the basis of the first peer-reviewed examination of a lab origin for this pandemic, Might SARS-CoV-2 Have Arisen via Serial Passage through an Animal Hose or Cell Culture? which passed peer-review and was published in August 2020, you can find it enclosed. 

Now Jason might have seemed to be going out on a bit of limb since despite his background within the Intelligence Community, my son doesn’t have a formal scientific background. But Jason had very good reason to believe that our arguments were scientifically sound, since he’s known our family since second-grade and he had some idea of my resume, which I’ll summarize below:

Dr. Karl Sirotkin is a 40-year PhD in Microbiology and the architect of dbSNP, and the original databases behind NLM’s GenBank, with nearly 20 years of molecular wet-work experience. He previously taught molecular virology at the University of Tennessee, and worked within the Theoretical Biology Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory on GenBank when it was managed there, as a component of the Human Genome Project. At the time of his retirement from government service, Dr. Sirotkin had more years working for GenBank than any other staff member - with his 28 years of service on the world’s premiere DNA sequencing database making him one of the most experienced scientists on the planet when it comes to managing and understanding genomic sequences.

We have had absolutely no contact from Jason at all since passing our whitepaper along. This Committee has previously taken testimony from journalists and academics without a single peer-reviewed piece covering a lab origin for this pandemic to their name - we’ve written the first two pieces covering that possibility, after first drawing the NSC’s attention to the possibility in January 2020, why have we been ignored? Have you been listening to academics without anything approaching my experience and background, who have obvious conflicts of interest around funding and research, while pretending our research doesn’t exist at all? 

My son and I are US Citizens, one of whom previously held TS/SCI clearance, the other a Q clearance - why is this Committee seeking the testimony of compromised foreign nationals and scientists with millions of dollars of funding on the line while ignoring us? 

Oddly, Jason was soundly demoted to “Requirements Officer” in August of 2020 right after that peer-reviewed paper was published, but even more oddly, shortly after publication we were contacted by a team including former Secretary of the Navy, Richard Danzig, and Mrs. Gigi Kwik-Gronvell, who’s made extensive public comments about the origins of this pandemic. They emailed us since they noticed we’d missed a citation in our paper. 

Danzig and Kwik-Gronvell contacted us because in the process of compiling our endnotes my son accidentally elided one of the citations around the outbreak of H1N1 in 1977, which made our claim that that virus had in fact been engineered very questionable. So we passed them the paper we’d left out, which did in fact demonstrate that the H1N1 virus of 1977 had in fact been engineered, almost certainly via serial passage given the technology available at the time. Their criticizing our work, as above and in other contexts, is a perfect example of policy folks who do not really have significant biology background in laboratory work and bioinformatics pontificating on a field, and even demeaning those with much more experience. That he bothered to contact us and then Danzig had no interest in any follow up discussion of the science, seems rather odd to me. Excerpts from those emails are within the enclosed article, “The DARPA-taped Letters.”

As we explain our second peer-reviewed paper, a correction to our original which addressed this missing citation and is also enclosed, serial passage is somewhat of an umbrella term that covers multiple different processes. However one of its strongest ties is to the development of live-attenuated vaccines (LAVs), since they are passaged through animals on the way to making a virus weakened enough that it can serve as a vaccine.  However, they can also be used to promote gain of function, depending on the details, as was done with influenza virus and led to the discussion of gain of function virology back in 2012.  

And the animal most commonly used to make these LAVs is a species of ferret that is an overlapping species with the farmed mink that SARS-CoV-2 also exploded through during the genesis of this pandemic, as we point out in our first peer-reviewed paper under the subheading Ferreting out the signs of serial passage. But perhaps the oddest part of all this is that Richard Danzig spent much of 2019 writing whitepapers alongside our esteemed Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, arguing for more technological and personnel cooperation with China. All of whom are tied together by WestExec, which seems to have parasitized the Executive Branch, and who David Asher would’ve ultimately been reporting to since he was empowered by Tony Blinken, who’s yet another WestExec alum.

So if the sitting Director of National Intelligence has one of her very recent co-authors reaching out to us, why is it that the certain officials of the United States Government seem to be intent on burying all of our work and acting like none of it exists at all? 

The only explanation that makes even the slightest bit of sense is that elements within the US Government are very intently seeking to bury any mention of “serial passage” which was highlighted in our peer-reviewed paper - and yet our paper and the term “serial passage” is never mentioned once in any government report. That is, except within the FOIAed emails from Tony Fauci et. al. in the early months of 2020, which reveal “serial passage” was extensively discussed in multiple places before being buried:

And finally, words from Dr. Ron Fouchier, of 2012 serial passage infamy:

I imagine some of this Committee are aware, both of my son’s writings on his Substack as well as his unsavory criminal background, since David Asher explicitly told my son that he was not welcome into the discussions around a lab origin because his charges “gave people the creeps.” That email is also included below, since it was one of the most vile and baffling communications I’ve ever heard of in my life, and it’s helped condemn countless millions of innocent lives to horrific deaths. 

And as my son has pointed-out, the entire “giving people the creeps” story seems more like a smokescreen for ignoring our original peer-reviewed article about serial passage and its ties to live-attenuated vaccines, and instead dangling some unseeable “classified” paper from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, that for some reason no one can see. What possible sources or methods from the Intelligence Community could possibly be involved in a scientific paper about the origins of a pandemic that could justify its censorship?

Finally, David Asher told me that my son’s paper was very useful and that my son would get credit at the right time when discussions of the laboratory origin were open. But it’s become abundantly clear that neither David Asher, Jamie Metzl, Alina Chan, Matt Ridley, Richard Ebright nor anyone else feeding quotes and information to government officials and the legacy media have any intention at all of behaving with the slightest shred of ethics, and are all determined to bury the truth my son uncovered two years ago: This pandemic began with a live-attenuated vaccine-trial gone-wrong. 

The unethical behavior from this cabal pretending to look into a lab leak is entirely consistent with the names in the paragraph above being part of the controlled opposition meant to pretend to look into the truth, while really intending to help bury it. Nothing has stunned and disgusted me as a scientist more than when Chan and Ridley attempted to bribe Rossana Segrteo to have me and my son removed from a scientific paper we were co-authoring:

For over two years my son has been arguing that this pandemic began when a live-attenuated vaccine distributed shortly before the Wuhan Military Games reverted faster than expected, which is also an accepted theory for how the H1N1 outbreak in 1977 began. And although the exact mechanisms around that reversion fifty years ago remain unknown, my son has provided a viable explanation for exactly how this reversion accelerated out-of-control. 

Back in 2012 two teams of scientists subjected the avian flu virus, H5N1, to highly mutagenic processes that created any number of mutations within its genome, and then allowed this mutated virus to have the chance to jump between ferrets. And in both cases, the virus quickly became airborne and jumped between ferret cages. Examining the virus samples that managed to make this airborne journey, both teams found that it was a furin-cleavage site (FCS) that seemed to grant the ability for airborne transmission. 

One of these teams was led by Dr. Ron Fouchier, who made a rather remarkable statement during a conference back in July of 2019, during the European Congress of Virology in Rotterdam, which is available on YouTube under the title “TWiV 557: Congress in Rotterdam” at 23:00 on the playback:

“That’s what happened in the 70s, people were trying to do live-attenuated vaccines and doing human challenge studies and that might be the way the H1 re-emerged in the 70s. Some people say it was a lab accident. I don’t believe that. I think it was actually human challenge studies and live-attenuated vaccines that reverted that are the likely candidates of the 1970 reemergence of H1. And we need to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

Before giving their mutated H5N1 viruses the chance to jump in the air between caged ferrets, the FCS was hidden and invisible. They had no idea it was there at all because it was only present in an infinitesimally small and so hidden number of samples, until the evolutionary challenge of jumping in the air to a new host was presented, at which point the minute numbers of samples with an FCS were the only ones able to make the airborne trip, and so they quickly proliferated within new hosts after making the airborne trip. 

In the exact same way, scientists trying to attenuate an engineered and mutated chimeric virus via serial passage through ferrets in the attempt to make a live-attenuated vaccine would also want a vaccine-candidate virus without its FCS. However as the enclosed article A Grin Without a Cat explains, virology is far too messy for viruses with stable and unchanging genomes to be isolated in modern scientific settings, and a single genomic sequence does not represent clinical reality for either individuals or populations in any case. 

That’s why the gain-of-function serial passage experiments of 2012 were so startling, the FCS appeared out-of-nowhere and so scientists didn’t know how to prevent it from happening in the first place. And so as my son points out, perhaps it’s more than a coincidence that the only place on earth publicly working on live-attenuated vaccines for SARS-like viruses was Baric’s lab at UNC, with all of its ties to Wuhan. 

Ties that point directly to the collaborative work between Baric’s lab and viral research at the WIV, which of course would’ve been passed along to the PLA’s facilities all throughout China. Collaboration that points directly back to WestExec and its extensive ties to the Chinese government, and WestExec’s current proliferation throughout the Executive Branch, since Biden’s White House has become a satellite office for that lobbying firm. As my son has been explaining for over two years, the overlap between the Wuhan Military Games and Event 201 is the furthest thing from a coincidence, since the overcrowding and poor sanitation of the 250,000 volunteers brought in for the Wuhan Military Games would’ve created the same poor sanitation that’s the spark for other LAVs such as OPV to revert back to virulence - something that typically only happens where there’s third-world sanitation since feces are the most potent vector for viral transmission. 

So the conspiracy to limit any discussion of the likely laboratory origin of COVID19 to an “accident” combined with the above makes it seem that there is either traitorous collaboration with Chinese elements, or at least fear of mutually assured reputational destruction. It seems that at least some officials in both America and China know exactly how this pandemic started because both nations were involved with the research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan labs, and quite possibly the creation of a live-attenuated vaccine that they collaborated on testing. America provided the technological underpinnings, and the PLA spun it out into their novel LAV, which would be rather easy to test on their captive Uighur population - just another example of how captive populations have been used for medical experimentation all the way back to the Nazis.

Daniel, who has studied geopolitics way more than I have, is convinced that nothing will change until our Pacific fleet is devastated by a surprise attack likely spearheaded by the North Koreans, which will give the CCP a bit of strategic plausible deniability, and begin their seizure of Taiwan and America being pushed back out of Guam and Diego Garcia at least to Hawaii.  

I certainly hope he’s wrong, because if that’s what it takes for the truth to come out, given my rather limited understanding of history, what happens next is going to make titles and fancy offices utterly meaningless. Those in charge of media influence and spinning the reaction to COVID were very explicitly warned, many many times, and yet had no interest in the truth. It seems that those burying our reports were only interested in only securing the next round of funding and playing nice with billionaire donors like Bill Gates, who also - oddly enough - have lots of ties to China and vaccine development, and appear to have a stranglehold on the media and most of your pocketbooks. 

My son will be publishing this entire letter on his Substack shortly after it’s sent out in the mail just so there’s never any public confusion about how hard we tried to work with this Committee and the rest of our government. Eventually those responsible for this pandemic will have to answer for what they’ve done, and then there will be a reckoning that will seek to understand why so many millions of innocents had to die, when I helped my son tell the world exactly what was happening over two years ago, after we were the first to cover a lab origin both journalistically and academically.

The triumph of Evil is right at our doorsteps, are each and every one of you really going to continue to do nothing?

X____________________________

 Dr. Karl Sirotkin