The Biological Weapons Convention almost ended the COVID-19 Pandemic before it could really start.

Demystifying the coordinated effort across multiple government agencies to hide SARS-CoV-2's origins as a reverting live-attenuated vaccine, made with American research by Chinese scientists.

Dan Sirotkin is the co-author of the first peer-reviewed paper examining a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2, as well as its addendum, which settled a 50-year mystery and formally linked the H1N1 Spanish Flu pandemic strain release of 1977 to gain-of-function research.

---

Unbeknownst to me and my father at the time, all the way back in November 2020 before this pandemic that’s claimed so many millions of lives was even a year old, the State Department’s Arms Control Team was preparing to use Article V of the UN’s Biological Weapons Convention to start an investigation against China. And they were planning to use our paper as at least one of their main rationales, which you can see in an email chain titled “For Review: Draft Article 5 re China BWC compliance - serial passage as another technique that might have been applied.”

So here’s the thing, I can turn the most coordinated cover-up in history spanning the entire globe and the two most powerful governments on earth into a really simple magic-trick.

There’s nothing in my hands, take a good look. But don’t forget to take a moment and notice how many different times our last name shows up in existing State Department FOIA requests in the link above, none of those hits came from us - our name was just caught in those old nets over the course of several years.

Oddly enough, we wouldn’t hear from anyone on this team - or anyone from our own government at all - until many months later in April 2021. But more about that part of the story in a moment, first it’s worth taking a look at what the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and its fifth article actually say:

Formally known as “The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction”, the Convention was negotiated by the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland. It opened for signature on 10 April 1972 and entered into force on 26 March 1975. The BWC supplements the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which had prohibited only the use of biological weapons.

States Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention undertook “never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain:

1. microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes;

2. weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.”

BWC States Parties have strived to ensure that the Convention remains relevant and effective, despite the changes in science and technology, politics and security since it entered into force. Throughout the intervening years, States Parties have met approximately every five years to review the operation of the BWC. Between these Review Conferences, States Parties have pursued various activities and initiatives to strengthen the effectiveness and improve the implementation of the Convention. A total of eight Review Conferences have taken place since the first one in 1980.

Article V:

The States party to this Convention undertake to consult one another and to cooperate in solving any problems which may arise in relation to the objective of, or in the application of the provisions of, the Convention. Consultation and cooperation pursuant to this Article may also be undertaken through appropriate international procedures within the framework of the United Nations and in accordance with its Charter.

And yet it wouldn’t be until many months later when Vanity Fair’s reporting in the summer of 2021 would reveal something about what happened within this Arms Control group and their early invocation of Article V against China:

Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.

As the group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a ‘Pandora’s box,’ said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. The admonitions ‘smelled like a cover-up,’ said Thomas DiNanno, ‘and I wasn’t going to be part of it.’”

So one of the correspondents in the email chain discussing our peer-reviewed paper back in November 2020, Thomas DiNanno, would later write lots of memos about feeling like there was a cover-up and give quotes to a reporter with Vanity Fair to that effect… but felt no reason to mention the peer-reviewed paper me and my dad wrote, nor us in general? DiNanno didn’t want to point to a peer-reviewed paper that’d already become part of the published scientific literature and which was going to help him invoke Article V of the Biological Weapons Convention against China?

In case you think the government would insist on handling this internally and wouldn’t ever consult anyone on the outside given how classified all this could possibly be, DiNanno’s group at the State Department did in fact assemble a group of outside experts to evaluate a lab origin:

With deep distrust simmering, the State Department team convened a panel of experts to confidentially “red team” the lab-leak hypothesis. The idea was to pummel the theory and see if it still stood. The panel took place on the evening of January 7 2021…

Twenty-nine people logged on to a secure State Department video call that lasted three hours, according to meeting minutes obtained by Vanity Fair. The scientific experts included Ralph Baric, Alina Chan, and the Stanford microbiologist David Relman.

Wow, even all the way back then they managed to find twenty-nine people for this call about a lab origin including a bunch of folks who weren’t government employees, but for some reason didn’t think it was appropriate to even touch base with me and my dad? Even after we’d co-written the first peer-reviewed paper arguing for an engineered virus, had both previously held security clearances, and with this as just a summary of my dad’s resume:

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.

So gee, for some silly reason it turns out our own government would rather trust and seek the advice of someone like Alina Chan, a foreign national with no allegiance to the United States of America and a hilariously junior scientist in comparison to my father. Must have been that preening article in Boston Magazine, which really conveniently came out just a couple weeks after me and my dad got our first peer-reviewed paper published - and distracted absolutely everyone alive from it.

What a strange coinky-dink. What timing, that a vapid biopic about Alina Chan would be published within a few weeks of the first peer-reviewed paper scientifically arguing for a lab origin, and so the actual peer-reviewed literature was totally ignored by everyone so that Alina China, sorry Chan, could be quoted throughout the corporate and government-controlled media.

Gosh golly.

So yeah, instead of me and my dad, the State Department turned to foreign nationals without any notable scientific expertise or relevant publications or experience, or to people like this fucking guy who lives in Hong Kong and has spent his entire career trying to make as much money as possible:

David Asher invited Dr. Steven Quay, a breast cancer specialist who’d founded a biopharmaceutical company, to present a statistical analysis weighing the probability of a lab origin versus a natural one… When a State Department adviser asked Quay whether he’d ever done a similar analysis, he replied there’s “a first time for everything,” according to the meeting minutes.

If you were reading carefully, you’ll remember David Asher’s name from the State Department’s FOIA results and the discussion around using our paper to invoke Article V of the Biological Weapons Convention against China. And it would be David Asher who would finally contact me and my dad in the spring of 2021, but not through official government channels. Asher would email us over a personal Protonmail, which isn’t what you’re supposed to do when you’re on official government business, and called me and my dad from his personal cell, which also isn’t exactly following protocol.

That’s when we’d first learn that our original whitepaper from January 2020 had in fact made it all the way to the White House and in front of the National Security Council after I’d asked my childhood bestfriend from second grade to pass it along, since at that point in January 2020 he was serving on the NSC as the Director of National Intelligence Programs. So even though David Asher had been aware of our work since at least November 2020, was aware that it was the first peer-reviewed science arguing for a lab origin, was aware that our whitepaper first put the idea of a lab origins on the radar of the U.S. Government at all back in January 2020… It took six-months to make any contact at all?

Probably seems strange, until you learn that David Asher only reached out to offer me and my father $10,000 to stop publicly discussing a lab origin, and let Jamie Metzl take over. Which yeah, also doesn’t really seem like official government protocol either.

And so back on January 7th 2021 when that big fancy meeting hosted by the State Department was going on twenty-nine entire people deep… somehow neither me nor my dad made that not-so-short list? Oh yeah hold on I’m sorry, I forgot that David Asher already explained why he and the U.S. Government as a whole have entirely disavowed all of my work:

My background issue “give[s] people the creeps,” huh?

Yeah I sort of feel like the fact that I’m a retired NSA counterterrorism analyst who held a TS/SCI clearance should be a little more salient than my criminal misdeeds, which didn’t have anything to do with academic integrity or intellectual theft, or anything salient to the origins of a pandemic at all.

That’s why the fact that the Arms Control team you were on was going to use my peer-reviewed work all the way back in November 2020 to try and get to the bottom of this pandemic, my “background issue” is why the peer-reviewed science I wrote with my dad’s help shouldn’t be publicly known or even mentioned once at all? You were ready to confront China using an international weapons treaty dating back to 1972 backed by the United Nations based on our work, but then totally changed your mind?

That’s why my father’s entire career should be erased? Because of his own son’s crimes?

Pretty sure there’s a lot of really old philosophy about how that goes, about how that whole cycle leads to destruction and isn’t a Good Thing. Okay sure, technically it goes the other way around, but that really doesn’t seem like an excuse given the circumstances and given what’s at stake:

For nearly two millennia, Western law visited the sins of fathers and mothers upon their illegitimate children, subjecting them to systematic discrimination and deprivation. The graver the sins of their parents, the further these children fell in social standing and legal protection. While some reformers sought to better the plight of illegitimate children, only in recent decades has illegitimacy lost its full legal sting. Yet the social, economic, and psychological costs of illegitimacy still remain high even in the liberal, affluent West.

And in case you’re ready to go a little deeper down this rabbit-hole, there’s concrete evidence that not only the State Department but also the Department of Energy and its highly-vaunted top-secret “Z-Division” has been aware of our work and the specter of reverting live-attenuating vaccines since at least 2021. This was first indicated back in May 2021, when the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) first began reporting on the possible engineered origins of this pandemic:

An intelligence analyst working with David Asher sifted through classified channels and turned up a report that outlined why the lab-leak hypothesis was plausible. It had been written in May 2021 by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which performs national security research for the Department of Energy. But it appeared to have been buried within the classified collections system.

Y’all wanna see a magic trick? As per this article covering Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s double-super-secret “Z Division” and its report on COVID likely having an engineering origin, the man in charge of that ultra secretive division when it comes to biodefense is named Dr. David Rakestraw:

The Z Division report received only limited distribution at the time of its issuance, sources said, prompting some senior U.S. officials in the Trump administration to make inquiries into why it had not been brought to their attention last May. Senior officials at the Energy and State Departments were said to have intervened to quash efforts by lower-level U.S. officials who, intrigued by the Z Division report, contacted the Livermore scientists who wrote it to seek additional information. Seaver, the LLNL spokesperson, did not respond to that allegation.

One individual said to have been intimately involved in the preparation of the Z Division report is Dr. David J. Rakestraw, a senior science adviser who formerly ran LLNL’s biodefense programs and has been coordinating the lab’s technical response to COVID-19.

Alright here we go… nothing in my hands… wanna make me see David Rakestraw’s name appear?

Look away from your screen and then look right back - no further than this FOIA result dating back to March and June 2023, where down at the bottom he’s communicating with Jamie Metzl about the origins of this pandemic and responding within an email chain talking about our original whitepaper from January 2020. Okay you don’t recognize the first guy in that file, Nils Carlson, but it’s probably worth noting that in May 2021 Carlson received an award for exceptional service from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) for “exceptional service.”

Isn’t that delightfully open-ended? And if you’re not impressed yet, just keep on scrolling just a little bit until you get to the bottom of the file, where you’ll see Dr. David Rakestraw’s email.

And yet it wasn’t until the spring of 2023 when Vanity Fair would get around to reporting more about the DOE’s skeptical opinions, in the wake of the 90-day deadline the Intelligence Community was given to declassify everything about COVID’s origins. A declassification which of course didn’t happen, and of course no accountability resulted. So you’d think that maybe after three years had passed since our peer-reviewed paper was published, that maybe at that point Vanity Fair might consider mentioning me and my dad, or possibly our work or maybe even the term “serial passage” at all?

Oh, my sweet summer child.

If you take a moment to search both of the Vanity Fair articles that I’ve linked above, spanning almost the entirety of the pandemic, you’ll notice that not only are me and my father excluded entirely, but there’s no mention of “serial passage” or reverting live-attenuated vaccines or our peer-reviewed paper at all - despite playing such a pivotal role in both the State Department’s deliberations in November 2020, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab and their Z-Division’s analysis, which apparently involves our January 2020 whitepaper.

But in the end, the bad news is that there was a very legitimate reason not to use Article V of the Biological Weapons Convention to investigate the origins of this pandemic. Since as the treaty states, the only items covered until this convention “that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes” and biological weapons and their delivery.

A reverting live-attenuated vaccine would not in fact be covered by the Biological Weapons Convention, since on paper its entirely peaceful and shouldn’t ever hurt anyone. But that’s only if it’s a live-attenuated vaccine that’s been properly designed and tested, as the long history of wildly unethical and vastly evil experimentation on orphans just a few generations ago attests to.

The only reason humanity thought it stopped Polio was due to the live-attenuated vaccine against it known as OPV, which was refined by extensive testing on helpless orphans all across America. One of those orphans, Chadwick, would lend his name to the particular strain of OPV known as CHAT-OPV that’s long been linked with originally seeding HIV in yet another false zoonosis born by medical experimentation and live-attenuated vaccines.

To be fair, the United States Government officials working with Dr. Ralph Baric at his lab in UNC, the only place on earth trying to make a live-attenuated vaccines against SARS-like viruses, and China’s People’s Liberation Army had good reason to believe that their live-attenuated vaccine that’d reverted unexpectedly would simply just fade away. After all that’s what’d happened in both 1977 and 2009 with live-attenuated vaccines against H1N1, the Spanish Flu pandemic strain of influenza, the former coming from either the Soviet or Chinese military, and the later Mexican pork farms.

And it was that past live-attenuated vaccine reversion of 1977 that unlocks so much of our ongoing pandemic, since in our original peer-reviewed paper I accidentally deleted the citation which demonstrated that the H1N1 variant of 1977 had indisputably been engineered by serial passage, which given the technology at the time pointed directly at live-attenuated vaccine programs known to exist at the time:

When referring to the H1N1 Swine Flu strain, which presumably leaked out of a Soviet lab as part of a vaccine program in the late 1970s, “serial passage” refers to the expected attenuation of a viral strain that naturally occurs as it is forced to pass multiple times through cell lines, usually cells from a different species than originally hosted the virus. Serial passage for attenuation leads to a strain with lesser virulence, and mirrors the natural loss of virulence that generally occurs as a virus proliferates throughout a large population of hosts over many generations.

But unfortunately, when we first mentioned serial passage while referencing that Soviet strain of H1N1 Swine Flu, one of our citations that made it just about beyond doubt that this strain of influenza had been subject to serial passage[1] was accidently elided by us in the process of coordinating several different manuscripts.

However the only reason we became aware of that mistake was due to an email from a bunch of government-adjacent folks trying real hard to act like they have no relation at all to the Intelligence Community. One of the people on that email was Gigi Kwik-Gronvall, who’s been one of the most outspoken critics against a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2, and who’s failed to ever admit that peer-reviewed science exists explaining a lab origin. But that email was authored by a former Secretary of the Navy and long-time bio-security consultant for DARPA, Richard Danzig, who has a rather interesting writing relationship with our sitting Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines.

Before they emailed us I’d never heard of Richard Danzig or Gigi Kwik-Gronvall or anyone else on the email, but a little digging revealed that Danzig spent 2018 as the lead author of a paper directly lobbying with the help of Johns Hopkins for more scientific and academic engagement and cooperation with the CCP, especially if another pandemic broke out:

This global environment requires that a successful American security strategy do more than attempt to prevail in or manage competition; it must artfully blend and balance competition and cooperation. This is particularly evident in our relations with China, a nation whose economic power, we have emphasized, is approaching America’s and will probably come to exceed it. In this context, our recommended strategic premises encourage a willingness to take risks for peace that at least approaches our acceptance of risk in conflict. This example provides some illustrations of how our call for cooperative initiatives might be translated into action.

…

So it may be in the years ahead. If, for example, a highly contagious disease like SARS broke out in North Korea, we believe the resulting concerns would render America and China, at least for these purposes, allies.

Sure is interesting that Avril Haines, the current head of the Office of National Intelligence, is one of Danzig’s coauthors of a paper arguing that a pandemic would make the USA and China BFFs. Pretty hard to imagine that Richard Danzig would email me and my father about our peer-reviewed paper regarding an engineered origin for the COVID-19 Pandemic without her having any idea at all, ain’t it?

Maybe this comes across as more excessively paranoid and less of a magic trick, but keep in mind that not only have the entirety of Wikipedia and the corporate media refused to link our work on serial passage in any form at all, but even outlets like The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, USRTK, and The Intercept which pretend to be journalistically independent have refused to cite any of our work - even after their own reporting and FOIAs revealed extensive discussions about serial passage.

So if you want to know how to make many millions of innocent people disappear, all you have to do is follow the blueprint laid by the HIV epidemic, which almost certainly used the fact that the 1977 H1N1 Pandemic’s origins were totally disputed until February 2021 - disputed until my dad and I published the clarification pointing to the Soviet paper that made it clear it’d been engineered by serial passage:

When that Soviet paper was published back in 1981, the internet was still a bit off in the distance, however it’s not hard to imagine that it eventually made its way across Robert Gallo’s desk, while he was hard at work on retroviruses and furiously digging for the origins of AIDS. Tellingly, he’d go on to spend many years lying about the fact that he’d gotten the notorious virus he’d been researching from France, and it wasn’t something he’d independently isolated, a crime he wouldn’t apologize for until years later.

And there’d be good reason for Gallo to be on the lookout for anything in the scientific literature relating to serial passage through cell cultures, since a few years earlier in 1978 he’d been a key player in the founding of the Special Virus-Cancer Program, formed in large part because of how often the monkey virus SV-40 was being introduced into human research and vaccine lines especially during serial passage experiments, causing concerns it might be seeding cancers.

Then a few years later in 1982, Gallo would receive his first prestigious Lasker Award for being the first to associate this specific retrovirus with cancers, and then two more years later in 1984, his team would publish a series of four papers asserting together that the virus he’d gotten the Lasker for was in fact the cause of AIDS.

And although there’s nothing in these papers about SIV or the virus’s possible origins, there was probably no one else on the planet more capable and prepared than Gallo to read that Soviet paper about serial passage causing some but not all shared genes to line-up, and realize that the same phenomenon might apply to HIV and SIV, with SIV serving the same role as SV-40, a monkey virus that’d been introduced into human cell lines via vaccine research and gone on to infect humans prior to the emergence of HIV.

Since when you compare HIV and SIV, you also find that their genes appear to have aged out-of-sync with each other, and so determining when a theoretical evolution from SIV into HIV happened has no good answer. Scientists wave their hands a bunch and offer explanations, but by this measure HIV is just as unnatural as the 1977 H1N1 strain, probably more so since several genes are out of sync instead of just one.

And so back in the 1980s, Tony Fauci was brought in by Robert Gallo to occlude HIV’s origins in the CHAT-OPV vaccine programs, understanding how the viral contamination across cell-lines happened. But whether or not that’s ever proven - Fauci definitely got installed to push AZT as an unproven but miraculous solution.

Nearly nothing has changed, except for instead of a virus that only spreads through blood and sexual fluids, ours spreads right through the air. Might be a tiny bit more of a problem. And Tony’s old pal Robert Gallo has now become a horcrux for both Joseph Mengele and Joseph Goebbels - first pioneering the military cancer-vaccine research programs that emerged from experiments like the CHAT-OPV and lead to SARS-CoV-2, and now writing propaganda for Time Magazine while trying once again to gaslight the American people into complacency about an incredibly lethal virus whose origins Gallo is helping to occlude.

Up until April 2021, the only thing we were talking about was “serial passage” as a general technique that’d almost certainly been used to engineer SARS-CoV-2, since serial passage creates an artificial zoonosis and as a virus that’d been passaged through lab ferrets would be expected to do, it jumped right into farmed mink - a sister species to the incarcerated ferrets used to attenuate live-attenuated vaccines - all across the West.

And up until April 2021, no one officially attached to our own government had made any contact at all, the only contact was that Richard Danzig email, and on paper he’s retired. But then on April 1st 2021, I published Golden Silkworms in Pandora’s Box, which made the explicit argument that the pandemic began when a live-attenuated vaccine reverted unexpectedly just as has happened many times before, and is still happening right now with OPV all across the third-world as it reverts back to full virulence.

It was only then that David Asher, acting as the State Department’s lead investigator into a lab origin of the pandemic, actually made contact. He made no mention of his team’s use of our paper all the way back in November 2020, he just tried to buy our silence while communicating via his personal cell phone and Protonmail.

So unfortunately in the end, after you’ve seen the big picture and the full history of what’s really been going on - there isn’t really any magic happening at all. After you understand the truth, all you can see is treasonous collusion between multiple American government officials and agencies working alongside China’s Peoples Liberation Army to do what happened to the origins of HIV: Bury it in the past forever.

Leave the truth about its origins alongside the many millions of its victims, covered in dirt and hidden from public view.

The Prestige