by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
June 6, 2020

Flying completely under the radar of the various crises that have come to define 2020, an interesting story is playing out in India. This story shines a light on the increasingly globalized nature of medical research and on the dark practice of using poor people in third-world nations as guinea pigs in that research.

In early May, the US Centers for Disease Creation and Propaganda (CDC) announced a $3.6 million grant to “further strengthen and support the Indian government’s efforts to increase laboratory capacity for SARS-COV-2 testing.” But just days later, it was reported that the grant may be delayed because the CDC was placed on a “watch list” by the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs last December.

Wait, what? The Indian government placed the CDC on a “watch list” last year? Why?

Well, according to The Hindustan Times, the Indian government specifically asked the CDC to “stop funding research in India without government approval” after they discovered that the US health agency had helped an under-qualified Indian research facility to study a potential bioweapon. The facility in question—the Manipal Centre for Virus Research—was researching the Nipah virus, a so-called “Risk Group 4” (RG4) pathogen that is “likely to cause serious or lethal human disease for which preventive or therapeutic interventions are not usually available.”

Given their extremely dangerous nature, RG4 pathogens can only be handled in special “biological safety level 4” (BSL4) laboratories. BSL4 labs are completely sealed off from the outside, with dedicated supply and exhaust air systems and rigorous procedures for decontaminating all personnel and materials leaving the building. As a result, BSL4 laboratories are very rare, with only a handful of facilities in the world able to meet the stringent security protocols. Like the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

. . . Oh, wait.

Well, anyway, the key point is that the Manipal Centre for Virus Research (MCVR) is a BSL2 facility, not a BSL4 laboratory, and thus was not cleared to be working with Nipah virus at all. So how did the researchers at the MCVR get their hands on the viral samples? And how did they get the funding for their research?

The illegal research was uncovered after the coronavirus panic prompted the Indian government to order a review of biological weapons-grade pathogens in the country. The review discovered that the CDC was funding a training program at the MCVR to detect and diagnose Nipah virus and that the US agency was secretly funding the program in violation of India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act 2010. The bold, illegal scheme was laid out in an internal government report titled “Unapproved, US-funded Indian Laboratory stored samples of Nipah Virus—a bioterrorism agent.”

The Hindustan Times report includes a startling accusation from one unnamed Indian government official:

Our apprehension is that the lab was being used to map the Nipah virus, which can be used to develop a vaccine, the intellectual property right of which will not be with India. Importantly, understanding how the human body reacted to the virus will also produce a more virulent form of virus for biological warfare.

That’s right, folks. For some reason, the US CDC was secretly funding research on a highly dangerous weapons-grade biological pathogen at an under-qualified research facility in India.

Even more incredibly, this isn’t the first time that the CDC has been accused of nefarious biowarfare activity in the country. In 1994, an outbreak of bubonic and pneumonic plague hit south-central and western India, causing 693 cases of the disease and 56 deaths. The loss of life may have been relatively small, but the panic surrounding the event was unprecedented. Some 300,000 people fled the plague-stricken city of Surat in two days, the largest post-independence migration of Indians in history, and the Indian economy suffered a $600 million hit.

Upon further inspection, however, questions began to emerge about whether the outbreak had really been the plague at all. Writing about the questions surrounding the recent coronavirus panic, a journalist in the Indian publication THE WEEK wrote:

During the 1994 plague outbreak in Surat and Beed, it was found that the germs had an extra protein ring which could only have been inserted artificially. Indian scientists had raised concerns about a US biowar experiment having gone awry. THE WEEK had carried reports giving details of germ war research being carried on in labs under the Centre [sic] for Disease Control in Atlanta and about a newly developed germ detector being tested. The US embassy had denied the allegations.

Yes, perhaps the only surprising thing about this latest Nipah virus scandal is that the Indian government had the gumption to call the CDC out on their illegal activity and even to delay cashing a big juicy bribe check from the agency just to smooth things over.

You see, ever since it was effectively conquered by the British East India Company in the 18th century, India has been used as a giant open-air laboratory for the would-be social engineers of the ruling oligarchy.

The Company began its conquests in the mid-18th century and gradually expanded military, political and economic control over India. At the height of the East India Company’s power, the nation of India had effectively become the plaything of a private corporation. As historian William Dalrymple writes:

We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by an unstable sociopath—[Robert] Clive.

Fast-forward a century or two and India is still the plaything of multinational corporations. The much-touted “Green Revolution” of the 1950s and 1960s, for example—a set of technology transfer initiatives designed to “modernize” agricultural practices in developing countries by selling them American-made machinery running on petrochemicals—not only exacerbated the problems faced by landless peasants in India, but actually slowed the growth of agricultural production in the country. The seed cartels and agricultural giants like Monsanto that colonized the country in the wake of this “Green Revolution” have left their own scar on India in the form of an epidemic of suicides committed by farmers saddled with unpayable debts.

In the current era, however, the privatization of India is done not by the corporations directly, but under the guise of “philanthropy” by nongovernmental organizations and private foundations.

Viewers of Who Is Bill Gates? will already know some of the lowlights of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s involvement in India. From the national vaccination schedule to the national biometric identification scheme (Aadhaar) to the country’s headlong rush towards a mobile digital payment system, there is no aspect of the modern Indian state that does not bear the fingerprints of Gates or one of his minions. In fact, such was the concern over the way that the Gates Foundation was influencing India’s vaccination strategy on behalf of Gates’ Big Pharma buddies that the Indian government was forced to cut all financial ties between the Foundation and the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation—the primary body advising New Delhi on all vaccination-related matters.

But, contrary to the headlines that have been generated in the alt media that the Gates Foundation has been “kicked out” of the country, the relationship between the Indian government and Gates is as close as ever. In fact, so close is the relationship that the Gates Foundation actually maintains an “India Office,” which “operates as a branch office with permission of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) under Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) and is appropriately registered under Indian law.”

The reasons that India continues to be a rich target for the likes of the Gates Foundation are that it provides an easily accessible testing ground for medical research and its large population provides ready markets for Big Pharma vaccines and other products. As Samiran Nundy, editor emeritus of the National Medical Journal of India, observed regarding a scandal surrounding an HPV vaccine study in the country that committed “gross violations” of consent, “This is an obvious case where Indians were being used as guinea pigs.”

The Indian people, and poor people across Asia and Africa, have been used as human guinea pigs by medical researchers, social engineers and agents of empire for centuries. It should come as no surprise that the US CDC has been caught with their hand in the India cookie jar, funding secret bioweapon development research in the country without the government’s knowledge or consent. The only question now is whether the Indian government is willing to cash their $3.6 million “coronavirus research” bribe and look the other way or stick to their guns and kick the CDC out of the country for good.

This weekly editorial is part of The Corbett Report Subscriber newsletter. To support The Corbett Report and to access the full newsletter, please sign up to become a member of the website.

Too Little, Too Late? India Stands Up to the CDC