Dr. Mercola Interviews the Experts
This article is part of a weekly series in which Dr. Mercola interviews various experts on a variety of health issues. To see more expert interviews, click here.
As you know, a novel coronavirus (initially labeled 2019-nCOV before being renamed COVID-19 by the World Health Organization1) originating in Wuhan City, Hubei Province in China, is rapidly spreading across the world.
The first case was reported in Wuhan on December 21, 2019. Symptoms include fever, shortness of breath, severe cough and pneumonia which, in more severe cases, can lead to impaired kidney and liver function and kidney failure.2,3
On January 21, 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first U.S. case4 — a patient in Washington state who had recently visited Wuhan. Then, the first U.S. death was reported February 29, 2020, in Washington state.5
Less than a week later, CBS News reported March 5, 2020, that the number of deaths had quickly risen to 11 nationwide in the U.S. — 10 in Washington state and one in California.6 Not only that, but as of that day, “The World Health Organization urged governments around the world to pull out ‘all the stops’” to fight the outbreak. On the up side, China “appeared to be over the worst” of it, CBS said.
All told, as of March 5, 2020, there were 98,067 reported cases of novel coronavirus infections affecting 88 countries, 80,430 of which were in China. Worldometer.info provides an easy overview of confirmed cases and deaths that you can check for the latest statistics.7
COVID-19 — A Weaponized Coronavirus?
In this interview, Francis Boyle — whose background includes an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago, a juris doctor (lawyer) degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science — shares his theory of the origin of this novel coronavirus.
For decades, he’s advocated against the development and use of bioweapons, which he suspects COVID-19 is. In fact, Boyle was the one who called for biowarfare legislation at the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, and the one who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which was passed unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by George Bush, Sr.
At the time of this recording, February 14, 2020, more than 50,000 people in China had been infected with the virus. Certainly, it does not originate from infected bat soup.
As a result of Boyle’s antibiological warfare work, which goes back to the early days of the Reagan administration — a time in which they were using DNA genetic engineering to manufacture biological weapons — Boyle has carefully followed “mysterious outbreaks of disease in both humans and animals around the world” that have appeared since then.
“My biowarfare antiterrorism act was specifically designed to not only to deal with regular biological weapons but also with DNA genetic engineering for biological weapons that was just coming into its infancy when the BWC was being drafted.
Even though the BWC would cover DNA genetic engineering, I wanted to make it clear by name that it was covered. I also made it clear [that] it covered synthetic biology as well,” Boyle says.
“So, when these unexplained mysterious illnesses break out, I monitor them a while and usually I just conclude they can be explained by normal reasons: lack of sanitation, poverty, things of that nature. But in Wuhan it seemed pretty suspicious to me.
There is this Biosafety Level 4 facility there in Wuhan. It’s the first in China, and it was specifically set up to deal with the coronavirus and SARS. SARS is basically a weaponized version of the coronavirus.
There have been leaks before of SARS out of this facility, and indeed the only reason for these BSL-4 facilities, based on my experience, is the research, development, testing and stockpiling of offensive biological weapons.
For that reason, I stated my opinion: That this Wuhan coronavirus leaked out of that BSL-4 facility … maybe mid-November … and the Chinese government has been lying about it and covering up ever since.”
Many Unknowns Remain
The first reported case of COVID-19 infection was December 1, 2019. Depending on the incubation period, which is still unknown, the initial lead, provided there was one, might have occurred anywhere in November. The official estimate is a 14-day incubation period, but a British health expert believes it’s 24 days, and North Korean biological warfare experts believe it’s 30 days, Boyle says.
“As for Wuhan and Hubei Province, they’re basically under martial law. There’s no other word for it. If you read the statements by President Xi and his assistants, they’ve made it very clear they’re at war here, and that is correct. They’re at war with their own biological warfare agent.
President Xi just fired the party apparatchiks in charge of this and has brought in trusted military personnel to handle it, as well as large numbers of PLA [People’s Liberation Army] forces saying they’re health care workers. They don’t look like health care workers to me. So, as of now, that’s my best reading of the situation.”
When asked about rumors the COVID-19 virus might have been stolen from a high-security laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada, Boyle says:
“It could have been. I want to make it clear that, in my opinion they were already working on that at the Wuhan BSL-4 facility. They were working on a biological warfare weapon involving SARS, which is a coronavirus to begin with.
We do know that Dr. [Yoshihiro] Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin … resurrected the Spanish flu virus for the Pentagon, obviously for weapons purposes, and he specializes in mating the Spanish flu virus to all sorts of hideous biowarfare instrumentalities. And there was a record of him shipping his products to Winnipeg.
Winnipeg is Canada’s equivalent of our own Fort Detrick. It’s a BSL-4 facility, and yes, they research, develop tests, manufacture and stockpile every type of hideous biological warfare weapon that we know of. So, some of this technology could have been stolen from Winnipeg. I don’t know about that but, as I said, the Wuhan BSL-4 was already working on this to begin with.
They had already developed SARS. SARS had leaked out two to three times before this, and it seems they were turbocharging SARS, which is what [COVID-19] looks to be. This is a brand-new generation of biowarfare weapons we haven’t seen before.
Its lethality goes from 15%, as estimated by Lancet, up to 17% to 18% by a British health official and even Chinese statistics. Its infectivity is 83%. It can infect maybe three to four people for every person infected.
It has gain of function properties, which means it travels through air at least 6 or 7 feet, and … there are reports that even contaminated human feces give it off, that the human feces radiate off maybe 6 or 7 feet. So, we’ve never seen anything like this before in the history of biological warfare, at least in the public record.
I want to make it clear: I have never worked for the United States government. I’ve never had a security clearance. I’ve never had access to any type of secret information.
I just read what is in the public record and the scientific record and try to draw my own conclusions, and that’s what I’m giving you today. I could change my opinion if people can provide me reputable scientific evidence to the contrary.
Right now, I’m standing by my conclusion that it leaked out of the Wuhan BSL-4, the highest level of the Chinese government has known about it, they’ve been covering it up from the get-go, until they informed the WHO at the end of December.”
Despite Laws, Biowarfare Experimentation Is Alive and Well
As noted by Boyle, the Wuhan lab is a designated WHO research lab, which may sound odd, considering these facilities specialize in developing and researching dangerous pathogens that can easily be turned into bioweapons.
According to Boyle, we should not be surprised however, as “WHO is up to its eyeballs in this type of work and has been for quite some time.” The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the drug industry also appear to have had their hand in many of the outbreaks of what appear to be weaponized viruses.
“I won’t go through the long history of big pharma getting involved in this. There’s huge amounts of money here. I believe the West Africa Ebola pandemic originated out of the US BSL-4 facility in Sierra Leone, and [that] they were testing out a so-called vaccine that contained live Ebola and gave it to these poor people,” Boyle says.
“As for the CDC, it has been involved in every … BSL-4 biological warfare death science you could possibly imagine … It’s a matter of public record that during the Reagan administration, the CDC and the American Type Culture Collection sent 40 shipments of weapons-grade biological warfare agents to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, in the hope and expectation that he would weaponize these agents and use them against Iran …
Of course, the problem is that when that war was over … an order was given to U.S. military forces to blow up Saddam Hussein’s biological warfare facilities, and that’s not how you deal with biological warfare weapons …
[It] contaminated our own troops, and that was a causative factor in the Gulf War Syndrome that … murdered about 11,000 U.S. troops and disabled about 100,000.”
According to Boyle, the U.S. government spent $ 100 billion on biological warfare programs since September 11, 2011, up until October 2015, which is no small sum. To put it into perspective, the U.S. spent $ 40 billion (assuming a constant dollar value) on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Boyle also estimates the U.S. has some 13,000 life scientists working within the biowarfare industry.
“Clearly, the Reagan administration, under the influence of its neoconservatives who definitely believe in biological weapons and ethnic-specific biological weapons (you can see that in the PNAC report), were engaged in the use of DNA genetic engineering for the purpose of manufacturing biological weapons.
That is why I gave a Congressional briefing in Washington, D.C. in 1985. I was asked to do that by the Council for Responsible Genetics that I work with, which involves the leading life scientists in the world from MIT and Harvard.
I spent seven years at Harvard. I have three degrees and I knew all these people. They asked me to serve as their lawyer and give this Congressional briefing. I blew the whistle, and then they asked me to draft the implementing legislation, which I did …
I want to make it clear I’m not here to speak in their name, I’m only speaking in my name, but if you look at my book, ‘Biological Warfare and Terrorism,’ professor Jonathan King wrote the foreword. So, I have the leading MIT professor of molecular biology supporting what I’m saying, if you don’t think I know enough science about it.”
US Prepares for COVID-19 Pandemic
While there have so far only been a limited number of reported cases of COVID-19 infection in the U.S., the U.S. military has designated several detention sites around the country to quarantine Americans,8 should the situation take a turn for the worse.
Historically speaking, however, government health officials have been vastly exaggerating the threat of pandemics in the U.S., including the bird flu, the swine flu, anthrax and Ebola.
For example, as detailed in my 2009 New York Times bestseller “The Great Bird Flu Hoax,” then-President George Bush Jr. projected 2 million Americans would die from bird flu; the best-case scenario taking only 200,000 lives. The final death count in the U.S. from that pandemic was zero.
It generated massive profits, though, as U.S. taxpayer dollars were used to purchase 20 million doses of Tamiflu. One of the people who was able to line his pockets from that hoax was defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was president of Gilead Sciences when the drug was created.
“[The bird flu] was another DNA, genetically engineered biological warfare weapon,” Boyle notes. “It was a chimera. It had three different elements in it and we were all lucky that somehow they attenuated the lethality and the infectiveness of the bird flu.”
Whether or not COVID-19 will be similarly ineffective in its spread and lethality remains to be seen. Judging by the statistics in China, “it doesn’t look very good,” Boyle says.
Understanding the COVID-19 Virus
According to Boyle, the COVID-19 virus is a chimera, like the avian flu virus before it. It includes SARS, an already weaponized coronavirus, along with HIV genetic material. “That was in a published article by Indian scientists. You could see the pictures right there, [but] political pressure was brought to bear upon them so they withdrew [the paper].”
This is why some scientists are now looking into using HIV drugs to treat it,9 Boyle says. COVID-19 may also have a flu virus mixed in, along with gain of function properties that allow it to spread a greater distance than normal.
Pandemics Repeatedly Used to Further Police State
Pandemics have also been used to chip away public freedoms. For example, the anthrax scare of 2001 was used as the impetus for signing the Patriot Act, which was the first step in taking away many of our personal freedoms and rolling out a complete surveillance state. To me, such outcomes are far more concerning than the risk of infection itself. Boyle adds:
“They used Amerithrax to ram the Patriot Act through, that is correct … We became a police state … And as I pointed out in ‘Biowarfare and Terrorism,’ I think the same people who were behind the 9/11 terrorist attack were also behind the Amerithrax, but I’m just connecting dots there …
What’s called Amerithrax came out of a U.S. government biological warfare weapons lab and program, and I publicly blew the whistle on that the first weekend of November 2001.
The Council for Responsible Genetics was having its convention at Harvard Business School and I was chairing a panel with King and other experts on biological warfare, on U.S. biological warfare programs.
As I was walking into the Harvard Divinity School, Fox TV had a camera crew there and I said, ‘Obviously, this came out a U.S. biological weapons program and probably Fort Detrick.’
I conducted the session and made the same comment. Then I made a comment to a Washington, D.C., radio station to that effect [and to] the BBC, so everyone in the world heard me.
At that point, someone gave an order that I was never to be interviewed again by any mainstream news about biological warfare programs. And that’s been the case since the first week of November 2001.”
As noted by Boyle, George Orwell’s book, “1984,” has become reality. Boyle has since lectured lawyers at DePaul Law School in Chicago about the totalitarian nature of the Patriot Act.
“Snowden has correctly pointed out the federal government is spying on everything we say, all of our electronic communications, you name it,” Boyle says.
“And again, the proof is I’ve been completely blackballed out of U.S. media. Indeed, if you go back and look at the Amerithrax attacks, they also hit mainstream U.S. media to make it clear to them that if they covered this issue they will be killed too.”
Bioweapons Are Developed To Be Used
As noted by Boyle, the U.S. government has a large stockpile of Amerithrax — a super weapons-grade nanotechnology anthrax with 1 trillion spores per gram — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the biological weapons developed. What’s more, Boyle has no doubt these weapons will eventually be put to use, as they have in the past. He says:
“There was a tabletop exercise at John Hopkins University last fall … on coronavirus.10 Tabletop exercise, that’s a euphemism for a war game. Their estimate was that it killed 65 million people11 …
John Hopkins is up to their eyeballs in this Nazi biological warfare dirty work. They have a BSL-3 facility there … that they proudly announce on their website … They justify it by saying they’re developing vaccines. OK … How do they do that?
They go out around the world, and this is a matter of public record, and scour for every type of hideous disease, fungus, virus and bacteria you can possibly imagine. They then bring it back to these BSL-4 labs and develop an offensive, biological agent using DNA genetic engineering and synthetic biology … set up by the Pentagon under DARPA …
Once they have this offensive agent, they then proceed to develop a vaccine, because the agent is no good unless you can have a vaccine to protect your own people.
So, they’re developing vaccines to have biological weapons, because a biological weapon consists of two elements: the offensive biological warfare agent in the first place, and then, second, a vaccine to protect your own people, and that is what is being done at all these BSL-4 facilities, and many of the BSL-3s as well.
John Hopkins has a BSL-3 and they admit they do dual use. That’s what dual use means. They first develop the offensive biological warfare agent and then they develop the supposed vaccine.”
Indeed, Johns Hopkins University is the biggest recipient of research grants from federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Department of Defense. It has also received millions of dollars in research grants from the Gates Foundation.12 In 2016, Johns Hopkins spent more than $ 2 billion on research projects, leading all U.S. universities in research spending for the 38th year in a row.13
How Can We Best Prevent or Treat COVID-19 Infection?
While it’s unclear exactly which treatment is the most effective, my guess is that Dr. Paul Marik’s intravenous vitamin C protocol for sepsis would be a good starting point, seeing how sepsis appears to be what kills those who succumb to a serious COVID-19 infection.
Marik’s retrospective before-after clinical study14,15 showed that giving patients IV vitamin C with hydrocortisone and vitamin B1 for two days reduced mortality from 40% to 8.5%. The precise protocol used was 200 mg of thiamine every 12 hours, 1,500 mg of ascorbic acid every six hours, and 50 mg of hydrocortisone every six hours.16 Importantly, the treatment has no side effects and is inexpensive, readily available and simple to administer.
According to Marik, vitamin C and corticosteroids have a synergistic effect,17 which is part of why his combo protocol is so effective. Still, simply using high-dose IV vitamin C exclusively has been shown to improve survival in patients with sepsis and acute respiratory failure, reducing mortality from 46% to 30%.18
It also reduced the number of days they needed to remain hospitalized. On average, those who received vitamin C had by Day 28 spent three fewer days in the intensive care unit than the placebo group (seven days compared to 10). By Day 60, the treatment group had also spent seven fewer days in the hospital overall —15 days compared to 22.19
While there are no trials that look at integrating hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), my suspicion is that this would provide a powerful synergy that could get the fatality rate from sepsis even closer to zero. Sadly, HBOT is not available at many hospitals, and even if it were, it is not approved for sepsis.
You can learn more about Marik’s sepsis protocol in “Vitamin C — A Game Changer in Treatment of Deadly Sepsis,” along with commonsense recommendations for how to lower your risk of sepsis in the first place.
You can also review Marik’s PowerPoint presentation, “Hydrocortisone, Ascorbic Acid and Thiamine for the Treatment of Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock,” presented at the 2020 Critical Care Reviews meeting in Australia. For COVID-19 at-home care advice from the WHO, please see “Novel Coronavirus — The Latest Pandemic Scare.”