Did West Africa’s Ebola Outbreak of 2014 Have a Lab Origin?
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Did West Africa’s Ebola Outbreak of 2014 Have a Lab Origin?
"Their claimed patient zero, Emile Ouamouno, allegedly caught Ebola after playing with, or maybe hunting, bats."
Background:
Previously here on Boutique Substack, we have covered how Notorious GVB (Geert Vanden Bossche) had attempted to sound the alarm about the Ebola Vaccine Ring Trials in West Africa.
Spotting a problem with the Vaccine Science and sounding the alarm and getting told to Sit Down and STFU did not begin with COVID-19 for Geert Vanden Bossche.
Notorious had a warm up beatdown in trying to slow the Global Public-Private Partnership Vaccine train barreling down the tracks with the Ebola Trials, whilst working with GAVI.
That warning was ignored, too.
Once this train starts rolling, and once the WHO opens the door to industry, you know what you’re going to get. Those guys are not concerned or worrying about our health. This is about, of course, the shareholders; enriching the shareholders.
GVB, CHD Friday Roundtable, August 26, 2022
Speaking of shareholders, Geert.
Did you and Bob by chance talk about dem dere Ebola Ring Trials whilst shooting the Headwinds Real Scientists of Covid Reality TV show?
By the way, “Unknown Dog” appears to have an Unknown Brother that meeebbeeee made it to the Santa Monica Mountains. 😅
Is it going to shock anyone who was crowing about just those infernal shareholder industry trains on his CV and those Ebola Ring Trials and making dem dere robust shareholder returns?
I am trying very hard not to wade into “dark conspiracy”, and adhere exactly to documentable evidence, such as a copy and paste from Malone’s 2021 CV.
Dr. Malone has a history of assembling and managing expert teams that focus on solving complicated biodefense challenges to meet US Government requirements. He was instrumental in enabling the PHAC/rVSV ZEBOV (“Merck Ebola”) vaccine to move forward quickly towards BLA and (now recently granted) licensure. Dr. Malone got the project on track in support of DoD/DTRA and NewLink Genetics, recruited organizations to team with USAMRIID/WRAIR to develop the immunoassays, put WHO and Norwegian government philanthropic leadership in touch with Pentagon leadership to expedite the initial WRAIR clinical and ring vaccination trials, recruited a management team, recruited Merck vaccines to purchase the product candidate from NewLink, helped write and edit the clinical trials developed by the World Health Organization and lead the development of the BARDA and DTRA contracts - yielding over 200M$ in resources. Dr. Malone’s early involvement in this project allowed for the Merck vaccine to be developed very rapidly.
Previously on Boutique Substack, we have also covered Bobby Kennedy positing that PANDEMICS HAVE BEEN FAKED, which Intellectual Dark Web interviewer Bret Weinstein had zero zip nada interest in exploring further and of which Deep Insider Bob Malone has never mentioned one time despite a lifetime of being involved in the military countermeasures “vaccine” space.
Don’t take my word for it. Short video clip of VERY IMPORTANT SCIENTIST Bob telling you (and Joe Rogan) all about it in this post.
Previously on Boutique Substack, we’ve tracked back to 1969, and the Rockefeller insider pronouncements that “The Science” would be falsified to further Depopulation and Globalist Totalitarian Agendas.
FALSIFIED SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
Somewhere in this connection, then, was the statement admitting that some scientific research data could be - and indeed has been - falsified in order to bring about desired results. And here was said, "People don't ask the right questions. Some people are too trusting."
Now this was an interesting statement because the speaker and the audience all being doctors of medicine and supposedly very objectively, dispassionately scientific and science being the be all and end-all ... well to falsify scientific research data in that setting is like blasphemy in the church ... you just don't do that.
Anyhow, out of all of this was to come the New International Governing Body, probably to come through the U.N . and with a World Court, but not necessarily through those structures. It could be brought about in other ways. Acceptance of the U.N . at that time was seen as not being as wide as was hoped. Efforts would continue to give the United Nations increasing importance. People would be more and more used to the idea of relinquishing some national sovereignty.
Okay, let’s tie it all together like the rug tied the room together in Big Lebowski.
If you watch the Geert video from Highwire and CHD interview, you will see that he is frustrated with the misuse of the science.
Straight out of the Day Tapes, Notorious.
(What are the odds that GVB will listen to the Day Tapes?)
If Covid was a live exercise on the world and Africa was one of many warmups…and Day Tapes Science would be falsified is accurate…
Then the following deep dive not exactly a stretch of logic.
Gosh. I hope that Tucker Carlson and Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan will all dive into this.
Wonder what Deep Insider Bob Malone knows about this?
Or his old pal, Michael Callahan, or Anthony Fauci know?
Maybe they could all shed some light on the pandemics that were faked, per Bobby Kennedy, Camelot Candidate for President of these here World Economic Forum New World Order States.
Extended excerpt is provided, click the link to view the rest of this thorough investigation.
by Sam Husseini and Jonathan Latham, PhD
Between 2014 and 2016, West Africa endured an Ebola epidemic that was easily the largest and deadliest in history. Over 29,000 people were infected and more than 11,000 died in what was also an economic and social calamity.
The countries most afflicted were Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea; but lives were also lost far afield. Ebola cases were detected in Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Spain, the UK, and the U.S. This international spread unleashed its own, albeit fairly short-lived, panic.
The infectious agent that caused the outbreak was a filovirus, the Zaire species of Ebola virus (sometimes called ZEBOV and sometimes just Ebola), which has a fatality rate of up to 90 percent (Feldmann and Geisbert, 2011).
The orthodox story of the outbreaks’ origin remains the one given at the time by the global media. In the U.S., the Atlantic ran “The Beautiful Tree, the Bats, and the Boy Who Brought Ebola.” The UK Independent led with “Ebola outbreak: Two-year-old boy from tiny Guinea village was first to be infected after playing with bats in tree stump.” The BBC filed: “First Ebola boy likely infected by playing in bat tree” and Canada’s Toronto Star informed its readers “Scientists trace Ebola outbreak to a tree where children play“. While disagreeing whether it was a “stump” or a “beautiful tree”, the media all concurred on one African boy and the bats.
The primary source for these accounts was a research paper that appeared on December 30th, 2014 in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine (Saéz et al., 2014). Titled “Investigating the zoonotic origin of the West African Ebola epidemic“, the paper begins:
“The severe Ebola virus disease epidemic occurring in West Africa stems from a single zoonotic transmission event to a 2‐year‐old boy in Meliandou, Guinea.”
Their claimed patient zero, Emile Ouamouno, allegedly caught Ebola after playing with, or maybe hunting, bats.
Perhaps dissuaded by the definitive opening sentence, the media seems not to have enquired at the time into what evidence supported this narrative. This was perhaps a mistake.
Granted, there seemed grounds for confidence in these scientists. The senior author was Fabian Leendertz of the prestigious Robert Koch Institute in Germany. Leendertz is a renowned virus hunter best known as a member of the WHO team that reported, in March 2021, on the origins of COVID-19.
Missing evidence: the search for a zoonosis in Meliandou
For their investigation, the Leendertz team surveyed bats in the area surrounding Meliandou. Bats were chosen since they were considered the presumptive reservoir host of Zaire Ebola viruses (Leroy et al., 2005; Leroy et al, 2009; Pigott et al., 2014).
Samples of bat blood and bat tissue were collected from 159 individuals of 13 bat species. However, the results were uniformly negative:
“No EBOV RNA was detected in any of the PCR-tested bat samples [and] attempts to demonstrate the presence of IgG antibodies against Ebola viruses were inconclusive (data not shown).”
Trying another tack, the authors knew that outbreaks of Zaire Ebola are sometimes correlated with mass die-offs of forest mammals (Walsh et al., 2003; Leroy et al., 2004). However, no evidence for mammal declines could be found near Meliandou:
“[these results] suggest they have not experienced a major decline; in fact, carnivore and chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) populations may have increased.”
All-told, the Leendertz team found no sign whatever of Ebola in the area around Meliandou.
What of Emile? The Leendertz team concluded that Emile and his mother, who was eight months pregnant at the time, were both Ebola victims, as was a sister who also died. They did not note, however, that Emile’s primary caregiver at the time (probably because of the pregnancy) was his father, who never became sick.
Moreover, no blood or other samples were ever taken from any of these suspected cases. Hence no laboratory evidence exists for any of them having had Ebola and so these diagnoses rest on symptoms alone.
This is highly significant because the symptoms of Ebola are very variable. Even when severe, they overlap with many diseases that are common in West Africa, including malaria, cholera, and Lassa fever. It is therefore generally agreed that Zaire Ebola cannot be diagnosed without genome sequencing or other lab tests (Gire et al., 2014). These tests were not available until much later in the outbreak.
Thus the Leendertz investigation detected no Ebola in bats or other animals in the vicinity of Meliandou, nor did they uncover any other evidence that an Ebola outbreak had occurred in the region. They also found no evidence that Emile or his immediate contacts had Ebola infections; nor even was there a clear indication that Emile had any contact with a bat or the now infamous tree. Such findings did not warrant anything like the absolute certitude of the opening sentence of their report.
Rather, the evidence collected by the Leendertz team was, if anything, against Ebola having been in Meliandou at that time.
Independent evidence against Ebola in Meliandou
Chernoh Bah, an independent journalist from Sierra Leone, wrote a book on the 2014 Ebola outbreak and visited Meliandou. Bah found that:
“Local health workers still think malaria may have been the actual cause of his [Emile’s] death.”
While in Meliandou, Chernoh Bah also interviewed Emile’s father. According to Bah, the Leendertz team (who never claimed to have interviewed the father) made a crucial error:
“The child was actually 18 months old when he died.”
Bah confirmed this assessment in an interview with Independent Science News. This age is also accepted by the US CDC and was independently confirmed by Reuters journalists, who also interviewed Emile’s father. The age question, it should be noted, is crucial to the entire outbreak narrative. As Emile’s father told Reuters:
“Emile was too young to eat bats, and he was too small to be playing in the bush all on his own. He was always with his mother.”
Bah also identified another apparent error: that Emile had four siblings who never became sick. These siblings are not mentioned anywhere in the scientific literature.
The wider context is also important for weighing these contending accounts. Some previous outbreaks of Zaire Ebola have been linked with hunting, but only once has an Ebola outbreak been linked to handling or consumption of bats, and then only tentatively (Leroy et al., 2009). Thus, although catching and eating bats is common in parts of Africa, a clear precedent for their passing Ebola to humans does not exist.
Further, although some bats appear to carry antibodies against Ebola viruses, only intact Bombali Ebola (a different virus species in the Ebola genus) has ever been isolated from a bat, despite intensive searches (Leroy et al., 2005; Pigott et al., 2014; Goldstein et al., 2018; Forbes et al., 2019). Bombali is a species of Ebola that does not infect humans.
Taken together, this suggests that bats rarely carry Ebola viruses and when they do it is in small quantities. This context makes it somewhat surprising that Saéz et al. ascribed the 2014 outbreak (without supporting evidence) to contact with bats. Indeed, Fabian Leendertz now doubts that bats are true reservoirs of Ebola viruses (Leendertz et al., 2016).
Given the general want of evidence, one wonders by what exact process such poorly supported claims were transmuted into international headlines.
The missing epidemiology connecting Emile to the first proven Ebola cases
Emile Ouamouno died in Meliandou, Guinea, on Dec 6th, 2013 (Saéz et al. 2014; Baize et al., 2014).
Relying on hospital records and interviews, a putative transmission chain connecting Emile to (most of) the earliest confirmed cases was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (Baize et al., 2014).
The proposed epidemiological chain is shown in full in figure 2 (reproduced from Baize et al., 2014). In figure 2, suspected cases are indicated by an ‘S’ while patients confirmed by laboratory test are denoted with a ‘C’ for ‘confirmed’ (and also given a red spot). This makes Emile ‘S1’ in the standard narrative.
These authors acknowledge that the dashed connections in figure 2 represent epidemiological links that “are not well established”. It is thus important to note that Emile connects to the first confirmed cases only via dashed lines.
The next thing to understand about the standard epidemiological account is that laboratory tests for Ebola disease only became available in West Africa on March 21st, 2014. Every step in the infection chain in figure 2 (except when C12 infected C14) relies on symptoms alone. Thus even the solid lines in figure 2 are highly provisional too.
The third important consideration is that there are two alternate versions of Baize et al. 2014 available online. The version initially published by the NEJM is represented by figure 2. The version available now (dated July 12, 2022) on the NEJM website states that the first (peer-reviewed) version of the article was “preliminary”. The major change in the final text was to state that a second epidemiological investigation concluded death dates for S1 (Emile), S2, S3 and S4 were later by up to 3-4 weeks (Baize et al., 2014). However, no information about this second investigation is provided. There is no explanation for why it was necessary and it contradicts figure 2 (which remains unchanged in the new version of the paper). It is also never stated which of the two conclusions, if any, the authors themselves favour.
(Potentially, this second investigation was the one conducted by the Leendertz team and noted in Saéz et al., 2014. These researchers claimed that the first Baize investigation was incorrect and that Emile (S1) died on Dec 28th (not December 6th) and his sister on January 5th (not December 29th) and his mother (S3) on January 11th (not December 13th). However, Saéz et al. do not mention revising the death date of the grandmother (S4) which Baize et al. state was revised in the second investigation from January 3rd to an unspecified date.)
This epidemiological uncertainty manifests even at later dates and among confirmed cases. For example, figure 2 does not include patient C3, who was the first confirmed Ebola death (on March 17th) at Guéckédou hospital. This is the nearest hospital to Meliandou, 12 km away. Nor was a chain established for one of the next two deaths (C4 on March 18th) at Guéckédou hospital (both are therefore only noted in Table 1 of Baize and not figure 2).
This insufficiency of concrete data surrounding the very early cases, plus the lengthy time interval separating Emile’s death in December from the first confirmed cases in mid-March and the delayed subsequent investigations cast considerable doubt on the validity of the whole chain.
There are other problems too. As can be seen in figure 2, if we consider only the first cases confirmed by laboratory tests, the earliest deaths were not recorded at Guéckédou hospital at all. Despite being labeled with higher numbers (as if they were later in the outbreak), the four earliest deaths among confirmed cases were C12 (d. Feb 28th), C13 (d. March 12th), C8 (d. March 16th), and C14 (d. March 16th). These patients all presented at Macenta hospital which is over 100 km east of both Meliandou and Guéckédou (see figure 1, above).
This pattern among the earliest confirmed deaths does not obviously suggest an epicentre in Meliandou. So, although Baize et al. conducted epidemiological investigations, this rooting of the outbreak is, in reality, highly provisional.
Last, but perhaps not least, since the diagnoses are mostly unconfirmed, the credibility of the epidemiological chain in figure 2 rests heavily on the researchers’ claims to have interviewed eyewitnesses, yet Emile’s father contradicted them in 2015, telling Reuters:
“It wasn’t Emile that started it”.
Zaire Ebola in 2014: the prima facie case for a lab origin
After Ebola was first confirmed by laboratory tests in mid-March 2014, persistent rumours in the region linked the outbreak to a US-run research laboratory in Kenema, Sierra Leone (Wilkinson, 2017). This facility studies viral hemorrhagic diseases, of which Ebola is one.
Kenema is 140 km southwest of Guéckédou and the same distance from Macenta and a little farther from Nzérékoré (see figure 1, above). All these towns sit close to or fairly close to the border where Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia meet.
The Kenema laboratory stands in the grounds of the Kenema Government Hospital (KGH). The lab, but not the hospital, has been operated by the US-based Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (VHFC) since 2010. Though there is an interesting continuity–a viral hemorrhagic fever laboratory was run by the US CDC in Kenema between 1976 up to Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s.
The president and founder of the VHFC is virologist Robert (Bob) Garry of Tulane University.
In response to lab origin speculation, Garry gave a curious denial of any connection to his lab in an interview with Politifact published on 15 October, 2014, titled “5 falsehoods about Ebola“. Garry told his interviewer, Aaron Sharockman:
“We were there working 10 years and then Ebola came here.”
The possibility of a lab origin never gained much attention outside Africa. But the 2014 Ebola outbreak was enigmatic on several key grounds.
One puzzle was noted by the Leendertz group:
“[The] current epidemic represents the first proven emergence of Zaire Ebola virus in West Africa.” (Saéz et al., 2014)
The Zaire species of Ebola is the most lethal (to humans) of all the members of the Ebola genus. This genus also includes other Ebola-like viruses: Bundibugyo virus, Tai Forest Virus, Reston Ebola, Bombali Ebola, and Sudan Ebola. As its name implies, all prior outbreaks of Zaire Ebola were in the central African equatorial zone (the Congo basin) (Feldmann and Geisbert, 2011). At its closest, this classical Zairean Ebola zone is 3,000 km from Guinea. Hence Zaire Ebola’s appearance in West Africa was a striking and very unexpected development.
How might it have reached West Africa? Ebola is not highly contagious. Transmission normally requires direct contact with the body fluids of an infected host. With such weak infectious properties and poor spreading potential, how could it move so far? Moreover, although often lethal and hence relatively easy to spot when it emerges, the virus caused no known human or animal outbreaks en route from its traditional Congo refuge.
A second major puzzle is that subsequent genome sequencing and phylogenetic analysis has shown unambiguously that the 2014 outbreak resulted from a single jump into humans (Gire et al., 2014; Dudas and Rambaut, 2014).
Zoonotic outbreaks, including most past Ebola outbreaks, typically feature multiple jumps to humans from an animal source (Feldmann and Geisbert, 2011). Single jumps, however, are consistent with lab origins and are often considered a red flag for that possibility (Nakajima et al., 1978). The reason is that researchers often work with a single isolate, perhaps one that they have found is particularly easy to replicate in the laboratory, whereas natural populations are typically diverse. This difference provides a genetic signal for distinguishing natural origins from laboratory ones.
Last, Zaire Ebola is the species favoured by civilian and military research labs for studying Ebola-type viruses. It is their focus because of its high mortality rate and thus biowarfare potential.
Journalist Chernoh Bah is now a graduate student at Northwestern University. Noting the gap between the weakness of the Leendertz account of the outbreak origin (and we would add that of Baize too) and the forcefulness with which the Emile narrative was asserted by western scientists and western media, he wrote:
“it is difficult not to interpret the ‘zoonotic origin of the West African Ebola epidemic’ narrative advanced by Fabian Leendertz and his team as part of a cover-up or obfuscation of the actual chain of events that laid the foundation for the West African Ebola outbreak.” (Chernoh Bah, The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa)
Indeed, the Kenema laboratory merits close inspection as a potential source of the Zaire Ebola strain that led to the 2014 outbreak.
Helicopter View Productions.
Aggregating dem dere dots as they converge at the Monster McDonald’s and sipping that coffee and watching the mushroom cloud on the horizon.
Did West Africa’s Ebola Outbreak of 2014 Have a Lab Origin?
🔥👏💥🎯 Another stunning post. ❤️
Where did I read this? "This does not fulfill the requirements for a pandemic"...