DARPA’s Blue Angel – Pentagon prepares millions of vaccines against future global flu

Published: RT

Pentagon’s cutting edge research lab says that they’ve used a massive harvest of tobacco plants to help produce a plethora of flu-fighting vaccines.

TAGS: Health, Drugs, USA

The Pentagon’s DARPA lab has announced a milestone, but it doesn’t involve drones or death missiles. Scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency say they’ve produced 10 million doses of an influenza vaccine in only one month’s time.

In a press release out of the agency’s office this week, scientists with DARPA say they’ve reach an important step in being able to combat a flu pandemic that might someday decimate the Earth’s population. By working with the Medicago Inc. vaccine company, the Pentagon’s cutting edge research lab says that they’ve used a massive harvest of tobacco plants to help produce a plethora of flu-fighting vaccines.

“Testing confirmed that a single dose of the H1N1 VLP influenza vaccine candidate induced protective levels of hemagglutinin antibodies in an animal model when combined with a standard aluminum adjuvant,” the agency writes, while still noting, though, that “The equivalent dose required to protect humans from natural disease can only be determined by future, prospective clinical trials.”

Researchers have before relied on using chicken eggs to harvest compounds to use in influenza vaccines. With a future outbreak requiring scientists to step up with a solution as soon as possible, though, they’ve turned to tobacco plants to help produce the vaccines.

“Vaccinating susceptible populations during the initial stage of a pandemic is critical to containment,” Dr. Alan Magill, DARPA program manager, says in an official statement. “We’re looking at plant-based solutions to vaccine production as a more rapid and efficient alternative to the standard egg-based technologies, and the research is very promising.”

The World Health Organization has gone on the record to say that as much as half of the people on the planet could be affected by a pandemic in the near future, and it could take as much as nine months for a vaccine for a pandemic virus strain to become made available. With the lives of billions of people across the world at stake, DARPA has been trying to determine new ways of churning out antidotes in as little time as possible. Now its researchers say, that in only a month, scientists “produced more than 10 million doses (as defined in an animal model) of an H1N1 influenza vaccine candidate based on virus-like particles (VLP).”

Through DARPA’s previously established Blue Angel program, researchers have spent several years searching for new ways to produce mass quantities of vaccine-grade protein that could be used to combat what they say are very real emerging and novel biological threats.

Andy Sheldon, Chief Executive Officer of Medicago , says in the company’s own press release that “The completion of the rapid fire test marks a substantial achievement in demonstrating our technology and the potential for Medicago to be the first responder in the event of a pandemic flu outbreak.”

Medicago’s research was conducted in a 97,000-square-foot vaccine facility in North Carolina that was funded through a $21 million Technology Investment Agreement with DARPA.

How Airports Quickly Spread Pandemics Like H1N1 And SARS

Airports in New York, Los Angeles and Honolulu are judged likeliest to play a significant role in the growth of a pandemic.

Public health crises of the past decade — such as the 2003 SARS outbreak, which spread to 37 countries and caused about 1,000 deaths, and the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic that killed about 300,000 people worldwide — have heightened awareness that new viruses or bacteria could spread quickly across the globe, aided by air travel.

Credit: MIT

While epidemiologists and scientists who study complex network systems — such as contagion patterns and information spread in social networks — are working to create mathematical models that describe the worldwide spread of disease, to date these models have focused on the final stages of epidemics, examining the locations that ultimately develop the highest infection rates.

But a new study by researchers in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) shifts the focus to the first few days of an epidemic, determining how likely the 40 largest U.S. airports are to influence the spread of a contagious disease originating in their home cities. This new approach could help determine appropriate measures for containing infection in specific geographic areas and aid public health officials in making decisions about the distribution of vaccinations or treatments in the earliest days of contagion.

Unlike existing models, the new MIT model incorporates variations in travel patterns among individuals, the geographic locations of airports, the disparity in interactions among airports, and waiting times at individual airports to create a tool that could be used to predict where and how fast a disease might spread.

“Our work is the first to look at the spatial spreading of contagion processes at early times, and to propose a predictor for which ‘nodes’ — in this case, airports — will lead to more aggressive spatial spreading,” says Ruben Juanes, the ARCO Associate Professor in Energy Studies in CEE. “The findings could form the basis for an initial evaluation of vaccine allocation strategies in the event of an outbreak, and could inform national security agencies of the most vulnerable pathways for biological attacks in a densely connected world.”

A more realistic model

Juanes’ studies of the flow of fluids through fracture networks in subsurface rock and the research of CEE’s Marta González, who uses cellphone data to model human mobility patterns and trace contagion processes in social networks, laid the basis for determining individual travel patterns among airports in the new study. Existing models typically assume a random, homogenous diffusion of travelers from one airport to the next.

However, people don’t travel randomly; they tend to create patterns that can be replicated. Using González’s work on human mobility patterns, Juanes and his research group — including graduate student Christos Nicolaides and research associate Luis Cueto-Felgueroso — applied Monte Carlo simulations to determine the likelihood of any single traveler flying from one airport to another.

“The results from our model are very different from those of a conventional model that relies on the random diffusion of travelers … [and] similar to the advective flow of fluids,” says Nicolaides, first author of a paper by the four MIT researchers that was published in the journal PLoS ONE. “The advective transport process relies on distinctive properties of the substance that’s moving, as opposed to diffusion, which assumes a random flow. If you include diffusion only in the model, the biggest airport hubs in terms of traffic would be the most influential spreaders of disease. But that’s not accurate.”

Outsize role for Honolulu

For example, a simplified model using random diffusion might say that half the travelers at the Honolulu airport will go to San Francisco and half to Anchorage, Alaska, taking the disease and spreading it to travelers at those airports, who would randomly travel and continue the contagion.

In fact, while the Honolulu airport gets only 30 percent as much air traffic as New York’s Kennedy International Airport, the new model predicts that it is nearly as influential in terms of contagion, because of where it fits in the air transportation network: Its location in the Pacific Ocean and its many connections to distant, large and well-connected hubs gives it a ranking of third in terms of contagion-spreading influence.

Kennedy Airport is ranked first by the model, followed by airports in Los Angeles, Honolulu, San Francisco, Newark, Chicago (O’Hare) and Washington (Dulles). Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, which is first in number of flights, ranks eighth in contagion influence. Boston’s Logan International Airport ranks 15th.

“The study of spreading dynamics and human mobility, using tools of complex networks, can be applied to many different fields of study to improve predictive models,” says González, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “It’s a relatively new but very robust approach. The incorporation of statistical physics methods to develop predictive models will likely have far-reaching effects for modeling in many applications.”

“Nowadays, one of the most ambitious scientific goals is to predict how different processes of great economic and societal impact evolve as time goes on,” says Professor Yamir Moreno of the University of Zaragoza, who studies complex networks and spreading patterns of epidemics. “We are currently capable of modeling with some detail real disease outbreaks, but we are less effective when it comes to identifying new countermeasures to minimize the impact of an emerging disease. The work done by the MIT team paves the way to find new containment strategies, as the newly developed measure of influential spreading allows for a better comprehension of the spatiotemporal patterns characterizing the initial stages of a disease outbreak.”

This work was supported by a Vergottis Graduate Fellowship and awards from the NEC Corporation Fund, the Solomon Buchsbaum Research Fund and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Contacts and sources:
Written by: Denise Brehm, Civil and Environmental Engineering
MIT

Rockefeller Foundation Predicts 13,000 Dead at London 2012 Olympics

Posted by truther on June 8, 2012

By James Britpod

A 2010 Rockefeller Foundation document entitled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development” outlines a scenario which results in the death of 13,000 during the2012 Olympics.

The first worrying prediction begins in 2012 when ‘the pandemic the world had been anticipating for years’, finally hits, infecting nearly 20 percent of world population and claiming 8 million lives. Due to this pandemic, the Rockefeller Foundationoutlines how the public will welcome a more authoritative government and a tighter control across all aspects of life, including Biometric IDs for all citizens.

The 2012 London Olympics Bombing

In the document, the Rockefeller Foundation ‘predicts’ that the decade of 2010-2020 will be named “The Doom Decade”, because of  a wave of terrorist attacks, natural disasters as well as civil uprisings and financial collapses.

The years 2010 to 2020 were dubbed the “doom decade” for good reason: the 2012 Olympic bombing, which killed 13,000, was followed closely by an earthquake in Indonesia killing 40,000, a tsunami that almost wiped

out Nicaragua, and the onset of the West China Famine, caused by a once-in-a-millennium drought linked to climate change.

Mirroring events in real life, the document also predicts that by 2015 a large share of the US’ armed forces are recalled from countries such as Afghanistan to be stationed domestically, apparently posse comitatus no longer being a concern.

 In 2015, the U.S. reallocated a large share of its defense spending to domestic concerns, pulling out of Afghanistan—where the resurgent Taliban seized power once again.

As is happening right now, the document outlines how nations will lose power over their own finances due to massive debt, apparently handing over financial sovereignty to the banking technocrats.

But the document doesn’t just cover these topics. The growing mistrust in vaccines is covered in the Rockefeller document, where they state  that due to corruption within national and global bodies such as WHO, “bogus” vaccines will result in mass deaths.  According to the paper, the resulting mistrust in vaccines results in a large number of parents who avoid vaccination, which causes infant and child morality to rise to levels not seen since the 1970s.

In the context of weak health systems, corruption, and inattention to standards—either within countries or

from global bodies like the World Health Organization—tainted vaccines entered thepublic health systems of several African countries. In 2021, 600 children in Cote d’Ivoire died from a bogus Hepatitis B vaccine, which paled in comparison to the scandal sparked by mass deaths from a tainted anti-malarial drug years later. The deaths and resulting scandals sharply affected public confidence in vaccine delivery; parents not just in Africa but elsewhere began to avoid vaccinating their children, and it wasn’t long before infant and child mortality rates rose to levels not seen since the 1970s.

Technology becomes an increasing theater of battle in the Doom Decade, with cyber terrorism and hacking mafia organizations becoming more and more widespread.  A worrying prediction outlined in the document covers “Bio-Hacking” where GMO and DoItYourself-Biotech push the Globalist’s love for Transhumanism forward.

Interestingly, not all of the “hacking” was bad. Genetically modified crops (GMOs) and do-it- yourself (DIY) biotech became backyard and garage activities, producing important advances. In 2017, a network of renegade African scientists who had returned to their home countries after working in Western multinationals unveiled the first of a range of new GMOs that boosted agricultural productivity on the continent.

Just as desired by Globalists for over a hundred years, the developed world begins to fall back into feudalism, with the gap between the rich and poor growing to levels not seen for hundreds of years as the middle classbecomes extinct.

The rich moving into fortress like compounds, whereas the poor are forced to move into ghettos. By 2030, the document portrays the “developed” and “developing” nations to no longer be relevant or distinguishable.

Agenda 21

The report also outlines several Environmental scenarios stemming from Climate Change which include a new worldwide economic system based on Green Infrastructure by 2018.

The Foundation describes how the resulting collapse of society requires an exodus out of rural areas and into urban environments for survivability, a bizarre take on reality where those living in urban environments are far more restricted in being self sufficient than those in rural areas who have the ability to more easily grow their own food.

Another mirror to Agenda 21 is the documents prediction that only the very rich will have the ability to travel, as prices skyrocket and the restrictions in the name of security reach such high levels  that the poor simply cannot travel from their communities.

Conclusion

As with other such documents such as those released by RAND and the MoD in the UK, these predictive papers are a window into the think-tanks who help shape world events. Where the documents are always portrayed as simple predictions, it is important to realize that many such papers have been eerily accurate in the past and thus must be considered when such events unfold in the near future.

Documentation:

Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development
– The Rockefeller Foundation

This article was originally published at Liberty Tactics.