The United States is the country most involved in biomilitary activities, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin claimed on August 18, alluding to the Pentagon’s recent report on biological threats.
“As we all know, it is the United States that carries out the most bio-military activities in the world, carries out the most actions that raise doubts,” Wang told reporters.
On August 17, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) published a review of biological threats. The review, also known as the Biodefense Posture Review, especially castigated China as a major long-term menace to America owing to its endeavors in the area of biological weapons, which reportedly undermine America’s security.
The U.S. frequently creates reports on so-called threats for geopolitical means “to deter and suppress other countries, to protect its hegemonic interests,” the diplomat claimed, saying that Washington incites conflict and ruins the global biosecurity management system.
China backs the international community in assessing how the U.S. is complying with the Biological Weapons Convention, and urges the U.S. to fulfill its global obligations, Wang said.
China has already called on the U.S. to account for its overseas military-biological activities and meet its international obligations.
“We reiterate our calls on the United States to faithfully observe their international obligations and provide comprehensive explanations on its military-biological activity within the country and abroad,” Wang told journalists on April 12.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry also asserted that the U.S. Department of Defense controls 336 biolaboratories in 30 countries around the world. Therefore, the matter of U.S.-led biological research sounded alarm bells in China, with details offered by the Russian Ministry of Defense augmenting the need for concern.
In March, Russia and China issued a joint statement on the military biological activities conducted by the United States.
“The parties express serious concern about the military biological activities of the United States of America, carried out on their territory and beyond its borders, which pose a serious threat to the security of other states and entire regions, [and] demand that the United States provide clarifications on this matter and not carry out any biological activities that contradict [the Biological Weapons] Convention, as well as not hinder the establishment of a mechanism for verifying compliance with obligations under this Convention,” the statement read.
The U.S. wants to leverage hazardous biological agents and manage artificial epidemics by backing illegal research in biolabs across the globe, the Russian embassy in Washington remarked last Thursday.
In their statement, the embassy recalled that Moscow has frequently warned about what it termed as “gross violations by the United States of its obligations” under the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which forbids this type of armament and has been signed by practically all countries in the world, including Russia and the United States.
Nonetheless, “Washington ignores the claims, justifying itself by some humanitarian component of its programs,” the embassy alleged, claiming that such excuses were not founded in reality.
To bolster the pathogenic capabilities of infections, the U.S. “brazenly and with complete impunity scatters its illegal laboratories all over the world” under the pretext of “epidemiological monitoring,” with many of those facilities situated in Russia’s neighborhood, the statement lambasted.
The embassy singled out American biological activities in Ukraine, where it said Washington “has drawn dozens of country’s state institutions and private companies into its projects,” with civilians and military personnel alike being exploited as test subjects.
“There is no doubt that such actions require appropriate legal assessment, including by competent international institutions,” it added.
Moscow’s Defense Ministry had hitherto suggested that Washington was working with highly infectious and risky pathogens, anticipating a potential new pandemic. Last autumn, Russia tabled a resolution in the UN urging for investigations into the activities of American laboratories in Ukraine. However, the U.S. and its allies France and Britain vetoed the resolution.
The commander of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, posited that the U.S. military is examining pathogens that could be used as biological weapons as the nation prepares for a potential new pandemic.
U.S. specialists supposedly have their eyes on diseases such as anthrax, tularemia, and various coronaviruses, Kirillov claimed during a media briefing. Some of these pathogens have been classified by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as “high-priority” threats that can be used as “bioterrorism agents.”
“There is a clear trend: pathogens that fall within the Pentagon’s area of interest, such as Covid-19, avian influenza, African swine fever, subsequently become a pandemic, and American pharmaceutical companies become the beneficiaries,” the general asserted, though providing no further details.
Kirillov also said that the U.S. was extensively investigating coronaviruses right before the advent of Covid-19. The White House recently divulged the establishment of the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR), tasked with “leading, coordinating, and implementing actions related to preparedness for, and response to, known and unknown biological threats.”
The Russian military is of the opinion that the OPPR may be another move by Washington to gain control over the global biological and epidemical situation. “As in 2019, the U.S. has begun preparing for a new pandemic by searching for virus mutations,” Kirillov said.
Moscow does “not rule out that the United States will use so-called defensive technologies for offensive purposes, as well as for global governance by creating crisis situations of a biological nature,” the general continued.
Kirillov also stated that one of the key functions of the Ukrainian laboratories was to collect and send to the United States strains of pathogens of dangerous infectious diseases — cholera, anthrax, tularemia, and others. Notably, the transportation of the pathogens was not regulated within the WHO, BWC, or other global institutions. Ukrainian military personnel, indigent citizens, and patients of mental hospitals became the test subjects of various biological agents.
Last March, alluding to allegations of biological weapons development in Ukraine, the White House labeled Moscow’s statements as “classic Russian propaganda.” Nevertheless, a few months later, the Pentagon acknowledged that it had been backing 46 Ukrainian laboratories, while maintaining that all its joint programs “focused on improving public health and agricultural safety.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry has claimed that the U.S. has spent over $200 million on 46 biological laboratories in Ukraine involved in the American military biological program, and that these were only a fraction of a global network of 300 similar facilities.
Such claims were confirmed by presidential hopeful and longtime Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Twitter/X.
Kennedy, who is campaigning against U.S. President Joe Biden, has been criticized for his contentious stances on vaccines. However, for the recent interview, Kennedy focused on other vital matters, such as the NATO proxy conflict between Ukraine and Russia and biological labs in Ukraine, where he claimed that bioweapons were being produced.
During the interview, Kennedy said that “we have bio-labs in Ukraine because we are developing bioweapons, and these weapons involve all sorts of cutting-edge synthetic biology technologies like CRISPR and genetic engineering methods that were not available to the previous generation.”
He pointed out that the U.S. began investing heavily in bioweapons in 2001 but was worried that “violating the Geneva Convention is a crime,” so it handed over the management of biological security to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy added that the development of any biological weapon requires a vaccine, as there is a “100 percent chance” of unintended consequences when bioweapons are mobilized.
