Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified intelligence about a constellation of biological laboratories in Ukraine on Friday, four years after members of Congress and biodefense officials criticized her for expressing concerns about them.
The new documents reveal two dozen biological labs in Ukraine. The map reveals that a lab in Odessa, a city with a population of more than one million people, has a lab with stored biological weapons from the defunct Soviet Union biological weapons program. Viruses in storage include anthrax, tularemia, tuberculosis, Swine Fever, New Castles Disease, MERS, SARS, Marburg, Ebola, Lassa, the Plague, and Rickettsia, the documents show.
“Despite the obvious potential for catastrophic global impact research on dangerous pathogens in biolabs can have, politicians, so-called health professionals like Dr. Fauci, and entities within the Biden administration’s national security team lied to the American people about the existence of U.S.-funded and supported biolabs, and threatened those who attempted to expose the truth,” Gabbard said in a statement. “ODNI will continue to work closely with partners across the government to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain to end dangerous Gain-of-Function research that threatens the health and wellbeing of the American people and people around the world.”
Gabbard is pushing to declassify documents in the public interest in her final days in office, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported last week. Gabbard announced on May 22 that she would step down to care for her husband following his cancer diagnosis. Her last day is slated to be June 19. Trump announced on Thursday he had picked New York attorney and former SEC chairman Jay Clayton to replace her.
The Odessa lab and four others in Ukraine are biosafety level three labs (BSL-3), the second highest level of containment, which is usually reserved for virulent pathogens.
(Credit: Office of the Director of National Intelligence)
Another lab in the battered city of Kharkiv on the Russian border had reported biosafety problems in 2019 in rooms handling Brucella bacteria, the intelligence shows. The documents also mention anthrax.
“The Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine (IECVM) in Kharkiv probably houses at least some dangerous pathogens and almost certainly remains vulnerable to long-standing Russian information operations, seizure or damage,” the declassified intelligence community document reads.
Under an initiative called the Biological Threat Reduction Program (BTRP), the Pentagon has sought to decommission the Soviet biological weapons program by securing the program’s deadly pathogens and occupying its former bioweaponeers with civilian infectious diseases research. Forty labs in Ukraine received BTRP funding as of the 2010s, according to the documents.
The U.S. built new labs in Ukraine too, the documents reveal.
But the newly declassified documents reveal that some of the labs conduct gain-of-function research, research that makes pathogens more infectious or deadly in the lab. Most biodefense experts consider gain-of-function research to be “dual use.” It has civilian applications, but could it could also be weaponized for more nefarious applications in the wrong hands. Many of the labs have permits for handing “especially dangerous pathogens.” One project involved highly pathogenic avian influenza, a virus with a 50% fatality rate.
(Credit: Office of the Director of National Intelligence)
Gabbard’s office described some of this research as “supposed public health initiatives” in a press release Friday, citing new intelligence unearthed by American spy agencies. Gabbard has issued new guidance to the intelligence community directing increased collection on laboratories and facilities overseas.
American collaborators of the BTRP in Ukraine include the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, the hub of America’s biological weapons program before President Richard Nixon signed the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1972. Partners also include Metabiota, a contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that has faced scrutiny for repeated lapses in biosafety, its role in a USAID-backed scientific collaboration on novel coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and its connection to Hunter Biden’s investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners.
The Trump administration shuttered USAID last year.
(Credit: Office of the Director of National Intelligence)
In March 2022, roughly one month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Gabbard expressed concerns about the security of biolabs in Ukraine and called for a ceasefire.
State Department official Victoria Nuland had days earlier acknowledged concerns about Russia assuming control of biological research facilities in Ukraine.
“Ukraine has biological research facilities which in fact we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of. So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach,” Nuland said.
But critics accused Gabbard of echoing Russian misinformation.
Sen. Mitt Romney described her comments as “treasonous lies.”
“The information surrounding the existence, history, locations and funding of these US funded biolabs has been intentionally covered up by powerful people falsely, claiming that they do not exist and accusing anyone who says otherwise to be foreign assets and traitors to America,” the ODNI said in a statement Friday.
Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) March 13, 2022
Some biodefense experts opposed her appointment to the DNI in part for these comments.
But the new declassified documents reveal that the intelligence community acknowledged that these collaborations on infectious diseases in Ukraine posed a risk to America’s reputation.
Russian propaganda accused the U.S. of generating bioweapons in the basement of the Kharkiv lab. The intelligence community internally acknowledged that the lab does have a basement.
(Credit: Office of the Director of National Intelligence)
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