Dr. Rodolfo Ondarza

Biological Warfare and the Need for a Global Health System

This is the edited transcript of the presentation by Rodolfo Ondarza to Panel 2, “Peace Through Development,” of the Schiller Institute’s Nov. 22 conference, “For World Peace—Stop the Danger of Nuclear War: Third Seminar of Political and Social Leaders of the World.”

Dr. Ondarza is a former Representative in the Mexico City Legislative Assembly. He spoke in Spanish, with simultaneous translation into several languages. The full proceedings of the conference are available at the Schiller Institute website.

Aside from the imminent danger of nuclear war, to which we have been exposed in this hybrid world war, whose central battleground is the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, an example of which risk of escalation is seen in the Ukrainian missile that exploded on Polish territory, the risk of a possible biological war is also evident.

Russia has indicated at the UN Security Council that Ukraine possesses biological weapons in its laboratories supported by the United States. The U.S. has charged that Russia could be using those accusations as a pretext to deploy its own chemical or biological weapons. Victoria Nuland, current Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, has admitted that such laboratories exist.

According to China’s Foreign Ministry, the Pentagon manages and finances 336 biological laboratories in around 30 countries. Lt. General Igor Kirillov, Chief of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops of Russia’s Armed Forces, confirms that more than 50 of those laboratories are located near the border with Russia, and have nothing to do with current problems related to Ukrainian health and sanitation, but rather work secretly.

The Lt. General denounced an atypical epidemiological situation created by the activity of those laboratories under U. S. control. Beginning in 2010, in Ukrainian areas bordering Russia, a significant increase was detected in the incidence of diseases and infections caused by bacteria and viruses which use animals and insects as vectors, such as brucellosis, Crimea-Congo hemorrhagic fever, West Nile fever, and the African swine flu.

One possible origin of this situation could be the Insect Allies Program, which uses insects to infect crops with different viruses modified through CRISPR technology, a last generation DNA sequencing editing system. This program began in 2016 with initial financing of $45 million from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), located in Arlington, Virginia.

According to Kirillov, the experimentation and control of pathogens in these laboratories explains the increase in the incidence of measles in Ukraine, which has increased 100-fold, the worsening of the African swine flu, as well as agricultural losses in Eastern Europe totaling €2.4 billion.

Kirillov confirmed that in February of 2022 when Russia began its Special Military Operation, the Mechnikov [Anti-Plague] Research Institute in Odessa had 654 containers with anthrax and 422 with cholera, estimating that these and about 10,000 strains with pathogens were exported from Ukrainian laboratories to the United States.

Reality outdoes fiction when it is confirmed that the U.S. is developing genetically-modified insects that are carriers of viral loads, and that in the U.S., an unmanned apparatus has been patented that can propagate infected insects in the air to “destroy or deactivate enemy forces without risk to U.S. troops.” It is also worrisome that Ukraine is interested in acquiring drones from the Turkish firm Bayraktar that can be equipped with systems and mechanisms for aerosol dispersal.

All of this is occurring in violation of U.S. and Ukrainian obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention. The World Health Organization has advised Ukraine to destroy the high-risk pathogens stored at the country’s public health laboratories to avoid any “potential leaks,” which could spread disease among the population.

The risk of future pandemics arising from the research and experimentation with pathogens is real. There are four levels of biosecurity related to the equipping of the laboratories that handle these pathogens, the functions, activities, and operations carried out in them, the technologies employed, as well as the transmission routes of the infectious agents that characterize these kinds of laboratories.

In this context, there are some 59 laboratories in the world which work with the most lethal viruses, and these 59 laboratories maintain a biosecurity level of 4 [BSL-4]. Nonetheless, the possibility of human or technological error always exists. The escape of pathogenic agents from high-security laboratories could also occur during conventional warfare or a nuclear war.

Labs rated BSL-4 are found in 23 countries, the majority of which are in Europe, with 25 laboratories. North America and Asia have 14 and 13 respectively. Australia has four and Africa three. One of the 59 maximum-containment laboratories is the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, which was the focus of discussion about the possible escape of pathogens.

Like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, three-fourths of the BSL-4 laboratories in the world are located in urban centers. And many of these are run by public health institutions but also by universities, and 20% by biodefense agencies.

Three-quarters of those laboratories do not have the recommended optimal levels of security. Safety and protection scores of all the laboratories also depend on the policies of biosecurity and biocustody in the countries in which they are located. Only approximately one-quarter of the countries that have these level laboratories have received high enough scores in terms of biocustody and biosecurity. This is truly something that is very worrisome and really terrible. One thinks that the United States is creating a network of biological networks to try to make use of these capabilities in its own interest.

A World Health System

To conclude, I would like to make mention of the importance of the proposals, the projects, made by the Schiller Institute back in April in 2020. In the project that was proposed by LaRouche’s Apollo Mission to defeat the global pandemic, which is very interesting at this time, a world health system to cover all areas of the planet is needed.

This global response requires fundamentally the coordination of the United States, China, Russia and India, an alliance of those four powers open to all the nations of the planet. The leaders of these four nations should hold a summit as soon as possible in order to elaborate common approaches to address the enormous sanitation, material, and infrastructure needs of the world, as a first step toward the creation of a whole New Paradigm to replace the old, bankrupt system. There is no other way, no lesser approach, according to the Schiller Institute, to truly defeat the COVID-19 pandemic.

The world community must create a capability for resistance, for successful, long-term survival, not just for the short term with the hope that no unexpected events will occur, but rather to be prepared with a real security system. This cannot happen under the current neoliberal economic paradigm which has shown itself to be a total failure.

And this is what the Schiller Institute has to say, which has made such proposals for public health measures to be taken, and also with regard to industry and infrastructure required to support those public health measures, along with the needed changes in global policies.

Finally, I want to insist on the necessity, that nurses and doctors around the world join our efforts to create an organization which, along with civil and academic society, shows and exposes the risks that the world faces, which such a nuclear, biological, or chemical war would entail for life itself on this planet. And I would like to invite all such people, all of us, to join in this fight for world peace, and for the right to exist.