Biotech – American Conservative Movement

Pharma Food — Biotech on Your Plate

Dr. Joseph Mercola — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 10:12:44 +0000

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

Dutch investigative journalist Elze van Hamelen reports on the “tsunami of fake foods” being rolled out by the biotech industry
Fake meats are not about your health or the environment’s; they’re a tool to phase out farmers and ranchers and replace them with an ultraprocessed food product that can be controlled by patents
Creating lab-grown meat is “insanely expensive” and plagued by bacterial and viral contamination
Despite the pharmaceutical-style manufacturing, lab-grown meat isn’t considered a pharmaceutical product, which means no human testing is required
Van Hamelen recommends directing your food dollars not to corporate supermarket chains or fake food products but to small farmers growing real food

(Mercola)—Lab-grown meat may one day represent 80% or more of the “meat” consumed worldwide,¹ a dramatic departure from the way humans have eaten for centuries. Speaking with Catherine Austin Fitts of “The Solari Report,” Dutch investigative journalist Elze van Hamelen reports on the “tsunami of fake foods”² being rolled out by the biotech industry — and what this means for human health.

The Dutch government is among those investing heavily in lab-grown meat, using technologies made to develop pharmaceuticals. While fake meat is touted as the solution to save the planet and end world hunger, it’s plagued by technological challenges that make it prohibitively expensive, prone to bacterial and viral contamination and nearly impossible to grow at scale.³

Fake meats are not about your health or the environment’s; they’re a tool to phase out farmers and ranchers and replace them with an ultraprocessed food product that can be controlled by patents. Remember that if government and corporate entities are able to take control of the food supply via fake food, they also control the people.

How Biotech Grows Meat in Labs

To make fake meat, cell lines are taken from a living organism. They’re then manipulated to grow quickly and consistently. “What are cells that proliferate quickly? Either cancers or fetuses. They have cells that proliferate very quickly,” van Hamelen says.⁴ For lab-grown meats, biotech is cryptic about what types of cell lines are actually used.

Normally, cells grow in a structure in your body. The cell lines being grown in bioreactors in labs are grown in a thin film or growth medium. In the body, the growth medium is your blood, van Hamelen explains, a complex substance that laboratories try to replicate using fetal bovine serum (FBS) — blood taken from living calf fetuses.

“It’s really gruesome how this is harvested,” she says,⁵ pointing out that this negates the narrative that lab-grown meats are made without animals. FBS is often used to grow cultured cells because of the proteins and vitamins it contains. A 2013 study stated, “In many common culture media, the sole source of micronutrients is fetal bovine serum (FBS) …”⁶

When lab-grown chicken made by U.S. startup Eat Just debuted in Singapore in 2020 — marking the first cultured meat to be sold at a restaurant⁷ — it was produced using FBS.

In order to develop synthetic “blood” instead, precision fermentation, using genetically engineered microbes, is used, along with artificial hormones, which can’t legally be added to food in the European Union. Micronutrients and minerals must also be sourced, making the process “insanely expensive,” van Hamelen says.⁸

How expensive? Use of FBS-free medium may cause cultured meat to cost over $20,000 per kilogram.⁹ A report from the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit group behind the alternative protein industry,¹⁰ suggested that if the cost of FBS-free mediums could be reduced, it would drive down the cost of cultured meat by 90%. This, however, is unlikely.

“[T]he report provides no evidence to explain why these micronutrient costs will fall,” Joe Fassler, The Counter’s deputy editor, wrote in an in-depth exposé about the actual science behind lab-grown meat.”¹¹

Contamination May Also Put Lab-Grown Meat Out of Reach

In precision fermentation, GE microbes such as yeast and bacteria are fermented in brewery-style tanks under high-tech, sterile conditions. Contamination must be controlled down to 2 parts per billion, van Hamelen says, “because as soon as there is a contamination … it becomes riddled with bacteria, and you don’t have a cell culture, you have a bacteria culture.”¹²

GFI’s report assumes that cultured meat facilities of the future will be food-grade, as opposed to pharmaceutical-grade — the latter of which would increase costs even further. But a report by chemical engineer David Humbird for Open Philanthropy¹³ found that cultured meat may remain too expensive to ever come to market, assuming pharmaceutical-grade specifications and aseptic “clean rooms” would be necessary due to the slow growth rate of culture cells.

This makes them extremely vulnerable to contamination from bacteria and viruses. Humbird told Fassler:¹⁴

“Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event … There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick.

Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”

Paul Wood, a former pharmaceutical industry executive, added, “We’re saying, guys, it has to be pharmaceutical-grade because the process is going to demand it. It’s not whether someone will allow you [to run at food-grade specs.] It’s just the fact you can’t physically do it.”¹⁵

Adding to the issues, the human body has vessels that not only deliver nutrients to cells but also get rid of toxins. In the fake meat growing process, there is no vessel system, so the culture starts to generate toxins, and there’s no way to get rid of them.

An exposé in Wired points to a number of the technological challenges that van Hamelen speaks of,¹⁶ direct from employees at Upside Foods, one of two companies allowed to sell cultured meat in the U.S. Wired reported:¹⁷

“One former employee says that between the factory opening in November 2021 and the summer of 2022, they saw dozens of attempts to use the bioreactors to produce sheets of tissue, but they rarely resulted in usable meat. At times, production runs were ruined by contamination that meant the meat was unsuitable for turning into a product, the former employee says.

Former Upside employees describe how batches of meat growing in the custom-made bioreactors would frequently be ruined by contamination and have to be incinerated. ‘Once they had any indication it was contaminating, they would try to just stop the run, get the cells, and get any results out of it that they could,’ says a former employee with knowledge of the process.”

Meanwhile, despite the pharmaceutical-style manufacturing, lab-grown meat isn’t considered a pharmaceutical product, which means no human testing is required. “If this is brought to market, it’s a human experiment,” van Hamelen says.¹⁸

Fake Food Has Roots in Central Control

Van Hamelen also describes a war against Dutch farmers that has emerged, threatening to push them off the land they’ve farmed for generations. As small and mid-sized farms close their doors, governments and corporate entities can scoop up the land, leaving consumers with no choice but to eat the fake lab-grown, animal-free foods they’re offering.

You can hear about this in-depth van Hamelen’s report and podcast for “The Solari Report” — Dutch Farmers and Fishermen: The People Who Feed Us.¹⁹

“In 2021, the European Union’s Natura 2000 network released a map of areas in the Netherlands that are now protected against nitrogen emissions. Any Dutch farmer who operates their farm within 5 kilometers of a Natura 2000 protected area would now need to severely curtail their nitrogen output, which in turn would limit their production,” Roman Balmakov, Epoch Times reporter and host of ‘Facts Matter,’ says.²⁰

Dutch dairy farmer Nynke Koopmans, with the Forum for Democracy, believes the nitrogen problem is made up. “It’s one big lie,” she says. “The nitrogen has nothing to do with environmental. It’s just getting rid of farmers.” Another farmer said if new nitrogen rules go into effect, he’d have to reduce his herd of 58 milking cows down to six.

Nitrogen scientist Jaap C. Hanekamp, Ph.D., was working for a government committee to study nitrogen, tasked with analyzing the government’s nitrogen model. He told Balmakov:²¹

“The whole policy is based on the deposition model about how to deal with nitrogen emissions on nature areas. And I looked at the validation studies and show that the model is actually crap. It doesn’t work. And doesn’t matter. They still continue using it. Which is, in a sense, unsettling. I mean, really, can we do such a thing in terms of policy? Use a model which doesn’t work? It’s never about innovation, it’s always about getting rid of farmers.”

Fake Food a ‘Dangerous Chapter’ in ‘the Great Poisoning’

Once you get rid of farmers, the only food choices left will be lab-grown products, insects and other synthetic foods. According to Fitts’ Solari Report:²²

“Synthetic food and lab-grown meat represent a new and dangerous chapter in what I call ‘the Great Poisoning.’ Despite an economics that makes no sense — and clear indications that these products are repugnant to consumers — money is apparently no object.

Staked by massive infusions of venture capital and burgeoning public-private partnerships, items like cricket flour and lab-cultured ‘eggs’ have already made their way into grocery stores — with non-existent or misleading labeling designed to get past unwary consumers’ defenses.

As Elze’s research shows, this is a multipronged attack, with synthetic foods also targeting pets and livestock. There is every indication that governments, corporations, and others are serious about establishing a tightly controlled food system that replaces real food and real meat with synthetic, pharma-inspired ‘alternatives.’”

One way you can fight back, aside from supporting farmers producing real food using real farming, is to contact your representatives and encourage them to vote in favor of the Prime Act. Introduced by U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, the Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption (PRIME) Act would allow farmers to sell meat processed at smaller slaughtering facilities and allow states to set their own meat processing standards.

Because small slaughterhouses do not have an inspector on staff — a requirement that only large facilities can easily fulfill — they’re banned from selling their meat. The PRIME Act would lift this regulation without sacrificing safety, as random USDA inspections could still occur.²³ Ultimately, the Act would make meat much more affordable and available.

The answer to food safety and security lies in a decentralized food system that connects communities with farmers growing real food sustainably and distributing it locally. Van Hamelen recommends directing your food dollars not to corporate supermarket chains but to small farmers or their intermediaries.

The Biotech Plan to Destroy Us

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 07:42:40 +0000

Covid has generated a great of controversy, but one thing can’t be doubted. Covid, and the misguided attempts to combat it, have wreaked havoc since March 2022. How was the Covid virus created? An answer, devastating in its implications, has just come to light. (Thanks to the heroic Ron Unz for tipping us off on this). What you’re about to read sounds like something you would expect from one of our authors at LRC, authors whom the Left is quick to dismiss as “conspiracy theorists.” But the person we’re talking about has impeccable leftwing credentials. He’s the economist Jeffrey Sachs, famous for his work on “sustainable development” and “third-world poverty.” You couldn’t miss reading about him in the mainstream media—at least until recently.

In an interview published online in Current Affairs, on August 22, “Prof. Sachs explains how he, as the head of the COVID-19 commission for a leading medical journal, [The Lancet] came to the conclusion that powerful actors were preventing a real investigation from taking place.

He also explains why it is so important to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID: because, he says, there is extremely dangerous research taking place with little accountability, and the public has a right to know since we are the ones whose lives are being put at risk without our consent. “

The “official” view is that the Covid virus was an accident that came from contaminated animal parts in the Wuhan market in China. Sachs suggests that studies that purport to confirm this account have been faked. “Well, the funny thing is those scientists who are saying that said the same thing on February 4, 2020, before they had done any research at all. And they published the same statement in March 2020, before they had any facts at all. So they’re creating a narrative. And they’re denying the alternative hypothesis without looking closely at it. That’s the basic point. “

That’s the “official” truth, in other words the government lies, about Covid. What does Sachs think was really going on? “The alternative hypothesis is quite straightforward. And that is that there was a lot of research underway in the United States and China on taking SARS-like viruses, manipulating them in the laboratory, and creating potentially far more dangerous viruses. And the particular virus that causes COVID-19, called SARS-Cov-2, is notable because it has a piece of its genetic makeup that makes the virus more dangerous. And that piece of the genome is called the ‘furin cleavage site.’ Now, what’s interesting, and concerning if I may say so, is that the research that was underway very actively and being promoted, was to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses to see what would happen. Oops!”

It gets worse. The “scientists” who published the “accidental market mishap” theory knew it was false, but they circulated this lie to cover up biotech research they didn’t want disturbed. “At the beginning, which we could date from the first phone call of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with a group of virologists on February 1, 2020, the virologists said ‘Oh my god, that is strange, that could well be a laboratory creation. What is that furin cleavage site doing in there?’ Because scientists knew that was part of an active ongoing research program. And yet, by February 3, the same group is saying ‘No, no, it’s natural, it’s natural.’

By February 4, they start to draft the papers that are telling the public, ‘Don’t worry, it’s natural.’ By March, they write a paper—totally spurious, in my view—called the proximal origins paper that is the most cited bio paper in 2020. It said: it is absolutely natural. [Note: the paper’s conclusion is ‘we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.’] But they didn’t have any of the data that you read about in the New York Times. They didn’t have any of this. They just said the labs weren’t working on this alternative. But you know what, they don’t know what the labs were working on, because they never asked, and NIH hasn’t told us.”

Sachs is emphatic about this: “So my point is, there is a huge amount of reason to believe that that research was underway. Because there are published papers on this. There are interviews on this. There are research proposals. But NIH isn’t talking. It’s not asking. And these scientists have never asked either. From the very first day, they have kept hidden from view the alternative. And when they discuss the alternative, they don’t discuss the research program. They discuss complete straw men about the lab, not the actual kind of research that was underway, which was to stick furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses in a way that could have created SARS-Cov-2.

What I’m calling for is not the conclusion. I’m calling for the investigation. Finally, after two and a half years of this, it’s time to fess up that it might have come out of a lab and here’s the data that we need to know to find out whether it did.”

When you read this, you of course want to know more details about motives for the plot Sachs has uncovered. Sachs has an answer: “One thing that is rather clear to me is that there is so much dangerous research underway right now under the umbrella of biodefense or other things that we don’t know about, that is not being properly controlled. This is for sure. And that’s happening around the world. And governments say ‘don’t poke your nose into that.’ That’s our business, not your business. But it’s actually our business. It’s our business to understand what is going on with this. This is not to be kept secret. We don’t trust you.

Let me put it this way: I don’t trust them right now. I want to know. Because even what we know of the dangerous research is enough to raise a lot of questions of responsibility for the future. And to pose the question: ‘Hey, what other viruses are you guys working on? What should we know?’ Because no matter what the truth is on SARS-Cov-2, what is pretty clear is we’ve got so much technological capacity to engineer dangerous pathogens right now. And a lot of that is being done. And it’s classified. It’s secret, and we don’t know what it is. And I don’t like that feeling at all. I don’t recommend it for us and for the world.”

LRC readers won’t be surprised that the monster “Dr.” Anthony Fauci is in this up to his neck. “The alternative that is the right one to look at is part of a very extensive research program that was underway from 2015 onward, funded by the NIH, by Tony Fauci, in particular NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases], and it was to examine the spillover potential of SARS-like viruses.

The champions of this research explained in detail their proposals. But after the event, we’d never asked them, ‘So what were you actually doing? What experiments did you do? What do you know?’ We somehow never asked. It was better just to sweep it under the rug, which is what Fauci and the NIH have done up until this point. Maybe they could tell us, ‘Oh, full exoneration,’ but they haven’t told us that at all. They haven’t shown us anything.

So there’s nothing ‘kooky’ about it, because it’s precisely what the scientists were doing. And then you can listen to the scientists on tape describing why they think the research program is so important, because they say these are dangerous viruses, and therefore we have to prepare broad spectrum vaccines and drugs.

They explain it’s not good enough to test one or two viruses. We have to test all of them. And then they came to realize, as I said earlier, that just having a SARS-like virus, if it doesn’t have this piece of the gene, it’s almost surely not going to be that effective. So they got around to the idea. ‘Well, let’s put these in,’ if you can imagine that. To my mind, it’s mind-boggling.’

Sachs compares the biotech danger to the threat of nuclear war. “I can tell you one thing that I’ve learned from talking to a lot of scientists in the last couple of years: the technological capacity to do dangerous things using this biotechnology is extraordinary right now. So I want to know what’s being done. I want to know what other governments are doing, too, not just ours. I want some global control over this stuff.

We’ve kind of understood the nuclear risk—even that, of course, is in a lot of ways hidden from view. But this is a clear and present risk. And there’s reason to believe we’re actually in the midst of it, not just hypothetically. So come on: it’s time to open the books everywhere. It’s time to find out. Maybe it was the marketplace. Maybe it wasn’t a lab. But we need to get real answers, now. Not the kind of misdirection that’s been going in since February 2020. Enough nonsense! Enough New York Times stories saying, ‘Oh, it’s this, it’s that,’ without looking closely at the very plausible laboratory hypothesis.

There’s more. As the great Murray Rothbard would have said, “Get this!” “The most interesting things that I got as chair of the Lancet commission came from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits and whistleblower leaks from inside the U.S. government. Isn’t that terrible? NIH was actually asked at one point: give us your research program on SARS-like viruses. And you know what they did? They released the cover page and redacted 290 pages. They gave us a cover page and 290 blank pages! That’s NIH, for heaven’s sake. That’s not some corporation. That is the U.S. government charged with keeping us healthy.

What I found is that we have a lot of data which we’re not finding right now. And I don’t want to have to rely on FOIA and leaks, though those can be incredibly informative. I want clear, independent scientific investigation and transparency. One way to do this would be a bipartisan congressional oversight investigation that had subpoena power. Give us your lab records, your notebooks, your data files of virus strains, and so forth. There are many questions that we need independent scientists to define, to tell us exactly the kinds of information. But we know right now we’re operating in an environment in which the government is working to hide the data that we need to make a real assessment.”

In the past few years, Sachs has also called for a ceasefire in the Ukraine and an end to US economic sanctions against Venezuela. Somehow, I suspect you won’t be hearing much about Sachs anymore in the organs of the kept press.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and . Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Article cross-posted from Lew’s Blog.