Did this videotape of a speaker at an anti-vaccine conference prove COVID-19 is a bioweapon created by government officials to kill Americans and put the world's people under the dominion of a globalist cabal? No, there's no evidence the pandemic was caused by a super-virus developed at the University of North Carolina's immunology laboratories, the central allegation by conference speaker David Martin. Nor did he prove the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA) had anything to do with "gain-of-function" research to make viruses more lethal. DARPA has repeatedly said it does not fund development of viruses as weapons and provides documents to back its assertion.
This recycled set of claims appears in a December 11, 2021, online video (archived here) posted to rumble.com, titled "Dr. David Martin | Exposing the Coup D'Etat & the Plot to Steal America." It opens:
It's Epic!!! Eric Trump, Lance Walnau, Dr. David Martin, Comedian Jim Breuer, Dr. Zelenko Join the ReAwaken America Tour!!! BREAKING!!! The ReAwaken America Tour is coming to SAN DEIGO! March 11th and
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Dr. David Martin | The TRUTH About COVID-19
It's Epic!!! Eric Trump, Lance Walnau, Dr. David Martin, Comedian Jim Breuer, Dr. Zelenko Join the ReAwaken America Tour!!! BREAKING!!! The ReAwaken America Tour is coming to SAN DEIGO! March 11th and
Martin's claims, debunked several times, relies on false claims about the contents and meaning of U.S. patent documents and repeats disproved claims from the "Plandemic" film in which he stars, which offers unproven claims about a plot to take over the world with a virus. Lead Stories has collected here its debunks of Martin's multiple versions of his claim about a nefarious infection plot.
Although he speaks at length about medical matters and is introduced as a doctor, David Martin is not a medical doctor. He is an exercise physiologist, with a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia Department of Education. In the past, he has presented himself as an expert on patent fraud, a self-actualization entrepreneur and a hedge fund manager.
This video's claims mirror claims he has made in prior slide shows and films: that a lab-created virus caused the pandemic of 2020. For instance, One of the documents he has in the past offered as "proof" is a 2015 report in a science journal. But that article makes the opposite point in an author's update, stating scientists have not proven a theory of lab origin of COVID.
At the eight-minute mark in the video, Martin, arguing that HIV vaccine research led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2, says University of North Carolina microbiologist Ralph Baric, Ph.D., figured out how to weaponize the spike protein on the coronavirus. "He received a grant and then a series of grants in 1999, by Anthony Fauci to actually weaponize the coronavirus spike protein so it can be used as a vaccine vector with the idea that it would be the next HIV vaccine." Fauci failed to develop a universal vaccine against HIV, but continued funding Baric's research in order to develop dangerous viruses, Martin says.
Baric has dismissed the claim, saying the work he does -- studying viruses that cross over from other species to humans -- does not amp up the lethality of viruses.
Martin's theory of the origin of the COVID pandemic has gained no traction among experts in microbiology, epidemiology and infectious disease.
Expert international panels commissioned to find out have since narrowed down the origin of SARS-CoV-2 to two possibilities: another instance of viral cross-over from animal species or escape from the Chinese immunology lab at Wuhan near where the first cases were identified in December 2019. None of the expert panels' reports mention or point to Baric's lab as the point of origin of the 2019 SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.
At 18:30, after tying Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to failed HIV vaccine projects, Martin says, without documentary evidence, witness statements, photographs or independent forms of verification, that Fauci used Baric's lab to launch the pandemic:
This was a bio warfare act of domestic terrorism meted out on the citizens in the United States and the people of the world. And it was not a lab leak from China. It was not a lab leak from anywhere. It was an intentional weaponization of the spike protein and it's murder and we will call it what it is.
Martin's theory is easily disproved in public documents, DARPA Chief of Communications Jared B. Adams said in a Sept. 9, 2020, email to Lead Stories. For starters, he said, DARPA has never worked with Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina virologist Martin (and his film-maker Ben Swann) claim is the key player in a COVID-19 conspiracy. From Adams:
Like all conspiracy theorists, Swann and Martin build on elements of truth and then add false and/or misleading claims...DARPA's research concerning zoonosis or the animal origins of viral pathogens began in 2018, not earlier in 2005 nor in 1999-2001...
DARPA would certainly welcome seeing the "trail of evidence" Swann has that ties the good professor to the agency considering the micro flashes of paper in the YouTube video prove nothing other than that Baric is active in publishing and patenting.
More important than these supposed ties, however, is that DARPA is not now nor has it ever been involved in gain of function research. If Swann had an ounce of journalistic integrity, which he obviously does not, he could easily talk to any of our PREEMPT researchers and/or review extant literature and realize pretty quickly that DARPA is not making bioweapons: (Full listing of PREEPMT researchers).
Further, DARPA and the PREEMPT teams receive guidance from independent expert advisors in the ethical, legal, social, and regulatory aspects of the life sciences. These individuals include Dr. Claudia Emerson, director of the Institute on Ethics & Policy for Innovation at McMaster University; Dr. Matt Kasper, legislative liaison for the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, and a former deputy director of field laboratory operations at the Naval Medical Research Center; and Dr. Steve Monroe, associate director for Laboratory Science and Safety at the CDC, and a former deputy director of the CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. You are welcome to call anyone above to inquire about the program.
