Microsoft founder Bill Gates has been secretly funding experiments that seek to modify H1N1 bird flu to jump to humans and spread rapidly through global populations.
The Bill Gates Foundation awarded the University of Wisconsin–Madison a $9.5 million grant to conduct research on making the H5N1 virus transmissible to humans and other mammals.
The McCullough Foundation, led by Dr. Peter McCullough, shared on X that this funding, directed to UW-Madison and principal investigator Yoshihiro Kawaoka, involves modifying H5N1, potentially using gain-of-function techniques.
The experiments hope to ensure bird flu “preferentially recognizes human-type receptors and transmits efficiently in mammals.”
Similar to how bat coronaviruses were altered in laboratories to jump from bats to humans, H5N1 naturally infects birds.
Building on prior research by Ron Fouchier, who demonstrated how H5N1 could become airborne in ferrets, the UW-Madison team has identified two additional mutations necessary to make Egyptian H5N1 capable of producing mammalian-transmissible “variants.”
“This reveals that the Gates Foundation has been funding activities akin to bioterrorism by providing the framework for others who might weaponize H5N1,” the McCullough Foundation stated in a tweet addressing the unsettling implications of this research.
In 2006, Kawaoka, along with colleague Taisuke Horimoto, conducted a study focused on creating new vaccines for