Pfizer admits engineering new viruses? 'No. Actually yes. But the government made us do it.'

Pfizer's official response to a Project Veritas video, of a Pfizer director describing the company's plans to “mutate” the COVID virus, starts out as an outright denial but quickly moves to a seeming admission followed by an attempted justification. A Gab user offered this summary of Pfizer's response:

Project Veritas: Pfizer is conducting gain of function and directed evolution experiments.

Pfizer: Well no. But actually yes. Also the government made us do it.

No

Pfizer's statement starts off with a clear denial in response to the taped statements of its Director of Research and Development - Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning, Jordon Trishton Walker: “Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research.” 

Actually yes

This was followed by a discussion of how they merely “express the spike protein from new variants of concern," but only after a new variant has been ”identified by public health authorities." 

After seemingly gaslighting a public which has already viewed the Project Veritas video 40 million times, justifying its changes to variants by emphasizing that the variants already exist, Pfizer suddenly describes how it also engineers viruses.

In a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells. 

Dr. Robert Malone, an early inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, dismissed Pfizer's attempts to find a semantic difference between their admitted virus “engineering” and “gain of function” adaptations, writing on Twitter that, “Swapping new spike sequences into original Wuhan-1 is technically gain of function research.”

The government made us do it

As noted in the above Gab post, Pfizer's statement goes on to claim that they are actually “required” to engineer COVID variants.

It is important to note that these studies are required by U.S. and global regulators for all antiviral products and are carried out by many companies and academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world.

Until the Project Veritas exposé, though, Pfizer did not publicly discuss its claim that the government requires virus engineering.

Foreign collaborators?

Dr. Naomi Wolf, appearing on Steve Bannon's The War Room, likewise expressed concern with the details of Pfizer's denial, particularly its admission that it's working with collaborators, but failing to identify those collaborators. 

They go on to say, “Working with collaborators we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.” So that is basically saying, “Yes, we are indeed driving gain of function research. We are indeed experimenting to making viruses more lethal.” 

And the word that scares me is ‘collaborators’. Because they’re not saying American collaborators. They’re not saying we’re working with Moderna, we’re working with the FDA, we’re working with the CDC… It could be our existential adversaries working as they have before to make a virus more lethal.

Secure labs?

Though written for the lay public, Pfizer's statement describes using a secure “level 3” laboratory when engineering viruses, without explaining where level 3 falls in the range of safety levels. 

In addition, in vitro resistance selection experiments are undertaken in cells incubated with SARS-CoV-2 and nirmatrelvir in our secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory to assess whether the main protease can mutate to yield resistant strains of the virus.  

National Institutes of Health (NIH) guidelines appear to indicate, however, that a level 4 biosafety laboratory (the highest level) should be used for newly engineered, life-threatening viruses, since they are not yet covered by a vaccine.

Scientists use biosafety labs to study contagious materials safely and . . . to prevent microorganisms from entering the environment. . . . 

1. BSL-4 labs are used to study agents that pose a high risk of life-threatening disease for which no vaccine or therapy is available. Lab personnel are required to wear full-body, air-supplied suits and to shower when exiting the facility. The labs incorporate all BSL-3 features and occupy safe, isolated zones within a larger building.

What Pfizer didn't deny

As Dr. Malone points out in his above tweet, Pfizer did not deny the veracity of its director's claims, such as his claim that the revolving door for government regulators leads to a kids glove treatment of Pfizer by the government.

Walker: [Big Pharma] is a revolving door for all government officials . . . all the people who review our drugs — eventually most of them will come work for pharma companies. . . . 

Veritas Journalist: How do you feel about that revolving door?

Walker: It’s pretty good for the industry to be honest. It’s bad for everybody else in America.

Veritas Journalist: Why is it bad for everybody else?

Walker: Because when the regulators reviewing our drugs know that once they stop regulating, they are going to work for the company, they are not going to be as hard towards the company that’s going to give them a job.

Media blackout

Tucker Carlson pointed out that in addition to the danger presented by what Pfizer is doing in the laboratory, there's a danger in its ability to keep what it is doing out of the mainstream news and internet searches.

The public is very interested . . . but the media are not. No other media outlet has covered this story, at all. . . . MSNBC and CNN . . . take huge amounts of advertising dollars from Pfizer . . . devoted a total of zero seconds. . . . Google . . . appears to have gone out of its way to make it much more difficult for users to learn anything about the Pfizer executive pictured in the footage. . . . How powerful is Big Pharma? That powerful. [2:17-3:13].

The original video was even removed by Google subsidiary YouTube because it allegedly contradicted “expert consensus,” while, as Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe explains, the information in the video is from a Pfizer director.

Social media steps in

The news blackout did not stop meme makers, though, from publicizing the new video.