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The VECTOR Explosion (What the Conspiracy!)
25 Plays2 years ago
M tells Josh about an incident at a BSL-4 lab back in late 2019. No, not that BSL-4 lab!
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Introduction to the Russian Bio-lab Explosion Topic
00:00:00
Speaker
Look, I'll cut to the chase. This week's episode of What the Conspiracy is on a Russian bio-laboratory explosion you've never heard of. It occurred in late 2019, and it's interesting because of the lack of conspiracy theories around it. Okay, why are you telling me this in advance? Oh, because otherwise you'd spend time in the intro trying to get the topic out of me, and it's been a long, long week, and I just don't have the energy to avoid your penetrating questions.
00:00:29
Speaker
Or, this is a double bluff. Whaaat? But you want me to think the episode is on... Sorry, what was it again? A BioLab explosion in 2019. Yeah, okay. So you want me to think that, so I won't work out what you're really talking about this week.
00:00:45
Speaker
No, that's this week's topic. Furthermore, at no point ever in the admittedly short history of these intros concerning what the conspiracy has anyone actually managed to get the topic out of the other person, so it makes no sense whatsoever that you'd give the topic away unless it's a very elaborate double bluff. Okay, you got me.
00:01:03
Speaker
This week's episode is on space ghosts coming to a solar system near you. Or maybe that's the double bluff. Or maybe it's this. Presidential candidates who faked their own attack ads. Or maybe it's about how I'm going home to sleep with your wife. Sure would have got away with the two if it weren't for my meddling kids.
00:01:30
Speaker
Get out in that kitchen and ride all those pots and pans. Get out in that kitchen and ride all those pots and pans.
Hosts Introduce Themselves
00:01:41
Speaker
Well, roll my breakfast, cause I'm a hungry man. I said shake, rattle and roll. I said shake, rattle and roll.
00:01:59
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Dentist. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Here in Auckland, New Zealand, I'm Josh Addison, and in Zhuhai, China, it's associate professor of philosophy and backing vocalist on Mozart's Symphony No. 12 in G major, Dr. M. Dentist. Although it's really more Mozart than it is Beethoven.
00:02:29
Speaker
So it's funny because there's no...
00:02:32
Speaker
No vocals in his symphony. It's an orchestral piece. Well, at least not the symphonies which have ever been published and released. Anyway, we're here.
Technical Concerns and Quick Start
00:02:44
Speaker
We're recording. Fingers crossed, but the connection actually seems okay. Who knows how long it'll last. It's what the conspiracy episode this week, and Em's gonna throw something in my face. Do we have anything to get out of the way before that?
00:03:01
Speaker
I actually don't think we have any administration. I don't think we do. No, that's nice. Well then good. Then we can not waste time in which time our connection could die again and go straight into it. How about you play one of them little old chimes? I will put a chime in around about here.
Explaining 'What the Conspiracy' Game Format
00:03:27
Speaker
Okay, Josh, it is time to play what the conspiracy, so we have the usual three questions. First question, when the conspiracy. The second question being where the conspiracy and the third and final question being what the conspiracy. So when the conspiracy.
00:03:47
Speaker
Right, well, you mentioned 2019 in the intro, which was either a double bluff or possibly just some sort of a Freudian stumble on your part when you inadvertently let the cat out of the bag. So I'm going to say 2019.
00:04:01
Speaker
Okay, so when is 2019? Where the conspiracy? Where I'm going to quite deliberately not learn from your mistake last time we did this when you could have given any location on planet Earth and been right and you chose to go into outer space. I'm going to say outer space. Okay, and what the conspiracy?
00:04:22
Speaker
Well, I mean, based on the subtle clues you gave earlier on at the start, I'm going to say it's a conspiracy about presidential candidates faking the explosion of space goats in a bio lab in Russia. Close? Interesting. Pretty close. Come on, admit it. That's got to be close.
00:04:43
Speaker
When I, that, the first conspiracy I mentioned in the intro is the topic of this week's episode. So you're right on the year. So it was a triple bluff and your location, you've actually managed to actually put in the entire conspiracy in there, but because you've placed it in outer space and put the space goats in, you're actually almost completely wrong because of that. So if you just said,
00:05:09
Speaker
2019, Russia, bio lab explosion, it would have been a trifecta. But you got the year right, you got the location completely wrong, and then you kind of hedged your bets with the what by cramming everything in. And as we know from a conjunction,
00:05:26
Speaker
if one part of the conjunction is false, the entire conjunction is false. So it's really only one out of three. So frankly, my double bluff has worked. Curse you, propositional logic. Okay, so we actually honestly talking about now, at the start, you said a Russian biorelaboratory explosion you've never heard of. I've heard of quite a few biorelaboratory explosions.
Confirmation of the Actual Topic: Russian Bio-lab Explosion
00:05:50
Speaker
That's a lie. I can't back that up. Tell me about this one, please. All right. So you
00:05:55
Speaker
I suddenly realized that, because I wrote the intro after I wrote my notes, I was actually going to lead with, so the conspiracy here is an event at a bio lab in 2019, which some people were worried about would have led to a virus getting out into the general population, which I was then hoping would then be the double bluff. Oh, you're going to talk about the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis. I know all about that, because no,
00:06:19
Speaker
We're not in China, we're in Siberia. So yes, we are looking at an explosion at a biolib, biolib, biolibs. The brand new liberal philosophy comes you genetically engineered by liberals. New biolibs, they're biodegradable.
Details of the Explosion and Smallpox Risk
00:06:40
Speaker
No, so this is an explosion at a bio laboratory, not a bio liberality, or whatever I was trying to say initially, back in September of 2019. And this was a bio lab that contained smallpox.
00:06:58
Speaker
Now, smallpox is only found now in two locations in the world because it was successfully eradicated from the Earth. I think actually sometime in the late 1980s is when the last natural case of smallpox was actually found in the human population. There's been one subsequent case of smallpox
00:07:18
Speaker
post that point but it was a lab problem rather than a field problem and smallpox is only found in Atlanta in the US at the CDC
00:07:33
Speaker
It's also found in Siberia in the Russian Federation at the Vektor Laboratory. And the twist in this episode was also in the intro, in that this is an event which occurred, so a Biolab explosion in 2019.
00:07:50
Speaker
in which smallpox had the potential of being disseminated into a populated area of Russia, although Siberia is not the most populated part of Russia, given its kind of harsh environment. But weirdly enough,
00:08:06
Speaker
there is there were a few people concerned about the laboratory explosion not being an accident back in 2019 but there it seemed to be no conspiracy theories about this event at all which is kind of astounding given we have an explosion in a bio lab which contains smallpox and nobody seems to care no especially since bio labs are one of the big talking points in the Ukraine invasion that was
00:08:35
Speaker
It seemed at the time like they were casting around a little bit for a conspiracy theory to see which one would stick, and the Biolabs one definitely did. People seemed interested in the possibility of Biolabs in Ukraine, but one in Siberia nobody cares. That seems odd. Yeah, now I have to say this idea of talking about the vector explosion doesn't come from me. This is actually a listener request, so occur to one of our patrons.
00:09:00
Speaker
sent a message into the Patreon probably two or three weeks ago asking that we cover this particular topic entirely because of the lack of conspiracy theories around it. And because Josh doesn't check the Patreon account in any way, shape or form, I knew there was no way that Josh was going to know about this particular topic. Although I see as we'll get into the bonus content this week,
00:09:26
Speaker
People are working out how to contact you without going through May, which is a disturbing new series of events. We'll get into that in our bonus episode.
00:09:37
Speaker
So what's really interesting about this is of course in 2019 of course we also have a novel coronavirus which takes the world by storm and has changed the very foundation of the way in which we live and there might be a rationale behind that which explains why no one's talking about the vector explosion but let's talk about the vector explosion.
00:10:00
Speaker
So in September 2019, a bio-lab undergoing renovation at a former Soviet bio-weapon laboratory exploded. Now the blast took place during repairs to a fifth floor sanitary inspection room in Kolsovo in the Novosparisk region of Siberia. I'm fairly sure I've just mispronounced Novosparisk.
00:10:25
Speaker
which I believe actually stands for New Siberia. It's one of the largest cities in Siberia. I know people who live there. And this laboratory facility is one of the two places, as I said earlier, which has the smallpox causing varrola virus. Now, the explosion was unusual for the sheer fact that at the time,
00:10:51
Speaker
people thought that this possibly wasn't an accident, in part because of the history of the vector laboratory we're going to go into later on in this episode. So I'm going to read here from the bulletin of the atomic scientists.
Global Reactions and Historical Context
00:11:06
Speaker
Josh, do you know who the atomic scientists are and why they have a bulletin?
00:11:10
Speaker
No, but now I want to. So are you an atomic scientist? Unfortunately not. I'm more of a non-atomic scientist, or an atomic non-scientist, depending on how you want to describe it. So this is actually a fairly old bulletin from the end of the Second World War.
00:11:29
Speaker
So basically after the bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, there was kind of a feeling by atomic scientists that they should probably opine on a whole bunch of matters. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a varied history.
00:11:47
Speaker
If you actually look at the things they've written on in the past, some of it's been very good, some of it's been very dubious. But even though it sounds ever so slightly hyperbolic with the bulletin of the atomic scientists, it is a respectable publication. And they wrote on the vector explosion thusly. And this is in four parts. I'll take kind of break between each so you can pass commentary on what I've said. But part the first.
00:12:15
Speaker
At a huge Soviet-era virology campus in Siberia called Vekta, a sudden unexpected explosion in September blew out the windows and set parts of a building ablaze. Around the world, people sat up and took notice. Global public health and security officials were concerned the explosion might have affected labs, holding dangerous viruses.
00:12:37
Speaker
Now I should point out, they say around the world, people set up and took notice, but I'm actually not entirely sure that's true. I guess some people did, but not me and not in the news media, I suppose.
00:12:54
Speaker
No, no. So it continues. This is part the second. Biosecurity experts questioned whether it was a deliberate attack and international security analysts and biodefense experts deliberated how to read the situation, acutely aware that biosafety breaches in a similar facility 40 years ago had caused a large and deadly anthrax outbreak that eventually exposed the Soviet Union's prohibited biowarfare activities.
00:13:23
Speaker
Ah, and that would be the Svedlovsk leak that we've talked about on this podcast before, I assume the Anthrax one. Indeed it would be. Mmm, it all comes full circle. Now, I've got a question for you. When were bioweapons first banned? First banned? Oh gosh, I wouldn't know. Is it a Geneva Convention thing? It was a Geneva Convention, but can you guess approximately when?
00:13:49
Speaker
I'm guessing it's probably more recently than we'd like it to be, so maybe the 1980. So you're out by about 60 years. Oh, is it older than that? 1925. Ah, so it was post-World War I. Yes, so post the German warfare and gas warfare that occurred in the First World War.
00:14:10
Speaker
So the ban on biological weapons was also banned on gas weapons at the same time. But yes, it turns out actually they were banned a lot earlier than I expected.
Bioweapons Ban and Violations
00:14:21
Speaker
Yeah, I was assuming it was going to be one of those things where we would assume they've been illegal for a long, long time, but then be shocked to discover it's actually only been recently. So I'm glad to see it has actually been a long time.
00:14:36
Speaker
It didn't stop people from engaging in germ warfare or gas warfare in World War Two, but it did also mean that people could then be prosecuted for engaging in germ warfare and gas warfare after World War Two. So it turns out that even as some people won the war, they still got pinged for winning the war in the wrong way.
00:14:58
Speaker
So, let me, let me then continue. This is part the third. From media reports on the explosion, it was unclear exactly which parts of vector in which labs had been affected by the explosion and fire. Of particular concern was the facility housing the unique smallpox-causing forola virus, one of just two such repositories in the world, both routinely monitored by the World Health Organization.
00:15:24
Speaker
Mmm. So, at this stage, we weren't sure if Smallpox... I see they don't notice Smallpox by name, but is that what?
00:15:33
Speaker
reading between the lines they're worried about? Or is it just a general read? We're not sure. So I can give you a list of what else was contained at Vector, or is still contained at Vector, still an ongoing bio-laboratory. Vector contains smallpox, as mentioned, HIV, Marburg. Now, I don't know about you, Josh, but when people mention the Marburg virus, I think of the TV show Millennium.
00:15:59
Speaker
Ah, I never, oh no, I did watch that, didn't I? Was that Marburg? Was that the rare disease there? It was a weaponization of Marburg from memory, yeah. That's been a while. Ebola, which looks a lot like Marburg, or Marburg looks a lot like Ebola, but they are separate viruses, even though they're from the same region of the world, influenza and measles. Hmm.
00:16:26
Speaker
So yeah, I guess you would want to know if any of those had been affected, but that was section 3, bring it home with section 4 then. So following the media report, Vector Management responded to queries from the World Health Organization with reassurance that the smallpox repository had not been affected, according to an organization spokesperson.
00:16:50
Speaker
From the organisation's perspective, there was no need to follow up with a visit or ad hoc inspection. Well, that's nice. Assuming one takes the word. Well, yes, and therein lies the issue, because of course, you might think, because this is Russia, that
00:17:08
Speaker
maybe you don't take it on trust that things are A-OK. And yet, if, as you say, there have been surprisingly no conspiracy theories around it, I assume everybody did take them at their word? Well, yeah, therein lies the issue, because I do also think the emergence of Covid-19, a few months later, may well have taken the sting out of the worries of what went on at the Vector Lab.
00:17:37
Speaker
So yeah, so we have a fire.
00:17:40
Speaker
in part of the laboratory, it reportedly spread through the building's ventilation system. So it ended up being a fire covering around about 30 square meters, which had to later be extinguished. And the worry was by some biosecurity experts that the explosion could have resulted in the propagation of viral aerosols leading to a global epidemic of smallpox. And given that we just recently wiped smallpox out,
00:18:09
Speaker
A reemergent of smallpox really wouldn't be a particularly good thing for the human population. As we're seeing with having to live with COVID-19 now, viruses, they're not much fun. They're not much fun at all. No. Harder to get rid of than you might think. Yeah. I'm more Team Phage than I am Team Virus. Yes.
00:18:31
Speaker
more entertaining, if nothing else. Yes, and so this is, here's some more about the potential problem of this explosion. And this is a lengthy, terminologically latent piece from the Journal of Global Biosecurity, which has a great name, but it's no bulletin of the atomic scientists.
00:18:53
Speaker
A gas explosion of this scale can result in propagation of a detonation slash shockwave of speeds of 1500 to 2000 meters per second. The flame on the other hand propagates at a slower speed, typically 20 to 25 milliseconds, and up to several hundred milliseconds.
00:19:11
Speaker
In a deflagration, the commonest way a flame propagates in a gas explosion, unburnt gases propagated ahead of the flame. Therefore, in this instance, if any biological material were present, it could have been propagated and aerosolized well ahead of the fire and before the fire was widespread.
00:19:31
Speaker
The reports of shattered glass across multiple floors in the building is indicative of a sufficiently strong explosion that could lead to a dispersion of contagious pathogens to surrounding areas. An explosion interacting with a vial of liquid or frozen pathogen will
00:19:50
Speaker
will quickly and completely rupture the contents, creating tiny droplets or particles in the order of microns that could conceivably be projected well clear of the building and resulting fire by the shockwave. Pathogens present in liquid or solid media, even frozen pathogens, could be at risk of dispersion during an explosion.
00:20:13
Speaker
A blast that shatters the windows in a building would equally be expected to shatter freezers, fridges, biosafety cabinets and incubators. We do not have adequate research data on the effect of explosions on pathogen dispersion to make confident assertions about the safety to the public following this incident.
00:20:33
Speaker
BSL-4 laboratories are generally not designed to withstand explosions, so we should assume that secure structures, equipment and workspaces were affected. Well that sounds a little bit honest. In a worst case scenario kind of way I suppose.
00:20:52
Speaker
Yes, and actually one of the criticisms of this particular report was that they did take the worst case scenario and then hypothesized from that. Was other people going, well yeah sure, that could have happened, but it's not as likely as the fire actually burning the virus out. The situation they're describing is
00:21:14
Speaker
very unique and could happen, but it's not the most likely thing to have happened. At the same time, the people running the vector organization were going, yeah, well, this, uh...
00:21:27
Speaker
There's nothing to see here. Everything is fine. There are no problems. I mean, we just had an explosion, but that's just normal operating procedures. So everything's fine. So do we know anything more than conjecture and official everything's fine? So do we know what exploded, for one thing? So apparently, the room in question was being renovated.
00:21:52
Speaker
And the person who was in charge of the renovation was negligent. Indeed, the person who was in the room at the time, who I believe ended up suffering from burns over 80% of his body, was sued in the Russian courts for criminal negligence whilst engaging in renovations.
00:22:18
Speaker
and was found guilty of negligent behaviour. So it appears to be basically a gas flame in a room basically being repainted without adequate ventilation, thus causing an explosion. So that is the official story basically.
00:22:37
Speaker
A room was being renovated. The renovating went probably as badly as you could imagine because explosions at laboratories containing smallpox pretty much on the very end of the of extreme renovation failures there. But that apparently was that as far as we know. I mean, we had what was it back here in Auckland? Was it the Sky City?
00:23:07
Speaker
Well, there was a mess of fire in a building that was being renovated because some guy had lived out a little bit, which we shouldn't have. Not the renovation, the creation of the brand new Sky City Casino building.
00:23:18
Speaker
Right, yeah. Yeah, that was turned into a massive fire in that instance rather than an explosion. But yeah, a relatively simple mistake can end up being very costly. And if, as you say, this was to do with a poorly ventilated room, then yeah, I suppose I can see how it could get more explosive. But if there was a court case, presumably evidence was presented there and so on about what exactly went on.
00:23:43
Speaker
Presumably, I mean, once again, the worry here is, of course, cover ups might be to rigor in the Russian situation. So I think what's interesting is at the time there were people, particularly the authors of the Journal of Global Biosecurity Study, who were going, we don't know whether this was an accident or whether this was some kind of deliberate attack.
00:24:09
Speaker
And we don't know why we should trust the Russian Federation when they say it was merely an accident.
Speculations on Cover-Ups and Safety Standards
00:24:18
Speaker
And it sounds like that's what happened. Were there any rumblings in this sort of international community politically or anything like that? Well, not as far as I can tell. I mean, it seems that
00:24:30
Speaker
The people who were going, this might not be an accident, or they might be more to the story, because of course there is the other hypothesis, that maybe it wasn't a deliberate attack, but maybe it's not the simple accident it's been officially made out to be. Maybe there's a bigger story here about, say, LEC security standards.
00:24:50
Speaker
at a laboratory containing things like Marburg, HIV, smallpox, measles, rubella, the whole shinango. Shinango? That's a brand new word. I'm going to keep using that. Shinango. Yes. Durango. Go short. Shinango.
00:25:05
Speaker
So, and these things are kind of motivated by the fact that the month before Russian authorities had been very slow to release information about an explosion at a military testing site, which caused a spike in radiation levels when a liquid-fueled rocket carrying nuclear materials exploded, killing at least five people. So people at the time were going, well look,
00:25:33
Speaker
There was a situation a month ago where nuclear materials were blowing up and people died, and Russian authorities were very, very hesitant to actually say, oh, this is what went on there. They engaged in an immediate, we're going to cover up what really occurred. So when the people at Victor went, ah, it's just a simple renovation explosion. These things happen all the time.
00:25:59
Speaker
People went, well, they don't happen all the time. And also, we don't necessarily trust that your government is going to let you say what happened. Yeah, which I guess is a reasonable, a reasonable concern.
00:26:16
Speaker
So is that where we leave it? Did it was there? No, I thought it would actually be quite useful to talk a little about Victor's history. Because in part, I think one of the reasons why there's a huge amount of suspicion at the time the explosion occurred
00:26:33
Speaker
was actually really a demonstration of people's suspicion about bio-labs in Russia as kind of a consequence of what happened not just in the Cold War, but also what happened after the Cold War. So, as we noted, early in 1925 is when we have a Geneva Convention with the banning of biological and gas weaponry, a convention which basically got broken during World War II,
00:27:02
Speaker
And then during the Cold War, of course, with Russia being basically living outside of Western norms, it was no one that the Soviet Union were developing by weapons in contravention of that Geneva Convention.
00:27:19
Speaker
But that's in part because Russia also knew the West was engaging in bioweapon research and contravention of that convention. As we've talked about on this podcast in the past, there was an arms race going on during the Cold War. We've talked a little bit about the psychic arms race, which caused both Russia and the US to engage in spending moderate sums of money.
00:27:46
Speaker
on trying to make goats die by getting people to stare at them, or getting people to dream about where they thought military bases were and the like, because it was felt that even though our side, our side either being the US or the USSR,
00:28:03
Speaker
realize that there's nothing really to the psychic warfare stuff. If it turns out the other side actually do find something to it, well, we can't let them have the advantage. So we better do some research into something that we think isn't going to bear fruit on the minuscule chance that our fundamental understanding of the world is completely wrong. And it turns out we can talk to angels after all.
00:28:29
Speaker
So the USSR was engaging in bioweapon research because the West was also engaging in bioweapons research but in 1975 there was a biological weapons convention which came into force and the Soviet Union signed up to that particular international treaty as did the US at the time.
00:28:53
Speaker
So technically, in 1975, the USSR stopped developing biological weapons. Josh, do you think the Soviet Union stopped developing biological weapons in 1975?
00:29:06
Speaker
I would be very much surprised if they did. In fact, I know they didn't because they had anthrax and Sverdlovsk. I actually just pulled up our Sverdlovsk leak episode notes, so I'd know I could compare it to that one. 1979, that was, so yeah, very much they had not stopped. I'm not very good with maths, but I think 1979 is at least
00:29:29
Speaker
five to seven years after 1975. It's definitely after. I don't know there's any way to be sure how long after, but definitely after. Yeah, anywhere between six to 17 years after 1975 and 1979 occurred, especially if we use Fomenko's revised chronology.
00:29:48
Speaker
Now, officially, Victor was engaging in work on pesticide development at that time and definitely wasn't doing biological weapons research, which is precisely why by the 1990s, Victor had the capacity and was producing two tons of weaponized smallpox virus a year. Goodness. I mean, it makes a very effective pesticide if the pests you're trying to eradicate are human beings.
00:30:14
Speaker
Yes, yes. I mean, that sounds like a lot of smallpox. It was a lot of smallpox. Two tons of smallpoxes. I actually don't know how. No. I mean, smallpox is quite, I mean, by its nature, it's a smallpox. It's small, yeah.
00:30:32
Speaker
I don't know how weighty each individual pox in a small pox is. I mean, it could be like lead. Yes. Is it two small pox and one small pox? I don't even know. What is the point of it would be lots? Poxes? I don't know. I have pox's and pox's. Two tons of small pox or two tons of small pox's? Maybe it's poxin like oxen because the English language makes no sense.
00:31:00
Speaker
Mmm, two tonnes of smallpox in place. Yes. So, sorry, when was that? The 1990s. Now, in 1992, the USSR stopped bioweapons research because Yeltsin said so.
00:31:16
Speaker
Yes. Well, he did. Going back to our old notes, I see 1992 was the year when Boris Yeltsin admitted that the Sverdlovsk leak had been involved with military developments and was not, as some had tried to argue, just a naturally occurring anthrax outbreak. Yes. So in 1992, Yeltsin said, look, we're going to stop this bioweapons research. And he even invited people in the West to visit the various laboratories.
00:31:46
Speaker
But as people noted at the time, even though Yeltsin said we're stopping bioweapon research, which is almost in part a reaction to what was going on with this fedlask leak, with the realisation that oh Russia's doing a lot more than we thought they were doing. So Yeltsin and the Kremlin had to basically find a way to shut down that speculation. So officially everything ends.
00:32:09
Speaker
But the actual shutdown of the research remained completely undocumented, so there was no paper trail to show that labs were stopping their research. And there are kind of two schools of thought here. One is that Yeltsin was sincere and said we are going to stop bioweapons research at this time, and he was basically ignored.
00:32:31
Speaker
or Yelton was insincere, there was a PR crisis going on at the time, one way to make that PR crisis disappear is to confidently assert in front of the doomer we are stopping all research into bioweapons at this time and then wink a few times walk off stage and realise that things are going to continue as they were and indeed
00:32:53
Speaker
We know something was going on because in the mid 90s, which is as far as I know, after 1992, because 1992 I would say would be early 90s. So mid 90s really has to be kind of post 1992 with them about 60 to 80 years. In the mid 90s, FSB officers were regularly stealing specimens of deadly bacteria and viruses from Western biolamps.
00:33:21
Speaker
So they were bringing samples back home, and I don't think it was tourist hat.
Soviet Bioweapons Concerns and Western Interest
00:33:28
Speaker
Maybe they were just stealing them from the Americans so they could take them home and dispose of them responsibly. Maybe they were helping clean up the world's biological weapon supplies. That sounds like something the FSP would do.
00:33:44
Speaker
Ah yes, we steal the laboratory samples to help clean up American problem.
00:33:51
Speaker
Maybe it's like Pokémon, you know? This is tele-racist. Transylvanian accent. I'm not even Russian. I am Dracula. Ah, ah, ah, ah. Now I count things. One small pox. Two small poxes. Three small poxin. Maybe it was like a collectible craze within the FSB. Like Pokémon or something. Quite literally, you've got to catch a small pox.
00:34:18
Speaker
Oh yeah yeah so the other so so first of all we have this kind of this weird history so vector being kind of the biggest lab in Siberia doing this research there's this long history of the Soviet Union saying we're not doing biological weapons research we secretly are we've stopped doing biological research we really
00:34:41
Speaker
and then of course you get the collapse of the Soviet Union and that's where the West comes in because as the Soviet Union collapses people get very concerned what's going to happen to the biolabs and what's going to happen to the things inside the biolabs
00:35:05
Speaker
there's a bunch of concerns here. There's the concern that as the Soviet Union collapses, and we saw this at the time, things get sold. So there's an entire museum devoted to Soviet propaganda in LA. And that's because as the Soviet Union was collapsing, a rich American was in Moscow, and he just bought everything he could, which sometimes meant he was buying things
00:35:30
Speaker
that had literally been on the president's desk a day beforehand, had been smuggled out by someone in the staff and then sold on the street. So stuff was being sold to outside interests at either low cost or within backroom deals. And there was a concern that stuff in bio labs would be sold to say North Korea or be sold to Iraq.
00:35:56
Speaker
and the West were not particularly interested in their enemies getting hold of bioweapons. That would not be good for the West, because it wouldn't be good for the West because the only people allowed to buy bioweapons are people who are buying them from the West. You can't buy bioweapons from other people. That would be unfair in a capitalist marketplace. So there was that particular concern. There's also the concern that
00:36:24
Speaker
Maybe safety issues would be an ongoing concern with funding in the collapse of the USSR. There was kind of a cliche going on during the Cold War that bioweapons labs were unsafe compared to bioweapons labs in the West.
00:36:43
Speaker
It turns out that when Western scientists actually got to inspect bioweapons labs in Russia and other polities, they discovered that despite the cliche of life being cheap in the Soviet Union, the people who worked in bioweapons labs
00:36:59
Speaker
They were very, very conscious of how unsafe their jobs would be unless they had incredibly strict safety standards. So sometimes the technology they were using would be older than you'd find in say a Western lab, but they had very strict protocols on hand.
00:37:18
Speaker
So it was no worry that the labs themselves are unsafe. The worry was without adequate funding ongoing, labs that were safe during the collapse would not be safe a few years after the collapse and that might lead to things happening there. Also,
00:37:37
Speaker
Even though the safety issues in those labs were pretty good, there was one particular issue that Western scientists were not particularly keen on, which was the reusing of disposables. So it turns out that you'd go to these labs and you would find that scientists would be reusing pipettes,
00:37:57
Speaker
or reusing gloves, sometimes gloves that had been thrown away and were meant to be disposed of as hazardous materials, they'd get reused because small things like that, broken bulbs and the like, were not being replaced on the regular as maybe they should be. There was this concern that there would be ongoing safety issues unless the wear stepped in and engaged in funding those labs as an ongoing concern.
00:38:26
Speaker
And so the West basically stepped in and engaged in the funding of those labs to ensure that A, stuff didn't get sold as the Soviet Union collapsed, and B, the safety standards were kept up during that transition. Which leads us, I guess, to A,
00:38:49
Speaker
what's happening in labs in the current age, if explosions like that can go off. And also B, I guess it ties into the whole Ukraine thing as well, because the labs that people were concerned about were ones where the Americans had been involved in making sure they stayed safe and what have you, weren't they? Which some people thought was actually the Americans using them to make all sorts of horrible stuff.
00:39:16
Speaker
Yes, and in 2019, well before the Covid crisis, Russia's disinformation campaigns were very much focused on talking about how there were bioweapons labs in the Ukraine that the West was involved in.
00:39:31
Speaker
And at the time in 2019, people in the West were going, yeah, but there are also bioweapons labs in Russia that we're involved in. There are bioweapons labs in countries which Russia doesn't see as enemies but as...
00:39:48
Speaker
as allies, such as Georgia, where there are bioweapons labs, biolaboratories, probably shouldn't call them bioweapons labs, they are laboratories which these days study biological contaminants. Historically, some of those labs are engaged in bioweapon research. Those labs these days are studying more, how do we stop an outbreak? Or can we learn something about this virus to stop a similar virus in the future?
00:40:18
Speaker
There are lots of these labs all around and inside the Russian Federation, which the West has been happily funding for quite some time. So why are you suddenly concerned about only the similar labs in Ukraine?
00:40:35
Speaker
almost seems as if you're coming up with some kind of rationale to create a sense of being under attack by ignoring other salient bits of data. Weird, that. Very strange. Very weird. 2019, you said. I mean, it's strange that the company that invented the term disinformation might still be engaging in producing disinformation. So, returning to your actual topic, is that where it stands?
00:41:04
Speaker
There was an explosion. They had an explanation of what went on that was non-sinister. Everybody got on with their lives and then was distracted by COVID.
00:41:16
Speaker
Yeah, which does raise the question, where's the conspiracy theory? Because it seems like the kind of thing that normally would have generated quite a number of conspiracy theories about there being a cover-up as to exactly what happened at the laboratory
00:41:34
Speaker
or unexplained illnesses in the region. And that being covered up is, oh, it's not related to the explosion at Vector. No, this smallpox-like virus which is spreading through the community has nothing to do with what happened at Vector a few months ago. And yet, as Kurt points out,
00:41:57
Speaker
there appears to be no conspiracy theories about the vector explosion, and it seems like the kind of thing you would expect there to be conspiracy theories about, and yet a bio-laboratory containing smallpox which had been involved in bio-weapon engineering in the past.
00:42:17
Speaker
And the world does not seem to care. And that seems quite unusual. It does. I mean, is it simply a case of COVID coming along and blowing any competing theories out of the
Impact of COVID-19 on Conspiracy Theories
00:42:30
Speaker
water? I mean, that I think took everyone's lightly explanation here that
00:42:36
Speaker
If we hadn't had COVID-19 conspiracy theories emerging at the end of 2019, or indeed just the weird stories circulating about there being a novel virus circulating around the world,
00:42:52
Speaker
then maybe the vector story would have been revisited and become part of the lexicon or say Alex Jones's cohort of conspiracy theories about infectious diseases. But I think COVID-19 so quickly dominated the discussion there and everything became what's causing COVID or is COVID even real?
00:43:14
Speaker
that the vector explosion basically just got forgotten about to the point where no one seems to talk about it. If you do a cursory search for the vector explosion online, you find a whole bunch of articles from September and October of 2019. And that's basically it. It doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere else. Oh, well, maybe it's a maybe it's just a footnote when people come to people such as yourself come to
00:43:44
Speaker
to talk about the conspiracy theories that were everywhere following COVID-19. This just goes to show that other ones that could have been competition
00:43:58
Speaker
were snuffed out before they could even find their feet. Just like Jesus. It wasn't too mixed. Exactly like Jesus. And in case people are wondering why it's just like Jesus, because of course there were lots of messianic figures wandering around the Levant 2,000 years ago. Only one of those, actually two of those, have become so famous that then no one heard about today, which of course is Jesus and John the Baptist.
00:44:28
Speaker
Yes, yeah, maybe it is, maybe it isn't a suitable analogy. Although if we do follow my analogy to its logical conclusion, I mean there were hundreds of messianic figures wandering around the place at the time.
00:44:42
Speaker
My nudgy would indicate there were hundreds of bio-lab explosions going on sometime between July and September of 2019. I didn't know much about the vector explosion until recently. There really could be hundreds more of these unknown explosions. It could be the case that bio-labs are just exploding all the time.
00:45:05
Speaker
It just turned out to be something they do. Yeah, it's just what they do. They're very badly built and they explode. I mean, you get a build up of small poxin and it causes an explosion. I tried to make an explosion and it almost worked. Almost. Almost. Almost. Almost. Almost. Okay. Well then, it certainly sounds like we've come to the end of an episode then. We have. Is there anything else? Excellent.
00:45:34
Speaker
Well, thank you very much. That was here. An interesting thing to hear about, something that you would have thought we would have heard a lot more about and yet didn't.
Episode Wrap-Up and Patreon Bonus Content Preview
00:45:43
Speaker
So being the end of the episode it's probably a good time to point out that once we're done recording this we're going to record a bonus episode and this week we're going to be going through the the the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy mailbag of of a sort, going through a little bit of various items of correspondence we've received recently.
00:46:06
Speaker
unsolicited, I think, in most cases. So if you're interested in that and you're a patron, then the episode will be showing up in your feed or inbox or wherever the podcasts end up after we finish recording them. If you'd like to hear about that and you're not a patron, just need to go to patreon.com and sign yourself up to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. And if you're not interested in that and you don't want to be a patron, well then that's okay, you do you.
00:46:35
Speaker
It's a free world. Damn. I mean, I mean, I don't know why you're listening to this podcast if you don't even like it. Well, it's just not necessarily they don't like the podcast. Maybe they just don't like us. They also don't know why you want to give us pictures of the podcast if you don't like us. I mean, our content is us.
00:46:51
Speaker
Well, yeah, I suppose. We do bring the flavour, I suppose, to what would otherwise simply be a dry recitation of conspiracy theory events. But anyway, whatever you're doing, if you're listening to us now, you're our audience and that's fine.
00:47:09
Speaker
Um, but I think I'm, I'm, I'm starting to get a frog in the back of my throat. And I think I need to go and drink some water before we start recording the bonus episodes. I'm going to call this to a close and go get hydrated. But before I do that, I'm just going to go and say goodbye. Durango. The podcasters guide to the conspiracy is Josh Anderson and me, Dr. M.R.X.Denter.
00:47:37
Speaker
You can contact us at podcastconspiracygmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.