The Polio-Biowarfare Connection
What if the scientists who developed the polio vaccine were also secret bioweapons researchers?
As my regular readers know, I’ve spent the last few years investigating and exposing the military/intelligence operations behind the Covid-19 global events, with an important focus on the mRNA Covid vaccines.
Along with several other researchers, I examined the legal framework within which these novel products were developed, manufactured and administered to the world’s populations – a framework intended for responding to CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) attacks – not naturally occurring viruses.
The result was that the mRNA injections were rushed into billions of arms with no legally binding safety regulations or manufacturing oversight.
Under CBRN laws, the Covid mRNA shots are defined not as pharmaceutical products but as “biowarfare countermeasures” – in other words, mechanisms of protection against bioweapons attacks. Yet they were, and continue to be, advertised as the pinnacle of public health achievement: “safe and effective vaccines,” supposedly developed according to normally regulated pharmaceutical protocols, albeit greatly accelerated.
Trying to explain this is difficult. It involves explicating reams of convoluted legal tracts, military contracts, and government documents. But once you understand that the mRNA vaccines were not developed under normal, civilian legal or regulatory constraints, it becomes possible to question the basis for the “safe and effective” claims, as I and many others have done.
Furthermore, because mRNA products fall into the category of novel genetic therapies/biologics, many people seem willing to question their safety and efficacy, especially as compared to all the other, conventional vaccines. What applies to mRNA Covid vaccines, many people believe, does not apply to the proven track record of our most celebrated medical achievements – like, for instance, the polio vaccine.
And yet…
What if that seemingly unassailable beacon of scientific victory over a terrifying public health scourge was developed in the same shady realms of military and biowarfare research as the mRNA products?
I never intended to ask that question, nor explore that issue, because my focus until now has been everything Covid related. But I chanced upon information that led me into a deep-dive on some of the scientists who were key developers of the polio vaccine. And the hitherto unreported histories I discovered were eye-opening, to say the least.
It turns out that, in the 1930s-1950s, when the polio vaccines were developed, many of the top microbiologists and vaccine specialists were intensely involved in covert bioweapons research and biowarfare activities. This may not be surprising, considering the massive panics about chemical and biological weapons during WWII, and then at the beginning of the Cold War. It might also not be surprising that the same specialists were in charge of both top-secret biowarfare efforts and purported public health endeavors like the polio vaccine.
Not surprising, perhaps, but – at least to me – an important and rarely, if ever, discussed overlap. If we knew that the polio vaccine was developed by the same scientists, at the same institutions, using the same ethical and scientific standards, as biowarfare agents and products intended for the military, would we feel the same about them? Would this knowledge at least allow us to open up for discussion the taboo topic of the safety and efficacy of all such products, not just the Covid vaccines?
I hope the information in this article can provide such an opening.
Understanding the biowarfare/public health vaccine connection
But first, to begin exploring the overlap between biowarfare and public health vaccine endeavors, it’s important to understand how crucial vaccines are to the field of biowarfare. In fact, it would not be an overstatement to say that vaccines are the core project of biowarfare, because they involve both its offensive and defensive goals.
Annie Jacobsen explains this point in her 2014 book Operation Paperclip, about the secret CIA program to move German and Japanese scientists into U.S. weapons programs:
In order to successfully unleash a biological weapon against an enemy force, the attacking army had to have already created its own vaccine against the deadly pathogen it intended to spread. This vaccine would act as the shield for its own soldiers and civilians; the biological weapon would act as the sword.” (p. 14)
International biowarfare expert Dr. Francis Boyle explained the same concept to RFK Jr., as discussed in The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race:
Anytime you deploy a biological weapon, you need to first inoculate your own troops to avoid casualties from ‘blowback.’ The strategy is always to identify a biological pathogen, formulate a vaccine, and only then, to develop the weapon. You can’t use the weapon if you don’t have a vaccine. (pp. 130-131, Kindle Edition).
Furthermore, because vaccines are also considered important tools in promoting public health, it is in the interest of the covert bioweapons industry to hide its activities on potentially deadly pathogens and their “shielding” vaccines behind a screen of public health work.
A prime example of this was FDR’s War Bureau of Consultants (WBC) – the first official U.S. government bioweapons commission in 1941. As explained in a (perhaps somewhat misleadingly) titled 2022 article “The History of the Now Defunct US Bioweapons Program” on 19.FortyFive.com:
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) formed the War Bureau of Consultants (WBC) who conducted bioweapons research; the WBC’s findings pushed them to advocate for the creation of a bioweapons program.
Outwardly, what FDR authorized was the creation of the War Research Service (WRS) for the purpose of promoting “public security and health.” In reality, what WRS did was coordinate and supervise the development of US bioweapons at several facilities around the country – most importantly, Fort Detrick in Maryland.
Of course, FDR’s commission and all future biowarfare endeavors understandably aimed to recruit the top scientists at the best medical and scientific institutions for their research. Indeed, a 1970s Senate report on secret biowarfare research (as discussed in the section on Dr. Mack below) revealed that at least 88 research institutions received hundreds of government grants to pursue bioweapons research over a thirty-year period. There can be little doubt that the massive government funding for such work not only supported, but also enabled, whatever civilian-oriented public health studies were also taking place at those institutions.
Thus, the funding for the work of many scientists in microbiology, public health, vaccinology and related fields, at a vast number of research institutions, at least partially depended on government funding for biowarfare research.
These scientists and institutions also conducted vaccine research intended to protect civilians against naturally occurring, non-weapons-grade, pathogens. However, the massive overlap and the centrality of the biowarfare research raises important issues.
Examples of biowarfare/polio overlap
In this article, with the aim of raising some of those important biowarfare/public health issues, I will provide details about the secret work of two scientists closely related to foundational research on the polio virus and polio vaccines. One is completely unknown, while the other is widely revered. Both were involved in biowarfare vaccine research at the same time that they were involved in researching polio.
The two scientists are:
Walter N. Mack, a top-secret bioweapons researcher; and
Thomas Milton Rivers, the “father of virology.”
Who is Dr. Mack?
Or: Why I Began Investigating the Polio-Biowarfare Connection
The impetus for this article came from a seemingly innocuous sentence I stumbled upon while helping my colleague Sasha Latypova research the origins of the polio vaccine. The sentence refers to the “Mahoney virus” which is classified as a “Type 1” polio virus and is used as a basis for all polio vaccines and a benchmark for testing vaccine efficacy.
The sentence came from a 1973 article in the Journal of Biological Standardization, entitled “History of Sabin attenuated poliovirus oral live vaccine strains.” Here it is:
“The Mahoney virus was isolated in 1941 by Drs. Francis and Mack from the pooled faeces of three healthy children in Cleveland.”
There is no footnote or attribution for the information in this sentence.
I was unable to find any article from 1941, or from any other year, describing or reporting on this historic event.
I found just one article by authors Francis and Mack in the public record: a JAMA article from 1942, “POLIOMYELITIS FOLLOWING TONSILLECTOMY IN FIVE MEMBERS OF A FAMILY: An Epidemiologic Study.” This article is not about isolating the Mahoney virus. In fact, the word “Mahoney” does not appear in the article at all. As the title suggests, it is about how/whether polio spreads in a community.
My curiosity was piqued: How could a single sentence in a 1973 journal article be the only mention on the entire Internet of one of the most important events in the history of polio eradication – the isolation of a strain upon which all polio vaccines were based, starting with the Salk vaccine in the 1950s?
I started by looking up Dr. Francis and Dr. Mack. The former is the celebrated developer of the flu vaccine and overseer of the Salk polio vaccine trials. The latter is not mentioned in any polio books or articles and is seemingly unknown.
The Mysterious Dr. Mack
When I typed the search term “Dr. Mack polio,” into Google, I expected to find at the very least a Wikipedia page and some research papers. Instead, I was informed by Google AI that “there is no widely known ‘Dr. Mack’ specifically recognized for a breakthrough in polio.”
Given his reported role in a historic polio event, I found that hard to believe. I clicked on a few of the top search results. Most were about Dr. Macks who had nothing to do with polio research.
The only two relevant results were single-paragraph New York Times articles, from 1957 and 1972. In these articles, a “Dr. Walter N. Mack” is identified as either “a health aide,” “a microbiologist,” or “a professor of Microbiology at Michigan State University,” and he warns about public drinking fountains and viruses in water supplies as “serious public health hazards.”
Despite their paucity, these results yielded a fuller name than I’d found before: Walter N. Mack; and a place of work: Michigan State University (MSU). Repeating the Google search with these details, I was able to find Dr. Mack’s published research record: a grand total of just twelve articles, only two related to polio, and with gaps of decades between publications. For someone credited with isolating one of the most important viruses in the history of virology and vaccinology, this seemed like a suspiciously meager publication production.
How long did Dr. Mack work at MSU and where else did he work? I asked Google for a “Walter N. Mack bio” or “Walter N. Mack resume” or “Walter N. Mack Michigan State University” and got the same scant results as “Dr. Mack polio,” with one interesting addition: a comment on an obituary notice dated September 29, 2008 written by a Mrs. Susan Stutzky, who identified herself as a former neighbor of Dr. Mack and his wife. She shared these interesting tidbits:
The memories of him shooting individual dandelions in his yard with a syringe are priceless. He once told me he couldn’t understand how people made it through life without syringes. We heard many stories of his work in polio research…
Mrs. Stutzky’s memorial confirmed that Dr. Walter N. Mack did indeed work on polio research, or at least he told his neighbors that he did.
I contacted her to see if she might share some of those “stories of his work in polio research” with me. Here are excerpts from her February 23, 2026 email:
By the time we became neighbors, Dr Mack had been retired for a decade or more from Michigan State University where he had taught microbiology. His work with Jonas Salk probably ended in the 1940s or early 1950s.
He was an absolute character. The dandelion story had nothing to do with polio research. It was his method of lawncare. Rather than spread herbicide over a large area, he would use a syringe with weed killer and give a shot to each individual dandelion in the yard.
But as to details and specifics of his involvement in polio research and development of the polio vaccine, I know nothing. If he talked about any specifics, he probably saved those discussions for other scientists.
I know it was difficult and emotional work for those scientists as many were dying or paralyzed. Many relegated to life in a wheelchair or iron lung. Children were dying. Babies were dying. Unborn fetuses and their mothers were dying. And so part of the research involved in depth autopsies to see if any clues leading to an effective vaccine could be discovered in tissue samples.
Had to be emotional for those scientists to see all those bodies and feel the pressure to hurry up and discover a safe and viable vaccine to stop polio from taking or damaging another life. He never uttered these words, but the pain of what he and others saw in their work was evident in his expression. He had to have seen children in iron lungs. He walked through wards of rows and rows of children lying paralyzed in hospital beds, heard their cries. Took and/or studied brain tissues of dead fetuses. That he told me.
To summarize: Dr. Walter Mack, with no online presence and just two polio-related publications, told his neighbor he “took and/or studied brain tissues of dead fetuses” and that he worked with Jonas Salk, originator of the first polio vaccine. There is no public record I could find of Drs. Mack and Salk ever working together.
I asked myself: Why was Mrs. Susan Stutzky the only person online who openly discussed Dr. Walter N. Mack’s “work in polio research” or any research at all, for that matter?
And, because I have been investigating undercover intelligence and military operations for a while, this led me to the following intriguing question: Could Dr. Mack have been engaged in secret research, perhaps for military/intelligence purposes?
The implications of this could be that polio was researched as part of a secret bioweapons program. Or it could be that it was researched by the same scientists who were working on separate covert bioweapons programs. Or maybe biowarfare researchers put their names on polio research to cover up for their actual secret work. Whatever the answer, if Mack was engaged in covert bioweapons work, this would be the first time anyone ever reported on it.
Needless to say, I found that he was.
Submitting queries about Dr. Mack and bioweapons research to a professional version of ChatGPT yielded a single relevant result: an article from the April 11, 1977 edition of the Michigan State University newspaper entitled “MSU researched germ warfare for Army during 18 year period.”
The article cited the 1977 report by the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, chaired by Senator Ted Kennedy – a report that exposed some of the secret biowarfare research conducted starting in 1941, when FDR officially established the U.S. biowarfare program.
Based on this Senate report, the university newspaper summarized: “MSU is one of 88 universities that conducted biological warfare research through more than 300 contracts between 1942 and 1971.”
And, the article noted, two of those MSU biowarfare contracts were led by none other than Walter N. Mack, “with money from the former Army base in Ft. Detrick, Md.” According to the article, “Mack said he received a lot of money, approximately $70,000 for the two studies, in the 1950s.” (According to Google AI, that is the equivalent of nearly one million dollars today.)
The article noted that, “University officials could not find any records of the specific studies conducted by researchers at MSU,” but Dr. Mack said one of his studies looked at whether gas masks were protective against viruses and the other was for work on hog cholera. “Mack said he did not know why the Army would be interested in hog cholera,” the article reported. He just said they wanted to study it and “see if a vaccine could be used against it.”
Furthermore, Mack lamented that many biowarfare projects “conducted between the military and universities” were ordered abandoned by Nixon in 1969. “I know there were some terrible things that were done,” he said. “I saw some of them. But the vast majority of the work helped a lot of people and it is a shame they had to stop it.”
It is very hard to imagine that Dr. Mack did not know about the sword-and-shield paradigm of biowarfare research: hog cholera was a potential bioweapon and the biowarfare program which funded his research was focused on finding a vaccine against it.
I confirmed that Dr. Mack was indeed working on secret bioweapons research while employed as a professor at MSU through a FOIA request. The university provided records, with some redactions, of Dr. Mack’s employment, including references to his “research for Camp Detrick and the United States Army,” most of which “is confidential or classified.” [Camp Detrick, also known as Fort Detrick, has been a major hub of the U.S. bioweapons program, beginning with FDR’s bioweapons program, as noted earlier in this article.]
When considering a promotion for Dr. Mack in 1956, the head of his department (redacted in the FOIAed documents I received) wrote:
Due to the fact that Dr. Mack’s research has been supported by Fort Detrick, he has been unable to publish many papers…
Which is exactly what made me suspicious of Dr. Mack in the first place!
And the dean wrote:
By reason of the type of work he does, I am not well acquainted with Dr. Mack. However, by reason of his educational qualifications and effective research [redaction], I feel he is deserving of promotion…
To summarize:
One of the two scientists reported to have isolated the most important strain of the polio virus has nearly no online presence, and barely a dozen scientific publications. He admitted in 1977 that he was working on military-university biowarfare studies at MSU, one of 88 universities with biowarfare contracts between 1942 and 1971. His work on bioweapons programs was confirmed by FOIAed documents from MSU.
He said he saw “some terrible things” being done in biowarfare research, yet lamented its curtailment.
The pathogens we know Dr. Mack was studying included Newcastle disease and cholera. Both are known potential bioweapons, and he was researching vaccines for both.
Strangely, given the dearth of any publicly available polio papers by Dr. Mack, his neighbor of many years said she heard a lot about his “polio research,” which involved, among other things, “taking and/or studying brain tissues of dead fetuses.”
Was he also researching polio vaccines? Was that research secret? Was it part of a bioweapons program? I could find no records to answer these questions.
Still, I was curious: Were any other prominent polio researchers also involved in bioweapons research?
The answer to this question is yes. In fact, the chief scientist at the biggest and most important polio research institution in the world – FDR’s National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP, or The March of Dimes) – was also one of the twelve members of the War Bureau of Consultants (WBC) – originators of FDR’s WWII bioweapons program. His name was Tom Rivers.
Thomas Milton (Tom) Rivers
In contrast to Walter N. Mack, Tom Rivers is one of the most well known polio-related scientists ever. Books, articles and publications about him abound.
In all of them, including Wikipedia, he is celebrated as the “father of virology.” As reported by David M. Oshinsky in his 2005 Pulitzer-prize winning Polio: An American Story, “Those in the relatively new field of virology saw him [Tom Rivers] as the dean of the field, its greatest living pioneer,” because he “helped promote the idea that viruses belong to a unique group of disease-causing agents, distinct from ordinary bacteria.” (p. 59)
Rivers held several prominent medical research positions, including:
Associate on the infectious disease ward at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research starting in 1922
Director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, 1937-1955
Chairman of the Committees on Research and Vaccine Advisory for the NFIP, overseeing the clinical trials of Jonas Salk’s vaccine, 1938-1955
Head of the Naval Medical Research Unit Two (NAMRU-2) during WWII in the South Pacific, rising to the rank of rear admiral, 1944-1946
Rivers published over 150 scientific papers between 1916 and 1960 [ref]. The most famous and influential articles were not primary research, but rather reviews of all the work that had been done up to that time on viruses.
These are all known aspects of Rivers’ career.
A much lesser known aspect – one, in fact, that I have not seen reported in any of the literature about him – is this: Rivers was a member of the committee that officially established the U.S. bioweapons program in 1941, at the behest of FDR and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and continued to serve on that committee until at least 1944.
This is new information, not included in any books or articles about Rivers that I could find: The most prominent scientist involved in polio research was also a founder of the U.S. bioweapons program. In fact, as I discovered, Rivers was most likely involved in top-secret biowarfare activities for his entire career, while ostensibly spending his time classifying viruses and overseeing polio vaccine development.
As with Mack, this does not necessarily mean that polio was part of his secret research. It does mean, however, that at the very least, biowarfare countermeasures and polio vaccines were developed in tandem.
Also as with Mack, there is little information in the public record pointing to Rivers’ biowarfare work.
Here are the clues I found:
Missing Documents
In his 1967 oral history memoir, Tom Rivers: Reflections on a Life in Medicine and Science, the most comprehensive story of Rivers’ life that I could find, Saul Benison discusses the archival material he used for background research. He laments that:
None of the collections, for example, were able to provide significant material for an examination of Dr. Rivers’ early life and medical education. Dr. Rivers’ papers, which should have been a prime source of information on these and related matters, proved to be almost useless. Several years before my interviews, Dr. Rivers destroyed the bulk of his papers in order to create more office space. Today all that remains of what was once an undoubtedly magnificent collection is one four-drawer cabinet of correspondence, reports, and photographs--largely for the period between 1940 and 1961--not very much when one considers the breadth of his scientific and administrative activity. (p. 623, boldface added)
Here Beneson reveals that Rivers destroyed nearly all the papers related to his medical education, his activities during WWI, his work before and during WWII, the Korean War, and the concomitant development of the polio vaccines under his supervision.
And, according to Beneson, Rivers did this “to create more office space.”
Maybe that’s the reason. Maybe Rivers could think of no institution that might be willing to preserve his documents for posterity, despite his lengthy and illustrious careers at the Rockefeller Foundation and National Foundation/March of Dimes, both of which house massive scientific archives.
Or maybe Rivers destroyed that “undoubtedly magnificent collection” to erase the evidence of his involvement in biowarfare and bioweapons development.
Here are some more hints supporting the latter hypothesis:
Activities during the the height of the Panama Canal project
As reported by multiple sources, including Wikipedia, In 1910 Rivers abruptly left Johns Hopkins Medical School not long after he started. This was purportedly because he came down with a “fatal form of muscular dystrophy” that “forced him to leave medical school and work as a lab assistant at a hospital in the Panama Canal Zone.” Then, in 1912 “somehow, inexplicably, his condition stabilized.” (Oshinsky, p. 59)
Benison reports that, after three months’ working with a fatal degenerative disorder as a “lab assistant” in a Panamanian hospital, Rivers was put in charge of the drug dispensary, a role in which he gave patients anesthesia during surgeries, and was then instructed to “go over and take care of the prison ward and the police ward” where he “did 85 major operations,” operated a huge x-ray machine, “and even pulled teeth.” (Benison, pp. 13-23)
Additional activities Rivers undertook during this extremely active period of grave degenerative illness, involved administering Salvarsan, an arsenic-based chemotherapy, to syphilis patients. And, as he recalled: “at one point I thought I would try to see what Salvarsan would do for leprosy.”
Having come up with this seemingly random research question in his official position as either a lab assistant and/or the person who ran the prison and police wards of a Panamanian hospital, Rivers then proceeded to “treat a number of [his] leprous patients with Salvarsan,” giving one patient 12 injections. The patient had such a severe reaction after the 12th one that Rivers decided to stop the experiment. “It was hard for me to understand why a person would become sensitive to a chemical agent,” he said, “because at that time most people believed that a person could only become sensitive to a protein.” (Benison, pp. 19-20)
Apparently, questions about what people would become sensitive to, when injected with dangerous chemicals, was of interest to Rivers at this time.
Another type of injection he reports working on was for cerebral malaria: “We had a pretty drastic method for treatment, because it usually killed one out of every three patients,” he says about intravenous injections of hydrochloride of quinine. “About one of every three would fall over dead before you could get the syringe out of the vein.” (Benison, p. 21)
One cannot help but wonder: Why would someone with a potentially lethal muscular degenerative disorder that forced him to leave medical school, decide to spend his time in the tropical wilds of the Panama Canal Zone and engage in intense, physically demanding and shocking activities like injecting lepers experimentally with a highly toxic medicine and other patients with a substance guaranteed to kill at least a third of them?
One answer to this question might be that Rivers was involved in very early chemical/biological warfare research related to the crucial work being done at precisely the time of his stay in Panama, when construction of the Panama Canal was reaching its climax, and the United States was engaged in “intense efforts to solidify control over the Canal Zone, culminating in the 1912 Panama Canal Act.” [ref]
We know that disease control was a major part of those intense efforts.[ref] We also know that in subsequent decades Panama became the site of U.S. chemical weapons research, as reported by envio: “In Panama, the United States had an active chemical weapons program from at least 1930 until 1968.” And, much earlier than that, in 1918, General William Sibert, the Army engineer who had designed the Gatun locks in Panama during the time of Rivers’ sojourn there, was made director of a newly consolidated Chemical Warfare Service.
Studying potential bioweapons before WWII
Following his time in Panama, when Rivers was employed as a research associate at the prestigious Rockefeller Institute in the 1920s and 1930s, he studied several pathogens that were not affecting the civilian population but were recognized as deadly potential bioweapons.
As reported by Dr. Frank L. Horsfall, Jr. in his 1965 biography: Tomas Milton Rivers 1888-1962,
Rivers developed a psittacosis (“parrot fever”) vaccine, using himself as an experimental subject, and did the first clinical studies on several viral infections, including louping ill, Rift Valley fever, and lymphocytic choriomeningitis. (p. 272)
Psittacosis, Rift Valley fever, and lymphocytic choriomeningitis are all listed in the WBC biowarfare report compiled by Rivers and his colleagues as having “sufficient importance in biological warfare to warrant special comment.” Louping ill is also considered a dangerous potential bioweapon. [ref]
Of particular interest to Rivers, psittacosis was, at the time, identified as a potential bioweapon of extreme danger.
As noted in a 2023 Pathogens article “Psittacosis: An Underappreciated and Often Undiagnosed Disease”:
The United States [6], the former Soviet Union [7,8], and China [9,10] have all examined C. psittaci for use as a biological weapon. Rear Admiral (Ret) Ellis Zacharias stated during the 1940’s that biological weapons at that time included “bacteriological bombs containing either botulinus toxin or psittacosis virus … and that “a single milliliter of infectious psittacosis virus could kill 20 million men” [11].
According to several accounts, including the Horsfall biography, after suspected lab-related outbreaks in 1930, everyone in the United States stopped working on Psittacosis – except for Rivers. As Horsfall reports:
For two years his remained the only laboratory in the country that ventured to deal with psittacosis and the only one available for diagnosing the disease in man or birds. In the course of this work he greatly advanced knowledge about the diagnosis, characteristics, and spread of this highly infectious disease. (p. 271)
Activities during WWII
During World War II, Rivers was officially organizing and leading the Navy Medical Research Unit in the South Pacific (NAMRU-2), while secretly serving on the War Bureau of Consultants (WBC), designing FDR’s nascent bioweapons program. Were the two related? Was NAMRU-2 actually one of the programs implemented as part of WBC plans? There is no formal record stating this, but there is some very strong supporting evidence:
As they are described today, NAMRU (Naval Military Research Units) are military research facilities for studying communicable diseases, and also bioweapons. The official NAMRU website states that the activities of the NAMRU ”support the Navy, Marine Corps and joint W.S. warfighters through the study of health concerns that affect the readiness of these forces and the development of methods to treat those concerns. Enterprise areas of research include infectious disease, biological warfare detection and defense…” [boldface added]
Indeed, Rivers’ descriptions of his work on NAMRU-2 sound very much like he was establishing a bioweapons research program with state-of-the-art facilities on Guam – an island situated right in the middle of the Western Pacific Ocean and, according to Wikipedia, a major U.S. military strategic asset.
“The Navy gave me a free hand in acquiring both equipment and personnel,” Rivers boasts. “No question was ever raised about what I bought or the amount of money I spent. I don’t believe that anyone in the navy had ever had that privilege before, but as a result I ended up with some of the most beautiful laboratories you have ever seen.” (Benison, p. 335-6). These facilities, according to Rivers, constructed in less than four months “with the aid of a naval construction battalion,” included 62 buildings, 12 complete laboratories, and “special wards.” (Benison, p. 340).
What was the purpose of those “beautiful laboratories”? Interestingly, Rivers asserts: “Remember, we weren’t stationed on Guam to find out what was going on on Guam; our primary job was to discover what was going on just behind the battle lines.” (Benison, p. 343) Nevertheless, for some inexplicable reason, Rivers says he did one noteworthy thing on Guam: “I ordered … autopsies on everybody who died on the island. It made no difference who they were or where they died, whether in a hospital, hut or tent – if they died on the island, they were autopsied.” (Benison, p. 343)
The purpose for these autopsies and, for that matter, the massive and lavish state-of-the art research facilities supposedly decommissioned, as Rivers mentions, “some time in 1946” (Benison, p. 351), just two years after construction, is never explained by Rivers, nor any other reference I could find.
The person whom Rivers sent to Guam to coordinate this massive project was his longtime colleague and friend, Dick Shope, a fellow Rockefeller Institute scientist who is known to have worked on biological/chemical weapons programs during and after WWII (see “friends and colleagues” appendix below).
And even before the labs were completed, Rivers sent Shope to lead a group of NAMRU-2 men to “participate in the projected Okinawa campaign.” Okinawa was the bloodiest battle in the Pacific in WWII, lasting 82 days and claiming a total of 250,000 lives (150,000 Japanese civilians and 100,000 American and Japanese troops [ref]). The participation of NAMRU-2 in this campaign is apparently not recorded anywhere, as Rivers himself explains: “There was nothing in writing; it was one of those things that are just understood.” (Denison, p. 344)
What was a purportedly medical research unit doing – off the record – during this protracted, bloody battle? Here’s what Rivers recounts: “During a marine invasion of Peleliu in 1944, they [NAMRU-2 men] successfully introduced aerial spraying of DDT. It marked the first time that an airplane had been used for the dispersal of DDT under combat conditions, and several months later, they used the same techniques during the Okinawa campaign… The techniques were highly successful.” (Denison, p. 338).
This very strange story that is apparently not recorded anywhere else, raises many unanswered questions:
Was the NAMRU-2 engaging in “aerial spraying of DDT” to control insects during combat? Or were there other reasons for spraying highly toxic chemicals over Peleliu and Okinawa at the height of the Pacific campaign?
It is interesting to note that, as bioweapons expert Dr. Boyle explains in The Wuhan Coverup:
Aerosolization of the biological agent . . . is critical to the success of the new biowarfare weapon because most anti-human biowarfare agents are delivered to their intended victims by air. (p. 131, Kindle Edition)
Indeed, one of Dr. Walter N. Mack’s greatest achievements, according to the FOIAed documents detailing his employment at MSU and secret biowarfare work, included: “a procedure for developing a homogeneous and reproductive aerosol.”
Close friends and associates
In the oral history memoir written by Saul Benison, Rivers speaks openly about his close association and friendship with at least one scientist known to have led a U.S. government bioweapons program – Richard Shope, mentioned in the WWII section above. Rivers does not mention or acknowledge this secret biowarfare work nor, of course, does he ever mention any participation himself.
More shockingly, Rivers casually mentions encounters and interactions with several scientists who were colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute and then proceeded to work for the Nazi bioweapons program during WWII – including Eugen Haagen and Eric Traub – reporting directly to Heinrich Himmler, one of Hitler’s closest advisers. One of these scientists, Eric Traub, who worked with Rivers before the war, was then brought back through Operation Paperclip to work on the U.S. bioweapons program (Jacobsen, p. 435).
In 1961, When Rivers shared his life stories with Benison, he would at least have known about his former colleagues’ WWII activities, yet these are never mentioned. I find that shocking, because I would expect him to at least admit that he knew and was perturbed by their Nazi activities. He never does.
More information about Rivers’ colleagues who were known biowarfare experts in the U.S., Nazi Germany, and Russia, is provided in the Appendix to this article.
To summarize:
Dr. Tom Rivers is widely known and celebrated as the “father of virology” and the scientist who presided over the development of the first polio vaccines, working simultaneously as research director at the Rockefeller Institute and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (March of Dimes), 1939-1955.
Yet none of the accounts of his work or life ever mentions that – at the very same time that he held these prestigious positions – Tom Rivers was also a member of the original group advising FDR on the formation of the U.S. bioweapons program, and he most likely helped establish and activate parts of that program during WWII.
In fact, there are hints that Rivers was working on secret chemical/biological weapons programs for his entire career, beginning all the way back when the Panama Canal was completed in 1912. And, perhaps most chillingly, although I have not found any reports of this elsewhere, he may have led a unit that deployed chemical/biological weapons during key Pacific battles in WWII.
Other indications of Rivers’ secret biowarfare career include his close work and relationships with known bioweapons scientists, at least one of whom went on to conduct human experiments on concentration camp inmates during WWII. And Rivers researched many known deadly potential bioweapons himself.
Was polio part of the biowarfare work of Rivers and his fellow bioweapons scientists? Although the WBC biowarfare report prepared for FDR during WWII listed polio as a “virus disease of sufficient importance in biological warfare to warrant special comment,” it also stated that “it is unlikely that a great deal of damage could be done through attempts to introduce this disease into a population.” (pp. 7-8) Thus, the polio work might have been conducted in tandem with, but not necessarily as an integral part of, bioweapons research.
What makes Dr. Rivers’ secret biowarfare career noteworthy, especially when we add it to Dr. Mack’s, is the interconnectedness of the development of the polio vaccine with the development of bioweapons countermeasures. If the same scientists were working on both biowarfare and civilian programs, how much difference was there between those programs in terms of scientific, ethical and human safety approaches?
Specifically as this question relates to top scientists, RFK Jr. notes in The Wuhan Coverup:
History has shown again and again the bioweapons agenda’s awesome power to transform compassionate, brilliant, idealistic doctors into monsters. (p. 47, Kindle Edition).
I believe this observation is supported by the details revealed in this article about Dr. Walter N. Mack and Dr. Tom Rivers’ work.
CONCLUSION
The hidden biowarfare biographies of the scientists discussed in this article point to a fascinating polio-biowarfare connection, which has never been reported elsewhere, as far as I can tell.
More broadly, they exemplify the huge overlaps in terms of funding, research institutions and scientists involved in both biowarfare and public health vaccine development, starting all the way back before WWII.
This raises important questions about the historic development of the polio vaccine in particular, and vaccines in general.
Polio vaccine questions
Did the two endeavors – bioweapons vaccine development and the public health polio vaccine campaign in the 1940s and 1950s, in the shadow of WWII and the Cold War – inevitably share certain underlying motivations, incentives, ethical frameworks and scientific standards?
Are those shared incentives and frameworks – while favorable to the development of a thriving top-secret biowarfare industry and eventually a too-big-to-fail vaccine manufacturing empire – equally conducive to advancing the health and safety of the civilian population?
In other words, if the foundational public health polio vaccine campaign was conducted by scientists primarily engaged in research for “national security” purposes – scientists used to working in extreme secrecy, with great urgency, and with no regulatory oversight or ethical imperatives – can we trust their claims and judgments regarding the products they developed for universal public vaccination campaigns?
General vaccine questions
Furthermore, even if we believe that the polio vaccine was developed with much more rigorous scrutiny and safety oversight than biowarfare countermeasures – such as the psittacosis or Newcastle vaccines developed by Drs. Mack and Rivers – the polio-biowarfare connection raises broader issues about our societal reverence for vaccines as the uniquely safe and effective way to protect the public from infectious disease:
If, as we have learned, vaccines are the linchpins of bioweapons research;
And if, as exemplified by Drs. Mack and Rivers, top scientists and their research institutions have been lavishly funded for many decades for their biowarfare work, while also working on vaccines against non-bioweapons-grade pathogens;
Then, is it far-fetched to surmise that when these top scientists in their top institutions see, or study, a pathogen – which in biowarfare may be described as a sword – they automatically look for the shield, or the vaccine?
Without attributing any ill motives, is it not likely that when studying a disease like polio, which they recognize as not very lethal in a biowarfare context, these scientists nevertheless focus all their energies on countering it with a vaccine – perhaps with little regard to the risk-benefit analysis of how dangerous the pathogen is, compared to the potential hazards of the vaccine?
If they are used to risk-benefit analyses in military and biowarfare contexts, in which, for example, it is desirable to inject all patients with a vaccine guaranteed to kill a third of them, in order to save the other two thirds, might they apply the same type of analysis to their non-covert research? Or at least have a completely different ethical orientation than what we would consider acceptable in a civilian context?
And, as corollaries to those questions, when we look at all universal vaccination campaigns – might we not want to take a closer look at the primacy of vaccines, as compared to all other measures, in public health efforts against infectious disease?
From polio to Covid, and beyond
These questions draw a straight line from the foundational public health polio vaccine campaign – considered a crowning scientific achievement, which we are not supposed to ever question – to the Covid mRNA global vaccine campaign, which was recently touted by President Trump as “one of the greatest military feats ever.”
As demonstrated in this article, the conflation of national security with public health, biowarfare countermeasures with non-military vaccines, and covert biowarfare work with vaccination campaigns involving entire populations, started at least as far back as polio, and culminated in the Covid catastrophe.
I believe, based on this historical understanding, it is time transcend the taboos and open up the topic of universal public health vaccination to rigorous and lively debate.
***
APPENDIX: Friends and Colleagues of Dr. Rivers involved in biowarfare activities
Richard Shope
Reported to have had “many years of association with and friendship for Rivers” (Horsfall, p. 274), Shope was the first director of the Commission on Epidemiological Survey (CES), a biowarfare committee, conceived as part of the mission of the original Armed Forces Epidemiological Board (AFEB).
According to the AMEDD (Army Medical Department) Center of Heritage and History:
The CES was formulated in 1954 when it became apparent that the threat of use of biological agents as weapons (biological warfare) was a reality and merited constant vigilance involving new studies of pathogenesis and development of effective means of early detection and control.
The CES was given oversight responsibility for the newly developed Biological Warfare program at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.
Note that this article erroneously states that the biowarfare program at Fort Detrick was “newly developed” in 1954 when, in fact, we know from documentation on the WBC and WRS (see above) that the biowarfare program at Fort Detrick was activated in the early 1940s.
It is also relevant to note that evidence exists pointing to the use of biowarfare by the United States during the Korean War, 1950-1953 – right before the falsely reported beginning date of the CES bioweapons program at Fort Detrick.
Furthermore, we can surmise that Richard Shope had been involved in biowarfare activities along with Rivers, going back at least to the formation of FDR’s biowarfare commission and the NAMRU-2 (see above). He is listed in the archives of the Committees on Biological Warfare as having been a member 1942-1943.
Eugen Haagen
Rivers tells an extremely strange story about Dr. Eugen Haagen’s work under his supervision at the Rockefeller Institute before WWII.
Rivers says: “In 1929 and 1930 I did a great deal of work with Eugen Haagen.” Then, he reports, in 1932 another Rockefeller scientist wanted to work with Dr. Haagen, “but by that time he [Haagen] had returned to Germany.” So Haagen was “brought back to New York,” but “was not paying full attention to his work.” This was because, Rivers believes, “Haagen, who was an ardent Nazi, got mixed up in the affairs of the German-American Bund [a Nazi organization] in New York.” As a result of his not being able to successfully complete his work, “Haagen was allowed to return to Germany.” (Benison, p. 414-5).
What kind of control did the Rockefeller Institute exercise over Haagen, when it “brought him back to NY” and then “allowed him to return to Germany” to pursue his Nazi-related activities? What connection did the Institute have with Haagen during and after the war, if any?
I could not find answers to these questions, but it is known, as summarized in Annie Jacobsen’s 2014 Operation Paperclip, that Haagen was a “key developer in the Nazi bioweapons program, notably vaccine research” and it was in his apartment that the Allies first found evidence that Nazi doctors were experimenting on humans in concentration camps. (p. 557)
Jacobsen quotes a bone-chilling letter dated November 15, 1943, from Eugen Haagen to a colleague:
Of the 100 prisoners you sent me, 18 died in transport. Only 12 are in a condition suitable for my experiments. I therefore request that you send me another 100 prisoners, between 20 and 40 years of age, who are healthy and in a physical condition comparable to soldiers. (pp. 13-14)
This letter was discovered by the Allies in 1944. After the war Haagen fled “to the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany and worked for the Russians.” (p. 8)
Eric Traub
Rivers reports that in the early 1930s, a scientist named Eric Traub, who was working in the Division of Animal Pathology of the Rockefeller Institute at Princeton along with Richard Shope (see above), “was trying to produce hog cholera in mice.” (Benison p. 176) Hog cholera is a known potential bioweapon, which Dr. Walter Mack would study a decade later under a secret bioweapons grant at MSU (see first section of this article).
Traub returned to Germany in 1939 (he was a visiting scientist at Rockefeller), and during WWII, he was the trustworthy scientist chosen by Heinrich Himmler to travel to Turkey to obtain samples of rinderpest [cattle plague] to weaponize. In 1949 he was brought through Operation Paperclip to work on the U.S. biowarfare program. (Jacobsen, p. 436)
As Jacobsen reports, “Traub worked at Camp Detrick on Antianimal research. The agents and diseases being studied by Detrick researchers at this time, meant to decimate a specific animal population, included rinderpest, hoof-and-mouth disease, Virus III disease of swine (likely African swine fever), fowl plague, Newcastle disease, and fowl malaria. (Jacobsen, p. 435)
We know Shope was the first director of the CES, whose main research facilities were at Camp Detrick. Thus Shope, Rivers’ close friend and colleague, worked with a Nazi bioweapons specialist before and after WWII. When Rivers told Benison about this Nazi scientist in 1961, he made no mention of these hair-raising details.