Claim: The COVID-19 pandemic was planned by the Rockefeller Foundation in "Operation Lockstep.
Verdict: REFUTES

Retrieved passages:
title: Max Theiler
text: War II. Subculturing the particularly virulent Asibi strain from West Africa in chicken embryos, a technique pioneered by Ernest Goodpasture, the Rockefeller team sought to obtain an attenuated strain of the virus that would not kill mice when injected into their brains. It took until 1937, and more than 100 subcultures in chicken embryos, for Theiler and his colleague Hugh Smith to obtain an attenuated strain, which they named "17D". Animal tests showed the attenuated 17D mutant was safe and immunizing. Theiler's team rapidly completed the development of a 17D vaccine, and the Rockefeller Foundation began human trials in South

title: United States biological weapons program
text: were commissioned on Plum Island. The other four programs researched included RVF, rinderpest, African swine fever, plus eleven miscellaneous exotic animal diseases. The eleven miscellaneous pathogens were: Blue tongue virus, bovine influenza, bovine virus diarrhea (BVD), fowl plague, goat pneumonitis, mycobacteria, "N" virus, Newcastle disease, sheep pox, Teschers disease, and vesicular stomatitis. Work on delivery systems for the U.S. bioweapons arsenal led to the first mass-produced biological weapon in 1952, the M33 cluster bomb. The M33's sub-munition, the pipe-bomb-like cylindrical M114 bomb, was also completed and battle-ready by 1952. Other delivery systems researched and at least partially developed during the

title: Virus (novel)
text: death in the closing stages of the pandemic. The two American officers admit that the ARS was borne out of hardline anti-Soviet policies; a new regime that took office in 1969 was working towards a nuclear disarmament deal with the Soviets around the time of the pandemic. The Soviet contingent admits that some of their missiles may be targeted at a now-decommissioned US rocket base in Antarctica. In a special mission codenamed Operation Fireman, Yoshizumi and Major Carter volunteer to go to the ARS command bunker underneath the White House; two Soviet volunteers go to Moscow aboard the "T-232" to

title: Operation Infektion
text: in 1962 for the sheer purpose of publishing disinformation. An anonymous letter was sent to the editor in July 1983 from a "well-known American scientist and anthropologist" who claimed that AIDS was manufactured at Fort Detrick by genetic engineers. The "scientist" claimed that "that deadly mysterious disease was believed to be the results of the Pentagon's experiments to develop new and dangerous biological weapons," and implicated CDC scientists sent to Africa and Latin America to find dangerous viruses alien to Asia and Europe. These results were purportedly analyzed in Atlanta and Fort Detrick and thus the "most likely course of

title: Views of Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche movement
text: "Larouche to Rumsfeld: FDR Defeated the Nazis, While Bushes Collaborated". In 1974, an organisation affiliated to LaRouche predicted that there would be pandemics in Africa. When AIDS was first recognized as a medical phenomenon in the early 1980s, LaRouche activists were convinced that this was the pandemic about which the task force had warned. LaRouche and his followers stated that HIV, the AIDS virus, could be transmitted by casual contact, citing as supporting evidence the high incidence of the disease in Africa, the Caribbean and southern Florida. LaRouche said that the transmission by insect bite was "thoroughly established". John Grauerholz,

title: Rainbow Six (novel)
text: Iran during its biological attack on the U.S. (depicted in "Executive Orders"). After the epidemic starts at the conclusion of the games, Brightling's company would then distribute a vaccine that actually contains the virus itself, effectively killing the rest of the world's population that are not infected with Shiva. The "chosen few", having been provided with the real vaccine, would then inherit the emptied world, convinced of their justification for mass murder as "saving the world" from the encroachment of destructive humanity. Popov, oblivious of the Project, learns about the existence of Rainbow. He is later tasked by Brightling and

title: Rockefeller Foundation
text: the Foundation's program. Another significant program was its Medical Sciences Division, which extensively funded women's contraception and the human reproductive system in general. Other funding went into endocrinology departments in American universities, human heredity, mammalian biology, human physiology and anatomy, psychology, and the studies of human sexual behavior by Dr. Alfred Kinsey. In 1950 the Foundation mounted a major program of virus research, establishing field laboratories in Poona, India; Port of Spain, Trinidad; Belém, Brazil; Johannesburg, South Africa; Cairo, Egypt; Ibadan, Nigeria; and Cali, Colombia. In time, major funding was also contributed by the countries involved, while in Trinidad the

title: Amir Attaran
text: in "The Lancet" that the editors of that journal credited as the "blueprint" for fighting the global HIV/AIDS pandemic on a large scale. Attaran and Sachs proposed a new, multibillion-dollar fund that would be "based on grants, not loans, for the poorest countries", and which would be "judged as having epidemiological merit ... by a panel of independent scientific experts." Attaran and Sachs' policy innovations were widely championed by advocates, and incorporated into the design of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria which launched later that year. The Fund has since saved over 20 million lives. In

title: Kurt Blome
text: must be attacked simultaneously with various human and animal epidemic pathogens as well as plant pests." According to Kliewe, plague, typhoid, cholera and anthrax were being developed as weapons, as well as a new "synthetic medium for the spread of these bacteria" which would allow them to remain virulent for eight to twelve weeks. As part of the Nazi biological warfare program code-named "Blitzableiter" (Lightning Rod), Blome's institute was therefore "a camouflaged operation for the production of biological warfare agents", and its construction was overseen by Karl I. Gross, an S.S. officer and specialist in tropical diseases, who had conducted

title: Rainbow Six (novel)
text: master plan to wipe out the majority of the human race, called "the Project". Dr. John Brightling, a staunch environmentalist who heads a biotechnology firm called the Horizon Corporation, had orchestrated the attacks through ex-KGB officer Dimitri Popov in order to raise awareness of terrorism, which then helps former FBI agent and co-conspirator Bill Henriksen's security firm land a contract during the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia. From within the Olympic security apparatus, Henriksen plans to launch a sophisticated bioweapon attack using nanocapsules containing the Shiva virus, a mutated form of the Ebola virus that had been previously used by

title: John P. Woodall
text: re-funding of Task Force Scorpio and the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network following the failures in the response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. In 2004, Woodall became a member of the Biological Weapons Working Group of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. He was on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Medical Chemical, Biological and Radiological Defense. In 1994, Woodall retired from WHO and returned to the New York State Department of Health. Woodall cofounded the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED-mail) in 1994. He built ProMED-mail from its original 40 members to over

title: Outbreak (film)
text: against Ford's orders, joining Keough's team with Schuler and Salt. As they begin a search for the monkey, the Army quarantines the town and imposes martial law. Schuler is infected when his suit tears, and Keough accidentally sticks herself with a contaminated needle. When Ford provides an experimental serum, Daniels realizes that he was aware of the virus before the outbreak. He confronts Ford, who admits that the original Motaba strain was actually a military bioweapon; the 1967 outbreak in Africa had in fact been a test-run of the virus, which subsequently infected the local monkey population despite Ford's and

title: Julio Isidro Maiztegui
text: patients in saline solution to those whose exposure had taken place under eight days earlier. The treatment, which reduced motality rates from 30% to around 1% of those infected, led to greater support for the work at CEMIC, and in 1978, the National Institute of Hemorrhagic Viruses (INVH) was established in Pergamino with Dr. Maiztegui as its director. A former colleague of Maiztegui's, Dr. Julio Barrera Oro, developed the "Candid#1" vaccine at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, in 1985, and the vaccine became available locally in 1990. Dr. Maiztegui remained at the helm of the INVH until his death from

title: The Stand
text: 16 – July 4 At a remote U.S. Army base, a weaponized strain of influenza known as "Project Blue" is accidentally released inside a secret underground laboratory. Charles Campion, a soldier charged with security, manages to escape from the base by car with his wife and child. By the time the Army tracks Campion down to the East Texas town of Arnette and establishes a cordon sanitaire around it, he as patient zero has already died of the Project Blue virus and spread it to numerous others beyond the cordon. The virus is extremely contagious and resistant to antibodies and

title: John P. Woodall
text: Woodall worked next at the Rockefeller Foundation, receiving additional training in 1963 and then later becoming director of the Foundation's Belém Virus Laboratory, where he oversaw the documentation of the distribution of arboviruses of Brazil, discovered new viruses and conducted research on yellow fever. While at Rockefeller, Woodall became a United States citizen. Woodall then moved to the Foundation's Yale Arbovirus Research Unit, where he continued work with the data gathered in Brazil. After completing that research, he became head of the arbovirus laboratory of the New York State Department of Health Laboratories in Albany. In 1975 he went to

title: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
text: the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation greatly supported malaria control, sought to have the governments take over some of its efforts, and collaborated with the agency. The new agency was a branch of the U.S. Public Health Service and Atlanta was chosen as the location because malaria was endemic in the Southern United States. The agency changed names (see infobox on top) before adopting the name "Communicable Disease Center" in 1946. Offices were located on the sixth floor of the Volunteer Building on Peachtree Street. With a budget at the time of about $1 million, 59 percent of its personnel

title: Virus (novel)
text: the space microbes (which have been suppressed for secrecy reasons) cripples efforts to develop a vaccine. Nearly all life on Earth are dead of the disease by the end of August. As the pandemic spreads worldwide, meanwhile, the staff of several international research stations in Antarctica begin to pool their resources towards creating a new society in the ice under the so-called "Supreme Council of Antarctica (SCA)." A scientist at Sloan-Kettering gets in touch with Dr. Meyer and is able to piece together all information about the virus for broadcast to the Antarctic bases before he dies. A US Polaris

title: Operation Infektion
text: Monkey virus into the deadly AIDS virus." Radio Moscow also claimed that instead of testing a cholera vaccine, American scientists were actually infecting unwitting Zairians, thus spreading it throughout the continent. These scientists were unaware of the long period before symptom onset, and resumed experimentation on convicts upon return to the U.S., where it then spread when the prisoners escaped. Claims that the CIA had sent "AIDS-oiled condoms" to other countries sprang up independently in the African press, well after the operation was started. In 1987, a book ("Once Again About the CIA") was published by the Novosti Press Agency,

title: Virus (novel)
text: stunned to see Yoshizumi emerge from hiding nearby - he spent the past several years trekking all the way from Washington, proving that de la Tour's vaccine worked. In August 1980, ten full years after the pandemic, the human colony in Argentina prepares to send an exploration team into the interior. A movie adaptation of the novel was released by Kadokawa Films in 1980 with Masao Kusakari as Yoshizumi. The movie was shot in several locations including Antarctica and Machu Picchu in Peru. Much of the novel's material was adjusted for the film. Some of the changes include: Viz Media

title: The Passage (Cronin novel)
text: entries, newspaper reports, and other documents. Occasional use is made of reference material from 1,000 years after the outbreak, coming from ""The Journal of Sara Fisher"", sourced from a future "University of New South Wales, Indo-Australian Republic". The U.S. government is conducting a top secret experiment referred to as "Project Noah" which involves acquiring and transporting death row inmates to a secret military compound in Colorado, ostensibly for the purposes of testing a drug intended to greatly prolong life. These genetic experiments originate from patient zero, Tim Fanning—one of two surviving members of an expedition investigating a Bolivian bat-carried virus.