In late January of last year, as the coronavirus that has changed our lives forever started to spread around the world, questions began to be raised about its origins. Was it natural or man-made?
Chinese Communist scientists and their allies at the World Health Organization insisted that the virus emerged from an exotic mammal — a bat, maybe, or a pangolin — that for some reason was being sold in a seafood market in Wuhan. When leading American virologists, Dr. Anthony Fauci and others, endorsed the idea that COVID infections originated in an animal eaten for food, it was “case closed.”
The American media has been selling that story ever since. In January 2020, National Public Radio was already reporting, “A wet market in Wuhan is catching the blame as the probable source of the current coronavirus outbreak that’s sweeping the globe.” National Geographic also chimed in, saying, “Wet markets launched the coronavirus.”
No one had actually been on the ground in Wuhan — the Chinese government wouldn’t let foreigners near the city for the next year — but somehow they all knew exactly where the virus had come from.
A few people disagreed. Among them was Dr. Francis Boyle, an expert on biowarfare. He
suggested that “the coronavirus that we’re dealing with here is an offensive
biological warfare weapon.” Speaking of Wuhan’s Institute of Virology, which is at the epicenter of the epidemic, he added that there have been “previous reports of problems with that lab and things leaking out of it.”
Dr. Yan Li-Meng, who fled China last April, agrees. She calls the virus an “unrestricted bioweapon,” saying that it was a bat coronavirus
isolated by the People’s Liberation Army that has been re-engineered using “gain of function” research to make it more infectious and deadly.
For Drs. Boyle and Yan to be correct, China would have to have both the “intention” and the “capability” to develop such a bioweapon, but does it?
It is no secret that the Chinese Communist regime, despite
being a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention, regards the development of bioweapons as a
key part of achieving military dominance. Since 2007, Chinese government researchers have been
writing publicly about developing bioweapons using controversial “gain of function” research to make the viruses more lethal. The vice president of China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, He Fuchu (贺福初) said in 2015 that biomaterials were the new “strategic commanding heights” of warfare.
Then in 2017 China’s top state television commentator
revealed that biowarfare, using viruses, was a new priority under Xi Jinping’s national security policy.
PLA general Zhang Shibo (张仕波) went even further that same year in his book,
War’s New High Ground, claiming that “modern biotechnology development is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability,” including the potential for “specific ethnic genetic attacks” (特定种族基因攻击).
To be perfectly clear, what General Zhang is talking about is bioweapons that kill other races, but for which people who look like him have a natural or acquired immunity. Such a weapon would selectively target Africans or Caucasians or Japanese or Koreans but leave your own population unscathed.
Those who might counter that one wild-eyed general does not necessarily speak for the Communist leadership should bear in mind that Zhang was a full member of the 18th Central Committee (2012-17) of the Chinese Communist Party and was the president of China’s National Defense University at the time.
So there’s no doubt that the CCP has been intent upon developing offensive biological warfare weapons for some years now. But can they? What do we know about China’s capabilities?
We know that China has mastered reverse genetics — the gene splicing techniques that are needed to create a biological superweapon — because we taught their top scientists how to do it. Actually it’s even worse than that: We may have actually been paying the Chinese scientists who created the China Virus that is now wreaking havoc on the world.
Shortly before the Wuhan outbreak, the head of an organization called EcoHealth Alliance gave an interview about his work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which he called a “world-class lab of the highest standards.” The man, Peter Daszak, explained that he had been funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for 15 years. The work involved collecting coronaviruses from nature and using something called “gain of function” techniques to make them more infectious and deadly.
Coronaviruses were perfect for this work, enthused Daszak: “You can manipulated them in the lab pretty easily. It’s a spike protein. Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus, the zoonotic risk [to humans]. So you can get the sequence, build the protein. And we worked with Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina to do this. We insert the sequence into the backbone of another virus and then do some work in the lab.”
Daszak claimed that the research he was carrying out in conjunction with the Wuhan lab was necessary to create a vaccine to prevent the next global pandemic. In light of what has happened since, however, his December 9, 2019, interview almost reads like a confession. Clearly the man had no idea that the Chinese Communist Party might have other uses in mind for dangerous coronaviruses than research into vaccines.
The bottom line is that China, thanks in part to training and funding it received from the U.S., had everything it needed to create a deadly bioweapon: the facility, the technology, and the raw biomaterial.
As far as Daszak himself, once the pandemic began, the last thing he wanted to talk about was his work with the Wuhan lab. He quickly endorsed China’s claim that it came from a wet market, and attacked anyone who said otherwise as an unhinged conspiracy theorist.
In an April interview with DemocracyNow he insisted, “The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It’s simply not true. I’ve been working with that lab for 15 years. They’re some of the best scientists in the world.”
China, however, has a long history of lab accidents. In 2004, for example, the
SARS virus leaked from a Beijing lab twice (!) and caused an outbreak of the disease. The Wuhan facility may have been state of the art, but Chinese safety standards in general are notably lax. And if Chinese scientists were under rush orders to research and develop bioweapons, corners would almost surely be cut.
Then there is this: If the first coronavirus infections were a simple result of accidental animal-to-human transmission, as claimed, this could have occurred anywhere in China. How curious that the epicenter of the epidemic just happens to be located in just a couple of miles away from where China’s only Level 4 lab is located. Chance? I think not.
Even the former Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Robert Redfield, now believes the coronavirus likely came from the lab in Wuhan.
From the beginning, however, the
Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets have tried
to convince us that the deadly coronavirus is a product of nature rather than nefariousness. In response to Redfield’s interview, for example, the
New York Times immediately published a hit piece entitled, “Ex-CDC Director Favors Debunked Covid-19 Origin Theory.”
The World Health Organization is also working hard to deny that the coronavirus came from the lab. It recently sent none other than Peter Daszak to Wuhan to help carry out an “investigation” on the origin of the coronavirus. Not surprisingly, the
120-page report that resulted devoted only a couple of pages to the Wuhan lab and concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” the virus came from there. Why am I not surprised?
Jamie Metzl, who served as a national security official in the Obama administration, told CBS last week that he wouldn’t call the WHO effort an “investigation” at all. “It’s essentially a highly-chaperoned, highly-curated study tour,” Metzl said. “This group of experts only saw what the Chinese government wanted them to see … It was agreed first that China would have veto power over who even got to be on the mission … WHO agreed to that … Imagine if we [had] asked the Soviet Union to do a co-investigation of Chernobyl. It doesn’t really make sense.”
The best research in the question has been done by David Asher, the former leader of the State Department’s task force investigating the origins of COVID-19. Asher not only believes the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but also that it was the result of bioweapons research.
“The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,”
says David Asher. “It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view, and I’m just one person, my view is it was a biological weapons program.”
There is one final piece of evidence that for me, as a China hand, supports the theory that the coronavirus is an escaped Chinese bioweapon.
There is a rumor
going around on the Chinese internet that the United States deliberately unleashed an American bioweapon on the Chinese population. Tellingly, such absurd claims are not being censored by the authorities, while accurate reporting on the epidemic is. In fact, having delayed, subverted, and side-tracked the WHO “investigation” of the Wuhan Lab, China is now demanding that the WHO investigate the U.S. anti-biowarfare center at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
It is very much in character for the Communist Party leaders to blame their chief geopolitical rival for crimes that they themselves commit.
With its lies and evasions, is the Party simply trying to cover up its incompetence in controlling the outbreak? Or are its leaders also trying to hide something much more serious: their criminal complicity in the epidemic’s origins? Even taking into account the Party’s penchant for secrecy, the multiple levels of deception engaged in by Communist officials over the past couple of months, including those at the highest levels, have been extraordinary.
We may never know for certain whether the novel coronavirus was intended to be used as a bioweapon. But we do know that the major Western print, broadcast, and social media are all doing their best to dismiss the very possibility as a paranoid fantasy.
But — as the old joke goes — it’s not paranoia if they are really out to get you. And on this point the evidence is clear. We know, because PLA generals have told us so, that their researchers are racing to develop lethal bioweapons as fast as their theft of Western technology and stolen virus samples will allow. And it is a most reasonable supposition to assume that, because of this push to develop a deadly bioweapon, safety standards were neglected at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan and the deadly coronavirus managed to escape from the lab.
At the end of the day, whether the novel coronavirus had already been tinkered with before it reached the streets of Wuhan is (almost) of secondary importance. For the Communist leaders are clearly engaged in an effort to develop such a weapon as part and parcel of their strategy for the PRC to replace the USA as the dominant power on the planet.
To put it another way, does anyone think that the Communist authorities — once they had perfected a bioweapon to which they themselves had a natural or induced immunity — would hesitate to unleash a deadly pandemic on the West to achieve their “China Dream” of world domination? Those who doubt that the leaders of the Communist Party would use such an “assassin’s mace” need to tell us precisely what moral or ethical considerations would stay their hand. Because I can think of none.
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