Very early in the pandemic, the infamous “Proximate origins” paper was published in Nature Medicine, using nonsensical reasoning to “prove” that COVID could not have come from a lab. The Big Lie held its ground for over two years, before Jon Stewart sneered at it and Jeffrey Sachs added gravitas to the case against the “Wet Market hypothesis”. Then in December, 2023, Robert Kennedy published The Wuhan Cover-up, making a detailed argument that COVID originated from bioweapons research (euphemistically called “gain-of-function”) in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Case solved.
I’m writing to raise the question whether there is a deeper cover-up. I don’t claim to have proof, but I think there’s substantial evidence that the Pandemic was not an accidental
release from a Chinese lab but a deliberate bioweapon attack from a US lab.
Already in April, 2020, I wrote about these two possibilities without choosing between them. Pepe Escobar was even earlier, accusing the US of attacking China with a bioweapon. Recently we have two new developments:
- A denial has come from the Wuhan Institute’s “Bat Lady”, Shi Zhengli (pronounced by swallowing the “sh” sound, “Shr Jung Lee”, not “She”), complete with genomes of all the viruses in her freezer. There’s no reason to believe Dr Shi, any more than others who have so much to lose if implicated in a disaster on the scale of a world war. Her claim is not verifiable because her high-security facility is not open to inspection. But I note that Dr Shi has been consistent in her story from the beginning, and US laboratories have issued no such denials.
- Three weeks ago, Robert Redfield, who led CDC under Trump, suggested that the COVID virus came from the UNC laboratory of Ralph Baric. Meryl Nass cites evidence for this possibility.
There are several “soft” reasons I take this hypothesis seriously.
First, Kennedy’s first pandemic book described dozens of “desktop exercises” that anticipated a global pandemic and a global pandemic response. All these events were organized by Americans connected to the Deep State, not by Chinese, and they all emphasized tightening social controls and censoring dissent, rather than discovering treatments that could help patients to recover. The most recent was in October, 2019, just as COVID was appearing in Wuhan. These exercises were not about public health but about containing public anger during an emergency.
Second, COVID appeared earlier in the US than in China. In the summer of 2019, there was a mysterious COVID-like illness that killed nursing home residents in the Virgina suburbs of DC. Perhaps it was related to the Fort Detrick bioweapons lab, which closed down at that time for security leaks. A Red Cross study of blood collected during 2019 found antibodies to COVID in 1.5% donors from 9 US states.
Third, the US was motivated to slow the galloping growth of the Chinese economy which, by some measures, was just overcoming US GDP around that time. The digital yuan was designed to compete with the US dollar as World Reserve Currency, and it was scheduled for full deployment in the spring of 2020. There has been suspicion of stealth American bioweapon attacks against China’s livestock in 2018, and solid evidence that the US has attacked Cuba with bioweapons repeatedly.
Fourth, authors of the “Proximate Origins” paper based their whole argument on their determination that the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 was not a perfect fit to the ACE-2 receptor that was its port of entry into human cells. How would they have known this so early in the game? How would they even have thought to look for this evidence back in February, 2020, when the genome had just been published? In retrospect, we know that the spike protein was the payload of the bioweapon, engineered to have many nasty effects,
- Causing blood clots
- Breaching the blood/brain barrier
- Causing neural damage
- Damaging arterial walls
- Disrupting regulation of blood pressure
The reason the spike protein matched the human ACE-2 receptor imperfectly is that it had been engineered for toxicity as well as cell entry, which must have entailed compromise. I find it suspicious that Christian Andersen and other authors of “Proximate Origins” knew where to look so early in the game. And, of course, their argument that this mismatch was conclusive evidence for a natural origin was nonsensical. Rather, the multi-faceted toxicity of the spike protein is powerful evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered as a bioweapon. (Natural viruses are evolved to reproduce rapidly, not to damage the body, and the damage that they do is incidental to their reproduction. Natural viruses are not gratuitously toxic.)
Fifth, the opportunity for spreading the virus came during the third week of October, 2019, when World Military Games were held in Wuhan. Several American soldier-athletes were airlifted back to the US when they came down with a respiratory virus. I imagine that Wuhan was considered an ideal place to seed a viral epidemic exactly because in case the virus was discovered to be a bioweapon, a natural fallback explanation would be that it had escaped from the Wuhan Institute (which is China’s only bioweapon laboratory). The limited hang-out was prepared long in advance.
Sixth, the next place after Wuhan to experience COVID deaths in early 2020 was Teheran. “A full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament [were] soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians” died. Ron Unz has written an e-book in which he lays out the evidence that COVID originated from a deliberate American bioweapon attack on China and Iran. Teheran is 2,000 miles from Wuhan, and the only thing that China and Iran have in common is that both countries are targets of American enmity.
The bottom line
I don’t consider any of this conclusive; there is much we cannot know. But I now judge it more likely that COVID originated from an American biological attack on China than that the virus escaped accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The post Is the “lab leak hypothesis” another cover-up? appeared first on Experimental Frontiers, with Josh Mitteldorf.
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