The evidence that the coronavirus originated in a lab is now compelling, as is the evidence that the virus was spreading undetected all over the world by autumn 2019, with one blood sample from Lombardy on September 12th 2019 found to be positive for both viral RNA and antibodies.
One crucial outstanding question is who knew what and when. In particular, what did the U.S. know about the virus before January 2020 and what did the Chinese Government know?
Here I will argue that both the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) knew that an engineered virus was circulating from mid-November 2019, and that while the CCP was initially not worried about the virus, the U.S. biodefence network was much more concerned. The pandemic emergency was therefore largely created by the U.S. biodefence network, which used it as an opportunity to put into practice all the emergency protocols it had been preparing for two decades to respond to a biological attack or pandemic. While the virus quickly turned out to be mild, the emergency response continued largely because the train had already started running and the opportunity was too good to miss.
If the U.S. and its allies did know anything covertly before 2020, the most likely people who would know it are members of the intelligence and security networks. What can we surmise about what they knew from what they were saying and doing in autumn and winter 2019-20 and from later reports?
Consider Dr. Michael Callahan, an ex-CIA agent who now runs the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was the U.S. Government’s only confirmed point of contact in Wuhan in January 2020. Out of the blue, Dr. Callahan contacted mRNA vaccine expert Dr. Robert Malone on January 4th 2020 to tell him that (to quote Dr. Malone): “There was a novel coronavirus circulating in the Wuhan region, it was looking like a significant biothreat, and I should get ‘my team’ engaged in seeking ways to mitigate the risk of this new agent.”
Bear in mind that at this point nobody else was spreading alarm about the new virus, which according to the public record had only been sequenced and confirmed to be a novel SARS-like virus by the private Chinese company Vision Medicals on December 27th. Certainly the CCP was not spreading alarm. Prior to the Wuhan lockdown on January 23rd 2020 it was playing down the threat from the virus, suppressing news of it and not making any concerted response.
The videos supposedly showing people collapsing in the streets with the virus that went round social media at the time were promoted not by the CCP but by organisations opposed to the CCP and aiming to expose its cover-up of the virus. Most people in the West, too, were not treating the virus as a significant threat and it was barely registering on government agendas. Recall that in early January there were officially just a few people in hospital in Wuhan and no recorded deaths, so any notion that this virus was a major threat to global public health was purely hypothetical – or based on information not in the public domain.
However, Dr. Callahan was not alone in his early alarmism. Others from the U.S. biodefence network were conspicuously alarmist and actively trying to raise alarm in those around them right from the start of January.
In the White House, Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger was stoking up the terror from the beginning of January. As Michael Senger notes: “Throughout January 2020, Pottinger unilaterally called White House meetings unbeknownst to those in attendance and breached protocol to ratchet up alarm about the new coronavirus based on information from his own sources in China, despite having no official intelligence to back up his alarmism.”
It was Pottinger who brought in fellow alarmist Deborah Birx as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator at the end of February 2020; Birx was instrumental in pushing the alarmist agenda and bringing lockdowns to America.
The leaked ‘Red Dawn’ emails among U.S. Government officials and others in early 2020 show long-time lockdown proponent Dr. Carter Mecher of the Department of Veterans Affairs also pushing for strong responses from very early on.
Dr. Mecher is an associate of Dr. Richard Hatchett, formerly of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) and now CEO of the Gates-funded pandemic vaccine organisation CEPI, with whom he wrote a paper in 2007 purporting to use the lessons of the 1918 pandemic to promote social distancing. A sister paper, also funded by the NIH, was produced at the same time by Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director (then and now) Dr. Anthony Fauci commented in 2007 that the two studies underline that “a primary lesson of the 1918 influenza pandemic is that it is critical to intervene early… Nonpharmaceutical interventions may buy valuable time at the beginning of a pandemic while a targeted vaccine is being produced”.
Richard Hatchett was attending the World Economic Forum when China locked down Wuhan on January 23rd. The following day he gave a press conference with Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust and a board member of CEPI, and Moderna’s CEO Stephane Bancel, backing China’s draconian response and making clear it was straight out of his own playbook.
One thing that is important to understand, is that when you don’t have treatments and you don’t have vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions are literally the only thing that you have, and it’s a combination of isolation, containment, infection prevention and control and then these social distancing interventions.
There is historical precedent for their use. We looked intensively and did an historical analysis of the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions in U.S. cities in 1918 and what we found was that cities that introduced multiple interventions, early in an epidemic, had much better outcomes.
The ‘we’ of course refers to Neil Ferguson and Carter Mecher, as per the above.
Further possible evidence of the involvement of the U.S. intelligence community and biodefence network is that the messages of the ‘whistleblower’ doctor Li Wenliang in Wuhan were initially promoted in English by an organisation funded by the U.S. Government. The flooding of social media with messages promoting lockdown in 2020 was also seen in 2014 with Ebola in Sierra Leone, where it was clearly the work of outside agents. It is also of significance that the same New York Times reporter, Donald McNeil, wrote almost identical articles praising the extreme interventions in both 2014 and 2020.
Anywhere you look in early 2020, amidst the sea of general calm, any source of alarm will invariably be found connected with someone associated with the biodefence network of the U.S. and its allies – people such as Michael Callahan, Matt Pottinger, Deborah Birx, Richard Hatchett, Carter Mecher and Neil Ferguson.
It comes as no surprise then to learn that in the U.S. the virus was treated, not as a matter of public health but of national security. This approach, already evident in the high level of activity from the biodefence network, was made official in March 2020 when the responsibility for policy in the pandemic was given not to the public health bodies but to the National Security Council and its agencies. The policy document that the ensuing policy decisions were based on has never been published.
Why would a virus that has as yet done very little be a national security matter? The most likely explanation is because it was known or suspected to be a non-natural, engineered agent. This likely conclusion is supported by other evidence, in particular, by what intelligence reports suggest both the U.S. and CCP knew about the virus in November 2019.
A recent report from the U.S. Senate showed that the CCP made a major safety intervention at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on November 12th 2019 to address the “complex and grave situation facing [bio]security work”. The Senate report also implied that around the same time the WIV must have begun work on a vaccine for the new coronavirus – deduced from the fact that Yusen Zhou (who mysteriously died shortly afterwards) applied for a vaccine patent on February 24th 2020. These facts indicate that the CCP became aware that a leaked virus was circulating in mid-November, presumably because it noticed people falling ill and, via testing, traced it back to the WIV (while there is no direct evidence of this, U.S. intelligence reports have noted WIV workers falling ill with a Covid-like illness in November).
The CCP’s response to discovering this appears to have been to address safety issues at the WIV and to begin working on a vaccine, but otherwise to suppress information about the virus and not treat it as a major threat. The CCP does not appear to have alerted its health services during November or December as medics in Wuhan had to discover it for themselves.
This play-it-down and suppress policy continued even once doctors in Wuhan spotted the novel virus in their patients and obtained the near-complete sequence from a private lab on December 27th. The CCP then continued to insist for weeks that the virus wasn’t spreading between humans, aggressively suppressed any suggestion it came from a lab and pushed from the start the scarcely plausible theory that it had jumped from animals in the wet market.
The sharing of the full virus sequence on January 11th only happened because a Chinese scientist breached protocol to do so, and was disciplined for it. Even once the CCP abandoned its play-it-down policy and initiated aggressive non-pharmaceutical interventions on January 23rd it continued to frustrate efforts to investigate the WIV and its virus database. It’s clear then, that up to January 23rd the CCP showed no sign of being worried about the virus, but every sign of worrying its origins would be discovered.
Separately, the U.S. intelligence community has let it be known that it was aware of a new virus circulating in China from mid-November. As an Israeli news website reported: “In the second week of November, U.S. intelligence recognised that a disease with new characteristics was developing in Wuhan, China. They followed its spread, when at that stage this classified information was not known to the media and did not come out of the Chinese regime either.”
This intelligence is said to have come “in the form of communications intercepts and overhead images showing increased activity at health facilities”. The U.S. military “then alerted NATO and the [Israeli] IDF of the outbreak precisely at the end of November”.
So we know the U.S. had intelligence on the virus circulating in mid-November. I think we have to assume this intel was linked to the CCP safety intervention at the WIV via intercepted communications, and thus that like the CCP, U.S. intelligence knew or suspected it was lab-engineered from that point. If so, no one appears to have told Dr. Fauci and his associates, as Fauci’s FOI emails reveal him and his colleagues to be figuring out that it was likely engineered (and that they funded it) at the end of January.
On February 1st, Fauci initiated an urgent cover-up operation, designed to discredit the idea of a lab leak as a baseless conspiracy theory, telling his associates: “You will have tasks today that must be done.” It is not clear whether Fauci orchestrated this cover-up on his own initiative or, more likely, after being instructed or pre-primed to do so by people in the biodefence network. The motive in any case was the same: to point the finger away from the U.S.’s funding of the implicated virus research and to avoid discrediting the field.
It thus appears that from November 2019, both the CCP and the intelligence community of the U.S. and its allies were watching the leaked outbreak to see what would happen and whether, as they hoped, it would fizzle out. Chinese President Xi Jinping and the CCP were keen to ignore it and suppress any alarm, as well as any hint of a lab leak. The biodefence network, on the other hand, appears to have been much more nervous about the new virus. As soon as word began to get out it amplified the news, spread alarm, pressed for strong interventions and activated biosecurity protocols, putting its members in charge wherever possible.
Despite this alarmist mode, however, members of the biodefence network consistently backed the natural origins and wet market theory and suppressed the lab leak theory. This is very telling, as there is no way they could have known at that point it was not of lab origin, and as we know there was plenty of evidence to suggest it was, not least what we presume they knew about the Chinese intervention at the WIV. If we assume for a moment they did not suspect it was lab-engineered it is very hard to account for their high degree of alarm about the new virus, or their activation of biodefence protocols and treating it as a national security matter, at a time when officially it had not yet killed anyone and there were few hospital patients.
Furthermore, publicly endorsing the lab leak theory or at least keeping it in play would clearly have been helpful to them as it would have added to the cause for alarm, reinforced their narrative of exposing the CCP’s virus cover-up and unambiguously made it a national security matter. The choice instead to back the CCP’s implausible version of events and suppress the lab leak theory thus betrays that it must have been seriously inconvenient for them in another way, namely that it implicated them and risked discrediting their research.
It is also telling in this regard that when some in the U.S. Government did start pushing the lab leak theory, the Chinese responded not by denying it but by trying to blame the U.S. for the leak. This feels like a warning shot: don’t expose us on this or we’ll expose you.
As is well known, the CCP’s play-it-down strategy came to an abrupt end on January 23rd 2020, when it caved in to the alarmist calls for lockdowns and NPIs (which actually have a long history in China). Thereafter the country embraced its new policy with zeal, turning itself into a showcase for the extreme pandemic response measures, joining in the promotion of them around the world and really making them their own.
Thus we find that the pandemic was largely a creation of the U.S. biodefence network, with China joining in after January 23rd. U.S. intelligence officers had been following the virus (which they, like the CCP, knew was lab-engineered) from mid-November, and the biodefence network made sure news of the virus got out once doctors noticed it, spreading alarm before there was anything really to be alarmed about and treating it immediately as a biosecurity threat.
I believe they did this initially, in part, out of genuine concern about the engineered virus, but also partly because they were itching to try out all the biosecurity protocols they’d been preparing for decades – not least the warp speed rollout of an mRNA vaccine. This latter motive also helps explain why it all carried on once it was obvious the virus was not a major threat to human life and the extreme responses were not justified. It was, in other words, a kind of trial run for a biological attack orchestrated by the biodefence network of the U.S. and its allies.
If true, this certainly helps to make sense of it all. But it is hardly a comforting thought, because it reinforces that they’re not done with us yet, but are just getting ready to do it again, and who can stop them?
Reprinted from The Daily Sceptic