According to Google News, the world’s top story early Monday morning was the report that intelligence analysts at the Department of Energy concluded that the global Covid epidemic had resulted from a Chinese lab-leak in Wuhan.
That original story ran as a Wall Street Journal news exclusive on Sunday and was Retweeted out many tens of thousands of times, separately promoted by such strikingly dissimilar public figures as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
- Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says
U.S. agency’s revised assessment is based on new intelligence
Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel • The Wall Street Journal • February 26, 2023 • 1,700 Words
Probably hundreds of other news outlets soon reported the story as well and such massive coverage hardly seemed unwarranted. According to reasonable estimates, the Covid disease epidemic has killed roughly twenty million people worldwide over the last three years, including well over a million Americans, and greatly disrupted the daily lives of many billions more. If that gigantic disaster had been due to the careless release of a virus bioengineered in a Chinese lab, the global political consequences would be immense.
But once we move past the dramatic headlines that captured the imagination of the world, the actual substance provided in the articles seemed extremely thin.
Back in 2021, President Joseph Biden had directed America’s 17 different intelligence agencies to spend 90 days investigating the origins of the Covid epidemic, promising to publicly release their findings. At the end of that period, 16 of those agencies had either failed to reach any conclusion, remained uncertain, or decided that the virus was probably natural, while the FBI had declared “with moderate confidence” that they believed Covid had probably come from a lab-leak in Wuhan.
Now, almost two years later, some unnamed intelligence analysts at our Department of Energy recently decided to revise their previous position and switch their support to the lab-leak theory but only did so “with low confidence.” Moreover, the WSJ story ignited a global media firestorm without giving any indication that their shifted position had been the result of any new evidence or analysis, let alone providing the actual details of their decision.
Over the last few months there has been a huge rise in American government hostility directed towards China, most recently fueled by accusations of spy-balloons and possible military support for Russia. So perhaps some government analysts merely absorbed that political message and after reading a few of the books or articles promoting the lab-leak theory that had been published during the last couple of years, they decided to hit China with a “low confidence” lab-leak accusation.
This hardly seemed the sort of development that should ignite a global media firestorm. One might even half-suspect that the massive media coverage was intended to distract conspiratorially-minded individuals from Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster revelations about America’s destruction of Europe’s Nord Stream energy pipelines and the UN Security Council session recently held to consider those explosive accusations.
Moreover, the lead author of the WSJ story was Michael R. Gordon, whose notorious, anonymously-sourced stories on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program had been filled with fraudulent intelligence information and successfully promoted our disastrous Iraq War. Then in 2021, he’d published a previous front-page story in the WSJ also touting the lab-leak accusations against China and at the time I’d noted the striking historical parallels with the Iraq War WMDs.
This situation carried disturbing echoes of how those same mainstream media organs had played a similar role twenty years ago in fostering the hoax of Saddam’s WMD and promoting our disastrous Iraq War. Indeed, I found it rather ironic that one of the main Trump Administration Covid experts quoted in that article and others was David Feith, whose father Douglas Feith had been one of the leading Neocons involved in that notorious Bush Administration intelligence fraud. Moreover, the lead author of the front-page Wall Street Journal story that helped to revive the lab-leak theory in late May was Michael R. Gordon, who had previously shared a byline with Judith Miller on most of the fraudulent Iraqi WMD stories that had propelled us into war. And in early 2020, former Mossad agent Dany Shoham had been one of the earliest figures suggesting that Covid was a Chinese bioweapon leaked from the Wuhan lab, with few remembering that in 2001 he had falsely fingered Saddam’s regime as the source of the Anthrax mailings. It almost seemed that members of the old Iraqi WMD cast were reassembling for a revival.
Beginning in December, Will Jones of Britain’s Daily Sceptic has published an excellent series of articles outlining the crucial evidence regarding the origins of Covid, and he quickly released a new piece that discussed the suddenly revived lab-leak theory.
- Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of COVID-19 Virus, Says U.S. But What Do We Really Know?
Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • February 27, 2023 • 1,400 Words
A month earlier he’d effectively summarized the strong case against the lab-leak theory, and until some new evidence or analysis comes to light, all those previous arguments still stand.
- Why the Lab Leak Theory is Almost Certainly False
Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • January 25, 2023 • 1,400 Words
I’d also strongly recommend his entire preceding series of articles on the subject, together with one by Jeffrey A. Tucker, who runs the Brownstone Institute website. These focus on many of the key factual issues surrounding the Covid outbreak, important information that has received far too little media scrutiny.
- How Did U.S. Intelligence Spot the Virus in Wuhan Weeks Before China?
Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • December 12, 2022 • 3,200 Words - What Is Crimson Contagion?
Jeffrey A. Tucker • The Brownstone Institute • December 22, 2022 • 1,300 Words - U.S. Accidentally Proves It Could Not Have Spotted the Virus in China in November 2019
Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • January 1, 2023 • 1,000 Words - U.S. Government Identified as Original Source of Lab Leak Theory. What’s Really Going On?
Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • January 10, 2023 • 2,800 Words
Jones and Tucker are prominent writers in what might be called the alt-Covid community, and their recent focus on the origins of the global epidemic has potentially been a very important development that I discussed last month in a major review article.
- The Alt-Covid Community Begins Unraveling the Origins of Covid
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 16, 2023 • 4,500 Words
Perhaps some anonymous analysts at the Department of Energy have suddenly uncovered exciting new evidence of a Wuhan lab-leak, evidence that had been missed by all previous investigators during the last three years. But if so, I would have expected to see some mention of that evidence in the media coverage, which instead said nothing. So it seems far more likely that they merely weighed the existing evidence and provided a different “low confidence” conclusion. And absent any such powerful new evidence, I think the case that has been made against any lab-leak remains very strong, even overwhelming.
However, there is also very strong evidence that the Covid virus was not natural but instead had been created in a laboratory. Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University spent two years serving as Chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission, and he and other scientific experts have made a compelling case that the characteristics of the virus are very unlikely to have been found in nature, arguing that the virus was bioengineered using American technology, with scientists in the orbit of the American government later mounting a major cover-up to hide that reality.
- Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on the Covid Origins Cover-Up
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 29, 2022 • 1,400 Words
Over the last six months, he has discussed these issues in numerous venues, including on this Grayzone podcast interview, which has been viewed more than 400,000 times.
Since January 2020, the public debate has been restricted to two major theories of Covid origins. Most of the scientific and media establishment quickly declared that the virus was natural and had randomly appeared in the city of Wuhan during late 2019. Meanwhile, a strong minority view widespread on the Internet had argued that the virus was bioengineered in a Wuhan laboratory and accidentally leaked out into the surrounding city, setting off the global epidemic.
Last year I reviewed the contradictory evidence and the arguments of the key proponents on both sides, suggesting that an excluded third possibility was the best solution:
I think these exchanges demonstrate that to a considerable extent, the two main camps on the Covid origins debate have been talking past each other.
The testimonies provided by Quammen and Holmes strongly challenged the possibility of any lab-leak at Wuhan, suggesting that this proves the virus must have been natural, even though few arguments on that latter point were ever made; at most, they raised some doubts about the strength of the evidence for bioengineering.
Meanwhile, the articles and papers by Wade, Sachs, Bruttel, and others have provided strong evidence that the virus was artificial. All of this has usually been interpreted as support for the lab-leak hypothesis, even though very little evidence was ever presented that any lab-leak had occurred.
Yet the apparent vector-sum of these conflicting arguments is the conclusion that the Covid virus neither leaked from the Wuhan lab nor was natural, and this suggests that the public debate has been improperly restricted to just those two possibilities.
For more than 30 months I have emphasized that there are actually three perfectly plausible hypotheses for the Covid outbreak. The virus might have been natural, randomly appearing in Wuhan during late 2019; the virus might have been the artificial product of a scientific lab in Wuhan, which accidentally leaked out at that time; or the virus might have been the bioengineered product of America’s hundred-billion-dollar biowarfare program, the oldest and largest in the world, a bioweapon deployed against China and Iran by elements of the Trump Administration at the height of our hostile international confrontation with those countries.
The first two possibilities have been very widely discussed and debated across the Western mainstream and alternative media, while the third has been almost totally ignored, despite top Russian, Iranian, and Chinese government officials having publicly accused America of releasing Covid in a deliberate biowarfare attack.
Indeed, beginning in April 2020 I have published a long series of articles arguing that there is strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence in favor of that third, disregarded possibility.
Last December I had discussed and reviewed several important recent books on the origins of the Covid virus, all advocating the lab-leak hypothesis. I noted that none of the authors—Jasper Becker, Sharri Markson, Alina Chan and Matt Ridley—had dared to even consider the excluded third possibility, perhaps because the realities of the publishing industry required them to apply such Orwellian “crimestop” to their thinking.
- American Pravda: Confronting Covid Crimestop
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 13, 2021 • 6,400 Words
A few days ago I was interviewed by a small audio podcaster and presented this analysis.
In my original article I outlined the likely motives for this attack.
If the virus had been released intentionally, the context and motive for such a biowarfare attack against China could not be more obvious. Although our disingenuous media continues to pretend otherwise, the size of China’s economy surpassed that of our own several years ago, and has continued to grow much more rapidly. Chinese companies have also taken the lead in several crucial technologies, with Huawei becoming the world’s leading telecommunications equipment manufacturer and dominating the important 5G market. China’s sweeping Belt and Road Initiative has threatened to reorient global trade around an interconnected Eurasian landmass, greatly diminishing the leverage of America’s own control over the seas. I have closely followed China for over forty years, and the trend-lines have never been more apparent. Back in 2012, I published an article bearing the provocative title “China’s Rise, America’s Fall?” and since then I have seen no reason to reassess my verdict.
- China’s Rise, America’s Fall
Which superpower is more threatened by its “extractive elites”?
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 17, 2012 • 7,000 WordsFor three generations following the end of World War II, America had stood as the world’s supreme economic and technological power, while the collapse of the Soviet Union thirty years ago left us as the sole remaining superpower, facing no conceivable military rival. A growing sense that we were rapidly losing that unchallenged position had certainly inspired the anti-China rhetoric of many senior figures in the Trump Administration, who launched a major trade war soon after coming into office. The increasing misery and impoverishment of large sections of the American population naturally left these voters searching for a convenient scapegoat, and the prosperous, rising Chinese made a perfect target.
Despite America’s growing economic conflict with China over the last couple of years, I had never considered the possibility that matters might take a military turn. The Chinese had long ago deployed advanced intermediate range missiles that many believed could easily sink our carriers in the region, and they had also generally improved their conventional military deterrent. Moreover, China was on quite good terms with Russia, which itself had been the target of intense American hostility for several years; and Russia’s new suite of revolutionary hypersonic missiles had drastically reduced any American strategic advantage. Thus, a conventional war against China seemed an absolutely hopeless undertaking, while China’s outstanding businessmen and engineers were steadily gaining ground against America’s decaying and heavily-financialized economic system.
Under these difficult circumstances, an American biowarfare attack against China might have seemed the only remaining card to play in hopes of maintaining American supremacy. Plausible deniability would minimize the risk of any direct Chinese retaliation, and if successful, the terrible blow inflicted to China’s economy would set it back for many years, perhaps even destabilizing its social and political system. Using alternative media to immediately promote theories that the coronavirus outbreak was the result of a leak from a Chinese biowarfare lab was a natural means of preempting any later Chinese accusations along similar lines, thereby allowing America to win the international propaganda war before China had even begun to fight.
A decision by elements of our national security establishment to wage biological warfare in hopes of maintaining American world power would certainly have been an extremely reckless act, but extreme recklessness has become a regular aspect of American behavior since 2001, especially under the Trump Administration. Just a year earlier we had kidnapped the daughter of Huawei’s founder and chairman, who also served as CFO and ranked as one of China’s top executives, while at the beginning of January we suddenly assassinated Iran’s top military leader.
All of the compelling evidence for my scenario has been freely available in mainstream media sources since early 2020, but few have been willing to recognize or mention it.
My long series of articles present this material and also place it within the context of the hidden history of America’s longstanding biological warfare programs, and these have been collected into a freely downloadable ebook.
- Covid/Biowarfare Series
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 2020-December 2021 • 60,000 Words
I’d particularly recommend the following articles in my series.
- American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 21, 2020 • 7,400 Words - American Pravda: Covid Epidemic as Lab-Leak or Biowarfare?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 12, 2021 • 13,100 Words - American Pravda: Waging Biological Warfare
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 9, 2021 • 7,500 Words - American Pravda: Confronting Covid Crimestop
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 13, 2021 • 6,400 Words
Although the articles run many tens of thousands of words, some of the most striking evidence can be summarized in just a few paragraphs mostly extracted from my original April 2020 article:
For example, in 2017 Trump brought in Robert Kadlec, who since the 1990s had been one of America’s leading biowarfare advocates. The following year in 2018 a mysterious viral epidemic hit China’s poultry industry and in 2019, another mysterious viral epidemic devastated China’s pork industry…
From the earliest days of the administration, leading Trump officials had regarded China as America’s most formidable geopolitical adversary, and orchestrated a policy of confrontation. Then from January to August 2019, Kadlec’s department ran the “Crimson Contagion” simulation exercise, involving the hypothetical outbreak of a dangerous respiratory viral disease in China, which eventually spreads into the United States, with the participants focusing on the necessary measures to control it in this country. As one of America’s foremost biowarfare experts, Kadlec had emphasized the unique effectiveness of bioweapons as far back as the late 1990s and we must commend him for his considerable prescience in having organized a major viral epidemic exercise in 2019 that was so remarkably similar to what actually began in the real world just a few months later.
With leading Trump officials greatly enamored of biowarfare, fiercely hostile to China, and running large-scale 2019 simulations on the consequences of a mysterious viral outbreak in that country, it seems entirely unreasonable to completely disregard the possibility that such extremely reckless plans may have been privately discussed and eventually implemented, though probably without presidential authorization.
But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.
It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.
According to these multiply-sourced mainstream media accounts, by “the second week of November” our Defense Intelligence Agency was already preparing a secret report warning of a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan. Yet at that point, probably no more than a couple of dozen individuals had been infected in that city of 11 million, with few of those yet having any serious symptoms. The implications are rather obvious. Furthermore:
As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hated Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.
Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?
The Iranians themselves were well aware of these facts, and their top political and military leaders publicly accused America of an illegal biowarfare attack against their own country and China, with their former president even filing an official protest with the United Nations. But although these explosive charges were widely reported in the Iranian press, they were completely ignored by the American media so that almost no Americans ever became aware of them.
Much of this same information is also effectively summarized in several of my podcast interviews from a year ago.
Kevin Barrett, FFWN • February 16, 2022 • 15m
Geopolitics & Empire • February 1, 2022 • 75m
Red Ice TV • February 3, 2022 • 130m
Related Reading:
- American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?
- American Pravda: Covid Epidemic as Lab-Leak or Biowarfare?
- American Pravda: Waging Biological Warfare
- American Pravda: Confronting Covid Crimestop
- A Thousand Times Greater Than the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster
- Challenging America’s Lords of Illusion
- Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on the Covid Origins Cover-Up
- The Alt-Covid Community Begins Unraveling the Origins of Covid
Source: https://www.unz.com/runz/did-a-chinese-lab-leak-kill-twenty-million-people/
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