Table of Contents

Introduction

Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?

America Devastated by “the China Virus”

Media Coverage of Previous Chinese-American Clashes

The Sudden Covid-19 Outbreak in Wuhan

American Accusations of a Chinese Lab-Leak

Initial Suspicions of an American Biowarfare Attack

Growing Evidence of American Responsibility

Apparent Proof of American Foreknowledge

Covid-19, Its Impact and Origins After One Year

More Than a Million Dead Americans?

What Did the Chinese Know and When Did They Know It?

Accusations of a Chinese Lab Leak

Pro-Chinese Counter-Propaganda

Scientific Claims and Counter-Claims

Considering an American Biowarfare Attack

The Smoking Gun?

The Hypothetical Scenario of the Covid-19 Outbreak

"The Truth" and "the Whole Truth" About the Origins of Covid-19

The Covid-19 Epidemic and How It Began

Suppressing Possible Artificial Origins as “a Conspiracy Theory”

The Excluded Third Possibility

The Strong Evidence for an American Biowarfare Attack

Summarizing the Evidence for a Biowarfare Attack and Outlining the Hypothetical Scenario

George Orwell's Virus Lab-Leak

An Orwellian Reversal on the Origins of Covid

Was Covid Developed as a Bioweapon?

A Bioweapon Lab-Leak Scenario Without a Lab-Leak?

The Case for an American Biowarfare Attack

Evidence Favors a Biowarfare Attack Rather Than a Random Lab-Leak

Outline of the Hypothetical Biowarfare Attack Scenario

The Covid Epidemic as Lab-Leak or Biowarfare?

The Alleged Wuhan Lab-Leak and Its Scientific Skeptics

The Plausible Deniability of Bioweapons and Their Effectiveness in Economic Warfare

The Long-Forgotten Early Iranian Outbreak

Manipulating Scientists into Deflecting the Iranian Accusations

Trying to Disguise a Smoking Gun

False Narratives Based Upon False Positives

Promoting a Ft. Detrick Lab-Leak as a Failure of Nerve

Diverting “Conspiracy Theorists” into Dead-Ends

The Unresolved Phylogenetic Analysis Puzzle

Understanding the Most Important World Event in Three Generations

Waging Biological Warfare

Confronting Covid Crimestop

Challenging America's Lords of Illusion

Jeffrey Sachs as Righteous Rogue Elephant

The Alt-Covid Community Begins Unraveling the Origins of Covid

Secret Intelligence Leaks vs. Basic Common Sense

Historical Examples

Covid Origins Leaks

The Forgotten Anthrax Attacks

Introduction

Based upon excess death totals, the Covid epidemic has probably killed more than 20 million people worldwide , and also greatly disrupted the lives of many billions more. For these reasons, it probably already ranks as the most important global event since World War II, with an impact easily exceeding the collapse of the Soviet Union or the 9/11 Attacks and the Middle Eastern wars they unleashed.

Since April 2020 I have published a long series of articles arguing the the global Covid outbreak was the result of blowback from a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), and I have been almost unique in publicly taking this extremely controversial position. I have also placed it within the context of the hidden history of America's longstanding biological warfare programs.

Although the articles make a lengthy and detailed case for my remarkable claims, some of the most striking evidence may easily be summarized in just the following few paragraphs, extracted from these much longer works:

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.

I have also presented my analysis in several video interviews from February 2022 that effectively summarize much of this information and together have been viewed many hundreds of thousands of times on Rumble.

Kevin Barrett, FFWN • February 16, 2022 • 15m

Geopolitics & Empire • February 1, 2022 • 75m

Red Ice TV • February 3, 2022 • 130m

Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?

The Unz Review • April 21, 2020 • 7,400 Words

America Devastated by “the China Virus”

Nearly 30,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus during the last two weeks, and by some estimates this is a substantial under-count, while the death-toll continues to rapidly mount.  Meanwhile, measures to control the spread of this deadly infection have already cost 22 million Americans their jobs, an unprecedented economic collapse that has pushed our unemployment rates to Great Depression levels.  Our country is facing a crisis as grave as almost any in our national history.

For many weeks President Donald Trump and his political allies had regularly dismissed or minimized this terrible health threat, and suddenly now faced with such a manifest disaster, they have naturally begun seeking other culprits to blame.

The obvious choice is China, where the global epidemic first began in late 2019.  Over the last week or two our media has been increasingly filled with accusations that the dishonesty and incompetence of the Chinese government played a major role in producing our own health catastrophe.

Even more serious charges are also being raised, with senior government officials informing the media that they suspect that the Covid-19 virus was developed in a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan and then carelessly released upon a vulnerable world.  Such “conspiracy theories” were once confined to the extreme political fringe of the Internet, but they are now found in the respectable pages of my morning New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Whether plausible or not, such accusations carry the gravest international implications, and there are growing demands that China should financially compensate our country for its trillions of dollars in economic losses.  A new global Cold War along both political and economic lines may soon be at hand.

Media Coverage of Previous Chinese-American Clashes

I have no personal expertise in biowarfare technology, nor access to the secret American intelligence reports that seem to have been taken seriously by our most elite national newspapers.  But I do think that a careful exploration of previous Sino-American clashes over the last couple of decades may provide some useful insight into the relative credibility of those two governments as well as that of our own media.

During the late 1990s, America seemed to reach the peak of its global power and prosperity, basking in the aftermath of our historic victory in the long Cold War, while ordinary Americans greatly benefited from the record-long economic expansion of that decade.  A huge Tech Boom was at its height, and Islamic terrorism seemed a vague and distant thing, almost entirely confined to Hollywood movies.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the possibility of large scale warfare seemed to have dissipated so political leaders boasted of the “peace dividend” that citizens were starting to enjoy as our huge military forces, built up over nearly a half-century, were downsized amid sweeping cuts to the bloated defense budget.  America was finally returning to a regular peacetime economy, with the benefits apparent to everyone.

At the time, I was overwhelmingly focused upon domestic political issues, so I only paid slight attention to our one small military operation of that period, the 1999 NATO air war against Serbia, intended to safeguard the Kosovo Albanians from ethnic cleansing and massacre, a Clinton Administration project that I fully endorsed.

Although our limited bombing campaign seemed quite successful and soon forced the Serbs to the bargaining table, the short war did include one very embarrassing mishap.  The use of old maps had led to a targeting error that caused one of our smart bombs to accidentally strike the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three members of its delegation and wounding dozens more.  The Chinese were outraged by this incident, and their propaganda organs began claiming that the attack had been deliberate, a reckless accusation that obviously made no logical sense.

In those days I watched the PBS Newshour every night, and was I shocked to see their U.S. Ambassador raise those absurd charges with host Jim Lehrer, whose disbelief matched my own.  But when I considered that the Chinese government was still stubbornly denying the reality of its massacre of the protesting students in Tiananmen Square a decade earlier, I concluded that unreasonable behavior by PRC officials was only to be expected.  Indeed, there was even some speculation that China was cynically milking the unfortunate accident for domestic reasons, hoping to stoke the sort of jingoist anti-Americanism among the Chinese people that would finally help bind the social wounds of that past 1989 outrage.

Such at least were my thoughts on that matter more than two decades ago.  But in the years that followed, my understanding of the world and of many pivotal events of modern history underwent the sweeping transformations that I have described in my American Pravda series.  And some of my 1990s assumptions were among them.

Consider, for example, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which every June 4th still evokes an annual wave of harsh condemnations in the news and opinion pages of our leading national newspapers.  I had never originally doubted those facts, but a year or two ago I happened to come across a short article by journalist Jay Matthews entitled  “The Myth of Tiananmen” that completely upended that apparent reality.

According to Matthews the infamous massacre had likely never happened, but was merely a media artifact produced by confused Western reporters and dishonest propaganda, a mistaken belief that had quickly become embedded in our standard media storyline, endlessly repeated by so many ignorant journalists that they all eventually believed it to be true.  Instead, as near as could be determined, the protesting students had all left Tiananmen Square peacefully, just as the Chinese government had always maintained.  Indeed, leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post had occasionally acknowledged these facts over the years, but usually buried those scanty admissions so deep in their stories that few had ever noticed.  Meanwhile, the bulk of the mainstream media had fallen for an apparent hoax.

Matthews himself had been the Beijing Bureau Chief of the Washington Post, personally covering the protests at the time, and his article appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, our most prestigious venue for media criticism.  This authoritative analysis containing such explosive conclusions was first published in 1998, and I find it difficult to believe that many reporters or editors covering China have remained ignorant of this information, yet the impact has been absolutely nil.  For over twenty years virtually every mainstream media account I have read has continued to promote the Tiananmen Square Massacre Hoax, usually implicitly but sometimes explicitly.

Even more remarkable were the discoveries I made regarding our supposedly accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in 1999.  Not long after launching this website, I added former Asia Times contributor Peter Lee as a columnist, incorporating his China Matters blogsite archives that stretched back for a decade.  He soon published a 7,000 word article on the Belgrade Embassy bombing, representing a compilation of material already contained in a half-dozen previous pieces he’d written on that subject from 2007 onward.  To my considerable surprise, he provided a great deal of persuasive evidence that the American attack on the Chinese embassy had indeed been deliberate, just as China had always maintained.

According to Lee, Beijing had allowed its embassy to be used as a site for secure radio transmission facilities by the Serbian military, whose own communications network was a primary target of NATO airstrikes.  Meanwhile, Serbian air defenses had shot down an advanced American F-117A fighter, whose top-secret stealth technology was a crucial U.S. military secret.  Portions of that enormously valuable wreckage were carefully gathered by the grateful Serbs, who delivered the material to the Chinese for temporary storage at their embassy prior to transport back home.  This vital technological acquisition later allowed China to deploy its own J20 stealth fighter in early 2011, many years sooner than American military analysts had believed possible.

Based upon this analysis, Lee argued that the Chinese embassy was attacked in order to destroy the Serbian retransmission facilities located there, while punishing the Chinese for allowing such use.  There were also widespread rumors in China that another motive had been an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the stealth debris stored within.  Later Congressional testimony revealed that the among all the hundreds of NATO airstrikes, the attack on the Chinese embassy was the only one directly ordered by the CIA, a highly-suspicious detail.

I was only slightly familiar with Lee’s work, and under normal circumstances I would have been very cautious in accepting his remarkable claims against the contrary position universally held by all our own elite media outlets.  But the sources he cited completely shifted that balance.

Although the American media dominates the English-language world, many British publications also possess a strong global reputation, and since they are often much less in thrall to our own national security state, they have sometimes covered important stories that were ignored here.  And in this case, the Sunday Observer published a remarkable expose in October 1999, citing several NATO military and intelligence sources who fully confirmed the deliberate nature of the American bombing of the Chinese embassy, with a US colonel even reportedly boasting that their smartbomb had hit the exact room intended.

This important story was immediately summarized in the Guardian, a sister publication, and also covered by the rival Times of London and many of the world’s other most prestigious publications, but encountered an absolute wall of silence in our own country.  Such a bizarre divergence on a story of global strategic importance—a deliberate and deadly US attack against Chinese diplomatic territory—drew the attention of FAIR, a leading American media watchdog group, which published an initial critique and a subsequent follow-up. These two pieces totaled some 3,000 words, and effectively summarized both the overwhelming evidence of the facts and also the heavy international coverage, while reporting the weak excuses made by top American editors to explain their continuing silence.  Based upon these articles, I consider the matter settled.

Few Americans remember our 1999 attack upon the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and if not for the annual waving of a bloody June 4th flag by our ignorant and disingenuous media, the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” would also have long since faded from memory.  Neither of these events has much direct importance today, at least for our own citizens.  But the broader media implications of these examples do seem quite significant.

These incidents represented two of the most serious flashpoints between the Chinese and American governments during the last thirty-odd years.  In both cases the claims of the Chinese government were entirely correct, although they were denied by our own top political leaders and dismissed or ridiculed by virtually our entire mainstream media.  Moreover, within a few months or a year the true facts became known to many journalists, even being reported in fully respectable venues.  But that reality was still completely ignored and suppressed for decades, so that today almost no American whose information comes from our regular media would even be aware of it.  Indeed, since many younger journalists draw their knowledge of the world from these same elite media sources, I suspect that many of them have never learned what their predecessors knew but dared not mention.

Most leading Chinese media outlets are owned or controlled by the Chinese government, and they tend to broadly follow the government line.  Leading American media outlets have a corporate ownership structure and often boast of their fierce independence; but on many crucial matters, I think the actual reality is not so very different from that in China.

I tend to doubt that Chinese leaders have any overwhelming commitment to the truth, and the reasons for their greater veracity are probably practical ones.  American news and entertainment completely dominate the global media landscape and they face no significant domestic rival.  So China recognizes that it is vastly outmatched in any propaganda conflict, and as the far weaker party must necessarily try to stick closer to the truth, lest its lies be immediately exposed.  Meanwhile, America’s overwhelming control over global information may inspire considerable hubris, with the government sometimes promoting the most outrageous and ridiculous falsehoods in the confident belief that a supportive American media will provide cover for any mistakes.

These considerations should be kept in mind as we attempt to sift the accounts of our often unreliable and dishonest media in hopes of extracting the true circumstances of the current coronavirus epidemic. Unlike careful historical studies, we are working in real-time and our analysis is greatly hindered by the ongoing fog of war, so that any conclusions are necessarily very preliminary ones.  But given the high stakes, such an attempt seems warranted.

The Sudden Covid-19 Outbreak in Wuhan

When my morning newspapers first began mentioning the appearance of a mysterious new illness in China during mid-January, I paid little attention, absorbed as I was in the aftermath of our sudden assassination of Iran’s top military leader and the dangerous possibility of a yet another Middle Eastern war.  But the reports persisted and grew, with deaths occurring and evidence growing that the viral disease could be transmitted between humans.  China’s early conventional efforts seemed unsuccessful in halting the spread of the disease.

Then on Jan. 23rd and after only 17 deaths, the Chinese government took the astonishing step of locking down and quarantining the entire 11 million inhabitants of the city of Wuhan, a story that drew worldwide attention.  They soon extended this policy to the 60 million Chinese of Hubei province, and not longer afterward shut down their entire national economy and confined 700 million Chinese to their homes, a public health measure probably a thousand times larger than anything previously undertaken in human history.  So either China’s leadership had suddenly gone insane, or they regarded this new virus as an absolutely deadly national threat, one that needed to be controlled at any possible cost.

Given these dramatic Chinese actions and the international headlines that they generated, the current accusations by Trump Administration officials that China had attempted to minimize or conceal the serious nature of the disease outbreak are so ludicrous as to defy rationality.  In any event, the record shows that on December 31st, the Chinese had already alerted the World Health Organization to the strange new illness, and Chinese scientists published the entire genome of the virus on Jan. 12th, allowing diagnostic tests to be produced worldwide.

Unlike other nations, China had received no advance warning of the nature or existence of the deadly new disease, and therefore faced unique obstacles.  But their government implemented public health control measures unprecedented in the history of the world and managed to almost completely eradicate the virus with merely the loss of a few thousand lives.  Meanwhile, many other Western countries such as the US, Italy, Spain, France, and Britain dawdled for months and ignored the potential threat, and have now suffered well over 100,000 dead as a consequence, with the toll still rapidly mounting.  For any of these nations or their media organs to criticize China for its ineffectiveness or slow response represents an absolute inversion of reality.

Some governments took full advantage of the early warning and scientific information provided by China.  Although nearby East Asian nations such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore had been at greatest risk and were among the first infected, their competent and energetic responses allowed them to almost completely suppress any major outbreak, and they have suffered minimal fatalities.  But America and several European countries avoided adopting these same early measures such as widespread testing, quarantine, and contact-tracing, and have paid a terrible price for their insouciance.

A few weeks ago British Prime Minister Boris Johnson boldly declared that his own disease strategy for Britain was based upon rapidly achieving “herd immunity”—essentially encouraging the bulk of his citizens to become infected—then quickly backed away after his desperate advisors recognized that the result might entail a million or more British deaths.

By any reasonable measure, the response to this global health crisis by China and most East Asian countries has been absolutely exemplary, while that of many Western countries has been equally disastrous.  Maintaining reasonable public health has been a basic function of governments since the days of the Sumerian city-states, and the sheer and total incompetence of America and most of its European vassals has been breathtaking.  If the Western media attempts to pretend otherwise, it will permanently forfeit whatever remaining international credibility it still possesses.

American Accusations of a Chinese Lab-Leak

I do not think these particular facts are much disputed except among the most blinkered partisans, and the Trump Administration probably recognizes the hopelessness of arguing otherwise.  This may explain its recent shift towards a far more explosive and controversial narrative, namely claiming that Covid-19 may have been the product of Chinese research into deadly viruses at a Wuhan laboratory, which suggests that the blood of hundreds of thousands or millions of victims around the world will be on Chinese hands.  Dramatic accusations backed by overwhelming international media power may deeply resonate across the globe.

News reports appearing in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have been reasonably consistent.  Senior Trump Administration officials have pointed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading Chinese biolab, as the possible source of the infection, with the deadly virus having been accidentally released, subsequently spreading first throughout China and later worldwide.  Trump himself has publicly voiced similar suspicions, as did Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo in a FoxNews interview.  Private lawsuits against China in the multi-trillion-dollar range have already been filed by rightwing activists and Republican senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham have raised similar governmental demands.

I obviously have no personal access to the classified intelligence reports that have been the basis of these charges by Trump, Pompeo, and other top administration officials.  But in reading these recent news accounts, I noticed something rather odd.

Back in January, few Americans were paying much attention to the early reports of an unusual disease outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which was hardly a household name.  Instead, overwhelming political attention was focused on the battle over Trump’s impeachment and the aftermath of our dangerous military confrontation with Iran.  But towards the end of that month, I discovered that the fringes of the Internet were awash with claims that the disease was caused by a Chinese bioweapon accidentally released from that same Wuhan laboratory, with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and ZeroHedge, a popular right-wing conspiracy-website, playing leading roles in advancing the theory.  Indeed, the stories became so widespread in those ideological circles that Sen. Tom Cotton, a leading Republican Neocon, began promoting them on Twitter and FoxNews, thereby provoking an article in the NYT on those “fringe conspiracy theories.”

I suspect that it may be more than purely coincidental that the biowarfare theories which erupted in such concerted fashion on small political websites and Social Media accounts back in January so closely match those now publicly advocated by top Trump Administration officials and supposedly based upon our most secure intelligence sources.  Perhaps a few intrepid citizen-activists managed to replicate the findings of our multi-billion-dollar intelligence apparatus, and did so in days while the latter required weeks or months.  But a more likely scenario is that the wave of January speculation was driven by private leaks and “guidance” provided by exactly the same elements that today are very publicly leveling similar charges in the elite media.  Initially promoting controversial theories in less mainstream outlets has long been a fairly standard intelligence practice.

Regardless of the origins of the idea, does it seem plausible that the coronavirus outbreak might have originated as an accidental leak from that Chinese laboratory?  I am not privy to the security procedures of Chinese government facilities, but applying a little common sense may shed some light on that question.

Although the coronavirus is only moderately lethal, apparently having a fatality rate of 1% or less, it is extremely contagious, including during an extended pre-symptomatic period and also among asymptomatic carriers.  Thus, portions of the US and Europe are now suffering heavy casualties, while the policies adopted to control the spread have devastated their national economies.  Although the virus is unlikely to kill more than a small sliver of our population, we have seen to our dismay how a major outbreak can so easily wreck our entire economic life.

During January, the journalists reporting on China’s mushrooming health crisis regularly emphasized that the mysterious new viral outbreak had occurred at the worst possible place and time, appearing in the major transport hub of Wuhan just prior to the Lunar New Year holiday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese would normally travel to their distant family homes for the celebration, thereby potentially spreading the disease to all parts of the country and producing a permanent, uncontrollable epidemic.  The Chinese government avoided that grim fate by the unprecedented decision to shut down its entire national economy and confine 700 million Chinese to their own homes for many weeks.  But the outcome seems to have been a very near thing, and if Wuhan had remained open for just a few days longer, China might easily have suffered long-term economic and social devastation.

The timing of an accidental laboratory release would obviously be entirely random.  Yet the outbreak seems to have begun during the precise period of time most likely to damage China, the worst possible ten-day or perhaps thirty-day window.  As I noted in January, I saw no solid evidence that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, but if it were, the timing of the release seemed very unlikely to have been accidental.

Initial Suspicions of an American Biowarfare 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 Words

For 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.

These were the thoughts that entered my mind during the last week of January once I discovered the widely circulating theories suggesting that China’s massive disease epidemic had been the self-inflicted consequence of its own biowarfare research.  I saw no solid evidence that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, but if it were, China was surely the innocent victim of the attack, presumably carried out by elements of the American national security establishment.

Soon afterward, someone brought to my attention a very long article by an American ex-pat living in China who called himself “Metallicman” and held a wide range of eccentric and implausible beliefs. I have long recognized that flawed individuals can often serve as the vessels of important information otherwise unavailable, and this case constituted a perfect example.  His piece denounced the outbreak as a likely American biowarfare attack, and provided a great wealth of factual material I had not previously considered.  Since he authorized republication elsewhere I did so, and his 15,000 word analysis, although somewhat raw and unpolished, began attracting an enormous amount of readership on our website, probably being one of the very first English-language pieces to suggest that the mysterious new disease was an American bioweapon.  Many of his arguments appeared doubtful to me or have been obviated by later developments, but several seemed quite telling.

He pointed out that during the previous two years, the Chinese economy had already suffered serious blows from other mysterious new diseases, although these had targeted farm animals rather than people.  During 2018 a new Avian Flu virus had swept the country, eliminating large portions of China’s poultry industry, and during 2019 the Swine Flu viral epidemic had devastated China’s pig farms, destroying 40% of the nation’s primary domestic source of meat, with widespread claims that the latter disease was being spread by mysterious small drones.  My morning newspapers had hardly ignored these important business stories, noting that the sudden collapse of much of China’s domestic food production might prove a huge boon to American farm exports at the height of our trade conflict, but I had never considered the obvious implications.  So for three years in a row, China had been severely impacted by strange new viral diseases, though only the most recent had been deadly to humans.  This evidence was merely circumstantial, but the pattern seemed highly suspicious.

The writer also noted that shortly before the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, that city had hosted 300 visiting American military officers, who came to participate in the 2019 Military World Games, an absolutely remarkable coincidence of timing.  As I pointed out at the time, how would Americans react if 300 Chinese military officers had paid an extended visit to Chicago, and soon afterward a mysterious and deadly epidemic had suddenly broken out in that city?  Once again, the evidence was merely circumstantial but certainly raised dark suspicions.

Scientific investigation of the coronavirus had already pointed to its origins in a bat virus, leading to widespread media speculation that bats sold as food in the Wuhan open markets had been the original disease vector.  Meanwhile, the orchestrated waves of anti-China accusations had emphasized Chinese laboratory research on that same viral source.  But we soon published a lengthy article by investigative journalist Whitney Webb providing copious evidence of America’s own enormous biowarfare research efforts, which had similarly focused for years on bat viruses.  Webb was then associated with MintPress News, but that publication had strangely declined to publish her important piece, perhaps skittish about the grave suspicions it directed towards the US government on so momentous an issue.  So without the benefit of our platform, her major contribution to the public debate might have attracted relatively little readership.

Around the same time, I noted another extremely strange coincidence that failed to attract any interest from our somnolent national media.  Although his name had meant nothing to me, in late January my morning newspapers carried major stories on the sudden arrest of Prof. Charles Lieber, one of Harvard University’s top scientists and Chairman of its Chemistry Department, sometimes characterized as a potential future Nobel Laureate.

The circumstances of that case seemed utterly bizarre to me.  Like numerous other prominent American academics, Lieber had had decades of close research ties with China, holding joint appointments and receiving substantial funding for his work.  But now he was accused of financial reporting violations in the disclosure portions of his government grant applications—the most obscure sort of offense—and on the basis of those accusations, he was seized by the FBI in an early-morning raid on his suburban Lexington home and dragged off in shackles, potentially facing years of federal imprisonment.

Such government action against an academic seemed almost without precedent.  During the height of the Cold War, numerous American scientists and technicians were rightfully accused of having stolen our nuclear weapons secrets for delivery to Stalin, yet I had never heard of any of them treated in so harsh a manner, let alone a scholar of Prof. Lieber’s stature, who was merely charged with technical disclosure violations.  Indeed, this incident recalled accounts of NKVD raids during the Soviet purges of the 1930s.

Although Lieber was described as a chemistry professor, a few seconds of Googling revealed that some of his most important work had been in virology, including technology for the detection of viruses.  So a massive and deadly new viral epidemic had broken out in China and almost simultaneously, a top American scholar with close Chinese ties and expertise in viruses was suddenly arrested by the federal government, yet no one in the media expressed any curiosity at a possible connection between these two events.

I think we can safely assume that Lieber’s arrest by the FBI had been prompted by the concurrent coronavirus epidemic, but anything more is mere speculation. Those now accusing China of having created the coronavirus might surely suggest that our intelligence agencies discovered that the Harvard professor had been personally involved with that deadly research.  But I think a far more likely possibility is that Lieber began to wonder whether the epidemic in China might not be the result of an American biowarfare attack, and was perhaps a little too free in voicing his suspicions, thereby drawing the wrath of our national security establishment.  Inflicting such extremely harsh treatment upon a top Harvard scientist would greatly intimidate all of his lesser colleagues elsewhere, who would surely now think twice before broaching certain controversial theories to any journalist.

Growing Evidence of American Responsibility

By the end of January, our webzine had published a dozen articles and posts on the coronavirus outbreak, then added many more by the middle of February.  These pieces totaled tens of thousands of words and attracted a half million words of comments, probably representing the primary English-language source for a particular perspective on the deadly epidemic, with this material eventually drawing many hundreds of thousands of pageviews.  A few weeks later, the Chinese government began gingerly raising the possibility that the coronavirus may have been brought to Wuhan by the 300 American military officers visiting that city, and was fiercely attacked by the Trump Administration for spreading anti-American propaganda.  But I strongly suspect that the Chinese had gotten that idea from our own publication.

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 hatred 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?

Biological warfare is a highly technical subject, and those possessing such expertise are unlikely to candidly report their classified research activities in the pages of our major newspapers, perhaps even less so after Prof. Lieber was dragged off to prison in chains.  My own knowledge is nil.  But in mid-March I came across several extremely long and detailed comments on the coronavirus outbreak that had been posted on a small website by an individual calling himself “OldMicrobiologist” and who claimed to be a retired forty-year veteran of American biodefense.  The style and details of his material struck me as quite credible, and after a little further investigation I concluded that there was a high likelihood his background was exactly as he had described.  I made arrangements to republish his comments in the form of a 3,400 word article, which soon attracted a great deal of traffic and 80,000 words of further comments.

Although the writer emphasized the lack of any hard evidence, he said that his experience led him to strongly suspect that the coronavirus outbreak was indeed an American biowarfare attack against China, probably carried out by agents brought into that country under cover of the Military Games held at Wuhan in late October, the sort of sabotage operation our intelligence agencies had sometimes undertaken elsewhere.  One important point he made was that high lethality was often counter-productive in a bioweapon since debilitating or hospitalizing large numbers of individuals may impose far greater economic costs on a country than a biological agent which simply inflicts an equal number of deaths.  In his words “a high communicability, low lethality disease is perfect for ruining an economy,” suggesting that the apparent characteristics of the coronavirus were close to optimal in this regard.  Those so interested should read his analysis and assess for themselves his credibility and persuasiveness.

- Was Coronavirus a Biowarfare Attack Against China?

OldMicrobiologist • March 13, 2020 • 3,400 Words

One intriguing aspect of the situation was that almost from the first moment that reports of the strange new epidemic in China reached the international media, a large and orchestrated campaign had been launched on numerous websites and Social Media platforms to identify the cause as a Chinese bioweapon carelessly released in its own country. Meanwhile, the far more plausible hypothesis that China was the victim rather than the perpetrator had received virtually no organized support anywhere, and only began to take shape as I gradually located and republished relevant material, usually drawn from very obscure quarters and often anonymously authored.  So it seemed that only the side hostile to China was waging an active information war.  The outbreak of the disease and the nearly simultaneous launch of such a major propaganda campaign may not necessarily prove that an actual biowarfare attack had occurred, but I do think it tends to support such a theory.

When considering the hypothesis of an American biowarfare attack, certain natural objections come to mind.  The major drawback to biological warfare has always been the obvious fact that the self-replicating agents employed will not respect national borders, thus raising the serious risk that the disease might eventually return to the land of its origin and inflict substantial casualties.  For this reason, it seems very doubtful that any rational and half-competent  American leadership would have unleashed the coronavirus against China.

But as we see absolutely demonstrated in our daily news headlines, America’s current government is grotesquely and manifestly incompetent, more incompetent than one could almost possibly imagine, with tens of thousands of Americans having now already paid with their lives for such extreme incompetence.  Rationality and competence are obviously nowhere to be found among the Deep State Neocons that President Donald Trump has appointed to so many crucial positions throughout our national security apparatus.

Moreover, the extremely lackadaisical notion that a massive coronavirus outbreak in China would never spread back to America might have seemed plausible to individuals who carelessly assumed that past historical analogies would continue to apply.  As I wrote a few weeks ago:

Reasonable people have suggested that if the coronavirus was a bioweapon deployed by elements of the American national security apparatus against China (and Iran), it’s difficult to imagine why the they didn’t assume it would naturally leak back in the US and start a huge pandemic here, as is currently happening.

The most obvious answer is that they were stupid and incompetent, but here’s another point to consider …

In late 2002 there was the outbreak of SARS in China, a related virus but that was far more deadly and somewhat different in other characteristics. The virus killed hundreds of Chinese and spread into a few other countries before it was controlled and stamped out. The impact on the US and Europe was negligible, with just a small scattering of cases and only a death or two.

So if American biowarfare analysts were considering a coronavirus attack against China, isn’t it quite possible they would have said to themselves that since SARS never significantly leaked back into the US or Europe, we’d similarly remain insulated from the coronavirus? Obviously, such an analysis was foolish and mistaken, but would it have seemed so implausible at the time?

Apparent Proof of American Foreknowledge

As some must have surely noticed, I have deliberately avoided investigating any of the scientific details of the coronavirus.  In principle, an objective and accurate analysis of the characteristics and structure of the virus might help suggest whether it was entirely natural or rather the product of a research laboratory, and in the latter case, perhaps whether the likely source was China, America, or some third country.

But we are dealing with a cataclysmic world event and those questions obviously have enormous political ramifications, so the entire subject is shrouded by a thick fog of complex propaganda, with numerous conflicting claims being advanced by interested parties. I have no background in microbiology let alone biological warfare, so I would be hopelessly adrift in evaluating such conflicting scientific and technical claims.  I suspect that this is equally true of the overwhelming majority of other observers as well, although committed partisans are loathe to admit that fact, and will eagerly seize upon any scientific argument that supports their preferred position while rejecting those that contradict it.

Therefore, by necessity, my own focus is on evidence that can at least be understood by every layman, if not necessarily always accepted. And I believe that the simple juxtaposition of several recent disclosures in the mainstream media leads to a rather telling conclusion.

For obvious reasons, the Trump Administration has become very eager to emphasize the early missteps and delays in the Chinese reaction to the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and has presumably encouraged our media outlets to direct their focus in that direction.

As an example of this, the Associated Press Investigative Unit recently published a rather detailed analysis of those early events purportedly based upon confidential Chinese documents.  Provocatively entitled “China Didn’t Warn Public of Likely Pandemic for 6 Key Days”, the piece was widely distributed, running in abridged form in the NYT and elsewhere.  According to this reconstruction, the Chinese government first became aware of the seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan. 14th, but delayed taking any major action until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the number of infections greatly multiplied.

Last month, a team of five WSJ reporters produced a very detailed and thorough 4,400 word analysis of the same period, and the NYT has published a helpful timeline of those early events as well.  Although there may be some differences of emphasis or minor disagreements, all these American media sources agree that Chinese officials first became aware of the serious viral outbreak in Wuhan in early to mid-January, with the first known death occurring on Jan. 11th, and finally implemented major new public health measures later that same month.  No one has apparently disputed these basic facts.

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.

Back in February, before a single American had died from the disease, I wrote my own overview of the possible course of events, and I would still stand by it today:

Consider a particularly ironic outcome of this situation, not particularly likely but certainly possible …

Everyone knows that America’s ruling elites are criminal, crazy, and also extremely incompetent.

So perhaps the coronavirus outbreak was indeed a deliberate biowarfare attack against China, hitting that nation just before Lunar New Year, the worst possible time to produce a permanent nationwide pandemic. However, the PRC responded with remarkable speed and efficiency, implementing by far the largest quarantine in human history, and the deadly disease now seems to be in decline there.

Meanwhile, the disease naturally leaks back into the US, and despite all the advance warning, our totally incompetent government mismanages the situation, producing a huge national health disaster, and the collapse of our economy and decrepit political system.

As I said, not particularly likely, but certainly a very fitting end to the American Empire …

Covid-19, Its Impact and Origins After One Year

As We Rapidly Approach a Million American Deaths

The Unz Review • March 15, 2021 • 8,700 Words

More Than a Million Dead Americans?

Winston Churchill famously observed that in wartime the truth must be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies. Many of my own long and most controversial articles have followed a somewhat analogous presentation, with the opening sections that sometimes run hundreds of words or longer often being rather innocuous or even somewhat off-topic. These are intended to serve as a bland or sugar-coated introduction to the far more dangerous material that then follows, which might otherwise tend to alarm and deter the casual reader if introduced too quickly.

Although I think this approach has its benefits, there are disadvantages as well. An unknown number of casual or busy readers may abandon the piece at that early stage, finding it too uninteresting to continue through to the more explosive elements. So there is probably value in extracting and highlighting some of the latter for a different sort of audience, and this may be especially true with regard to the current Covid-19 outbreak in America, which recently marked its first anniversary.

Almost exactly one year ago on March 16th, 2020, the local public health officers of the San Francisco Bay region, including Dr. Sarah Cody of my own Santa Clara County, suddenly imposed a sweeping lockdown order upon their nearly seven million residents, a government action unprecedented in American history. At that point, our country had suffered perhaps a dozen recorded deaths, and relatively little public attention had been focused on the growing danger. But experts believed that the virus was rapidly and invisibly spreading, and this dramatic Bay Area decision was quickly copied elsewhere, first in Los Angeles, then throughout the entire state of California, and soon afterward in other large states such as New York and Illinois. A temporary lockdown of three weeks was gradually extended to several months, with masking and social-distancing suddenly becoming a major part of everyday life throughout much of our country.

Not long afterward, federal health officials released a shocking warning that the new disease might eventually claim as many as 100,000 to 240,000 American lives. For over a century, nothing like that had ever happened in our country and with existing deaths still merely numbering in the dozens, these gigantic “worst case” estimates were ridiculed by various ideological camps and disbelieving individuals as absurdly inflated and alarmist. Yet today the official Covid-19 death toll stands at around 550,000, a figure more than twice as high as the upper bound of that supposedly exaggerated projection.

From the very beginning, “Covid Skeptics” have fiercely disputed such official totals. They have noted the considerable confusion between “dying from Covid-19” and “dying with Covid-19,” plausibly arguing that such postmortem diagnoses are often ambiguous, with many deaths of infected individuals having primarily been due to other factors. But it also seems quite likely that many Covid-19 deaths may not have been officially recorded as such. Given such problems of both over-counting and under-counting, the most reliable metric would be the total number of “excess deaths,” those above and beyond the normal figure for a given period. But considering these much more solid estimates for the actual death toll suffered during our current epidemic actually reveals a picture far worse than those official numbers.

Two months ago a large team of nearly a dozen Wall Street Journal reporters published a 2,000 word article entitled “The Covid-19 Death Toll Is Even Worse Than It Looks” which carefully analyzed the worldwide losses, finding that the CDC figures for total deaths during the first 11 months of 2020 suggested some grim conclusions:

In the U.S. alone, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show more than 475,000 excess deaths through early December, a time frame that also included about 281,000 deaths linked to Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The pandemic led U.S. deaths to climb at least 10% last year. Typically U.S. deaths grow about 1.6% a year as the population grows and ages.

Since that date, our official count of Covid-19 fatalities has nearly doubled, so if the same ratio of “excess” deaths has remained unchanged, well over 900,000 Americans have now died as a consequence of the epidemic. I have seen other estimates that are significantly lower, but even these still indicate that we have suffered nearly 800,000 additional deaths during the first twelve months of the disease outbreak, amounting to the greatest loss of life in American national history, far surpassing the combined total of all our foreign wars, and even exceeding the four bloody years of our Civil War, though admittedly relative to a much larger population base.

Moreover, the sluggish implementation of our national vaccination program ensures that these totals will continue to climb throughout much of the remaining year and are almost certain to break the million mark. Last spring, predictions that more than a million Americans would die despite our unprecedented disease control efforts might have been dismissed as total lunacy, but such numbers are now on the verge of becoming our actual reality. We should hardly be surprised that the CDC has estimated that by mid-2020 American life-expectancies had already dropped by a full year, their greatest decline since World War II.

A leading data website provides a convenient graph of the monthly mortality figures:

Credit: Our World in Data

The public health measures implemented to control this severe epidemic have remained controversial in various political quarters, and I have become somewhat agnostic regarding the relative impact of the different policies such as lockdowns, masking, and social-distancing. Indeed, a very long and comprehensive recent analysis argues that lockdowns—at least the rather intermittent and half-hearted ones used throughout the West—have had little impact upon ultimate deaths. But it seems almost undeniable that without some combination of these various approaches, our national death toll would have been far worse.

I am equally ignorant of the competing merits of the different types of vaccines that have been rushed into production to control the illness, but without such vaccines, the bulk of our entire population would surely become infected over the next year or more. Although the impact of the disease is very sharply age-skewed—with the death rate of those over 60 being more than a hundred times higher than those under 40—the overwhelming majority of studies have indicated an average community fatality rate of around 0.5% to 1.0%. So simple arithmetic indicates the vast human consequences of achieving unvaccinated “herd immunity” in our population of 330 million.

Even leaving aside our huge American death toll, the social and economic consequences of the Covid-19 outbreak have been enormous, certainly constituting the most momentous event in our national history since the Great Depression or World War II, perhaps even since the Civil War. We are likely living through one of those massive “discontinuities” that will eventually divide one section of a thick American history textbook from the next. And the impact upon many other countries around the world has been equally substantial.

What Did the Chinese Know and When Did They Know It?

According to the widely accepted conventional narrative, the original Covid-19 outbreak began during late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Given the catastrophic consequences both for America and the entire world, our leading media organs and their teams of investigative journalists have naturally made every effort over the last year to establish the exact chronology of those crucial early days, also prompted by the sometimes reckless accusations of the Trump Administration and its political allies. As I previously wrote in April 2020:

For obvious reasons, the Trump Administration has become very eager to emphasize the early missteps and delays in the Chinese reaction to the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and has presumably encouraged our media outlets to direct their focus in that direction.

As an example of this, the Associated Press Investigative Unit recently published a rather detailed analysis of those early events purportedly based upon confidential Chinese documents. Provocatively entitled “China Didn’t Warn Public of Likely Pandemic for 6 Key Days”, the piece was widely distributed, running in abridged form in the NYT and elsewhere. According to this reconstruction, the Chinese government first became aware of the seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan. 14th, but delayed taking any major action until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the number of infections greatly multiplied.

Last month, a team of five WSJ reporters produced a very detailed and thorough 4,400 word analysis of the same period, and the NYT has published a helpful timeline of those early events as well. Although there may be some differences of emphasis or minor disagreements, all these American media sources agree that Chinese officials first became aware of the serious viral outbreak in Wuhan in early to mid-January, with the first known death occurring on Jan. 11th, and finally implemented major new public health measures later that same month. No one has apparently disputed these basic facts.

The WSJ continued to devote considerable investigative resources to this same issue, and in August 2020, a team of several journalists published a further report focusing upon these same developments in China, which I summarized soon afterward:

Numerous publications have documented America’s severe mistakes in combating the disease, but this 4,500 word WSJ report focused upon the serious mishandling of the original outbreak by Chinese authorities.

The article revealed that top public health officials at China’s Center for Disease Control only became aware of the situation on December 30th, when they learned that at least 25 suspected cases of a mysterious illness had already occurred in Wuhan during that month. But as the writers noted, the outbreak had certainly begun somewhat earlier:

Even a fully empowered China CDC would likely have missed the very first cases of the coronavirus, which probably began spreading around Wuhan in October or November, most likely in people who never showed symptoms, or did but never saw a doctor, researchers say.

But the most detailed and exhaustive analysis of the circumstances of the Wuhan outbreak appeared outside the traditional media, published last August and September in Quillette, a well-regarded independent webzine. The author was Philippe Lemoine, a Cornell graduate student originally from France, and his remarkable four-part 31,000 word analysis remains the definitive work on the subject:

- The China Syndrome Part I: Outbreak

- The China Syndrome Part II: Transmission and Response

- The China Syndrome Part III: Wet Markets and BioLabs

- The China Syndrome Part IV: Did China Fudge its Data?

Philippe Lemoine • Quillette • August 24-September 6, 2020 • 31,000 Words

The first two parts of Lemoine’s series exhaustively analyzed the widespread claims by the Trump Administration and its political allies that China had somehow attempted to “cover up” the initial viral outbreak in Wuhan, or unreasonably delayed reporting the crucial facts to the outside world. He seems to scrupulously follow proper scholarly methods, carefully evaluating the often conflicting sources and applying a good deal of logic and common sense. In some cases he draws clear conclusions, though more often he correctly settles for reasonable likelihoods rather than anything stronger. But the ultimate result of the investigation was his total demolition of the case made against China on these particular grounds.

Obviously, there were some inevitable delays in discovering and responding to the sudden outbreak of an entirely unknown and unsuspected viral disease, including serious bureaucratic missteps or political failures; but the same had been equally true of the American government’s reaction to our own Swine Flu epidemic back in 2009. He also notes that the American CDC has a financial budget 150 times larger than its Chinese counterpart, and a per capita staff 25 times greater; yet the subsequent American delays and errors in detecting and containing our own Covid-19 outbreak were far worse, despite our many weeks of advance warning.

Based upon these results there seems not the slightest legitimate grounds for our sharp criticism of China regarding its promptness in alerting the world to the new and dangerous disease that had erupted in one of its largest cities. The exhaustive subsequent research by Lemoine, the WSJ, and others has fully confirmed my original April 2020 verdict:

Then on Jan. 23rd and after only 17 deaths, the Chinese government took the astonishing step of locking down and quarantining the entire 11 million inhabitants of the city of Wuhan, a story that drew worldwide attention. They soon extended this policy to the 60 million Chinese of Hubei province, and not longer afterward shut down their entire national economy and confined 700 million Chinese to their homes, a public health measure probably a thousand times larger than anything previously undertaken in human history. So either China’s leadership had suddenly gone insane, or they regarded this new virus as an absolutely deadly national threat, one that needed to be controlled at any possible cost.

Given these dramatic Chinese actions and the international headlines that they generated, the current accusations by Trump Administration officials that China had attempted to minimize or conceal the serious nature of the disease outbreak are so ludicrous as to defy rationality. In any event, the record shows that on December 31st, the Chinese had already alerted the World Health Organization to the strange new illness, and Chinese scientists published the entire genome of the virus on Jan. 12th, allowing diagnostic tests to be produced worldwide.

Accusations of a Chinese Lab Leak

The claims that the Chinese had failed to warn the world in timely fashion of the deadly new threat became ubiquitous in American-influenced media, but the weakness of such blatant falsehoods soon led Trump partisans to begin promoting far more shocking claims. As I wrote last year:

I do not think these particular facts are much disputed except among the most blinkered partisans, and the Trump Administration probably recognizes the hopelessness of arguing otherwise. This may explain its recent shift towards a far more explosive and controversial narrative, namely claiming that Covid-19 may have been the product of Chinese research into deadly viruses at a Wuhan laboratory, which suggests that the blood of hundreds of thousands or millions of victims around the world will be on Chinese hands. Dramatic accusations backed by overwhelming international media power may deeply resonate across the globe.

News reports appearing in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have been reasonably consistent. Senior Trump Administration officials have pointed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading Chinese biolab, as the possible source of the infection, with the deadly virus having been accidentally released, subsequently spreading first throughout China and later worldwide. Trump himself has publicly voiced similar suspicions, as did Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo in a FoxNews interview. Private lawsuits against China in the multi-trillion-dollar range have already been filed by rightwing activists and Republican senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham have raised similar governmental demands.

Within a few weeks, these claims had already become strongly embedded within American public opinion:

According to a poll taken at the end of April, a remarkable 45% of Americans believed that the deadly virus had “probably” or “definitely” originated in such a laboratory, with 74% of Republicans having that belief.

Although soon pushed aside by more recent domestic political controversies, the Wuhan Lab Leak Hypothesis has hardly disappeared from prominent public discussion. Just a few days ago, the top of the Wall Street Journal opinion page carried a piece by its leading business columnist, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., entitled “Wuhan Lab Theory a Dark Cloud on China,” once again restating these widespread suspicions. A day earlier, a Washington Post columnist named Josh Rogin had decided to revive his previous allegations along similar lines.

Leading American media outlets had promoted these theories last year by citing government intelligence sources. In an interview, Trump himself had fingered the Wuhan lab as the source of the virus, a conclusion which Pompeo immediately claimed was supported by “enormous evidence.” Yet absolutely no such evidence was ever provided.

Indeed, oddly enough, these exact sorts of accusations had begun widely circulating in social media and corners of the Internet as early as January, beginning almost as soon as the new epidemic in Wuhan became a major source of world attention. These claims were afterward picked up and regurgitated by American outlets and pundits hostile to China, but over a full year later no substantial evidence has ever been presented. Thus, the most recent WSJ column relied merely upon innuendo and statements of suspicion without citing a single fact, an astonishing basis for such monumental accusations of Chinese culpability in more than 2.5 million worldwide deaths.

The obvious reason for such circumspection is that the actual case is extremely weak, almost non-existent. The third part of Lemoine’s Quillette series, appearing last September and running 8,000 words, almost completely demolished the purported evidence. As I wrote a week later:

In reading this analysis I was repeatedly struck by the extremely flimsy nature of the evidence being used to indict China. One of the most widely cited theories implicating the Wuhan lab was apparently based upon nothing more than unsubstantiated social media rumors, while a major article in National Review doctored its central quotes by leaving out sentences that completely changed their meaning. In recent years our media has fiercely ridiculed those lunatic conspiracy-mongers who claim that most of our mass-shootings have been media hoaxes perpetrated by “crisis actors” or that “nobody died at Sandy Hook.” But much of the main evidence pointing to Chinese culpability for the worldwide Covid-19 disaster appears just as vacuous.

Pro-Chinese Counter-Propaganda

However, absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence, and although there seems virtually no solid evidence for a Wuhan lab leak being the source of the epidemic, the scientific facility did specialize in bat viruses closely related to Covid-19, which has naturally raised reasonable suspicions even in the fair-minded. Lemoine may have effectively debunked a considerable assortment of extremely weak or even fraudulent claims, but this hardly disproves the controversial hypothesis.

Under these circumstances, we should not be surprised that China’s own committed partisans soon began promoting their own theories and counter-narratives, intended to firmly close the door to those Wuhan lab accusations. But in most cases, the arguments they advanced were even weaker or more ludicrous than those of their anti-China opponents, perhaps underscoring the generally poor quality of pro-Chinese propaganda.

One of the most widespread of these theories, which had begun circulating on the Internet by early March, was the suggestion that the Covid-19 virus had its origins outside of China, and had actually been present in the U.S. during much of 2019; the disease was then accidentally brought to Wuhan by American visitors, thereby producing the Chinese outbreak. Since anti-China accusations had pointed to the Wuhan lab as the likely source of the virus, China’s partisans often returned the favor, suggesting that the deadly infection had somehow escaped from Ft. Detrick, America’s premier biowarfare research facility. During summer 2019 America had seen a flurry of news stories about “vaping deaths” and these were cited as misdiagnosed Covid-19 fatalities, while Ft. Detrick’s temporary shutdown for a few months during the summer became proof of a laboratory leak.

However, this theory makes absolutely no logical sense. The single most crucial fact about Covid-19 is that the virus is extremely contagious under normal conditions, and once it has become established in a community, the number of infected individuals will tend to double every three to five days absent strong public health measures. Thus, the infection of a tiny handful of Americans in January or February had led to huge regional outbreaks by March and April, including many thousands of deaths, with overburdened hospitals containing scenes out of Dante’s Inferno. If any significant number of Americans had already become infected during late summer 2019, the gigantic resulting epidemic and huge death toll by the end of that year would have so dominated our news headlines that no one would have paid any attention to the international developments out of Wuhan.

Exactly the same argument applies to claims that a single wastewater sample revealed traces of the virus in Barcelona during March 2019. Lab tests do occasionally produce false-positives, and since no further sample was detected in that city during the eight months that followed, a one-time testing error seems the most logical explanation.

There does exist much more credible wastewater evidence that the virus was already present in Italy by December 2019 and that a Frenchman had also become infected by that date, somewhat earlier than previously had been believed. But the current assumption is that Patient Zero became infected in Wuhan during late October or early November, thereby providing a couple of months for the earliest virus carriers to have reached those other cities, which hardly seems impossible. And with the sole exception of that entirely anomalous March 2019 wastewater sample from Barcelona, there is no solid evidence of the virus anywhere in the world prior to its original appearance in Wuhan.

As an extreme example of the sort of foolish speculation sometimes promoted on the Internet, a published study suggested that fully 2% of California’s entire population had already been infected by December 13, 2019. However, one of the authors later admitted the testing method used may not have been reliable, and I certainly think that if 800,000 Californians had already been suffering from Covid-19 at such an early date, we surely would have noticed something.

Some advocates of these pro-China fringe theories have argued that the virus might originally have been harmless or only slightly contagious while it was circulating in America during 2019, and then later mutated into its currently dangerous form only after it had arrived in Wuhan; but this is obviously ad hoc reasoning. Anyway, with the sole exception of that one discordant Barcelona result, wastewater tests have failed to find any reliable traces of the virus anywhere in the world before the Wuhan outbreak.

Scientific Claims and Counter-Claims

Although circulation of such weak and contradictory attacks on the Wuhan Lab Leak Hypothesis have been confined to fringe outlets, highly reputable mainstream scientists have made more sweeping claims on the same issue, arguing that the structure of Covid-19 was clearly natural in origin, and not what would have been produced in a lab. For example, a 3,000 word article published in Nature, one of the world’s premier scientific journals, has been regularly cited as debunking any artificial origin, with the five reputable co-authors lending weight to those claims. This analysis was initially released in mid-February and around that same time The Lancet, another highly authoritative publication, also carried a public declaration by 27 scientists taking a similar position while condemning the “conspiracy theories” suggesting a laboratory origin. However, the impact of that latter statement was considerably diminished once it became known that the main organizer, zoologist Peter Daszak, had himself long been closely associated with the Wuhan lab under suspicion, and indeed had previously channeled American funding toward its viral research.

Perhaps these sweeping denials of any possible man-made origin are correct, and I lack the professional expertise in virology or microbiology to properly evaluate them. But scientists do live in the real world, and one might easily imagine that the wild charges of the Trump Administration—itself hardly popular in academic circles—would have inspired various researchers to try to defuse the potentially dangerous looming international conflict by claiming that the virus was obviously natural, even if the actual evidence seemed much less clear-cut.

Meanwhile, the background of the leading scientific advocates taking the opposite side of this contentious issue raise even more serious suspicions. There exists a large body of work on the Internet claiming that the the virus displayed tell-tale evidence of artificial bioengineering, with particular signs pointing to the Wuhan lab as the creator. But apparently the bulk of this material is either based upon the work of an anonymous group of researchers calling themselves “Project Evidence” or that of a previously obscure biotech entrepreneur and part-time blogger. Lemoine carefully examined this evidence, found the case fairly weak, and laid out some reasonable objections to those theories.

Although I cannot properly weigh such conflicting claims, my strongest doubts fall in a completely different direction. As I wrote at the time:

Lemoine seems a very cautious writer and he carefully avoids contaminating his important analysis by suggesting any bad faith or fraud in the work he is examining, but given the history of the last couple of decades we can hardly ignore that possibility. Our disastrous Iraq War was promoted by the knowingly-false claims of Saddam’s WMDs, and the equally farcical Russiagate Hoax has roiled American politics for more than three years. Governmental intelligence agencies have great resources and expertise in fabricating evidence and then effectively promoting their concoctions through their network of friendly journalists. We should hardly be surprised if such means had been employed to redirect the political blame for a multi-trillion-dollar global catastrophe.

When an entirely anonymous group of allegedly independent researchers devotes a great deal of time and effort to publishing a set of scientific findings on the Internet that so exactly match the aggressive propaganda accusations of an American president and his national security apparatus, huge suspicions seem warranted. Is this not exactly the sort of propaganda project that we would normally expect to be undertaken by our intelligence agencies, notably the CIA, which most recently had been led by Pompeo, the leading proponent of the Wuhan Lab Leak Hypothesis?

Or take the other main scientific source, an individual named Yuri Deigin, previously almost unknown to the world except through his occasional blogging in the unrelated field of gerontology. On April 22nd, just one week after Trump, Pompeo, and other top officials began making their dramatic charges, Deigin released a massive 16,000 word article on Medium, containing an ocean of colorful and very professionally-produced diagrams, charts, and graphs, making exactly the same case, but doing so in tremendous scientific detail. No other authors were listed, so we are required to assume that a single, independently-minded individual decided to put aside all his regular work and undertake such heroic efforts to investigate, write, and produce this enormous research report simply out of his disinterested concern regarding the true origins of the Covid-19 outbreak, which had only just become an important issue for Americans the previous month.

That indeed may be exactly what happened, but I have my doubts. I carefully read the entire Deigin document not long after it was released, and found it exceptionally impressive, many, many times longer and more comprehensive than the contrary article published by those five academic scholars in Nature the previous month. Deigin’s analysis was so enormously detailed and exhaustive, one might at first glance assume that it had been the product of months of dedicated effort by a large team of top professionals rather than just a hobbyist-type undertaking by a solitary part-time blogger; and I strongly suspect that the former possibility is the actual reality.

Science functions under the honor system, and a research paper should be judged on its own merits rather than dismissed if the authors happen to be anonymous or previously obscure individuals. But international intelligence agencies obviously operate under entirely different rules, and we must become very suspicious when astonishingly detailed research findings suddenly appear on the Internet that dovetail so exactly with the current goals of the CIA or its various counterparts. But if authors and their publishers already have strong established reputations to protect, we can assume that they would be far less likely to serve as the willing front-men for government-sponsored black propaganda and scientific disinformation.

Major political events are always competing for the transitory mind-share of the fickle American public. The massive urban political protests following the May 25th death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody soon pushed aside the controversy over the Wuhan lab, and these were then followed by the national focus on Trump’s heated presidential reelection campaign and the bitter conflict in the media over alleged voter fraud that produced an angrily disputed outcome. But on January 4th, the debate over the true origins of Covid-19 seemed about to be reignited by a major cover-story in New York magazine, only to be immediately swamped and forgotten in the wake of the Capitol Hill protests two days later and the resulting arrests and national crackdown so heavily covered by the media.

The author of that massive but largely ignored 12,000 word article entitled “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis” was Nicholson Baker, a prominent novelist and liberal public intellectual, hardly a Neocon or Trump supporter and quite unlikely to be acting as a front for American intelligence agencies. Although he did not possess professional expertise in the subject, he seemed a sincere and intelligent layman, which actually constituted a strength rather than a weakness. Instead of attempting to blind his readers with the science of a dizzyingly long collection of technical references, colorful charts, and complex graphs—which 99% of his audience would have been unable to easily interpret or verify—he instead straightforwardly reported the results of his discussions with a number of reputable academics, together with his own conclusions.

- The Lab-Leak Hypothesis

For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?

Nicholson Baker • New York Magazine • January 4, 2021 • 12,000 Words

Baker may not have been a professional virologist or expert in biowarfare, but as the Covid-19 outbreak began he had just completed Baseless, a lengthy non-fictional account of American national security secrets, which appeared to glowing reviews in July 2020. One of his major elements was an account of America’s massive 1950s bioweapons research program, which had been accorded resources and importance matching that of our nuclear weapons efforts. Based upon his years of research, the author was not a complete neophyte on biological warfare issues and was also fully aware of our own long history of laboratory accidents, which had claimed a number of lives. So he was naturally alert to the possibility that a similar accident had occurred in Wuhan, which contained China’s most secure facility of that same type.

As he discussed in his very long article, many knowledgeable scientists had had similar thoughts during the initial Wuhan outbreak, and regarded the leak scenario as a very plausible one. Indeed, one of the earliest papers raising that possibility was released by a mainstream Chinese scientist only to be quickly removed under government pressure, and an early paper by a Taiwanese researcher took the same position and soon suffered the same fate. Several perfectly respectable American scientists held similar opinions, but as one of them explained, the reckless public accusations by Trump and Pompeo had rendered such ideas “toxic” in their academic circles.

Baker seems scrupulously fair in his presentation, emphasizing that numerous other scientists have taken the entirely contrary position that the virus is most likely natural, while honest members of both rival camps acknowledged that neither case had been solidly established. But he himself strongly leaned towards an artificial origin, emphasizing the seemingly remarkable efficiency with which Covid-19 spreads itself and attacks the human body. He therefore believed that a lab leak was the most likely source, and his thoughtfully considered opinion cannot easily be dismissed.

Considering an American Biowarfare Attack

The greatest weakness of Baker’s comprehensive analysis is not the controversial theory that he carefully examines, but the even more controversial possibility that he seems to totally ignore. At one point, he notes the remarkable characteristics of the pathogen, whose collection of features allowed it to so effectively target humans and which had first appeared in a city having one of the very few world laboratories engaged in exactly that type of viral research, closing his paragraph with the sentence “What are the odds?” But other, even more implausible coincidences were entirely excluded from his discussion, and the same had also been true for Lemoine.

Both these authors seem to assume that there exist only two possible scenarios: a natural virus that suddenly appeared in Wuhan during late 2019 or an accidental lab-leak of an enhanced disease agent in that same city. But there is an obvious third case as well, clearly suggested by Baker’s focus on America’s own very active biowarfare program, which he extensively discussed both in his long article and in his highly-regarded book. We must surely consider the possibility that the Covid-19 outbreak was not at all accidental, but instead constituted a deliberate attack against China, occurring as it did near the absolute height of the international tension with America, and therefore suggesting that elements of our own national security apparatus were the most obvious suspects. Given the realities of the publishing industry, any serious exploration of such a scenario would probably have precluded the appearance of the important Baker or Lemoine articles in any respectable publication, perhaps helping to explain such silence. But as I have argued in my long American Pravda series, many historical accounts that were blacklisted for exactly those sorts of reasons appear quite likely to be true.

As I had noted in my April article:

Although the coronavirus is only moderately lethal, apparently having a fatality rate of 1% or less, it is extremely contagious, including during an extended pre-symptomatic period and also among asymptomatic carriers. Thus, portions of the US and Europe are now suffering heavy casualties, while the policies adopted to control the spread have devastated their national economies. Although the virus is unlikely to kill more than a small sliver of our population, we have seen to our dismay how a major outbreak can so easily wreck our entire economic life.

During January, the journalists reporting on China’s mushrooming health crisis regularly emphasized that the mysterious new viral outbreak had occurred at the worst possible place and time, appearing in the major transport hub of Wuhan just prior to the Lunar New Year holiday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese would normally travel to their distant family homes for the celebration, thereby potentially spreading the disease to all parts of the country and producing a permanent, uncontrollable epidemic. The Chinese government avoided that grim fate by the unprecedented decision to shut down its entire national economy and confine 700 million Chinese to their own homes for many weeks. But the outcome seems to have been a very near thing, and if Wuhan had remained open for just a few days longer, China might easily have suffered long-term economic and social devastation.

The timing of an accidental laboratory release would obviously be entirely random. Yet the outbreak seems to have begun during the precise period of time most likely to damage China, the worst possible ten-day or perhaps thirty-day window. As I noted in January, I saw no solid evidence that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, but if it were, the timing of the release seemed very unlikely to have been accidental.

Consider also the preceding waves of other unfortunate viral epidemics that had recently ravaged China:

[D]uring the previous two years, the Chinese economy had already suffered serious blows from other mysterious new diseases, although these had targeted farm animals rather than people. During 2018 a new Avian Flu virus had swept the country, eliminating large portions of China’s poultry industry, and during 2019 the Swine Flu viral epidemic had devastated China’s pig farms, destroying 40% of the nation’s primary domestic source of meat, with widespread claims that the latter disease was being spread by mysterious small drones. My morning newspapers had hardly ignored these important business stories, noting that the sudden collapse of much of China’s domestic food production might prove a huge boon to American farm exports at the height of our trade conflict, but I had never considered the obvious implications. So for three years in a row, China had been severely impacted by strange new viral diseases, though only the most recent had been deadly to humans. This evidence was merely circumstantial, but the pattern seemed highly suspicious.

Another even more remarkable coincidence has received far greater distribution, becoming a staple of anti-American “conspiracy theories” and even resulting in a diplomatic incident involving the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

According to the widely accepted current chronology, the Covid-19 epidemic began in Wuhan during late October or early November of 2019. But the World Military Games were also held in Wuhan during that same period, ending in late October, with 300 American military servicemen attending. As I’ve repeatedly emphasized in my articles and comments for more than a year, how would Americans react if 300 Chinese military officers had paid an extended visit to Chicago, and soon afterward a mysterious and deadly epidemic had suddenly erupted in that city?

It surely would have been very easy for our intelligence services to have slipped a couple of their operatives into that large American military contingent, and the presence of many thousands of foreign military personnel, traveling around the large city and doing sightseeing, would have been ideally suited to providing cover for the quiet release of a highly-infectious viral bioweapon. None of this constitutes proof, but the coincidental timing is quite remarkable.

This intriguing speculation was included in a very long piece by an obscure and eccentric American ex-pat living in China that we had republished on our website on February 14, 2020. By the end of January, we had already run a dozen articles and posts on the coronavirus outbreak, then added many more by the middle of February. These pieces totaled tens of thousands of words and provoked a half million additional words of comments, probably establishing our website as the primary English-language source for this particular perspective on the deadly epidemic, with this material eventually attracting many hundreds of thousands of pageviews. The particular article suggesting that the American visitors to Wuhan had unleashed the disease quickly became one of our most popular, with over 90,000 pageviews and 110,000 words of comments, and with much of the interest coming from within China itself. Then, one week later, leading Chinese government newspapers, such as People’s Daily and Global Times began reporting the same story, citing growing speculation on Chinese social media sites. By mid-march, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman had Tweeted out links to foreign articles making these same points, which received enormous attention, leading the Trump Administration to summon the Chinese ambassador and demand a formal apology.

This latter sequence of events is carefully recounted in a massive 17,000 word, 54 page report released a few weeks ago by DFRLab, a social media-oriented research unit within the establishmentarian Atlantic Council, with the work being based upon nine months of research and preparation by a dozen staffers, together with the Associated Press investigations team. The study seemed aimed at tracking the appearance and Internet dissemination of a wide range of supposedly false or unsubstantiated “conspiracy theories” regarding the Covid-19 outbreak, and AP journalists soon publicized the results, denouncing “the superspreaders” of such allegedly spurious and potentially dangerous beliefs.

- Weaponized: How Rumors About Covid-19’s Origins Led to a Narrative Arms Race

DFRLab/The Atlantic Council • February 2021 • 17,000 Words

But while this project did produce a very useful compendium of the chronology and source references of the various unorthodox narratives surrounding the disease, many of which were certainly erroneous or implausible, few effective rebuttal arguments were provided, notably regarding the extremely suspicious timing of the American military presence in Wuhan. Blogger Steve Sailer and others have often ridiculed this “point-and-sputter” school of refutation, in which non-mainstream theories need only be described in order to be considered conclusively disproved.

Although the Atlantic Council/Associated Press team certainly included numerous skilled social media researchers, journalists, and editors, there is no indication that any of these individuals possessed serious national security credentials, let alone specialized expertise in the arcane topic of biowarfare. This may help to explain why the weighty report which drew upon such enormous resources was almost entirely descriptive and made so little effort to analyze or evaluate the plausibility of the various conflicting “conspiracy narratives” that it treated at great length. By contrast, the very different perspective of someone apparently well-versed in the subject was initially confined to his informal comments left on an obscure corner of the Internet.

Biological warfare is a highly technical subject, and those possessing such expertise are unlikely to candidly report their classified research activities in the pages of our major newspapers, perhaps even less so after Prof. Lieber was dragged off to prison in chains. My own knowledge is nil. But in mid-March I came across several extremely long and detailed comments on the coronavirus outbreak that had been posted on a small website by an individual calling himself “OldMicrobiologist” and who claimed to be a retired forty-year veteran of American biodefense. The style and details of his material struck me as quite credible, and after a little further investigation I concluded that there was a high likelihood his background was exactly as he had described. I made arrangements to republish his comments in the form of a 3,400 word article, which soon attracted a great deal of traffic and 80,000 words of further comments.

Although the writer emphasized the lack of any hard evidence, he said that his experience led him to strongly suspect that the coronavirus outbreak was indeed an American biowarfare attack against China, probably carried out by agents brought into that country under cover of the Military Games held at Wuhan in late October, the sort of sabotage operation our intelligence agencies had sometimes undertaken elsewhere. One important point he made was that high lethality was often counter-productive in a bioweapon since debilitating or hospitalizing large numbers of individuals may impose far greater economic costs on a country than a biological agent which simply inflicts an equal number of deaths. In his words “a high communicability, low lethality disease is perfect for ruining an economy,” suggesting that the apparent characteristics of the coronavirus were close to optimal in this regard. Those so interested should read his analysis and assess for themselves his credibility and persuasiveness.

During January, American media outlets, including those under the authority of Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, began focusing attention on the Wuhan lab as the potential source of the viral outbreak, while journalists disputing this narrative and attempting to raise other possibilities had serious difficulties even getting their articles published on alternative websites:

Scientific investigation of the coronavirus had already pointed to its origins in a bat virus, leading to widespread media speculation that bats sold as food in the Wuhan open markets had been the original disease vector. Meanwhile, the orchestrated waves of anti-China accusations had emphasized Chinese laboratory research on that same viral source. But we soon published a lengthy article by investigative journalist Whitney Webb providing copious evidence of America’s own enormous biowarfare research efforts, which had similarly focused for years on bat viruses. Webb was then associated with MintPress News, but that publication had strangely declined to publish her important piece, perhaps skittish about the grave suspicions it directed towards the US government on so momentous an issue. So without the benefit of our platform, her major contribution to the public debate might have attracted relatively little readership.

The extensive material collected by the Atlantic Council researchers lent further support to an important point I had made last April about the curious nature of the early Covid-19 coverage:

One intriguing aspect of the situation was that almost from the first moment that reports of the strange new epidemic in China reached the international media, a large and orchestrated campaign had been launched on numerous websites and Social Media platforms to identify the cause as a Chinese bioweapon carelessly released in its own country. Meanwhile, the far more plausible hypothesis that China was the victim rather than the perpetrator had received virtually no organized support anywhere, and only began to take shape as I gradually located and republished relevant material, usually drawn from very obscure quarters and often anonymously authored. So it seemed that only the side hostile to China was waging an active information war. The outbreak of the disease and the nearly simultaneous launch of such a major propaganda campaign may not necessarily prove that an actual biowarfare attack had occurred, but I do think it tends to support such a theory.

The Smoking Gun?

All the evidence thus far presented has merely been circumstantial, strongly establishing that elements of the American national security establishment had the means, motive, and opportunity to stage a biowarfare attack in Wuhan. However, in April additional facts appeared that some have characterized as “smoking gun” evidence of that disturbing scenario:

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 hatred 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?

I can easily understand why all these simple facts and their obvious implications regarding the likely origins of the worldwide epidemic might be considered extremely uncomfortable, perhaps too uncomfortable to be discussed in our media outlets, and therefore have been so widely ignored. Most of these crucial points were already presented in my original April 2020 article on the subject, which quickly began to attract enormous traffic and interest in social media. Yet just days after it ran, our entire website was suddenly banned from Facebook and all our web pages were deranked by Google, perhaps underscoring the very dangerous nature of this material, and the reasons why so few others have been willing to raise the same points.

But America now stands on the brink of recording a million “excess deaths” from this epidemic, so perhaps it has finally now become time to honestly explore the true reasons for our gigantic national calamity.

- American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 21, 2020 • 7,400 Words

The Hypothetical Scenario of the Covid-19 Outbreak

Given the conclusions suggested above, I think it may be useful for me to provide my own summary of a plausible scenario for the Covid-19 outbreak. Although I had already presented this outline six months ago in one of my previous articles, I see no need for any revisions. Obviously, this reconstruction is quite speculative, but I think it best fits all the available evidence, while individual elements may be modified, dropped, or replaced without necessarily damaging the overall hypothesis.

(1) Rogue elements within our large national security apparatus probably affiliated with the Deep State Neocons decided to inflict severe damage upon the huge Chinese economy using biowarfare. The plan was to infect the key transport hub of Wuhan with Covid-19 so that the disease would invisibly spread throughout the entire country during the annual Lunar New Year travels, and they used the cover of the Wuhan International Military Games to slip a couple of operatives into the city to release the virus. My guess is that only a relatively small number of individuals were involved in this plot.

(2) The biological agent they released was designed primarily as an anti-economy rather than an anti-personnel weapon. Although Covid-19 has rather low fatality rates, it is extremely contagious, has a long pre-symptomatic infectious period, and can even spread by asymptomatic carriers, making it ideally suited for that purpose. Thus, once it established itself throughout most of China, it would be extremely difficult to eradicate and the resulting efforts to control it would inflict enormous damage upon China’s economy and society.

(3) As a secondary operation, they decided to target Iran’s political elites, possibly deploying a somewhat more deadly variant of the virus. Since political elites generally tend to be elderly, they would anyway suffer far greater fatalities.

(4) The deadly SARS and MERS outbreaks in East Asia and the Near East had never significantly spread back to America (or Europe), so the plotters wrongly assumed that the same would be the case with Covid-19. Anyway, since international organizations always ranked the US and Europe as having the best and most effective public health systems for combating any disease epidemic, they believed that any possible blowback damage would be very minor.

(5) Only a small number of individuals were directly involved in this plot, and soon after the disease was successfully released in Wuhan, they decided to further safeguard America’s own interests by alerting the appropriate units with the Defense Intelligence Agency, probably by fabricating some sort of supposed “intelligence leak.” Basically, they arranged for the DIA to hear that Wuhan was apparently suffering a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak, thereby leading the DIA to prepare and distribute a secret report warning our own forces and allies to take appropriate precautions.

(6) Unfortunately for these plans, the Chinese government reacted with astonishing determination and effectiveness, and soon stamped out the disease. Meanwhile, the lackadaisical and incompetent American government largely ignored the problem, only reacting after the massive outbreak in Northern Italy had gotten media attention. Since the CDC had botched production of a testing kit, we had no means of recognizing that the disease was already spreading in our country, and the result was massive damage to America’s economy and society. In effect, America suffered exactly the fate that had originally been intended for its Chinese rival.

"The Truth" and "the Whole Truth" About the Origins of Covid-19

The Unz Review • May 10, 2021 • 6,400 Words

The Covid-19 Epidemic and How It Began

As every fan of the old Perry Mason show remembers, courtroom witnesses swear “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

There’s a reason for that particular choice of words. A pattern of selective omissions in an otherwise entirely truthful presentation can easily mislead us as much as any outright lie. And under certain circumstances, such omissions may be made necessary by powerful outside forces, so that even the most well-intentioned writer is faced with the difficult choice of either excluding certain elements from his analysis or having his important work denied a proper audience. I have sometimes faced this dilemma myself, but over the last few years, my lengthy American Pravda series has charted those gaping lacunae in our received accounts of modern world history, as I have sought to provide a historical counter-narrative of the last one hundred years.

Careful reexaminations of events from fifty or sixty years ago may be interesting, but those of the present day have far greater importance, and this is particularly true with regard to the Covid-19 epidemic that has engulfed the world since early 2020. Millions have already died, including many hundreds of thousands of Americans, with a newly released research study by the University of Washington’s authoritative Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) now suggesting that our domestic death-toll has already exceeded 900,000. This global outbreak first began in Wuhan, and the nature of its origin has become a major flashpoint in the new Cold War between China and America, with the trajectory of that conflict having only slightly changed as Trump Neocons have been replaced by Biden Neocons at the helm of our foreign policy.

Two months ago I published a lengthy article summarizing much of the information from the first year of the outbreak and focusing upon the heated debate regarding the origins of the virus. Aside from the reports of the teams of investigative journalists at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press, several very long articles by independent journalists and researchers have constituted my main sources of information, including:

- How It All Started: China’s Early Coronavirus Missteps

The Wall Street Journal • March 6, 2020 • 4,400 words

- China Didn’t Warn Public of Likely Pandemic for 6 Key Days

The Associated Press • April 14, 2020 • 2,400 Words

- China’s CDC, Built to Stop Pandemics Like Covid, Stumbled When It Mattered Most

The Wall Street Journal • August 17, 2020 • 4,500 Words

- The China Syndrome Part I: Outbreak

- The China Syndrome Part II: Transmission and Response

- The China Syndrome Part III: Wet Markets and BioLabs

- The China Syndrome Part IV: Did China Fudge its Data?

Philippe Lemoine • Quillette • August 24-September 6, 2020 • 31,000 Words

- The Lab-Leak Hypothesis

For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?

Nicholson Baker • New York Magazine • January 4, 2021 • 12,000 Words

This compendium of crucial research has now received a major addition, a 11,000 word analysis of the likely origins of Covid-19 by Nicholas Wade, a distinguished former science reporter and editor, who had spent more than four decades at the New York Times, Science, and Nature, and the author of several excellent books dealing with anthropology and evolutionary biology.

- Origin of Covid — Following the Clues

Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

Nicholas Wade • Medium • May 4, 2021 • 11,000 Words

Suppressing Possible Artificial Origins as “a Conspiracy Theory”

The central focus of both Baker and Wade is indicated by their closely-related titles, namely the origins of the virus and whether it was the product of a laboratory, presumably the Wuhan Institute of Virology, then later released in a tragic accident. Both these authors strongly lean toward that latter possibility, but take somewhat different approaches. While Baker, a prominent novelist and liberal public intellectual, must rely upon general arguments or merely reports the opinions of the experts that he interviewed, Wade deploys his strong scientific background to build a persuasive case for that same conclusion.

From nearly the beginning of the epidemic, the position taken by the mainstream media had been that Covid-19 was very likely natural in origin, and although President Trump and some of his political allies soon loudly claimed otherwise, the perceived scientific consensus remained unchanged.

But as Wade demonstrates, that supposed consensus was largely illusory, having been shaped by two early items that appeared in prestigious scientific publications. On February 19, 2020, the Lancet had published a statement signed by 27 virologists and other noted scientists that declared: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” and that “[scientists] overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” Then the following month Nature Medicine published an analysis by five virologists providing some theoretical arguments against any artificial origin, stating that: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

These published pieces became far more influential than was warranted. Wade notes that the former statement had actually been organized behind the scenes by Peter Daszak, an American closely associated with the Wuhan lab and therefore hardly a disinterested party, while the latter relied heavily upon very dubious scientific reasoning. But once these emphatic conclusions had appeared in influential periodicals, few microbiologists were willing to challenge this newly established orthodoxy, especially because doing so would have placed them in the same political camp as Trump, a much vilified figure in their community. Baker had earlier made similar criticism and I had fully endorsed his verdict in my own March article, but Wade’s analysis provides far greater depth.

Moreover, Wade also emphasizes the climate of fear that today governs much of our academic world, with future grant applications and even careers at risk if researchers depart from perceived orthodoxy on certain issues, perhaps including disputing the origins of Covid-19. He argues that although the Lancet and Nature Medicine letters were actually political statements rather than scientific findings, they were “amazingly effective” in suppressing dissent and led the overwhelming majority of journalists to accept them as reflecting a research consensus that actually did not exist.

Wade’s own personal experiences have surely informed this shrewd analysis of the underlying political dynamics. His most recent book A Troublesome Inheritance had appeared in 2014, and its subtitle “Genes, Race, and Human History” reflected the potentially explosive nature of his subject matter. Although I considered it an outstanding treatment of the controversial topic, Wade’s work soon attracted a lynch-mob of critics, who organized a denunciatory public statement that they persuaded 139 prominent genetic scientists to sign. All these individuals were soon humiliated once it was proven that not a single one of them had actually bothered examining the true contents of the book that they were so fiercely attacking.

In the case of Covid-19, Wade demonstrates that once the political barriers have been removed and we are allowed to consider the evidence objectively, our conclusions are transformed. The scientific case for the natural origins of the virus becomes pitifully weak, thereby automatically elevating the competing lab-leak hypothesis, which had previously been denounced and stigmatized as a so-called “conspiracy theory.”

For example, despite fifteen months of presumably intensive effort, the Chinese have failed to locate evidence of any wildlife population hosting a closely-related precursor virus, which had easily been found in the previous cases of emergent viral epidemics such as SARS and MERS. Indeed, the closest natural relative to Covid-19 only exists among bats in the caves of Yunnan, nearly 1,000 miles distant from the Wuhan outbreak.

We would also expect an animal virus that became dangerous to humans would require a lengthy series of intermediate mutational steps as it gradually evolved the ability to effectively infect our own species, just as had been the case with SARS and other previous diseases. But Covid-19 seems to have suddenly appeared in a maximally infectious form, perfectly pre-adapted to humans and apparently derived from a single original source.

Finally, an important structural element of the virus, the “furin cleavage site,” is entirely absent from all other members of its viral family, and crucially contributes to its dangerously infectious nature. A natural origin for that structure seems implausible, while the scientific literature is replete with such additions having been made in laboratory experiments, including those conducted by the Wuhan researchers. Moreover, the particular genetic sequence found in that Covid-19 element is extremely rare in other coronaviruses, strongly suggesting that it was added from a different source.

The Excluded Third Possibility

Having now twice read Wade’s long article, I can say that I find nearly all of his scientific arguments quite compelling, and I have almost no points of significant disagreement. Yet my overall conclusions are entirely different from his.

The explanation of this seeming paradox comes near the very beginning of his article, when he accurately states:

As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped.

A paragraph later, the text contains his first major section heading, entitled “A Tale of Two Theories.”

Although Wade is absolutely correct in stating that “there are two main theories” about the origins of Covid-19, this duality has been enforced by political pressures quite similar to those that had earlier excluded discussion of the “lab-leak hypothesis,” but with the sanctions being far harsher and more extreme.

Wade’s analysis masterfully demonstrates that once we are actually willing to explore the much-vilified “conspiracy theory” of an accidental lab-leak, we discover that it is far more plausible than the case of a natural origin, partly because the latter appears so unlikely. And if these were the only two possible theories, all arguments against the one would necessarily support the other. But this framework is upended once we recognize that there is a third logical possibility, far more vilified and excluded than that of the “lab-leak hypothesis” but also far more plausible and supported by much stronger evidence.

In my March discussion of Baker’s long article, I summarized how he first became involved in the topic, and described the crucial omission I had noticed in his 12,000 word opus:

Baker may not have been a professional virologist or expert in biowarfare, but as the Covid-19 outbreak began he had just completed Baseless, a lengthy non-fictional account of American national security secrets, which appeared to glowing reviews in July 2020. One of his major elements was an account of America’s massive 1950s bioweapons research program, which had been accorded resources and importance matching that of our nuclear weapons efforts. Based upon his years of research, the author was not a complete neophyte on biological warfare issues and was also fully aware of our own long history of laboratory accidents, which had claimed a number of lives. So he was naturally alert to the possibility that a similar accident had occurred in Wuhan, which contained China’s most secure facility of that same type.

The greatest weakness of Baker’s comprehensive analysis is not the controversial theory that he carefully examines, but the even more controversial possibility that he seems to totally ignore. At one point, he notes the remarkable characteristics of the pathogen, whose collection of features allowed it to so effectively target humans and which had first appeared in a city having one of the very few world laboratories engaged in exactly that type of viral research, closing his paragraph with the sentence “What are the odds?” But other, even more implausible coincidences were entirely excluded from his discussion, and the same had also been true for Lemoine.

Both these authors seem to assume that there exist only two possible scenarios: a natural virus that suddenly appeared in Wuhan during late 2019 or an accidental lab-leak of an enhanced disease agent in that same city. But there is an obvious third case as well, clearly suggested by Baker’s focus on America’s own very active biowarfare program, which he extensively discussed both in his long article and in his highly-regarded book. We must surely consider the possibility that the Covid-19 outbreak was not at all accidental, but instead constituted a deliberate attack against China, occurring as it did near the absolute height of the international tension with America, and therefore suggesting that elements of our own national security apparatus were the most obvious suspects. Given the realities of the publishing industry, any serious exploration of such a scenario would probably have precluded the appearance of the important Baker or Lemoine articles in any respectable publication, perhaps helping to explain such silence. But as I have argued in my long American Pravda series, many historical accounts that were blacklisted for exactly those sorts of reasons appear quite likely to be true.

Exactly the same glaring omission is found in Wade’s 11,000 word article. Taken together, Lemoine, Baker, and Wade have produced a large collection of high-quality articles on the origins of the global Covid-19 epidemic, but nowhere among their 54,000 words is there even a hint that the virus might possibly have had its origins in America’s well-documented and lavishly funded biowarfare program. For several years, our newspapers have proclaimed that we are now locked into a new Cold War against China, with some risk that it might turn hot. But the obvious possible implications of the sudden, potentially-devastating outbreak of a dangerous viral epidemic in our leading international adversary remains unmentionable, too explosive even to dismissed or ridiculed, let alone carefully considered.

As I noted towards the end of my long March article:

I can easily understand why all these simple facts and their obvious implications regarding the likely origins of the worldwide epidemic might be considered extremely uncomfortable, perhaps too uncomfortable to be discussed in our media outlets, and therefore have been so widely ignored. Most of these crucial points were already presented in my original April 2020 article on the subject, which quickly began to attract enormous traffic and interest in social media. Yet just days after it ran, our entire website was suddenly banned from Facebook and all our web pages were deranked by Google, perhaps underscoring the very dangerous nature of this material, and the reasons why so few others have been willing to raise the same points.

The Strong Evidence for an American Biowarfare Attack

I find almost nothing to dispute in the comprehensive analyses provided by Lemoine, Baker, and Wade, but I do think my own work represents a crucial supplement to their research, given that I have primarily focused on that third possibility, a possibility that they were necessarily forced to avoid considering. Readers may judge for themselves, but I believe that my articles have demonstrated that the evidence supporting that excluded hypothesis is considerably stronger than that favoring either of those other two possibilities, whether the mainstream narrative of a natural virus or the much-vilified “conspiracy theory” of a lab-leak in Wuhan.

- American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 21, 2020 • 7,400 Words

- American Pravda: Covid-19, Its Impact and Origins After One Year

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 15, 2021 • 8,700 Words

For convenience, I am excerpting substantial portions of my original April 2020 and my most recent March 2021 articles:

Although the coronavirus is only moderately lethal, apparently having a fatality rate of 1% or less, it is extremely contagious, including during an extended pre-symptomatic period and also among asymptomatic carriers. Thus, portions of the US and Europe are now suffering heavy casualties, while the policies adopted to control the spread have devastated their national economies. The virus is unlikely to kill more than a small sliver of our population, but we have seen to our dismay how a major outbreak can so easily wreck our entire economic life.

During January, the journalists reporting on China’s mushrooming health crisis regularly emphasized that the mysterious new viral outbreak had occurred at the worst possible place and time, appearing in the major transport hub of Wuhan just prior to the Lunar New Year holiday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese would normally travel to their distant family homes for the celebration, thereby potentially spreading the disease to all parts of the country and producing a permanent, uncontrollable epidemic. The Chinese government avoided that grim fate by the unprecedented decision to shut down its entire national economy and confine 700 million Chinese to their own homes for many weeks. But the outcome seems to have been a very near thing, and if Wuhan had remained open for just a few days longer, China might easily have suffered long-term economic and social devastation.

The timing of an accidental laboratory release would obviously be entirely random. Yet the outbreak seems to have begun during the precise period of time most likely to damage China, the worst possible ten-day or perhaps thirty-day window. As I noted in January, I saw no solid evidence that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, but if it were, the timing of the release seemed very unlikely to have been accidental.

Consider also the preceding waves of other unfortunate viral epidemics that had recently ravaged China:

[D]uring the previous two years, the Chinese economy had already suffered serious blows from other mysterious new diseases, although these had targeted farm animals rather than people. During 2018 a new Avian Flu virus had swept the country, eliminating large portions of China’s poultry industry, and during 2019 the Swine Flu viral epidemic had devastated China’s pig farms, destroying 40% of the nation’s primary domestic source of meat, with widespread claims that the latter disease was being spread by mysterious small drones. My morning newspapers had hardly ignored these important business stories, noting that the sudden collapse of much of China’s domestic food production might prove a huge boon to American farm exports at the height of our trade conflict, but I had never considered the obvious implications. So for three years in a row, China had been severely impacted by strange new viral diseases, though only the most recent had been deadly to humans. This evidence was merely circumstantial, but the pattern seemed highly suspicious.

Another even more remarkable coincidence has received far greater distribution, becoming a staple of anti-American “conspiracy theories” and even resulting in a diplomatic incident involving the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

According to the widely accepted current chronology, the Covid-19 epidemic began in Wuhan during late October or early November of 2019. But the World Military Games were also held in Wuhan during that same period, ending in late October, with 300 American military servicemen attending. As I’ve repeatedly emphasized in my articles and comments for more than a year, how would Americans react if 300 Chinese military officers had paid an extended visit to Chicago, and soon afterward a mysterious and deadly epidemic had suddenly erupted in that city?

It surely would have been very easy for our intelligence services to have slipped a couple of their operatives into that large American military contingent, and the presence of many thousands of foreign military personnel, traveling around the large city and doing sightseeing, would have been ideally suited to providing cover for the quiet release of a highly-infectious viral bioweapon. None of this constitutes proof, but the coincidental timing is quite remarkable.

Biological warfare is a highly technical subject, and those possessing such expertise are unlikely to candidly report their classified research activities in the pages of our major newspapers, perhaps even less so after Prof. Lieber was dragged off to prison in chains. My own knowledge is nil. But in mid-March I came across several extremely long and detailed comments on the coronavirus outbreak that had been posted on a small website by an individual calling himself “OldMicrobiologist” and who claimed to be a retired forty-year veteran of American biodefense. The style and details of his material struck me as quite credible, and after a little further investigation I concluded that there was a high likelihood his background was exactly as he had described. I made arrangements to republish his comments in the form of a 3,400 word article, which soon attracted a great deal of traffic and 80,000 words of further comments.

Although the writer emphasized the lack of any hard evidence, he said that his experience led him to strongly suspect that the coronavirus outbreak was indeed an American biowarfare attack against China, probably carried out by agents brought into that country under cover of the Military Games held at Wuhan in late October, the sort of sabotage operation our intelligence agencies had sometimes undertaken elsewhere. One important point he made was that high lethality was often counter-productive in a bioweapon since debilitating or hospitalizing large numbers of individuals may impose far greater economic costs on a country than a biological agent which simply inflicts an equal number of deaths. In his words “a high communicability, low lethality disease is perfect for ruining an economy,” suggesting that the apparent characteristics of the coronavirus were close to optimal in this regard. Those so interested should read his analysis and assess for themselves his credibility and persuasiveness.

Some of this same speculation eventually reached Chinese social media, and led to articles in Chinese government publications, which immediately provoked a very hostile response by Trump Administration officials.

This latter sequence of events is carefully recounted in a massive 17,000 word, 54 page report released a few weeks ago by DFRLab, a social media-oriented research unit within the establishmentarian Atlantic Council, with the work being based upon nine months of research and preparation by a dozen staffers, together with the Associated Press investigations team. The study seemed aimed at tracking the appearance and Internet dissemination of a wide range of supposedly false or unsubstantiated “conspiracy theories” regarding the Covid-19 outbreak, and AP journalists soon publicized the results, denouncing “the superspreaders” of such allegedly spurious and potentially dangerous beliefs.

- Weaponized: How Rumors About Covid-19’s Origins Led to a Narrative Arms Race

DFRLab/The Atlantic Council • February 2021 • 17,000 Words

But while this project did produce a very useful compendium of the chronology and source references of the various unorthodox narratives surrounding the disease, many of which were certainly erroneous or implausible, few effective rebuttal arguments were provided, notably regarding the extremely suspicious timing of the American military presence in Wuhan. Blogger Steve Sailer and others have often ridiculed this “point-and-sputter” school of refutation, in which non-mainstream theories need only be described in order to be considered conclusively disproved.

Although the Atlantic Council/Associated Press team certainly included numerous skilled social media researchers, journalists, and editors, there is no indication that any of these individuals possessed serious national security credentials, let alone specialized expertise in the arcane topic of biowarfare. This may help to explain why the weighty report which drew upon such enormous resources was almost entirely descriptive and made so little effort to analyze or evaluate the plausibility of the various conflicting “conspiracy narratives” that it treated at great length.

One further oddity of the very comprehensive DFRLab/Atlantic Council report was its own rather curious omissions. Given that its entire focus was on the full range of absurd “conspiracy theories,” the authors naturally explored speculation regarding an American biowarfare attack, and attributed this theory partly to Kevin Barrett, whom the report characterized as “a US Holocaust denier who has also claimed that the September 11 attacks were an ‘inside job’ by the George W. Bush Administration.”

The resulting news story by its Associated Press partners prominently featured Barrett as one of the America’s leading “super-spreaders” of Covid-19 conspiracy-nonsense. Yet Barrett’s only real role had been to quote and endorse my own very substantial writings in that area, and although he unsuccessfully urged the AP journalists to contact me directly, my name was entirely absent from either the news articles or the lengthy underlying research report. Since my own writings had constituted the longest and most comprehensive presentation of the American Biowarfare Hypothesis, such an omission appears curious. I suspect that the editors concluded that any attack on me would bring my articles to much wider attention, and therefore ruled it out as being obviously counter-productive.

I find it highly unlikely that the DFRLab staffers were unaware of my existence. Their comprehensive report appeared in February 2021, and since it was based upon nine months of investigation, the project would have begun in May 2020. But on April 21, 2020, I had published my long original article making the case for an American biowarfare attack, and its rapidly growing popularity on Facebook only came to an end after the social media giant quickly banned our entire website, a sudden action that had been based upon a very doubtful report produced by that very same DFRLab team, with which Facebook has long partnered. Indeed this remarkable coincidence of timing raises the interesting possibility that the appearance of my article and its considerable popularity had actually prompted DFRLab to undertake its nine month investigation into the general subject of Covid-19 “conspiracy theories.” Furthermore:

The extensive material collected by the Atlantic Council researchers lent further support to an important point I had made last April about the curious nature of the early Covid-19 coverage:

One intriguing aspect of the situation was that almost from the first moment that reports of the strange new epidemic in China reached the international media, a large and orchestrated campaign had been launched on numerous websites and Social Media platforms to identify the cause as a Chinese bioweapon carelessly released in its own country. Meanwhile, the far more plausible hypothesis that China was the victim rather than the perpetrator had received virtually no organized support anywhere, and only began to take shape as I gradually located and republished relevant material, usually drawn from very obscure quarters and often anonymously authored. So it seemed that only the side hostile to China was waging an active information war. The outbreak of the disease and the nearly simultaneous launch of such a major propaganda campaign may not necessarily prove that an actual biowarfare attack had occurred, but I do think it tends to support such a theory.

During January, American media outlets, including those under the authority of Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, began focusing attention on the Wuhan lab as the potential source of the viral outbreak, while journalists disputing this narrative and attempting to raise other possibilities had serious difficulties even getting their articles published on alternative websites:

Scientific investigation of the coronavirus had already pointed to its origins in a bat virus, leading to widespread media speculation that bats sold as food in the Wuhan open markets had been the original disease vector. Meanwhile, the orchestrated waves of anti-China accusations had emphasized Chinese laboratory research on that same viral source. But we soon published a lengthy article by investigative journalist Whitney Webb providing copious evidence of America’s own enormous biowarfare research efforts, which had similarly focused for years on bat viruses. Webb was then associated with MintPress News, but that publication had strangely declined to publish her important piece, perhaps skittish about the grave suspicions it directed towards the US government on so momentous an issue. So without the benefit of our platform, her major contribution to the public debate might have attracted relatively little readership.

All the evidence thus far presented has merely been circumstantial, strongly establishing that elements of the American national security establishment had the means, motive, and opportunity to stage a biowarfare attack in Wuhan. However, in April 2020 certain additional facts appeared that some have characterized as “smoking gun” proof of that disturbing scenario:

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 hatred 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?

Summarizing the Evidence for a Biowarfare Attack and Outlining the Hypothetical Scenario

Most of the material quoted above had originally appeared in my April 2020 article and was afterwards extended and further discussed in my later pieces, the most recent appearing in March 2021. Taken together, they have been read at least a couple of hundred thousand times, and have provoked more than 500,000 words of comments. Yet the undeniable facts I presented have remained almost entirely excluded from the ongoing public debate, presumably for the practical political reasons I have suggested, so it is difficult to know exactly who has become aware of them.

Donald Trump’s departure from the White House seems to have finally encouraged our timorous mainstream media organs to admit that their longstanding presumption of the entirely natural origin of Covid-19 might not be correct, and they have begun giving some consideration to the long-derided competing theory of a man-made virus released in an accidental lab-leak. But under these changed circumstances, I consider it entirely unreasonable if they continue ignoring that very real third possibility of an American biowarfare attack. The key pieces of evidence I have provided that favor this hypothesis over the competing lab-leak scenario may easily be summarized:

(1) For three years, China had been locked in growing conflict with America over trade and geopolitics, and for three years in a row, China had been hit very hard by mysterious viruses. An Avian Flu virus severely damaged its poultry industry in 2018 and the following year a Swine Flu virus destroyed over 40% of its pig herds, China’s primary meat source. The third year, Covid-19 appeared. Certainly a suspicious pattern if the last were just a random lab-leak.

(2) The Covid-19 outbreak appeared at absolutely the worst time and place for China, the major transit hub of Wuhan, timed almost perfectly to reach high local levels of infection just as the travelers for the Lunar New Year holiday spread the disease to all other parts of the country, thereby producing an unstoppable epidemic. The timing of an accidental lab-leak would obviously be random.

(3) 300 American military servicemen had just visited Wuhan as part of the World Military Games, providing a perfect opportunity for releasing a viral bioweapon. Consider what Americans would think if 300 Chinese military officers had visited Chicago, and immediately afterwards a mysterious, deadly viral disease suddenly broke out in that city. It would be a strange coincidence if that the American military visit and an entirely unrelated accidental lab-leak had occurred at exactly the same time.

(4) The characteristics of Covid-19, including high communicability and low lethality, are absolutely ideal in an anti-economy bioweapon. It seems odd that a random lab-leak would release a virus so perfectly designed to severely damage the Chinese economy.

(5) From almost the very moment that the outbreak began, anti-China bloggers in America and the US-funded Radio Free Asia network had launched a powerful international propaganda offensive against China, claiming that the outbreak in Wuhan was due to the leak of an illegal bioweapon from the Wuhan lab. This may have merely been an exceptionally prompt but opportunistic response of our propaganda organs, but they seemed remarkably quick to take full advantage of an entirely unexpected and mysterious development, which they immediately identified as being due to a lab-leak.

(6) By “the second week of November” our Defense Intelligence Agency had already begun preparing a secret report warning of a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak in Wuhan although according to the standard timeline at that point probably only a couple of dozen people had started experiencing any symptoms of illness in a city of 11 million. How did they discover what was happening in Wuhan so much sooner than the Chinese government or anyone else?

(7) Almost immediately afterwards, the ruling political elites in Iran became severely infected, with many of them dying. Why did the accidental Wuhan lab-leak jump to the Iran’s political elites so quickly, before it had reached almost anywhere else in the world.

Given the conclusions suggested above, I also think it would be useful for me to provide my own summary of a plausible scenario for the Covid-19 outbreak. Although I had already presented this outline in a September 2020 article, I see no need for any revisions. Obviously, this reconstruction is quite speculative, but I think it best fits all the available evidence, while individual elements may be modified, dropped, or replaced without necessarily compromising the overall hypothesis.

(1) Rogue elements within our large national security apparatus probably affiliated with the Deep State Neocons decided to inflict severe damage upon the huge Chinese economy using biowarfare. The plan was to infect the key transport hub of Wuhan with Covid-19 so that the disease would invisibly spread throughout the entire country during the annual Lunar New Year travels, and they used the cover of the Wuhan International Military Games to slip a couple of operatives into the city to release the virus. My guess is that only a relatively small number of individuals were involved in this plot.

(2) The biological agent they released was designed primarily as an anti-economy rather than an anti-personnel weapon. Although Covid-19 has rather low fatality rates, it is extremely contagious, has a long pre-symptomatic infectious period, and can even spread by asymptomatic carriers, making it ideally suited for that purpose. Thus, once it established itself throughout most of China, it would be extremely difficult to eradicate and the resulting efforts to control it would inflict enormous damage upon China’s economy and society.

(3) As a secondary operation, they decided to target Iran’s political elites, possibly deploying a somewhat more deadly variant of the virus. Since political elites generally tend to be elderly, they would anyway suffer far greater fatalities.

(4) The deadly SARS and MERS outbreaks in East Asia and the Near East had never significantly spread back to America (or Europe), so the plotters wrongly assumed that the same would be the case with Covid-19. Anyway, since international organizations always ranked the US and Europe as having the best and most effective public health systems for combating any disease epidemic, they believed that any possible blowback damage would be very minor.

(5) Only a small number of individuals were directly involved in this plot, and soon after the disease was successfully released in Wuhan, they decided to further safeguard America’s own interests by alerting the appropriate units with the Defense Intelligence Agency, probably by fabricating some sort of supposed “intelligence leak.” Basically, they arranged for the DIA to hear that Wuhan was apparently suffering a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak, thereby leading the DIA to prepare and distribute a secret report warning our own forces and allies to take appropriate precautions.

(6) Unfortunately for these plans, the Chinese government reacted with astonishing determination and effectiveness, and soon stamped out the disease. Meanwhile, the lackadaisical and incompetent American government largely ignored the problem, only reacting after the massive outbreak in Northern Italy had gotten media attention. Since the CDC had botched production of a testing kit, we had no means of recognizing that the disease was already spreading in our country, and the result was massive damage to America’s economy and society. In effect, America suffered exactly the fate that had originally been intended for its Chinese rival.

George Orwell's Virus Lab-Leak

The Unz Review • May 31, 2021 • 5,200 Words

An Orwellian Reversal on the Origins of Covid

It’s been decades since I last read George Orwell’s 1984, but portions of that classic dystopian novel have become part of our common political culture.

There’s that famous scene in which an orator is giving a lengthy wartime speech at a political rally, praising the heroic ally of Eurasia and denouncing the arch-foe of Eastasia, but then is quietly handed a note partway through and completely reverses himself, vilifying the former and hailing the latter. “We have always been at war with Eurasia.”

Over the last couple of weeks, we have witnessed in real time this sort of stark and sudden reversal in long-held positions with regard to the origins of the global Covid epidemic, which has devastated much of the world. From early 2020 onward, the mainstream narrative had been that the virus was completely natural, and anyone who suggested that it might be the man-made product of a laboratory was denounced as a “conspiracy theorist,” closely akin to the QAnon activists endlessly ridiculed in the media. This official party-line was often harshly enforced by our leading social media monopolies, with Facebook summarily banning all posts suggesting otherwise.

But this situation has now entirely changed, and in recent days the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and our leading electronic media outlets have carried top stories treating that former heresy in a very respectful manner, and even suggesting that the weight of evidence might favor it. The Senate has voted in favor of immediately declassifying all our intelligence documents related to the origin of the virus, and massive political pressure upon President Joe Biden has forced him to order that a full intelligence review be produced and released within 90 days. It appears that an emerging elite consensus may soon favor theories that had previously been consigned to odd corners of the Internet.

The triggering event for this remarkable reversal in American elite sentiment was a closely reasoned and persuasive 11,000 word article by journalist Nicholas Wade. Although the author had spent more than four decades as a top science reporter at the New York Times and other leading outlets, his work was quietly released May 2nd on the Medium blogging site, lacking any endorsements or prestigious imprimatur, then republished on May 5th by the low-traffic website of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

- Origin of Covid — Following the Clues

Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

Nicholas Wade • Medium • May 2, 2021 • 11,000 Words

Despite such extremely inauspicious beginnings and the cautious and subdued tone of his text, the consequences were dramatic. Although nearly all the facts and evidence that Wade discussed had already been publicly available for most of the past year, his careful analysis and considerable journalistic credibility quickly transformed the intellectual landscape. He began his long article by explaining that from February 2020 onward a huge ideological bubble had been inflated by political propaganda masquerading as science, a bubble that was afterwards maintained through a combination of journalistic cowardice and incompetence. President Donald Trump had proclaimed that the virus was artificial, so our media therefore insisted that it must be natural, even if all the evidence seemed to suggest otherwise.

Wade’s careful presentation immediately punctured that bubble, and upended the public discussion of an epidemic that had killed millions around the world. By May 28th, the Wall Street Journal carried the headline “Facebook Ends Ban on Posts Asserting Covid-19 Was Man-Made,” so that in less than one month a self-published article had already changed what nearly three billion individuals around the world were allowed to read and write. This illustrates the totalitarian control of information on the Internet held by American’s huge Tech monopolies, which determine the limits of permitted discussion worldwide at the flip of a switch. Can there be any better example of the ridiculous, Stalinesque climate of intellectual censorship currently enforced by those corporate giants?

Although Wade’s article served as the crucial catalyst, something similar had almost happened in early January, when prestigious New York magazine published a 12,000 cover-story by prominent liberal public intellectual Nicholson Baker, which reached very similar conclusions and might have produced the same impact. But Baker’s article ran on January 4th, and two days later our DC Capitol was suddenly stormed by a mob of outraged Trumpists, ensuring that all other matters were quickly forgotten for the next couple of months:

- The Lab-Leak Hypothesis

For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?

Nicholson Baker • New York Magazine • January 4, 2021 • 12,000 Words

I think a strong case may be made that the Covid epidemic has been the most important global event since World War II, and so sweeping and rapid a journalistic about-face seems almost unprecedented. Leading members of the Fourth Estate have fully recognized the magnitude of this reversal and the dire implications for their profession, registering their reactions, whether with delight or resigned embarrassment.

As a leading critic of our media establishment, famed investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald Tweeted out his own harsh verdict:

It's stunning how quickly, in mainstream sectors, this traveled from "insane unhinged conspiracy theory that must be censored from the internet as harmful disinformation" to "serious and plausible possibility for which rational evidence exists."

Let's learn lessons from this. https://t.co/aPnY0JLRJX

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 25, 2021

His frequent ally Matt Taibbi made similar remarks:

When the Wall Street Journal came out with a story that a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report detailed how three Wuhan researchers became sick enough to be hospitalized in November of 2019, the toothpaste was fully out of the tube: there was no longer any way to say the “lab origin” hypothesis was too silly to be reported upon.

That’s not to say the “lab origin” theory is correct, at all. However, that’s irrelevant to issue at hand.

But even more noteworthy was the lengthy mea culpa issued by Donald G. McNeil, Jr., the forty-five year veteran of the New York Times who had spearheaded his newspaper’s Covid coverage from the very beginning. Soon after reading his former colleague’s analysis and carefully considering the voluminous evidence cited, McNeil entirely reversed his opinion on the origins of the virus, endorsing a theory that he and other mainstream journalists had spent more than a year dismissing as “far right” lunacy, which he admitted they had grouped together with “Pizzagate, the Plandemic, Kung Flu, Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6 Capitol invasion.”

- How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory

Donald G. McNeil, Jr. • Medium • May 17, 2021 • 4,700 Words

Was Covid Developed as a Bioweapon?

With belief in a natural origin for the virus swiftly ebbing, our elite consensus seems to be moving toward the position of Wade, Baker, and many others that the original outbreak probably resulted from an accidental lab-leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, known to have been experimenting in that general area of viral research. Recent disclosures by members of our intelligence community that support this theory have been promoted in front-page stories in the Wall Street Journal and other leading media outlets, while naturally inspiring an enormous amount of discussion on the Internet.

One important element of the debate is the growing public awareness that the Wuhan lab’s viral research had received much of its recent funding from our own National Institutes of Health, providing a major scope for angry American political recriminations. These facts have been well known for more than a year, but they obviously had little importance when the virus was assumed to be natural.

Even the most horrific biological accidents can happen, but given the demonstrable cowardice and incompetence of our leading media organs, we should hardly be surprised that certain rather obvious implications of this lab-leak hypothesis have received less attention than they deserve.

First, there is the important fact that the top researchers at the Wuhan lab have adamantly denied that the virus was developed there, a position strongly supported by China’s national government. So if we accept a lab-leak, then both the local Chinese researchers and the country’s top political leaders have been concealing the true facts of this massive global catastrophe from day one. Such a total lack of candor might not be entirely surprising, but it casts a dark shadow over all of China’s other claims.

Even more suspicious is the publication history of the Wuhan lab. Sympathetic American scientists who had doubted that the virus was artificial have emphasized that absolutely none of the numerous articles produced by those Chinese viral researchers had included any mention of experimental work with the virus that eventually became formally known as SARS-CoV-2, which surely would have required a considerable amount of time and effort to transform into its current, highly-dangerous form. This implies that any such viral development work was kept entirely secret, a fact that carries dark implications. The production of biological weapons has been banned by international treaties, so any such illegal virus project would necessarily have remained secret.

Early last year, we published the perspective of a retired forty-year veteran of American biodefense, who focused on the particular epidemiological characteristics of the virus, which was extremely contagious but had a low fatality rate of 1% or less. As I summarized his analysis:

One important point he made was that high lethality was often counter-productive in a bioweapon since debilitating or hospitalizing large numbers of individuals may impose far greater economic costs on a country than a biological agent which simply inflicts an equal number of deaths. In his words “a high communicability, low lethality disease is perfect for ruining an economy,” suggesting that the apparent characteristics of the coronavirus were close to optimal in this regard.

For obvious reasons the majority of our mainstream journalists have been very reluctant to connect these dots of the Wuhan lab-leak scenario which they are now increasingly endorsing, just as nearly all of them had earlier failed to recognize that the virus was probably artificial. Even Wade and Baker have completely avoided any suggestion that the virus accidentally released in Wuhan had been an illegal bioweapon.

But if we abandon this understandable reticence and merely list the central elements of the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, the logical implications are quite obvious:

1. The virus accidentally leaked from China’s most advanced bioresearch facility, whose top virologists have repeatedly been lying about both the leak itself and their creation of the virus, falsehoods strongly echoed by top Chinese governmental leaders.

2. Since no mention of the virus development work had ever appeared in any published articles, the project had been kept entirely secret. Such total secrecy would be consistent with the creation of an illegal bioweapon.

3. The virus seems to have the ideal characteristics of an anti-economy bioweapon, intended to devastate the society and economic life of a targetted country.

Based upon these facts, the “Wuhan Lab-Leak Hypothesis” seems merely a euphemistic way of describing what is actually the “Chinese Bioweapon Lab-Leak Hypothesis.”

From the earliest days of the outbreak, anti-China publications and activists have regularly claimed that Covid was created in a laboratory, also describing it as an illegal Chinese bioweapon accidentally released into the world. Now that the former once-stigmatized assertion is becoming widely accepted, the latter possibility will inevitably become part of the public debate, regardless of any media attempts efforts to prevent this.

Once the virus began devastating large portions of Europe and America during the early months of 2020, the attacks upon China by President Trump and other top figures in his administration like Mike Pompeo became extremely harsh, and although the term “bioweapon” was only rarely uttered in public, it seemed implicit in many of their angry accusations and was probably widely discussed behind closed doors. For example, earlier this year David Asher, a former top Pompeo aide, publicly claimed that Covid was a Chinese bioweapon during a panel discussion organized by the neoconservative Hudson Institute.

The worldwide destruction inflicted by the virus has been enormous, both in human life and in social and economic damage. Taking into account both deaths and the concurrent lockdowns, America has clearly suffered its worst national calamity since the Great Depression. Many hundreds of thousands of our citizens have died, and according to the detailed analysis of the University of Washington public health researchers, our true total of virus deaths is already close to a million.

Other parts of the world have been even harder hit. India is currently the global epicenter of the outbreak, and most outside observers regard its official death tolls as severe undercounts. Last week, a major NYT survey of public health experts estimated that India’s actual fatalities have probably already exceeded 1.5 million and perhaps even passed 4 million.

If the carelessness of well-intentioned Chinese scientists has cost the world so many millions of lives and trillions of dollars, that situation would be bad enough. But if all this death and destruction was due to the accidental release of an illegal bioweapon which had been purposefully designed to destroy countries, the international consequences will surely be far more severe.

There are certain logical progressions that almost inevitably follow each other, so that once we have accepted A, we are forced to proceed to B, and then to C and D. Now that our elite media and political establishment seem ready to recognize the artificial nature of the virus, they will find it impossible to suppress the resulting debate on whether Covid was an illegal bioweapon. Indeed, I strongly suspect that many of those early figures who desperately—and often dishonestly—sought to establish the virus as natural and stifle any contrary possibility did so hoping to forestall exactly this situation. But as the Taibbi quote above emphasizes, by late May “the toothpaste was fully out of the tube.”

A Bioweapon Lab-Leak Scenario Without a Lab-Leak?

As discussed above, during the last two or three weeks we have witnessed the explosion of a massive propaganda bubble that had dominated our media narrative for more than a year, built around the assumption that Covid was a natural virus. That bubble had been maintained by the unwillingness of journalists to take notice of the obvious flaws in that theory and its total lack of any supporting evidence, while also completely ignoring important facts that pointed in an entirely different direction. As a consequence, that belief is being rapidly replaced by the contrary lab-leak hypothesis promoted by the Wade and Baker articles. But under these circumstances, we must be careful that we are not merely replacing one propaganda bubble with another.

Taken together, the Wade and Baker articles total some 23,000 words, and although they constitute the main case for the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, they strangely seem almost devoid of any significant evidence for an actual lab-leak. Even worse, from April 2020 onward Trump and Pompeo had loudly declared that they possessed “enormous evidence” supporting their claims of a Wuhan lab-leak, yet no such evidence has ever appeared. Have we forgotten the story of the Iraqi WMD’s so quickly?

There is one partial exception to these bare shelves. Wade’s long article contains a brief mention that just before Pompeo left office, he had his State Department release a Fact Sheet which mentioned that the US “had reason to believe” that during Autumn 2019, several researchers at the Wuhan lab fell ill with flu-like symptoms, and a couple of months later a former top Pompeo aide publicly made that same claim in somewhat greater detail.

Then last week, this tiny morsel resurfaced as the subject of an entire front-page WSJ story. According to intelligence from an unnamed third-party source of disputed reliability, three Wuhan lab researchers had fallen seriously ill during November 2019, around the time that the outbreak first began. Taibbi seemed to regard this tidbit as strong support for a lab-leak, and the story has been widely promoted on social media.

But this actual evidence seems almost invisibly thin. The journalists failed to mention that the Wuhan lab had over 1,000 staffers, and is it really so remarkable that three of these might have come down with serious flu-like symptoms at the height of flu season? Was this really the sum-total of the “enormous evidence” once claimed by Pompeo? Moreover, a sharp-eyed blogger noticed that the lead author of that WSJ article was none other than Michael R. Gordon, who had partnered with Judith Miller on her notoriously-fraudulent Iraqi WMD articles, an important detail that surely raises further doubts. And if we can credit the Chinese authorities, they say they later tested all Wuhan lab employees, none of whom had any signs of past infection.

It is true that there were also some American reports suggesting that the safety conditions at the Wuhan lab were insufficient, but relying upon such weak indications becomes a two-edged sword. Over the last year, pro-China propaganda-activists have widely promoted the completely unsubstantiated theory that the Covid virus had accidentally escaped from Ft. Detrick, America’s own premier biowarfare lab, heavily relying upon the fact that for eight months of 2019 major portions of the facility had been ordered shut down by the CDC for serious safety violations. There obviously exists far stronger circumstantial evidence of an American lab-leak than anything similar having happened in Wuhan.

So the major weakness in the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is that there are no actual signs of any lab-leak in Wuhan.

The Case for an American Biowarfare Attack

Thus, we are left with the strong likelihood that Covid came from a laboratory along with a good possibility that it was designed as a bioweapon, yet we lack serious indications that any lab-leak occurred. So if the original Wuhan outbreak was due to the deployment of a powerful bioweapon but not one that had accidentally leaked from any lab, then surely China was the intended target, the victim rather than the perpetrator. Indeed, the PRC only avoided suffering devastation because it responded in such extremely prompt fashion and quickly imposed exceptionally strong public health controls. Some 700 million Chinese were confined to their homes for weeks, a lockdown probably more than a thousand times greater than anything previously seen in history.

Given our ongoing military and geopolitical confrontation with China, America seems the likely source of the attack. However, once the virus eventually reached our own country, President Trump’s completely lackadaisical response demonstrated that he himself had absolutely no idea that he was confronting the threat of a dangerous bioweapon, thereby proving his own personal innocence. The most likely suspects would be rogue elements of our national security establishment, probably some of the Deep State Neocons whom Trump had placed near the top of his administration.

This small handful of high-level plotters would have then drawn upon the resources of the American national security apparatus to actually carry out the operation. The virus and its dispersal devices might have been obtained from Ft. Detrick and CIA operatives or members of special forces would have been sent to Wuhan to release it. However, all these latter individuals would have believed that they were participating in a fully authorized covert military strike against America’s primary geopolitical adversary. In effect, what happened was a Dr. Strangelove-type scenario, but brought to real life.

Starting in April 2020, I began publishing a long series of articles and columns that presented the evidence for this biowarfare attack hypothesis. Three of the most substantial pieces are linked below, and I would suggest that those so interested read them, especially the most recent one.

- American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 21, 2020 • 7,400 Words • 1,638 Comments

- American Pravda: Covid-19, Its Impact and Origins After One Year

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 15, 2021 • 8,700 Words • 975 Comments

- American Pravda: “The Truth” and “The Whole Truth” About the Origins of Covid-19

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 10, 2021 • 6,400 Words • 847 Comments

In addition, we had earlier republished two very relevant articles, one by a retired forty year veteran of American biodefense and the other by investigative journalist Whitney Webb:

- Was Coronavirus a Biowarfare Attack Against China?

OldMicrobiologist • The Unz Review • March 13, 2020 • 3,400 Words • 705 Comments

- Bats, Gene Editing and Bioweapons: Recent Darpa Experiments Raise Concerns Amid Coronavirus Outbreak

Whitney Webb • The Unz Review • January 30, 2020 • 5,700 Words • 297 Comments

The following few paragraphs extracted my articles probably provide some of the most compelling evidence for my thesis:

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 hatred 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?

On March 15, 2020 I had published a brief comment providing my simple analogy of what I thought had transpired. At that point, our country had only suffered a couple of dozen fatalities and had not yet had its first lockdown, but I would still stand by those same words today:

Suppose two neighbors are feuding, and one of them has a psychopathic teenage son, who sneaks out late at night and starts an arson fire next door to “teach them a lesson.”

But the victimized family smells smoke, wakes up, and using heroic effort puts the fire out with only fairly minor damage.

Meanwhile, the fire spreads back to the teenager’s own house, and since the family is too lazy and incompetent to bother doing anything, the house catches on fire and burns to the ground, killing several relatives and leaving everyone homeless.

Under such a scenario, wouldn’t it be more sensible for the attacked family to just quietly gloat a little and maybe offer condolences rather than to plot further vengeance?

Evidence Favors a Biowarfare Attack Rather Than a Random Lab-Leak

My past articles linked above make my case for an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran) but run many thousands of words. So I am providing below a brief summary of those main points, especially focused upon why the biowarfare scenario seems far more likely that the competing lab-leak hypothesis:

(1) For three years, China had been locked in growing conflict with America over trade and geopolitics, and for three years in a row, China had been hit very hard by mysterious viruses. An Avian Flu virus severely damaged its poultry industry in 2018 and the following year a Swine Flu virus destroyed over 40% of its pig herds, China’s primary meat source. The third year, Covid-19 appeared. Certainly a suspicious pattern if the last were just a random lab-leak.

(2) The Covid-19 outbreak appeared at absolutely the worst time and place for China, the major transit hub of Wuhan, timed almost perfectly to reach high local levels of infection just as the travelers for the Lunar New Year holiday spread the disease to all other parts of the country, thereby producing an unstoppable epidemic. The timing of an accidental lab-leak would obviously be random.

(3) 300 American military servicemen had just visited Wuhan as part of the World Military Games, providing a perfect opportunity for releasing a viral bioweapon. Consider what Americans would think if 300 Chinese military officers had visited Chicago, and immediately afterwards a mysterious, deadly viral disease suddenly broke out in that city. It would be a strange coincidence if that the American military visit and an entirely unrelated accidental lab-leak had occurred at exactly the same time.

(4) The characteristics of Covid-19, including high communicability and low lethality, are absolutely ideal in an anti-economy bioweapon. It seems odd that a random lab-leak would release a virus so perfectly designed to severely damage the Chinese economy.

(5) From almost the very moment that the outbreak began, anti-China bloggers in America and the US-funded Radio Free Asia network had launched a powerful international propaganda offensive against China, claiming that the outbreak in Wuhan was due to the leak of an illegal bioweapon from the Wuhan lab. This may have merely been an exceptionally prompt but opportunistic response of our propaganda organs, but they seemed remarkably quick to take full advantage of an entirely unexpected and mysterious development, which they immediately identified as being due to a lab-leak.

(6) By “the second week of November” our Defense Intelligence Agency had already begun preparing a secret report warning of a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak in Wuhan although according to the standard timeline at that point probably only a couple of dozen people had started experiencing any symptoms of illness in a city of 11 million. How did they discover what was happening in Wuhan so much sooner than the Chinese government or anyone else?

(7) Almost immediately afterwards, the ruling political elites in Iran became severely infected, with many of them dying. Why did the accidental Wuhan lab-leak jump to the Iran’s political elites so quickly, before it had reached almost anywhere else in the world.

Outline of the Hypothetical Biowarfare Attack Scenario

Given the conclusions suggested above, I also think it would be useful for me to provide my own summary of a plausible scenario for the Covid outbreak. Although I had already presented this outline in a September 2020 article, I see no need for any revisions. Obviously, this reconstruction is quite speculative, but I think it best fits all the available evidence, while individual elements may be modified, dropped, or replaced without necessarily compromising the overall hypothesis.

(1) Rogue elements within our large national security apparatus probably affiliated with the Deep State Neocons decided to inflict severe damage upon the huge Chinese economy using biowarfare. The plan was to infect the key transport hub of Wuhan with Covid-19 so that the disease would invisibly spread throughout the entire country during the annual Lunar New Year travels, and they used the cover of the Wuhan International Military Games to slip a couple of operatives into the city to release the virus. My guess is that only a relatively small number of individuals were involved in this plot.

(2) The biological agent they released was designed primarily as an anti-economy rather than an anti-personnel weapon. Although Covid-19 has rather low fatality rates, it is extremely contagious, has a long pre-symptomatic infectious period, and can even spread by asymptomatic carriers, making it ideally suited for that purpose. Thus, once it established itself throughout most of China, it would be extremely difficult to eradicate and the resulting efforts to control it would inflict enormous damage upon China’s economy and society.

(3) As a secondary operation, they decided to target Iran’s political elites, possibly deploying a somewhat more deadly variant of the virus. Since political elites generally tend to be elderly, they would anyway suffer far greater fatalities.

(4) The deadly SARS and MERS outbreaks in East Asia and the Near East had never significantly spread back to America (or Europe), so the plotters wrongly assumed that the same would be the case with Covid-19. Anyway, since international organizations always ranked the US and Europe as having the best and most effective public health systems for combating any disease epidemic, they believed that any possible blowback damage would be very minor.

(5) Only a small number of individuals were directly involved in this plot, and soon after the disease was successfully released in Wuhan, they decided to further safeguard America’s own interests by alerting the appropriate units with the Defense Intelligence Agency, probably by fabricating some sort of supposed “intelligence leak.” Basically, they arranged for the DIA to hear that Wuhan was apparently suffering a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak, thereby leading the DIA to prepare and distribute a secret report warning our own forces and allies to take appropriate precautions.

(6) Unfortunately for these plans, the Chinese government reacted with astonishing determination and effectiveness, and soon stamped out the disease. Meanwhile, the lackadaisical and incompetent American government largely ignored the problem, only reacting after the massive outbreak in Northern Italy had gotten media attention. Since the CDC had botched production of a testing kit, we had no means of recognizing that the disease was already spreading in our country, and the result was massive damage to America’s economy and society. In effect, America suffered exactly the fate that had originally been intended for its Chinese rival.

The Covid Epidemic as Lab-Leak or Biowarfare?

The Unz Review • July 12, 2021 • 13,100 Words

The Alleged Wuhan Lab-Leak and Its Scientific Skeptics

During most of the last year theories regarding the origins of Covid, whether conspiratorial or otherwise, had disappeared from the public debate, pushed aside by the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests and the final stages of the heated presidential campaign.

In early January, prominent liberal author and public intellectual Nicholson Baker had tried to revive the issue with a 12,000 word cover story in New York magazine, only to see his Covid lab-leak theory swamped and forgotten when the DC Capitol was stormed by a mob of outraged Trumpists two days later.

- The Lab-Leak Hypothesis

For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?

Nicholson Baker • New York Magazine • January 4, 2021 • 12,000 Words

But then on May 2nd, a revolution occurred after former New York Times science journalist and editor Nicholas Wade published a lengthy article on Medium. His careful 11,000 word analysis mustered the strong evidence that the virus was the artificial product of a human lab, suggesting that it had probably leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s most advanced viral research facility. That laboratory was known to have been working with those types of coronaviruses and was located in Wuhan, the site of the initial outbreak, raising all sorts of obvious suspicions.

- The Origin of Covid

Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

Nicholas Wade • Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists • May 5, 2021 • 11,000 Words

The floodgates soon opened and over the next few weeks far more was written on that subject than had been produced during the previous twelve months combined. In just one example, Donald G. McNeil, Jr., the forty-five year veteran of the Times who had spearheaded his paper’s Covid coverage, published a striking mea culpa and embraced the lab-leak hypothesis, admitting that he and other Timesmen had previously dismissed the idea as “far right” lunacy, closely associated with “Pizzagate, the Plandemic, Kung Flu, Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6 Capitol invasion.”

- How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory

Donald G. McNeil, Jr. • Medium • May 17, 2021 • 4,700 Words

McNeil had already retired from the Times the previous December after an unrelated controversy, but others at his former newspaper had also experienced a similar change of heart. For more than a year, the editors had been fiercely critical of the lab-leak theory, heavily promoted by Donald Trump and his allies, but with Trump now safely gone, their perspective changed.

In late June, Zeynep Tufekci, one of their opinion columnists, published a 5,500 word article harshly criticizing China and arguing that the global epidemic had probably been the consequence of a Chinese lab-leak. Prof. Tufekci’s field of study was sociology rather than the biological sciences and her expertise lay in social media, but the appearance of her long piece surely reflected a seismic shift in the views of her top editors.

- Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.

Zeynep Tufekci • June 25, 2021 • The New York Times • 5,500 Words

A far longer exposition of this emerging American media consensus had appeared at the beginning of that same month in Vanity Fair. The 12,000 word article strongly favored the lab-leak theory and focused upon the bureaucratic infighting regarding that issue within the national security apparatus of the Trump Administration. Based upon months of investigative reporting and numerous interviews, the piece seemed to heavily rely upon anonymous Trump intelligence sources, while generally taking our government claims at face value.

- The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins

Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.

Katherine Eban • June 3, 2021 • Vanity Fair • 12,000 Words

Moreover, although the suggestion was presented in a defensive, insinuating manner, the long article also raised serious suspicions that Covid had been developed as a Chinese bioweapon, with that particular word appearing nine times in the text. Millions had already died around the world, including many hundreds of thousands of Americans, so some might find it troubling that such inflammatory accusations had appeared in one of America’s most prestigious general interest magazines, especially considering the near-total lack of any supporting evidence. This article demonstrated the drastic shift in elite media sentiment, with theories previously confined to the extreme anti-China ideological fringe now occupying the center of American journalism.

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.

A useful roundup of this sudden wave of supportive lab-leak coverage came in a 4,500 word article published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a left-leaning watchdog organization. The article documented this rapid media shift by citing examples from the Washington Post, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and ABC News, and strongly pushed back against it, continuing to argue for a natural origin of the virus.

- US Media Give New Respect to Lab Leak Theory—Though Evidence Is as Lacking as Ever

Joshua Cho • Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) • June 28, 2021 • 4,500 Words

Unfortunately, although this piece was quite useful as a compendium of media links, the analysis provided was far from persuasive. Author Joshua Cho was described as a recent college graduate and former FAIR intern, presumably placing him in his early 20s, so I was hardly surprised to notice quite a number of factual and logical errors in his presentation. Most egregiously, he devoted half his article to attacking Wade, whom he ignorantly and insultingly denounced as a notorious promoter of “pseudo-science” and he seemed rather dismayed that prominent left-liberal journalists such as Thomas Frank and Jonathan Cook had taken Wade’s views so seriously. Perhaps this rather self-important former intern should recognize that they probably know some things that he does not, and might consider that Wade had become the science editor at the New York Times almost a decade before Cho was even born.

However, others possessing far greater credibility and scientific expertise have also recently challenged the lab-leak hypothesis on much stronger grounds. The day before Cho’s article appeared, Bloomberg had run a long interview with Danielle Anderson, an experienced Australian virologist who had been the only Westerner working at the Wuhan lab during the period in question. By her account, the description of the lab and its operations provided by the Western media had been totally at odds with what she had seen working there, and the likelihood of a virus leak seemed nil.

- The Last—And Only—Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out

Virologist Danielle Anderson paints a very different picture of the Wuhan Institute

Michelle Fay Cortez • June 27, 2021 • Bloomberg • 2,200 Words

Based upon a few sentences in American government cables, our media has repeatedly alleged that the operating standards of the Wuhan lab were poor, but Anderson’s own experience had been entirely different, with the safety protocols so impressive that she later suggested they be adopted at her own research organization. For many months, former members of the Trump Administration had been promoting some questionably-sourced “third party” intelligence claiming that three lab workers became seriously ill in November 2019 with Covid-like symptoms, but Dr. Anderson could recall no such cases, and believed that she would have heard about them. She had generally enjoyed a very friendly and open relationship with her Chinese colleagues, with scientific gossip regularly being shared back and forth. Under these circumstances, she felt certain that if a suspected lab-leak had occurred, she would have heard about it, but there had never been a hint of any such incident.

Furthermore, the creation of a dangerous virus such as Covid would have required many layers of official authorization by lab administrators, and she doubted that a decision of such importance could have been taken without word getting around. While she admitted that it was theoretically possible for some rogue Chinese lab researcher to have secretly undertaken such a project and bioengineered the virus, then accidentally infected himself or others, she rated the likelihood as “exceedingly slim.”

So based upon her personal experience at the Wuhan lab, she thought it very unlikely that the Covid virus was developed there and equally unlikely that any lab-leak had ever occurred. For these reasons, she still leaned towards a natural source for the viral outbreak.

Similar conclusions had been made in an early June interview with Christian Drosten, a German virologist ranked as one of the world’s leading experts on both SARS and Covid. Although the discussion appeared in a small German-language publication and has received minimal attention, the magic of Google Translate has made this important material available to a worldwide audience:

- Mr. Drosten, where did this virus come from?

Marie-Jose Kolly, Angela Richter, and Daniel Ryser • June 5, 2021 • Republik • 4,500 Words

Although Dr. Drosten fully accepted a natural origin for the virus, speculating that the undiscovered intermediate host might be found somewhere in China’s huge fur-farming industry, he also gave his opinion on the possibility of a bioengineered virus or a lab-leak. In particular, he broached the possibility that the virus was created and released as a bioweapon, but deliberately shied away from discussing it:

There are actually two laboratory theses. One would be malice that someone has intentionally constructed such a virus. The other would be the research accident, that in spite of good intentions and curiosity an experiment went wrong. The malicious thing, to be honest: you have to talk to the secret service about it. As a scientist, I cannot judge that.

He went on to say that the structure of the virus made it very unlikely that it would have been produced as a product of an innocent scientific research project, or that it came from the Wuhan lab and was accidentally released:

This idea of a research accident is extremely unlikely for me because it would be far too cumbersome. The idea of malicious use by some secret service laboratory somewhere: If anything, something like that would probably not come from the Wuhan Virology Institute. This is a reputable academic institute.

Although their reasons differ, the combined testimony of virologists Anderson and Drosten raises considerable doubts about the accidental Wuhan lab-leak scenario that now increasingly represents the conventional wisdom of the American mainstream media. Both experts are very skeptical that Covid could have been the product of innocent scientific research, and they also think it quite unlikely that the Wuhan lab either created or accidentally released it. Thus, although they both still prefer the natural virus theory, they seem to regard the likely alternative as an illegal or malicious project, seemingly implying the creation and deliberate release of a deadly bioweapon. But under such a scenario, the initial outbreak in Wuhan, one of China’s largest cities and a key transport hub, would obviously tend to exculpate that country, while logically pointing the finger of blame in an entirely different direction.

It is noteworthy that we have one of the world’s leading scientific authorities on Covid gingerly raising the possibility that it was a non-Chinese bioweapon, and doing so in a small-circulation German-language publication. Yet this very brief and glancing speculation seems to be the only time I have encountered this obvious idea anywhere in the 100,000 or more words of mainstream articles I have read on the possible origins of Covid during the last year or more. Surely many other journalists and scientists must have considered such a possibility, yet virtually none of them had allowed such an idea to appear in print. How can we best understand this complete intellectual embargo?

I think part of the explanation may be found in an interesting exchange late last year on entirely different matters between prominent liberal journalists Matt Taibbi and Chris Hedges, formerly of Rolling Stone and the New York Times respectively. As they described it, working journalists greatly rely upon social media, especially if they are not directly affiliated with a major publication. And such individuals recognized that a few wrongly-chosen words can provoke a swarming Twitter lynch-mob, possibly leading to the deadly fate of deplatforming. So writers and their employers must necessarily exercise a great deal of self-censorship, fearful of the disastrous consequences of a careless sentence.

Given this reality, the sudden, striking collapse of the natural virus propaganda-bubble that had so completely dominated the mainstream media for more than a year becomes much less surprising. Probably a considerable number of individuals had had their doubts all along, but fearful of being purged, they had kept silent. However, once Wade’s article appeared and began attracting some favorable discussion on social media, they gradually lost their fears and jumped on board, soon demonstrating that those views had been far more widespread than anyone realized.

The Plausible Deniability of Bioweapons and Their Effectiveness in Economic Warfare

There may or may not exist similar hidden reservoirs of support for the possibility that Covid was a non-Chinese bioweapon, but if so these have remained remarkably well concealed.

Over the last year I have produced a long series of articles explicitly making the case that the Covid virus was released in a deliberate biowarfare attack against China (and Iran). Taken together, these pieces have been viewed some 250,000 times. Yet with a few rare exceptions, the material has been considered far too radioactive to have been acknowledged anywhere in the alternative media, let alone by its mainstream counterpart. The following are the most substantial elements of the series:

- American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 21, 2020 • 7,400 Words • 1,638 Comments

- American Pravda: Covid-19, Its Impact and Origins After One Year

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 15, 2021 • 8,700 Words • 975 Comments

- American Pravda: “The Truth” and “The Whole Truth” About the Origins of Covid-19

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 10, 2021 • 6,400 Words • 847 Comments

- American Pravda: George Orwell’s Virus Lab-Leak

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 31, 2021 • 5,200 Words • 999 Comments

These articles have established our publication as one of the very few venues open to such controversial ideas. As a consequence, we recently received and published a submission by an emeritus professor in Europe with a background in politics and security issues, who wrote under the pen-name “Andreas Canetti.” Although somewhat unwieldy and unpolished, his text ran 26,000 words with over 280 footnotes and provided an enormous wealth of information and references, much of it analyzing and explicating the biowarfare hypothesis. While I would not necessarily endorse some of the arguments made, the article served as a very useful source of information on many aspects of the topic.

- The Flying Pangolin

Andreas Canetti • June 18, 2021 • The Unz Review • 26,000 Words

The lengthy Vanity Fair article had revealed that some Trump Administration national security officials were strongly opposed to challenging the natural virus theory, fearing that talk of an artificial origin would “open a can of worms,” with that phrase so significant that it was even used as one of the main section headings. But the possible nature of those concerns is much better understood after we absorb some of the important material revealed in the Canetti article.

For example, Canetti quotes long passages by a noted military expert on the particular effectiveness of biological warfare in crippling the economy of an international adversary but doing so in a manner that retains the plausible deniability that any attack had even occurred:

[T]he twenty-first century will be a century of economic warfare… [The] emergence of economic competition…raises the possibility of a new form of warfare. This includes the development and use of biological warfare (BW) against economic targets. Using BW to attack livestock, crops, or ecosystems offers an adversary the means to wage a potentially subtle yet devastating form of warfare, one which would impact the political, social, and economic sectors of a society and potentially of national survival itself…[Bacteria and viruses] that incapacitate or kill humans, animals, or plants have an unsettling value in waging economic warfare….[U]sing BW may inflict a grave blow to that nation’s economy or society and possibly result in some political impact. History has recorded the chaos and instability created by such natural catastrophes as famines and epidemics. Using BW in this fashion would have applications to waging low-intensity warfare with strategic outcomes.

[A bioweapon] is the only weapon of mass destruction which has utility across the spectrum of conflict. Using biological weapons under the cover of an endemic or natural disease occurrence provides an attacker the potential for plausible denial. In this context, [bioweapons] offer greater possibilities for use than do nuclear weapons… [Bioweapons] can be employed in noncombat settings under the guise of natural events, during operations other than war, or can be used in open combat scenarios against all biological systems – man, animal, or plant. Deliberate dissemination of BW agents may be afforded possible denial by naturally occurring diseases and events… Biological warfare’s potential to create significant economic loss and subsequent political instability with plausible denial exceeds any other known weapon.

These words were written in 1998 by Robert P. Kadlec, who went on to become a top biowarfare advisor in the George W. Bush Administration, and then most recently returned to government in 2017 as an Assistant Secretary under Trump. His cogent analysis brought to mind some disturbing facts I had noted in my original April 2020 article:

[D]uring the previous two years, the Chinese economy had already suffered serious blows from other mysterious new diseases, although these had targeted farm animals rather than people. During 2018 a new Avian Flu virus had swept the country, eliminating large portions of China’s poultry industry, and during 2019 the Swine Flu viral epidemic had devastated China’s pig farms, destroying 40% of the nation’s primary domestic source of meat, with widespread claims that the latter disease was being spread by mysterious small drones…So for three years in a row, China had been severely impacted by strange new viral diseases, though only the most recent had been deadly to humans. This evidence was merely circumstantial, but the pattern seemed highly suspicious.

Furthermore, the particular features of Covid itself seem to fall into this same category. Early last year, we published the perspective of a retired forty-year veteran of American biodefense, who focused on the unusual epidemiological characteristics of the virus, which was extremely contagious but had a low fatality rate of 1% or less. As I summarized his analysis:

One important point he made was that high lethality was often counter-productive in a bioweapon since debilitating or hospitalizing large numbers of individuals may impose far greater economic costs on a country than a biological agent which simply inflicts an equal number of deaths. In his words “a high communicability, low lethality disease is perfect for ruining an economy,” suggesting that the apparent characteristics of the coronavirus were close to optimal in this regard.

- Was Coronavirus a Biowarfare Attack Against China?

OldMicrobiologist • The Unz Review • March 13, 2020 • 3,400 Words

For decades, America has maintained the world’s most extensive biowarfare program, having absorbed much of the previous Soviet capacity after the collapse of the USSR. We now operate a global network of biolabs in 25 countries, many of them bordering either China or Russia.

US biolabs in 25 countries around Russia and China and in Africa (from Dilyana Gaytandzhieva)

A great deal of this information was summarized in a January 2020 article by investigative journalist Whitney Webb, which we published after her regular outlet at the time had balked at releasing it:

- Bats, Gene Editing and Bioweapons: Recent Darpa Experiments Raise Concerns Amid Coronavirus Outbreak

Whitney Webb • The Unz Review • January 30, 2020 • 5,700 Words

Finally, the website of Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, a former Bulgarian journalist, contains a long article providing a wealth of links and information on America’s biowarfare efforts, representing a very useful resource for those interested in further investigating this important topic:

- The Pentagon Bio-weapons

Dilyana Gaytandzhieva • Arms Watch • June 14, 2019 • 6,800 Words

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.

The Long-Forgotten Early Iranian Outbreak

China ranks as our most formidable geopolitical rival, and when it was suddenly struck by a mysterious viral plague at the height of our international tensions, the implications were entirely ignored by our timorous media. But they have also completely ignored an even stranger coincidence, as I had noted in my original April 2020 article:

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 hatred 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?

That initial Iranian outbreak was also strangely centered on the Holy City of Qom, the home of that country’s elite political and religious leadership rather than in the far larger metropolis of Tehran. Whether Covid appeared in Wuhan as a natural virus or was released due to an accidental lab-leak, Wuhan is some 5,500 kilometers from Qom, so the latter city would hardly seem the most likely location for the next major appearance of the virus.

By March additional major Covid outbreaks had also occurred in Northern Italy and soon afterwards Spain, but the circumstances were quite different. According to Wikipedia, some 300,000 Chinese live and work in that Italian region while another 150,000 Chinese reside in Spain, and many of these individuals had surely returned from annual Lunar New Year trips to their Chinese homeland, perhaps bringing the virus back with them. By contrast, Iran’s total Chinese population is one of the smallest in the world, numbering just 5,000-9,000, and overwhelmingly concentrated in Tehran rather than Qom.

China has very extensive trading and business links throughout the world, with perhaps a million Chinese residing in Africa and several million Chinese immigrants in the US and Canada, many of whom retain close personal ties to their homeland. So if an international panel of expert epidemiologists had been given the hypothetical case of a new epidemic in Wuhan, China and asked to predict the next city to which the disease would spread, I suspect that Qom in Iran would have been close to the bottom of their list. But after our early January assassination of Gen. Qasem Soleimini and Iran’s retaliatory cruise missile strikes against our Middle Eastern bases, any panel of military strategists would surely have ranked Iran’s leadership near the absolute top of American targets.

Together with its close Israeli ally, the U.S. has long maintained an effective network of agents and operatives in Iran, who have successfully carried out numerous major sabotage operations and high-level assassinations. Compared to such difficult attacks on heavily-guarded targets, the quiet release of an invisible and untraceable but highly contagious virus in some gathering of political elites would have been an extremely easy operation, especially since the results would have only become apparent weeks later as the victims fell ill and the disease began to spread.

The circumstantial evidence suggesting that America (or its Israeli partner) had deployed Covid against Iran’s leadership class in Qom seemed so strong, I found it puzzling that the Iranians themselves had apparently not drawn those same conclusions and publicly denounced what had occurred. They might not have had any proof, but such a biowarfare attack would been an unprecedented violation of important international conventions, and surely such plausible allegations would have generated international headlines and elicited a considerable amount of sympathy. But then a few months ago, I was very much surprised to discover that the Iranians had actually done exactly that.

In February 2021, a social media research group affiliated with the establishmentarian Atlantic Council released a massive 17,000 word, 54 page report documenting and denouncing the wide range of supposedly false or unsubstantiated “conspiracy theories” regarding the Covid epidemic, and devoted several pages to presenting what they considered widespread Iranian “falsehoods,” but which I viewed in an entirely different light. By early March 2020, the Iranian general overseeing his country’s biowarfare defense had already begun suggesting that Covid was a Western biological attack against his country and China, and a couple of days later the semiofficial Iranian news agency FARS quoted Iran’s top Revolutionary Guards military commander as declaring:

Today, the country is engaged in a biological battle. We will prevail in the fight against this virus, which might be the product of an American biological [attack], which first spread in China and then to the rest of the world…America should know that if it has done so, it will return to itself.

Soon afterward, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei took the same public position, while populist former president president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became especially vocal on Twitter for several months, even directing his formal accusations to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Just a single one of his numerous Tweets drew many thousands of Retweets and Likes.

Iranian radio and television and its international news service repeatedly carried these stories, backed by supportive interviews with a top political aide to Malaysia’s former prime minister. But America’s overwhelming domination over the English-language global media ensured that this major international controversy never came to my attention at the time it occurred.

The blockade preventing these Iranian charges from reaching the English-speaking world was further facilitated by American control over the basic infrastructure of the Internet. Just one month earlier, Iran’s PressTV channel for Britain had been deleted by YouTube, following the earlier elimination of its main global channel. Most recently, the American government took the unprecedented action of seizing PressTV‘s Internet domain, completely eliminating all access to that website.

Wikipedia is also under hostile control, so we should hardly be surprised that ubiquitous source of worldwide information rather implausibly suggests that a single Iranian businessman returning from China was the cause of the Qom outbreak.

Manipulating Scientists into Deflecting the Iranian Accusations

Although in recent decades America seems to have fallen behind various other countries in industrial production, governing competence, and some important aspects of military technology, the effectiveness of our propaganda organs remains undiminished. As I considered the means by which our Neocon-dominated national-security-media complex had so effortlessly deflected those seemingly formidable Iranian accusations, an apparent strategy became clear. As I explained in my April 2020 article:

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….I discovered that the fringes of the Internet were awash with claims that the disease was caused by a Chinese bioweapon accidentally released from that same Wuhan laboratory, with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and ZeroHedge, a popular right-wing conspiracy-website, playing leading roles in advancing the theory. Indeed, the stories became so widespread in those ideological circles that Sen. Tom Cotton, a leading Republican Neocon, began promoting them on Twitter and FoxNews, thereby provoking an article in the NYT on those “fringe conspiracy theories.”

As the Times article indicated, these early claims that Covid might be a leaked Chinese bioweapon were soon heavily amplified by Neocon-oriented international news outlets such as the Washington Times and Alex Jones’s popular InfoWars network. Fearful of the possible international consequences of such explosive charges, well-intentioned scientists mobilized behind the defense that the virus was entirely natural, whether or not they actually believed the evidence was as strong as they claimed. Public statements to this effect appeared in a January 29th Washington Post article and a couple of weeks later the New York Times article debunking Sen. Cotton’s charges.

This may also be the most likely explanation for the high-profile declaration published in the Lancet on February 19, 2020 by a group of 27 virologists and other noted scientists, condemning speculation about an artificial virus as an untenable “conspiracy theory,” and the equally high-profile piece the following month in Nature Medicine arguing for a natural Covid origin. These early statements in prestigious journals completely framed the media discourse for more than a year, and as a consequence this supposed scientific consensus ensured that any Iranian accusations of a biowarfare attack were automatically dismissed as absurd and ridiculous.

I think that this reconstruction of events is supported by the remarkably contradictory public positions taken by Prof. Richard H. Ebright, a highly-reputable Rutgers molecular biologist and biosafety expert, who has recently established himself as one of the most widely cited scientific backers of the Wuhan lab-leak theory.

In January, Nicholson Baker had quoted Ebright as saying that for years he had been concerned about the Wuhan lab and the work being done there to create “chimeric” SARS-related bat coronaviruses “with enhanced human infectivity.” In an email, the scientist further declared that “In this context, the news of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan ***screamed*** lab release.”

Soon afterwards, Ebright became one of the prominent signatories of the March Open Letter sharply criticizing the WHO report and calling for a renewed international investigation of the Wuhan lab, outlining his views in a lengthy Independent Science News interview. According to the Vanity Fair article, when the earliest reports of the Covid outbreak appeared, his suspicions that an artificial virus had leaked from the Wuhan lab were immediate, emerging within “a nanosecond or a picosecond.” Ebright’s statements also constituted a centerpiece of Wade’s seminal article:

It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice. It is also clear that, depending on the constant genomic contexts chosen for analysis, this work could have produced SARS-CoV-2 or a proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2…It is clear that some or all of this work was being performed using a biosafety standard … that would pose an unacceptably high risk of infection of laboratory staff. It also is clear that this work never should have been funded and never should have been performed.

Yet strangely enough, during the early months of the epidemic, Ebright had seemingly taken an entirely contrary public position. In his January 29, 2020 interview with the Washington Post, he had declared: “Based on the virus genome and properties there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus.” And according to a Post story a couple of weeks later, he also added “The possibility that this was a deliberately released bioweapon can be firmly excluded.”

Ebright’s sweeping statements had been intended to rebut the widespread allegations that Covid was a Chinese bioweapon that had accidentally been leaked, but they soon proved extremely helpful to our own government-sponsored RFE/RL, which denounced the Iranian biowarfare accusation as “an unfounded claim” backed by “no evidence,” and quoted Ebright’s blanket assertion as an effective rebuttal. The apparent scientific consensus that the virus was natural ensured that any further Iranian accusations were summarily rejected as completely irrational by the international media, forcing Tehran to soon abandon the effort as counter-productive.

Whether or not my analysis of Ebright’s motive is correct, there is the undeniable reality that the loudest early scientific voice favoring Covid as natural has become the loudest voice arguing that it came from a lab, a belief he now claims to have held from the very beginning. No one in the media seems to have commented upon or perhaps even noticed this radical reversal.

I cannot say if this political/media strategy was actually planned, but it proved very effective, and the fierce, early attacks on China for having released Covid achieved a double result. The accusations successfully demonized that country with much of the American and world public, so that according to a poll taken at the end of April, a remarkable 45% of Americans believed that the deadly virus had “probably” or “definitely” originated in a Chinese laboratory, with 74% of Republicans holding that belief. But the charges also provoked a defensive response by reputable scientific authorities, who gravitated towards the doubtful natural virus theory as their best defense, and this proved extremely useful in defeating the Iranian accusations when they soon came. Moreover, the resulting natural virus consensus remained confined to the mainstream media, a source of information widely distrusted by populist conservatives, most of whom may have remained stubbornly convinced that Covid had indeed come from the Wuhan lab and had probably been a Chinese bioweapon.

By the beginning of 2021, the extremely suspicious aspects of the early Iranian outbreak had long since been forgotten and Iran’s biowarfare accusations abandoned, so there was little cost in allowing the resurrection of the theory that Covid was the artificial product of a lab. This cleared the way for a new media consensus along those lines.

Trying to Disguise a Smoking Gun

The extremely suspicious nature of the very early Covid outbreak in Qom points the finger of blame in an obvious direction, as Iran’s top leadership had publicly declared at the time. But evidence related to Wuhan itself is even more compelling, and the probable timeline of the first appearance of Covid constitutes a crucial element of that story.

Throughout 2020, teams of investigative journalists from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press, sometimes assisted by leaked Chinese documents, had firmly established that China’s central government was unaware of the growing viral epidemic until the end of December, and then immediately provided the information to the World Health Organization and other international authorities. That same year a very thorough analysis by Philippe Lemoine in Quillette had also strongly argued that the local Wuhan officials only discovered the viral outbreak a couple of days earlier.

The exact date of Wuhan’s Patient Zero is much more difficult to determine, but can probably be roughly estimated. Years of censorship and ideological curation have severely impaired the utility of Google as an objective search engine on controversial topics, but it remains invaluable as a guide to the established standard narrative. And if we Google a phrase like “first Wuhan Covid case,” a top result is the official summary of an academic paper published in Science on March 18, 2021 by a team of researchers from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with the first author being Dr. Jonathan Pekar.

- Novel Coronavirus Circulated Undetected Months before First COVID-19 Cases in Wuhan, China

Study dates emergence to as early as October 2019; simulations suggest in most cases zoonotic viruses die out naturally before causing a pandemic

Scott LaFee • UCSanDiegoHealth • March 18, 2021 • 1,100 Words

Based upon the characteristics of the virus and employing a series of simulations using standard molecular clock techniques, the researchers concluded that the outbreak in Hubei province probably began no earlier than mid-October 2019, while regional newspaper reports suggest that Covid was already actively circulating by November 17, 2019. This allows us to effectively bracket the appearance of Patient Zero between mid-October and mid-November, with very early November being the most likely date. According to the paper’s estimate, there were probably no more than four infected individuals by mid-November and just nine by December 1, 2019, though obviously all these dates and totals are mere approximations. A rough timeline along these same lines had already been widely accepted by spring of last year, but a rigorous academic study has now placed it upon a much more solid footing.

However, when we combine certain other facts with these seemingly solid scientific conclusions, the implications are explosive, as I have repeatedly emphasized for more than a year:

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.

Founding Slate Editor Michael Kinsley once famously quipped that a gaffe was when a politician inadvertently spoke some forbidden truth, and by failing to recognize the obvious implications of the date of the secret DIA report, the four government sources who revealed its existence and the Israeli source who independently confirmed that disclosure had constructed an enormous political bomb, which only the “see no evil” behavior of our timorous media has allowed to remain undetonated.

Because the nominal focus of the original ABC News report had been the incompetence of the Trump Administration in failing to heed the November warning of the looming epidemic, the story received enormous early discussion, being very widely Tweeted out and attracting over 1,700 comments. The lead author was Josh Margolin, the news network’s chief investigative reporter, whose excellent governmental and intelligence sources greatly strengthened its credibility and impact. Even the much less prominent Israeli story confirming the secret report’s international distribution attracted more than 50 comments.

But there are grave implications to a secret American government report that described a potentially “cataclysmic” disease outbreak in Wuhan that has not yet actually occurred, and once these were recognized, the entire episode was quickly flushed down the media memory hole and almost never mentioned again, even by alternative journalists.

One particularly suspicious aspect of the DIA report was that it had allegedly been “the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images.” Yet at the time it was prepared—“the second week” of November—we now believe that no more than a handful of Chinese had yet become infected by Covid in that city, hardly the sort of situation that would have been apparent on satellite reconnaissance photos.

The Pentagon’s first line of defense was simply to deny that the report had ever existed, though this became more difficult after the Israelis confirmed that both they and NATO had received copies at the time. But given the enormous stakes involved, additional efforts to obfuscate the apparent smoking gun seem to have been quickly undertaken.

Two months after he had published his inadvertent bombshell, Margolin co-authored another article almost twice as long, which heavily promoted an unpublished Harvard Medical School study allegedly replicating those DIA findings. The authors claimed to have used satellite images and electronic Internet data to demonstrate that the virus outbreak had already produced a major health crisis in Wuhan by September or October, with local hospitals supposedly already heavily burdened by Covid patients, months earlier than previously believed. Such findings were obviously intended to explain how the DIA had come to similar conclusions in November, and the second sentence of the news story stated that the research study was performed “[u]sing techniques similar to those employed by intelligence agencies,” while explicit references to the DIA report also appeared later in the text.

- Satellite data suggests coronavirus may have hit China earlier: Researchers

Researchers say surge in cars at hospitals may indicate outbreak in fall

Kaitlyn Folmer and Josh Margolin • ABC News • June 8, 2020 • 2,500 Words

Dr. John Brownstein, the lead author of the study, served as an ABC News contributor, and he was described as having spent more than a month on the project, suggesting that it had begun just days after Israeli television confirmed the existence of the officially-denied secret DIA report. Heavy use was made of satellite-imaging and RS Metrics, a leading geospatial analysis firm, was recruited to evaluate the data. The authors claimed to have received no outside funding, but surely such services hardly came cheap, and the project seems to have been initiated and completed in record time.

Unpublished studies rarely receive much media coverage, but the report was propelled into the public eye by a glowing 2,500 word ABC News story, longer than the body of the paper itself, and immediately Tweeted out by such high-profile individuals as Donald Trump, Jr. and the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, thereby attracting a great deal of attention. According to Margolin’s article, it had been submitted to Nature Digital Health and was undergoing peer review, yet more than thirteen months later it has never appeared in that publication or anywhere else, implying that it was uniformly rejected for publication. Moreover, after such an auspicious launch, it has never been mentioned or cited in any subsequent mainstream analysis of the early Wuhan outbreak, suggesting that it was considered an embarrassment, an analysis that no respectable journalist nor editor took seriously.

The reasons are obvious. Covid is an extremely contagious disease, and once it has become established in an urban community, infections will normally tend to double every 3-6 days, so if thousands of Covid victims had been clogging Wuhan’s hospitals in September or October, the entire city would probably have reached herd immunity by the time the lockdowns and other strong public health measures were implemented in mid-January. Yet this huge supposed local health crisis had remained entirely invisible to the many Westerners who were still living in the city during that period.

The fact that a team of Harvard researchers was mobilized on such extremely short notice to produce an obviously fallacious and illogical study intended to explain away the secret DIA report simply underscores the tremendous importance of that inadvertent disclosure. And although apparently rejected by all academic journals and shunned by the regular media, the study has still served as a useful talking-point for the gullible, being regularly cited by online commenters as supposedly explaining and justifying those impossible DIA conclusions, which is how it first came to my attention.

False Narratives Based Upon False Positives

The promotion of the fallacious evidence that the Covid outbreak in Wuhan had begun much earlier than generally believed was a product of the anti-China camp. But similar sorts of claims have become quite common among pro-China propagandists, who have regularly argued that the virus was circulating in parts of Europe, America, and other countries during 2019, long before the Chinese authorities discovered its existence in Wuhan at the very end of that year. This theory has obviously been intended to deflect the accusation that a Chinese virus, whether natural or not, had been responsible for the deaths of millions around the world.

The most solid evidence for these supposedly early Covid infections have been tests of stored wastewater or blood samples in various countries, with the results published in reputable scientific journals. For reference purposes, here is a list of the examples known to me:

- Barcelona, Spain. Reuters, The Conversation. Wastewater, March 12, 2019. Paper.

- Milan, Italy, Reuters. Blood samples in lung cancer screening, as early as September 2019. Paper.

- Santa Catalina, Brazil. SCMP. Wastewater, November 27, 2019. Paper.

- France. CGTN, Inserm. Blood samples in twelve regions, between November 2019 and January 2020. Paper.

- Milan and Turin, Italy. Reuters. Wastewater, December 18, 2019. Paper.

- California and eight other states. NYT. Red Cross CDC blood samples, as early as December 13, 2019. Paper.

- Illinois and four other states, NYT, WSJ. Blood samples, as early as December 24, 2019. Paper.

At first glance, this collection of more than a half-dozen scientific studies seems a very impressive body of evidence. But although these individual cases are often grouped together and presented as evidence for the early presence of Covid in the West, important distinctions must be drawn. According to our standard timeline, the Covid virus probably first appeared in Wuhan between mid-October and mid-November of 2019, so given widespread international jet travel, the possibility that it might have initially reached parts of Europe or America by December hardly overturns our existing framework, and the same might even be true for those examples in which the virus seems to have appeared somewhere else by late November.

Wuhan is a densely populated urban metropolis, ideally suited for the rapid spread of an unsuspected contagious disease, and we still believe that a couple of months elapsed between the appearance of Patient Zero and the steadily growing epidemic reaching the attention of the local health authorities, so a roughly similar gap between the initial presence of the virus in other parts of the world and serious local outbreaks would only be expected. Also, the epidemiological simulations run in the Pekar study mentioned above have suggested that a large majority of initial pinprick infections die out by themselves, with only a fraction become the larger, exponentially-growing local epidemics that gain public visibility.

So among the above cases, only the first two—from March and September 2019—seem to seriously challenge our existing assumption of an original Wuhan source. And as we examine those cases in detail, their credibility disintegrates.

In June 2020, stored Barcelona wastewater revealed a single positive Covid result for March 12, 2019, while no other instances were found for the subsequent ten months until January 2020, a few weeks before the earliest victims were discovered and the large Spanish outbreak began. Such a single, anomalous datapoint can easily be ascribed to lab-error or accidental contamination of the sample, and indeed other Spanish and Chinese experts expressed strong skepticism of the test results on exactly those grounds.

Similarly, the Italian evidence for Covid infections as early as September 2019 was based upon stored blood samples from a large cancer-screening trial, and is also very doubtful. According to the antibody test used, a remarkable 11.6% of all healthy volunteers had tested positive for the virus by March 2020, seeming to imply that enormous numbers of Italians had already been infected by that date, a far larger total than the corresponding number of hospitalizations or deaths. So if an overwhelming majority of those 111 total Covid infections appear to be false-positives, the same might easily be true of the four cases that dated back to September.

The likely prevalence of false-positives also undermines the credibility of the other studies, which allegedly detected the virus in France, Brazil, Italy, and parts of the U.S. by November or December of 2019. For example, the French study based upon blood antibody tests seemed to reveal that 1.9% of the population—more than a million individuals—had already been infected by November 2019, which would have produced a huge public health care crisis long before the one that actually began in April of the following year.

Similarly, an antibody analysis of Red Cross blood samples by the researchers at our own CDC seemed to indicate that 2% of Americans—more than six million people—had already been infected by January 2020, long before our own first large outbreak began. If such enormous numbers of Americans had been infected that early, we surely would have seen direct evidence, and the exponential growth of infections would have swamped our health care system by the following month. Indeed, the lead author of the article seemed to acknowledge that the antibody evidence found was actually quite doubtful, suggesting that up to 98% of the supposed infections detected might be erroneous.

Our strong suspicion that nearly all these anomalous results were simply due to false-positives seems entirely confirmed once we carefully consider the details of the last study in the list.

On June 15, 2021 both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported the results of a newly published study that applied antibody tests to a very large set of stored blood samples, and found evidence of American infections as early as December 24, 2019, several weeks before the first known case. It is hardly surprising that the virus might have reached this country before the end of 2019, and those results do not seriously challenge our existing narrative. However, certain aspects of the methodology employed provide important information.

Due to serious concerns over false-positives, the researchers had decided to apply two consequence Covid antibody tests to the 24,000 blood samples that they analyzed, and the first test flagged 147 positive results, a total which was then reduced to just 9 by the second test. This implies that roughly 95% of the initial Covid antibody matches were actually false-positives, and it is quite possible that a third antibody test might have further reduced the total of true infections detected. Once we realize that at least 95% of the matches in a single-antibody test are likely to be false-positives, the very few anomalous early Covid results in those other papers no longer seem at all mysterious.

All these studies were aimed at locating the earliest signs of the Covid virus in various parts of the world, and there surely must have been many other studies that found no results worthy of publication, let alone media coverage. Yet with the exception of two minor and obviously spurious instances, this global effort found absolutely no signs of the virus anywhere in the world prior to the date we currently believe that it first appeared in Wuhan. This provides strong support for the null hypothesis, fully affirming our existing Covid timeline.

Promoting a Ft. Detrick Lab-Leak as a Failure of Nerve

The total absence of any Covid antibodies prior to December 2019 in tens of thousands of American blood samples should be kept firmly in mind as we consider the possibility of a summer 2019 Ft. Detrick leak, a theory widely popular among pro-China propagandists and anti-American “conspiracy” websites.

From January 2020 onward, anti-China elements had been promoting the theory of a Wuhan lab-leak, so a few weeks later their pro-China and anti-American counterparts began responding in kind, arguing that Covid had indeed leaked from a lab, but that the source had been Ft. Detrick, America’s premier biowarfare center. In fairness, that latter hypothesis at least had some solid factual basis, given that the facility had been ordered shut down by the CDC for eight months due to safety violations, as reported in the New York Times and other newspapers:

Screenshot from The New York Times August 08, 2019

However, the other half of the theory was much more doubtful. During 2019 there had been a flurry of unusual respiratory illnesses across America, including more than 2,600 individuals requiring hospitalization and 68 deaths, with the condition labeled EVALI by the CDC. A public shutdown of Ft. Detrick for safety violations soon followed by a wave of illness with symptoms somewhat similar to Covid constitutes a tidy package providing simple talking-points, and this allowed the blame for the virus to be thrown back at the Americans. Many China partisans jumped at this attractive bait, with the accusations sometimes amplified by Chinese officials or media organs.

This hypothesis disintegrates upon any close examination of the evidence. An unusual aspect of Covid is the extreme age-skew, with victims over 60 having fatality rates perhaps a hundred times greater than those under 40, and the young being almost invulnerable. Indeed, according to some estimates the majority of deaths have been among individuals in their late 70s or older. By contrast, EVALI was an illness of youth, with 52% of the serious cases occurring among those younger than 25, compared to perhaps 0.2% for Covid. Thus, the profile of victims seems entirely dissimilar, differing by more than two orders of magnitude.

Moreover, the single most important characteristic of Covid is the extremely contagious nature of the disease, with outbreaks growing exponentially if not controlled by strong public health measures. But the graph of EVALI cases provided on the CDC website tells a very different story, rising sharply during the summer of 2019, but then tailing off to low levels by late December.

EVALI Hospitalizations (CDC Website)

If thousands of Americans had become infected with Covid by mid-2019, the total would have reached many tens of millions by the end of the year, and the resulting hundreds of thousands of excess deaths would have ensured that no one paid any attention to emerging reports of some viral outbreak in Wuhan on the other side of the world. By contrast, there seems no evidence that EVALI was contagious, and according to the CDC it was strongly associated with the use of Vitamin E acetate in vaping products.

Thus, the two illnesses had entirely different age-profiles, entirely different epidemiological characteristics, and apparently different causes. No trace of Covid antibodies was found in America during the peak of the EVALI cases, which had already dwindled down to low levels several months before our Covid outbreak began. There were only a few dozen EVALI cases in the Ft. Detrick region and far more in California, Texas, Illinois, and New York. And much speculation notwithstanding, there is no evidence that anything, contagious, Covid, or otherwise, had leaked out of Ft. Detrick around the time of its temporary shutdown.

Closely associated with the highly implausible theory of a Ft. Detrick lab-leak has been the suggestion that the virus was accidentally brought to Wuhan by the American participants in the World Military Games held in that city, which ended on October 27, 2019. That date does seem to almost perfectly match the beginning of the Covid outbreak, and for more than a year I have suggested that the presence of 300 American military servicemen and many thousands of those from other countries would have provided perfect cover for a couple of operatives to have been slipped into the city in order to quietly release the virus. It is noteworthy that the Sheraton Wuhan Hankou Hotel hosting some of the American military contingent was located only a mile and a half from the Huanan seafood market, an early epicenter of the outbreak, while the Wuhan lab is twenty miles distant.

But there is no evidence that any of the American participants were themselves infected and if Covid had already spread widely enough in the U.S. to have infected random members of the team, our own outbreak would have occurred months before the one in China rather than months afterward.

I strongly suspect that the widespread focus by pro-China partisans on a Ft. Detrick lab-leak or some other accidental American release has been due to political expediency more than anything else. As discussed above, there exists strong even overwhelming evidence that the worldwide Covid epidemic was caused by an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), probably by rogue elements of our national security establishment associated with the Deep State Neocons near the top of the Trump Administration. But with millions dead, many of them American, such monumental accusations might easily exceed the intestinal fortitude of nearly all journalists and editors, even those found among alternative media outlets. Therefore, they judged it far safer to instead condemn America for an alleged lab-leak at Ft. Detrick, thereby mirroring the Wuhan lab charges. But there are serious difficulties with advancing theories that have no factual basis, including doing severe damage to one’s future credibility.

Diverting “Conspiracy Theorists” into Dead-Ends

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, a vibrant movement of “conspiracy theorists” developed on the Internet, arguing that the true facts had been quite different than the official story, with most of them suggesting heavy American government involvement in those momentous events.

Back then, the Internet was far less channeled and regulated than it eventually became, and few effective means existed for the political establishment to shut down such troubling discussions. So Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, soon to become a top Obama aide, shrewdly suggested that the activities of those energetic individuals could best be undermined and disrupted by means of “cognitive infiltration.” Agents of the government or its close allies should join those online communities and promote a wide range of additional theories, often rather absurd ones, thereby stirring up internal conflicts, diverting the members into theoretical dead-ends, and heavily discrediting them with the broader American public.

There is no evidence that Sunstein himself ever attempted to implement the project, nor did he pioneer the idea. Such an approach was hardly new, and J. Edgar Hoover’s notorious Cointelpro program of the late 1950s and 1960s had used quite similar methods, though the FBI had targeted real-life activist organizations rather than any non-existent online communities of those pre-Internet days. Indeed, the use of agents provocateurs has always been a standard technique of internal security services. But we should keep these obvious tactics in mind as we consider the vast profusion of diverse conspiratorial theories that have sprung up like mushrooms in the wake of the global Covid epidemic and the severe stresses that it imposed on the ordinary lives of so many Americans.

Many, perhaps most individuals are quite reluctant to embrace any theory not blessed by their personal figures of authority, whether these be the editors of the New York Times or the pundits of FoxNews. Only a small minority of the population is willing to cross such ideological boundaries and risk the stinging epithet of being labeled “a conspiracy theorist.”

Those transgressive individuals who adhere to some heterodox beliefs are usually willing to accept many others as well, and are often quite eager to do so, sometimes exhibiting the serious lack of logical thinking and careful analytical judgment that may taint their entire community. This leaves them open to eagerly nibbling the poisoned bait of fraudulent but attractive theories, whether these are advanced by well-meaning advocates, self-serving charlatans, or covert agents of the establishment engaged in “cognitive infiltration.” The vast profusion of unorthodox Covid theories, heavily promoted in videos, Tweets, and websites, may derive from all three of these different sources.

Some individuals have claimed that Covid does not exist, or that it is almost harmless, being little more dangerous than the ordinary flu, with our alleged death-toll merely a product of fraud and media propaganda. Others have taken this notion even further, arguing that viruses in general do not exist. Such sentiments have been all too annoyingly frequent on the very lightly moderated comment-threads of this website, provoking me to leave the following response on several occasions:

But here’s a listing of TOTAL American deaths from all causes over the last few years, taken directly from the CDC website:

2014: 2,626,418

2015: 2,712,630

2016: 2,744,248

2017: 2,813,503

2018: 2,839,205

2019: 2,854,838

2020: 3,384,426

You’ll notice that the numbers are fairly steady until 2020 when they suddenly jumped by well over 500,000.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d almost think that America had been struck by a dangerous disease epidemic that year.

It’s obviously just a matter of personal opinion whether an extra half-million deaths in 2020 is a big number or a small number …

The strong public health measures implemented in this country and elsewhere to control the spread of the virus—lockdowns, masking, and social distancing—have been very disruptive and unpleasant for many people, producing a wide range of harsh criticism, ranging from the reasonable to the ridiculous. The all-out effort to develop and distribute effective vaccines, including new and lightly-tested ones, has merged the Covid controversy with the longstanding anti-vaxx movement, whose best-known advocate has been Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Not having devoted much time to these matters, I can only say that a great deal of the agitated commentary on this subject seems outlandish and implausible. Many activists seem to assume a unified worldwide conspiracy involving China, America, Russia, Israel, Iran, and virtually every other nation, all secretly working together to pretend that Covid is dangerous and that the vaccines against it are not, even though the truth is exactly the opposite. But the notion of all these mutually-hostile countries collaborating in such a bizarre scheme seems extremely unlikely, and Russian President Vladimir Putin recently made exactly this important point in his long annual presentation to his concerned citizens:

I heard: that there is nothing at all, in reality there is no epidemic. When you tell them that this is happening all over the world, they reply: “Right, country leaders have come into collusion.” Do they have any idea of what is happening in the world, of the contradictions that are plaguing today’s world, where all leaders allegedly upped and conspired with each other? It is absolute rubbish.

Particularly absurd has been the cast of primary villains among many of these agitated activists, who often focus upon Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum and Microsoft founder Bill Gates as the diabolical masterminds of our global calamity, with their plot identified as “the Great Reset.” A couple of months ago I addressed some of these claims in one of my comments:

I’ll admit that the whole Great Reset/Agenda 2021/World Economic Forum stuff has always seemed like total crackpottery to me, so ridiculous that I never looked into it other than sometimes reading some of the articles or discussion on my own website. I also put all the “Bill Gates’ diabolical plot to exterminate mankind” stuff in pretty much the same category.

My very strong suspicion is that these sorts of (in my opinion) implausible and ridiculous “conspiracy theories” are probably promoted to divert attention from the very real and strong evidence of Covid-19 having been an American biowarfare attack. After all, wouldn’t the CIA or whomever prefer that agitated activists on the Internet spend all their time ranting about some 83-year-old Swiss international banker named Klaus Schwab who holds annual public conferences in Davos rather than paying attention to all the numerous pieces of evidence I’ve accumulated implicating America’s national security apparatus in the gigantic global disaster?

In fact, didn’t that Cass Sunstein fellow years ago say that the using “cognitive infiltration” to promote ridiculous nonsense was the best means of defeating “conspiracy theorists” on the Internet? It worked pretty well for 9/11, so why not apply it to Covid-19 as well?

I’d be the first to admit that various groups and individuals are certainly taking advantage of the viral epidemic, notably getting the Federal Reserve to spend many trillions of dollars bailing out their businesses and loans, and massively boosting their stock prices. But after the 2008 Financial Meltdown, they used their political power to loot the American Treasury in exactly the same way and got a huge government bailout without the need for any disease outbreak. So I doubt they created Covid-19 for that purpose.

The Unresolved Phylogenetic Analysis Puzzle

For reasons of completeness, I should also discuss one strange aspect of the global Covid epidemic that has been completely ignored by our Western media even while it has been heavily promoted by pro-China activists and outlets.

Like any RNA coronavirus, Covid has undergone a series of random mutations as it has spread around the world, and scientists have created an international database containing a large number of fully-sequenced Covid viruses from different geographical regions, allowing experts to trace the likely origins of particular outbreaks.

Beginning in March 2020, several different research teams of virologists and other scientists published academic papers attempting to use this genetic data to construct a complete ancestry-tree of the virus, using mathematical techniques to divide the virus into several major clades or ancestral families. But the rather surprising findings seemed to reveal only a single uniform clade in Wuhan itself, while several different ancestral families were found in Guangdong, other countries in Asia and Europe, and especially in the United States. This was illustrated by the diagrams below, taken from one of these papers.

Such a result seemed quite counter-intuitive, since we would normally expect the greatest genetic diversity of the virus to be found at the site of its first appearance, and various pro-China writers quickly seized upon these findings to argue that Covid did not originate in Wuhan but instead had been brought there from the U.S., which possessed the greatest number of different Covid strains.

These journal articles were published at the early stages of the massive international propaganda-war between China and America over culpability for the global disaster, whose cost would total many trillions of dollars. Most of the papers were written by Chinese researchers at Chinese academic institutions, raising natural suspicions that the findings might be inaccurate or at least distorted. But one of the most prominent articles was authored by a British-German team and appeared in PNAS, the prestigious flagship journal of the our own National Academy of Science, and anyway all the results were supposedly based upon objective analyses of a public genetic dataset. The following are links to two of the earliest papers as well as a much more recent one:

- Phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes

Peter Forster, Lucy Forster, Colin Renfrew, and Michael Forster • PNAS • April 28, 2020 • 2,100 Words

- Decoding the evolution and transmissions of the novel pneumonia coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 / HCoV-19) using whole genomic data

Wen-Bin Yu, Guang-Da Tang, Li Zhang, and Richard T. Corlett • Zoological Research • May 2020 • 7,300 Words

- Analysis of the Genomic Distance Between Bat Coronavirus RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 Reveals Multiple Origins of COVID-19

Shaojun Pei and Stephen S.-T. Yau • Acta Mathematica Scientia • April 19, 2021 • 2,800 Word

As we have seen, analysis of stored wastewater and blood samples in the U.S., Europe, and other parts of the world have found no credible traces of Covid anywhere prior to the Wuhan outbreak, so the interpretation of these research findings by pro-China elements seems erroneous. But the international map of Covid clades remains puzzling.

Given the total absence of any discussion of these anomalies in the mainstream sources I consulted, I tried to read the articles for myself, but my complete lack of technical expertise left me adrift. The important PNAS paper had provoked three critical letters by other researchers that disputed the results, and the authors then rebutted these, while admitting that the implications of their findings had been misinterpreted by some writers. But I found it impossible to properly evaluate these conflicting claims.

With no informed discussion of the results anywhere to be found and being at a loss to properly interpret them, I contacted a knowledgeable individual and solicited his opinion. Although previously unaware of these scientific findings, he suggested that the small number of Covid mutations during the few months between the initial Wuhan outbreak and those which soon followed elsewhere in the world might render the ancestry-tree techniques invalid or misleading, perhaps explaining the discrepancy. But I would feel much more comfortable if this issue were thoroughly debated in public by disinterested scientists rather than having been entirely ignored by our media.

Understanding the Most Important World Event in Three Generations

World War II ended more than 75 years ago, and across the last three generations there seems no single event that has impacted the world as much as the ongoing global Covid epidemic. The collapse of the USSR would be the only serious rival, but while that dramatic development greatly changed the lives of hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens and Eastern Europeans, most people elsewhere regarded it as no more than a story in the news. By contrast, the daily lives of many billions have already been drastically affected by Covid, while the fiscal and economic policies of major nations including our own have been transformed.

From the very beginning, many leading scientific experts believed that Covid was a product of human design, notably including virologist David Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate and former president of Caltech. But for various reasons our Western media establishment instead quickly constructed a Potemkin-like consensus that the virus was entirely natural and the global catastrophe a random, unforeseen event for which no one could be blamed. However, over the last couple of months, this propaganda-bubble has collapsed, and there is now increasing agreement that Covid was probably an artificial creation, engineered in some laboratory.

The same American-dominated propaganda organs that had spent more than twelve months mustering shreds of fact and logic to loudly proclaim that the virus was natural and ignoring all dissenting voices have now mustered other shreds of fact and logic to argue that it was created in China and leaked from a Wuhan lab, once again ignoring those who suggest otherwise.

But the flood of mainstream writers promoting this new consensus have built their narrative on a factual foundation that is gossamer-thin, and those spiderwebs of speculation were recently swept aside by the direct personal testimony of Danielle Anderson, a respected Western virologist who was working at the Wuhan lab during that period, and who described the likelihood that Covid was either created there or that any lab-leak had ever occurred as “exceedingly slim.”

From the first, there had been three plausible origins for the disease. Covid was either a natural virus, a Chinese virus, or an American virus. But although our media has wildly swung between the first and second possibilities, the third has been entirely excluded from consideration, with those who suggest it completely ignored.

This information blackout even extended to major world governments. The remarkable speed with which the virus had jumped more than 3,000 miles from Wuhan to Qom and infected much of Iran’s parliament and political leadership class led that country and its media to denounce the outbreak as a likely American biowarfare attack against its two leading international adversaries, China and Iran, with the former Iranian president lodging an official complaint with the United Nations. But virtually no Americans were ever informed of these grave public accusations by a nation of 80 million people.

A few weeks ago I summarized my own conclusions regarding the epidemic:

Thus, we are left with the strong likelihood that Covid came from a laboratory along with a good possibility that it was designed as a bioweapon, yet we lack serious indications that any lab-leak occurred. So if the original Wuhan outbreak was due to the deployment of a powerful bioweapon but not one that had accidentally leaked from any lab, then surely China was the intended target, the victim rather than the perpetrator. Indeed, the PRC only avoided suffering devastation because it responded in such extremely prompt fashion and quickly imposed exceptionally strong public health controls. Some 700 million Chinese were confined to their homes for weeks, a lockdown probably more than a thousand times greater than anything previously seen in history.

Given our ongoing military and geopolitical confrontation with China, America seems the likely source of the attack. However, once the virus eventually reached our own country, President Trump’s completely lackadaisical response demonstrated that he himself had absolutely no idea that he was confronting the threat of a dangerous bioweapon, thereby proving his own personal innocence. The most likely suspects would be rogue elements of our national security establishment, probably some of the Deep State Neocons whom Trump had placed near the top of his administration.

This small handful of high-level plotters would have then drawn upon the resources of the American national security apparatus to actually carry out the operation. The virus and its dispersal devices might have been obtained from Ft. Detrick and CIA operatives or members of special forces would have been sent to Wuhan to release it. However, all these latter individuals would have believed that they were participating in a fully authorized covert military strike against America’s primary geopolitical adversary. In effect, what happened was a Dr. Strangelove-type scenario, but brought to real life.

I have elsewhere provided summaries of the evidence favoring a biowarfare attack over a random lab-leak and also an outline of the hypothetical scenario:

- Evidence Favoring a Biowarfare Attack Over a Random Lab-Leak

- Outline of the Hypothetical Biowarfare Attack Scenario

During the fifteen months that I have advocated this same basic thesis, the most surprising reaction has been from the fierce critics of the Trump Administration, so numerous in elite circles.

During the last few years, Trump was regularly vilified in almost comic-book fashion, as a uniquely dangerous president who threatened our entire way of life, with such hysterical charges usually being based upon his crude public utterances or even his misspelled Tweets. Meanwhile, these same critics have entirely ignored the very real evidence that individuals he had placed in authority had carried out exceptionally reckless biowarfare attacks against China and Iran, with the unintended blowback consequences devastating our own society and killing many hundreds of thousands of our citizens. The ruling elites who fiercely attacked Trump dwelt upon his vulgar trivialities, which were magnified beyond all recognition, while steadfastly disregarding his enormities, thereby demonstrating astonishing levels of decadence and solipsism.

Future historians will surely mark this as a very telling episode in the likely twilight of the decaying American Empire.

Waging Biological Warfare

The Unz Review • August 9, 2021 • 7,500 Words

I came of age during the late Cold War Era, and while the possibility of nuclear war was regarded as horrifying, it was hardly unthinkable, being the subject of countless films and stories and with the rival U.S. and Soviet arsenals regularly compared in newspapers and magazines.

However, biological warfare did indeed seem unthinkable. Back in 1969, President Richard Nixon had ordered the destruction of our entire biowarfare arsenal and soon signed an international treaty with his Soviet counterparts to outlaw those horrifying weapons. The release of deadly, self-replicating biological organisms that respected no national borders obviously raised uniquely dangerous risks, and I easily understood why such weapons could never possibly be used in combat, especially by our own government.

Preconceived notions sometimes crack and crumble a bit before they finally collapse. For years I’d begun to see claims about the past use of biological weapons floating around the Internet, but the collapse only began in early January when I read a remarkable 12,000 word cover story in New York magazine. The author was Nicholson Baker, a prominent writer and liberal public intellectual, and he made a detailed and rather persuasive case that instead of being natural, the Covid virus devastating our country and the rest of the world was artificial, the product of some lab. As an intelligent layman rather than a scientist Baker’s expertise on the topic came from the many years of research that he had undertaken for Baseless, his 2020 book documenting America’s own extensive biological warfare program.

Nearly all of Baker’s very long article concerned the Covid issue, but a few facts from that book were mentioned here and there, and these greatly surprised me. Apparently during the 1950s our biowarfare program had been assigned a priority and importance comparable to that of nuclear weapons development, and the project had also resulted in numerous accidents, many of them fatal, which was hardly something I’d ever seen mentioned in my introductory textbooks. So the actual history of the topic was apparently far more complex than I’d realized.

At the time, my focus was entirely on Covid matters and my analysis that our disastrous global epidemic was probably the result of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran). But after producing a long series of articles on that topic, I decided to take a closer look at the history of American biowarfare programs, with Baker’s own book being a natural starting point.

Baker opened his volume by explaining that in 2009 he had begun to wonder about certain disputed events from the Korean War, a conflict that ended in 1953, years before he was even born. At the time, the Communist world had loudly accused the Americans of engaging in illegal “germ warfare” and the Americans had hotly denied those charges. Although never fully resolved during the decades that followed, most mainstream historians seemed to have come down on the American side, but Baker wondered who had really been telling the truth.

His initial exploration of books and articles led him to available government documents, including those found at a couple of presidential libraries and the National Archives, and he also interviewed some of the knowledgeable individuals and researchers. But none of the material he found seemed conclusive, so in 2012 he began using the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in hopes of obtaining some restricted documents that might finally resolve the matter.

He continued filing such FOIA requests for seven more years, and the nature of that landmark 1966 law, now seemingly honored as much in the breech as the observance, is a central theme of his book, almost as important as the particular historical question that originally prompted his effort, leading him to subtitle his volume “My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act.” Such criticism seems warranted given that the original statute required that agencies should respond with their documents within twenty working days, and if another agency needed to be consulted, they should do so “with all practicable speed.” But in reality, years of delay are not uncommon, with one outstanding FOIA request now more than a quarter-century old. Furthermore, such documents when finally released are sometimes rendered almost unintelligible by the whited-out redactions of words, sentences, paragraphs, or multiple pages.

The alleged legal justification for holding back or heavily mutilating such documents is that their release would endanger our current national security, but we must ask ourselves how plausible this really seems. The events of interest to Baker took place during a war that ended almost seventy years ago, fought against a global Communist coalition that no longer exists, and it hardly seems likely that any of the operational plans or technologies from that era would have much relevance today, while surely even the grandchildren of the individuals mentioned are now quite elderly if they are even still alive.

After the fall of the USSR, the old Soviet archives were generally thrown open to the world, allowing Western historians to discover many important facts and resolve various longstanding controversies such as the Katyn Forest Massacre, but over the last couple of decades they have mostly been closed back up again. Can anyone seriously argue that keeping secret the minutes of Stalin’s old Politburo meetings is vital for protecting current Russian national security rather than merely preventing Russian national embarrassment? And the same must surely be true with regard to almost all our own secret documents from the early 1950s.

At one point in his quest, Baker described sitting in a reading room of the National Archives building knowing that just on the other side of a thin wall were the 21 unavailable documents that would conclusively resolve his long investigation one way or the other. Instead, he was forced to make due with what he had been able to obtain, massive redactions and all.

By 2019 Baker had spent more than a decade on his project, punctuated by writing several unrelated but successful books and novels, and having reached his mid-sixties, he felt sure that the patient government bureaucrats would successfully outlast him. He had accumulated thousands of pages of notes and many boxes of reports and other materials, as well as a great deal of important personal knowledge that would not survive him, so he finally decided to write a book telling others what he had learned and allowing them to use the information for themselves.

Lacking access to the documents he had spent so many years fruitlessly seeking, he abandoned any effort to produce a polished chronological narrative. The author is best known as a novelist, so rather than writing in a dryly academic style, he instead chose to produce several months’ worth of long diary-style entries, mostly discussing and analyzing the contents and implications of the various documents he had uncovered, but leavening his account by including brief descriptions of his personal life and activities. Although his style was unassuming and informal, the main text itself, running less than 150,000 words, was backed by more than fifty pages of detailed source notes. The credibility of his material is indicated by the glowing cover-blurbs from noted writers who had covered related subjects.

Given that the crucial secret documents still remain secret, Baker’s analysis is necessarily based upon circumstantial evidence, including the unredacted portions of those documents that had been released, and he fully admits this difficulty, providing all his facts and conclusions in plain sight and drawing likelihoods and plausible inferences rather than expounding certitudes. Overall, I found him a very judicious analyst, and believe he made a strong even overwhelming case that America did indeed engage in biological warfare during the early stages of the Korean conflict, much as our Communist adversaries had charged at the time. The separate elements of this historical puzzle fit together to produce a reasonably persuasive whole.

First, over the decades it has been thoroughly documented that America did have a very substantial biowarfare program based at Ft. Detrick, originally established during World War II and then continuing into the postwar era, heavily augmented by the absorption of Japan’s own very extensive biowarfare resources after the close of hostilities. The Japanese had developed the feather as an ideal means of widely disseminating all sorts of deadly biological agents from the air, and our own military researchers soon built and tested a variety of “feather bombs” for that purpose, generally using the same physical containers that had been developed to distribute propaganda leaflets from planes.

In late 1950 American forces suffered a series of disastrous defeats in Korea at the hands of Chinese troops, and the report from a Pentagon committee in early December emphasized the importance of accelerating the development of bioweapons such as Q Fever, plague, and anthrax together with the necessary delivery mechanisms for covert use, while especially praising the CIA for its effectiveness in that regard. This secret report was eventually declassified by a FOIA request in 1996.

Around the same time that report was being written, a British sergeant retreating through a deserted North Korean village before advancing Chinese troops observed American military personnel, masked and gloved, carefully removing large quantities of feathers from special containers and flinging them into the empty houses before he was warned away by American MPs. He later stated that he had obviously witnessed “a clandestine operation” of some sort and mentioned that a few days afterward he was required to take an unspecified vaccine. This curious vignette appears in Unit 731, a 1989 historical account of Japan’s biowarfare program written by two BBC journalists, but oddly enough the incident was removed from the American edition of that same book.

Months later, the North Korean foreign minister issued a formal complaint to the United Nations that America had used illegal biological warfare, attacking his own troops and those of China with smallpox. These mysterious outbreaks had occurred a few months earlier, but only in areas recently occupied by retreating American forces. The accusations briefly appeared in the Western media, but were ridiculed and hotly denied by American government spokesmen.

Around the same time that Communist troops were sickening and dying, around two hundred American soldiers in the same theater had also been suddenly stricken by a mysterious outbreak of Songo fever, never before seen in Korea but with symptoms quite similar to smallpox and a specialty of America’s Japanese biowarfare mentors. Strict censorship prevented these stories from reaching the American media until many months later, at which point our government claimed that the illnesses had been spread by Chinese troops. But the disease seemed entirely absent from the hundreds of miles of Korean territory the enemy forces had traversed, and only appeared in a narrow belt along the front lines, with our stricken servicemen believing that they seemed to be spread by infected field mice or voles. Voles had long been regarded by American researchers as an excellent vector for their bioweapons, and when interviewed years later for a history of the Korean War, one of the leaders of our local CIA efforts explained that his covert operations had created a defensive belt along the front lines.

The diarist format used by Baker scatters these closely-connected facts across nearly 200 pages. So although I think any reader of Baker’s entire book will find his thesis quite convincing, any few pages read in isolation provide only a small portion of the crucial story, lacking the necessary juxtaposition to make the strongest case.

Although this round of events in 1951 and the accompanying Communist accusations received some world media coverage, a far greater volume of controversy came the following year, when Communist media organs issued widespread charges that America had begun a much larger round of biowarfare, claiming that American planes were dropping all sorts of diseased insects and voles in Korea and even parts of nearby China, once again trying to unleash an epidemic. Sensing the opportunity for a major propaganda coup, the Chinese organized an independent international fact-finding commission to investigate their accusations and interview local witnesses, managing to enlist as its head Dr. Joseph Needham, one of Britain’s most celebrated scientists and China experts, and the 665 page report eventually published claimed to have confirmed the Chinese case. An especially important element were the public confessions of numerous captured American pilots who admitted that they had taken part in such illegal germ warfare attacks.

However, these new accusations were once again blasted as a hoax by the much more powerful Western media, and after repatriation, the captured Americans claimed their statements had been coerced. Many later historians have come to the same conclusion, especially after 1998 when previously secret documents of the Soviet KGB archives revealed that they had created fake areas of disease exposure for propaganda purposes. As an example of this historical consensus, Simon Winchester’s widely-praised 2008 biography of Needham devoted almost 20 pages to this episode, which nearly wrecked his subject’s career, and firmly concluded that that the Communist charges were fallacious.

Baker, however, suggests a more nuanced reconstruction. The notion that American planes were dropping insects and rodents from the sky seems quite an extraordinary claim, less likely to be the sort of plausible-sounding story fabricated for a war propaganda plan, especially given the very large number of seemingly-credible eyewitnesses later interviewed by Needham and other investigators, and the author wonders whether thousands of individuals could have been enlisted into such a long-standing hoax. Moreover, in 2007 the CIA finally declassified and made available on its website a large cache of secret American documents, and these included numerous communication intercepts of Chinese and North Korean commanders reporting these events and urgently requesting vaccines or DDT to protect their troops from the expected disease outbreaks. So although the evidence for such actual epidemics seems minimal and possibly fabricated, the Communist forces certainly believed that they were under biological attack, suggesting that something very odd was happening.

Baker notes that psychological warfare was a central element of CIA operations, and memos from that period indicate that all sorts of possible strategies were being explored to demoralize enemy troops, including the unusual idea of using planes to spread “fake radioactive dust” and convince the Communist forces that they were in deadly peril. Absent a public and self-defeating American announcement, it is difficult to imagine that any such dust would have even been noticed let alone regarded as dangerous, but dropping large numbers of mysterious insects and rodents might have immediately persuaded the enemy they were suffering another round of American biological attacks, with the American pilots involved assuming the same thing, and Baker believes this best fits the limited available evidence. To a considerable extent, this resembles another bizarre but solidly documented action called Operation Red Frog, in which the CIA caught a hundred Korean frogs, painted them red, then had them dropped from planes to unnerve the opposing military forces.

Moreover, top Pentagon officials believed that full-scale war against the Soviets and the Chinese might break out at any moment, and this operation allowed them to test their biological delivery systems, which would have become a crucial element of their military strategy in such a conflict. So Baker believes that a small-scale covert biological warfare operation beginning in late 1950 afterward became confused and conflated with a large-scale psychological warfare operation in 1952, leading many later historians to discount the reality of the former.

Aside from the numerous FOIA documents that he had personally obtained, one of Baker’s most important sources was a short 1998 volume by Canadian historians Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman aptly entitled The United States and Biological Warfare. He became personally friendly with the authors, whom he interviewed early in his project, and was later given twenty boxes of their accumulated research materials.

Published by a small American university press, the Endicott/Hagerman volume contains an enormous wealth of very detailed factual material, and was glowingly praised by Prof. Richard Falk of Princeton, an eminent scholar of international law, as well as mainstream historian Stephen Ambrose, who had built his career upon Eisenhower hagiography. But the text is written in a very dry and dull manner, so I found the Baker book, despite its lack of a chronological sequence, much more useful, although it was obviously built upon the research foundation provided by that earlier work.

The authors differ with Baker by firmly believing that the aerial drops of 1952 were also biological attacks, but their evidence seems overwhelmingly circumstantial and most of it could easily be explained within Baker’s framework.

One crucial point they properly emphasize is the terrible scale of the American defeat at the hands of the intervening Chinese ground forces during late 1950. They quote from Disaster in Korea, the definitive military account of that conflict by Lt. Col. Roy E. Appleman, who characterizes the situation in extreme terms: “…a series of disasters unequaled in our country’s history…a massive retreat, without parallel in U.S. military history.” As a consequence, both President Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed that atomic bombs should be used if necessary to avert total defeat. Under such circumstances, is it really plausible that our forces would have balked at the use of biological warfare, especially in a very limited capacity and deployed in a plausibly-deniable manner?

Unless and until our remaining secret documents from seven decades ago are finally made available, Baker’s reconstruction strikes me as the most balanced and consistent with the somewhat contradictory evidence, and Winchester apparently agrees, seeming to reverse the conclusions of his Needham biography of a dozen years earlier by providing a long and glowing blurb for Baker’s book.

Preparation for the full use of offensive biowarfare against large enemy population centers obviously requires extensive field testing, and these efforts sometimes provoked great controversy when they eventually came to light. During September 1950, a mysterious fog with a strange odor enveloped the city of San Francisco for several days, and only decades later was this discovered to have been caused by a major biowarfare field test, as an offshore minesweeper blew a huge cloud of bacterial spores intended as a stand-in for anthrax towards the city. Although the spores were purportedly harmless, they actually produced a number of serious infections among the local residents, including at least one death. In 1975, the New York Times revealed that a decade earlier the CIA had filled New York City’s subways with “a harmless simulant of a disease-carrying gas” provoking further outrage.

There also seems reasonable evidence that far more permanent mistakes sometimes occurred. Lyme disease, transmitted by ticks, can produce itches, rashes, and sometimes more serious ailments and annually infects some 300,000 Americans and countless pets, plaguing the inhabitants of New England and much of the coastal North East. It was first diagnosed in 1975, a suspiciously recent date for the sudden appearance of an entirely natural disease, and based upon Lab 257, a heavily-researched 2005 book by Michael Carroll, Baker argues it was probably an inadvertent consequence of our biowarfare experiments. Apparently, nearby Plum Island had long been the center of CIA- and Army-funded research into tick-borne livestock diseases, and these could have accidentally infected local deer or birds, which then crossed the bay to Lyme, Connecticut, producing the endemic infestation.

Although hardly as controversial as those aimed at humans, such biological weapons targeting food supply had also constituted an important element of America’s military plans from the earliest stages, though they seem to have almost entirely disappeared from the historical record.

By early 1945, Ft. Detrick researchers had developed and tested a variety of weapons aimed at destroying Japan’s rice harvest, producing bombs to deliver mold, fungus, or bacteria for that purpose, while other military experts argued that spraying fuel oil would be the most effective means of destroying rice seedlings. Combined with America’s complete blockade of Japan’s home islands and the destruction of her fishing fleet, the strategy was intended to reduce the overcrowded Japanese population to total starvation.

Although the key documents regarding any actual implementation of these war plans remain classified or so heavily redacted as to be unreadable, we do know that the Joint Chiefs of Staff at some point officially authorized the full use of “plant BW[Biowarfare].” Baker notes that Japan’s rice crop failed in 1945, producing the worst harvest since 1909, when the population had been one-third smaller, and Japan only survived because Gen. MacArthur’s occupation government imported huge quantities of food. After the close of hostilities, leading biowarfare figures intervened with the media to suppress or downplay any stories of the methods that had been used to destroy Japanese agriculture.

Given such apparent success against Japan, it was hardly surprising that such anti-crop techniques soon became an important component of our Cold War strategy, though the consequences may have sometimes been counter-productive.

Wheat was as important to the Soviet food supply as rice had been to Japan’s, and our biowarfare experts investigated parasitic “wheat stem rust,” which they believed might be effective at destroying Soviet agriculture. By 1949 they had developed powerful anti-wheat strains, and the project was put into full production. A huge stockpile of spores was required in order to be able to deal a crushing blow to the USSR food supply, far more than could be produced in the enclosed Ft. Detrick greenhouses that had been used for testing purposes, so our experts began cultivating the fungal parasite on large sections of open acreage.

The spores were extremely light, could be lofted up to 10,000 feet into the air by winds, and a single pustule might produce 350,000 new spores. Although our biowarriors surely tried to be careful, mistakes do sometimes happen, and while no attack upon Soviet agriculture ever took place, beginning in 1950 our own wheat crop was devastated by five years of mysterious wheat rust epidemics, which eventually encompassed twelve states and by 1954 had destroyed a quarter of our bread wheat and three-quarters of our pasta wheat. This timing may have been purely coincidental, but Baker notes that a declassified Air Force report reveals that the main spore cultivation efforts had occurred in generally the same states which then became the epicenters of the spreading blight.

Sometimes such mistakes must be repeated before they are fully admitted. By the early 1960s, Ft. Detrick researchers were once again cultivating wheat rust in several acres of an experimental crop-station in Kansas, and their reports boasted of their success in reducing crop yields by 70%. This effort continued until 1965 when a huge wheat rust epidemic severely damaged the farmlands of much of Kansas and Nebraska, after which the project was halted.

Other anti-food projects were aimed at livestock, and Baker strongly suspects that hog cholera was used against East Germany’s swine herds, with the epidemic beginning soon after the CIA-abetted Berlin riots of 1953 and forcing the destruction of many tens of thousands of pigs. Such methods became part of the CIA’s standard toolkit, and according to Newsday their operatives in 1971 successfully infected Cuba’s herds with the African swine flu virus, forcing the slaughter of 500,000 pigs and completely eliminating the availability of pork, a staple of the Cuban diet, although similar efforts to destroy Cuba’s poultry industry failed. These historical events seem eerily reminiscent of the mysterious viral epidemics that began devastating China’s poultry and pork industries in 2018 and 2019, soon after the Trump Administration had brought on board one of America’s leading biowarfare advocates.

Although most of these historical facts have been known to academic specialists for decades, or could be discovered by those who actively searched them out, they have been much less likely to appear in more general works. For example, one of the glowing blurbs provided to Baker’s book is by Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner, who had spent decades covering intelligence issues at the New York Times and elsewhere. His 2007 work Legacy of Ashes runs 700 pages, and is considered an authoritative history of the CIA, but when I read it a year or two ago, I saw virtually no mention anywhere of biological weapons let alone their actual use, and rechecking the index just now confirmed my recollection.

However, this climate of media avoidance has recently begun changing. Another strong endorsement of Baker’s book came from Stephen Kinzer, who just a year earlier had published Poisoner in Chief, primarily focused upon the notorious MK-ULTRA mind-control projects of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA researcher described in the title. Kinzer’s book attracted glowing accolades from Pulitzer Prize winners Seymour Hersh and Kai Bird, both writers with great experience on intelligence matters, and received quite favorable reviews in the elite mainstream media.

At first glance, mind-control and biological warfare might seem entirely dissimilar topics, but they actually share considerable areas of overlap. Both required the creation and use of dangerous biological or biochemical agents, which for maximal effectiveness must then be tested upon unwilling human subjects, often in dangerous or lethal ways. Since in this regard they obviously operate outside the boundaries of normal legality, especially in peacetime, their use must be kept entirely secret, naturally matching them with the proclivities of an intelligence agency such as the CIA. Throughout his book Kinzer emphasized the considerable overlapping personnel and resources between these two domains. Indeed, as the CIA’s “chief poisoner,” Gottlieb developed a wide range of deadly biological compounds which he deployed in a number of mostly unsuccessful attempts to assassinate foreign leaders such as Prime Ministers Zhou Enlai of China and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, as well as Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

But Gottlieb’s great personal quest was to create an effective system of mind-control, the use of chemical compounds or physical techniques to gain mental control over an unwilling subject, which he persuaded CIA leaders represented the Holy Grail of their espionage efforts.

There is an additional and rather ironic connection between the Ft. Detrick biowarfare programs and the unsuccessful CIA efforts at mind-control. As discussed above, there seems to be overwhelming evidence that the severe military setbacks of the early Korean War had prompted America to surreptitiously employ biological warfare, though the military impact was hardly enormous. Then in 1952, a much larger aerial effort dropped insects, rodents, and other obvious potential disease carriers on Communist-held territory, including parts of China. Baker believes that these later attacks were mostly elements of psychological warfare, with no effort made to infect the potential carriers with diseases, but obviously both the enemy governments and the pilots involved would have assumed that actual biological attacks were once again taking place. So when some of the American pilots were shot down and captured, they confessed to these apparent germ-warfare attacks, signing statements and admitting the facts to foreign visitors, thereby serving as the centerpiece of a major Communist propaganda campaign.

Since such actions would have been considered war-crimes, their widespread recognition might have produced a huge public relations disaster for America, and they were heatedly denied in the strongest possible terms as ridiculous Communist propaganda, with these determined public efforts to suppress the facts largely succeeding within the Western bloc.

Upon their return, these captured flyers were threatened with court-martials, causing them to repudiate their statements as having been made under duress. But the records show that any such coercion was almost entirely psychological, with virtually no claims of harsh physical treatment or torture.

This naturally raised the problem of explaining away the detailed and seemingly credible public statements of those captured American officers and why they had confessed to supposedly non-existent war crimes. The response was the creation of a widespread myth that the Chinese Communists had pioneered “brainwashing” as a powerful technique of mind-control. This suggested that our Cold War adversaries had made a major breakthrough in a potentially important military technology, and prompted CIA efforts to match their techniques and close the “brainwashing-gap.”

These ideas also soon entered the popular culture, with the classic example being The Manchurian Candidate, a 1959 bestseller that became an even more influential 1962 film. The fictional work tells the story of a captured American soldier transformed by Chinese brainwashing into a programmed assassin used to remove any human obstacles to a Communist seizure of our political system, and for decades afterward brainwashing remained a staple of fictional suspense plots. Yet Kinzer notes that right around the time the film appeared, the CIA finally abandoned the project as a failure despite the heavy resources expended, hardly surprising since the underlying premise had been entirely fallacious.

One major element of these failed CIA efforts had been the widespread use of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs, often tested upon unwitting civilian subjects, and the use of these drugs eventually leaked out into our wider society, with serious negative consequences. So to some extent, our official refusal to acknowledge that we had illegally waged biological warfare in the early 1950s may have indirectly helped promote the creation of the drug culture that so greatly transformed our society by the late 1960s.

Although Gottlieb’s mind-control efforts had gone into high gear in the aftermath of the Korean War, they had actually begun during the early stages of that conflict, as Kinzer quotes in this grisly excerpt:

“In 1951 a team of CIA scientists led by Dr. Gottlieb flew to Tokyo,” according to one study. “Four Japanese suspected of working for the Russians were secretly brought to a location where the CIA doctors injected them with a variety of depressents and stimulants…Under relentless questioning, they confessed to working for the Russians. They were taken out into Tokyo Bay, shot and dumped overboard. The CIA team flew to Seoul in South Korea and repeated the experiment on twenty-five North Korean prisoners-of-war. They were asked to denounce Communism. They refused and were executed…In 1952 Dulles brought Dr. Gottlieb and his team to post-war Munich in southern Germany. They set up a base in a safe house…Throughout the winter of 1952-3 scores of ‘expendables’ were brought to the safe house. They were given massive amounts of drugs, some of which Frank Olson had prepared back at Detrick, to see if their minds could be altered. Others were given electro-convulsive shocks. Each experiment failed. The ‘expendables’ were killed and their bodies burned.”

This remarkable passage came from one of Kinzer’s major sources, Secrets and Lies by Thomas Gordon, which was published by a small American press in 2007 and bore the provocative subtitle “A History of CIA Mind Control and Germ Warfare.” Intrigued by this material, I decided to order a copy for myself, which proved a less trivial undertaking than I had assumed.

At one point in Baker’s account, he related the anecdote that when one of the earliest books revealing CIA activities appeared in 1964, representatives of the agency threatened to buy up all the copies and thereby remove it from circulation. This plan was immediately frustrated when the editor at Random House said he would simply order another print run, but such a strategy would obviously be much more effective if directed against books produced by small presses and that were no longer being printed. When I checked Amazon for the Thomas book, the cheapest hard copy available was listed at over $500, a price I had never previously encountered for a mainstream hardcover less than 15 years old and the only copy listed at AbeBooks.com turned out to be missing, but fortunately I was able to locate a more reasonably priced copy elsewhere.

The extreme rarity of that particular book is certainly quite different from the dozens of others in Thomas’s huge oeuvre, which accumulated an astonishing 45 million in total sales. Although produced by an extremely successful author and BBC broadcaster on historical and intelligence matters, this volume lacks any source notes and is also replete with the sort of detailed private conversations likely to have been invented by Thomas, who probably hoped the work would be made into a film, as had been the case with seven of his previous books. These factors naturally gave me some pause compared with the carefully-documented Baker, Endicott/Hagerman, and Kinzer volumes.

However, Thomas claims that much of his information came from CDs containing 22,000 secret CIA documents that a whistleblower had sent him in 2001, and he republishes some of these in his book, while his material has been treated as fully authentic by later writers such as Kinzer. The author also drew heavily upon extensive personal interviews, with his most important source being William Buckley, a thirty-year CIA veteran at the heart of the events, who had been close to both Allen Dulles and William Casey, two leading directors of the agency. So on balance, I regarded Thomas’s material as uniquely valuable and reasonably credible, though perhaps not quite as solid as the explicitly document-based works by Baker and Kinzer.

Thomas’s material strongly supports Baker’s account of American biowarfare attacks during the Korean War, and he even expands the story in important ways. For example, he suggests that during 1951 Gottlieb and our other biowarfare experts may have tested their lab-cultured diseases upon 20,000 North Korean POWs, of whom nearly 1,800 died, with the full CIA records of this damaging incident possibly having been destroyed during 1972-1973. According to Thomas, Buckley also investigated the records of the confessions of our captured pilots, and noted that their detailed descriptions so perfectly matched our actual biowarfare technologies as to seem very persuasive.

And if Thomas and his personal sources can be credited, his account may resolve one of the most puzzling and notorious incidents of the 1950s, widely discussed in other works.

In 1953 one of our leading biowarfare experts, Dr. Frank Olson, began behaving very oddly and after being taken to New York City for treatment by a psychiatrist was found dead on the pavement beneath the broken windows of his fifth floor hotel room, with the official verdict being suicide due to sudden mental illness. Decades later it came out that he had secretly been given a heavy dose of LSD as part of the CIA’s mind-control research project, and the incident was regarded as a notorious example of the potentially deadly effects of that hallucinogenic drug, which had been introduced into our society and tested upon unsuspecting Americans by CIA researchers. As compensation, the Olson family received a large financial settlement. But according to Thomas, the truth may have actually been far darker than even this story.

The development of deadly toxins and other biological weapons obviously requires considerable human testing to be effective, and during World War II Japan’s extremely large biowarfare program apparently consumed thousands of human subjects—euphemistically labeled “logs” in their reports—mostly hapless Chinese but also including some American and other Western POWs. The claims that similar lethal human experiments had been performed upon the inmates of some Nazi concentration camps figured quite prominently at the Nuremberg Tribunals. But practical needs transcend ideologies, and America’s own growing biowarfare program of the postwar years seems to have adopted entirely similar methods of testing, much of it taking place at a large secluded compound in the Black Forest region of occupied Germany, with the victims—various suspicious characters or other such “expendables”—afterwards eliminated if they somehow managed to survive the weapon tests themselves.

In 1953 Olson took his first trip to that field establishment and apparently was deeply horrified at personally witnessing the actual use of the deadly technologies he had spent the last dozen years developing in his laboratory. Returning home via Britain, his distraught state was apparent to one of his British biowarfare colleagues, who reported the facts to his superiors and the information was immediately passed along to their opposite numbers in America. It appears that Gottlieb, the head of the American program, became fearful that Olson might eventually reveal the sordid facts to the media, so he arranged to have him quickly killed, first administering a massive dose of LSD to produce the sudden behavioral changes that would support a verdict of suicide.

Apparently CIA Director Allen Dulles was very suspicious of the official suicide story, telling his close aide Buckley that Olson had seemed almost the last person in the world to commit suicide, and he tasked that officer with getting to the bottom of what had really happened. Buckley believed he had done so, even determining the identity of the assassin employed, and decades later the exhumation and autopsy of Olson’s corpse seemed to strongly support that reconstruction, so that a New York public prosecutor was preparing a homicide indictment of Gottlieb in 1999 shortly before the latter’s death. But the sordid incident was completely hushed up at the time, and after the fall of Communism, the files of the KGB and the East German Stasi revealed that they used the example of Olson’s demise as a case study of “the perfect murder by suicide.”

Kinzer seems to support this same reconstruction, though lacking access to Thomas’s documents or the benefit of his personal interviews with Buckley, he is much more circumspect in his conclusion.

Reading these books also helped to fully resolve an additional biowarfare question that had remained in the back of my mind for the last couple of years.

David Irving quite possibly ranks as Britain’s most internationally successful historian of the last one hundred years, and some of his archival research produced remarkable revelations. As I wrote in 2018:

Along with the laws prohibiting the bombing of cities, all nations had similarly agreed to ban the first use of poison gas, while stockpiling quantities for necessary retaliation. Since Germany was the world-leader in chemistry, the Nazis had produced the most lethal forms of new nerve gases, such as Tabun and Sarin, whose use might have easily resulted in major military victories on both the Eastern and Western fronts, but Hitler had scrupulously obeyed the international protocols that his nation had signed. However, late in the war during 1944 the relentless Allied bombardment of German cities led to the devastating retaliatory attacks of the V-1 flying bombs against London, and an outraged Churchill became adamant that German cities should be attacked with poison gas in counter-retaliation. If Churchill had gotten his way, many millions of British might soon have perished from German nerve gas counter-strikes. Around the same time, Churchill was also blocked in his proposal to bombard Germany with hundreds of thousands of deadly anthrax bombs, an operation that might have rendered much of Central and Western Europe uninhabitable for generations.

According to Irving, only the stubborn resistance of Churchill’s appalled military and political subordinates prevented the drunken wartime leader from carrying out his plan to to annihilate the heart of Europe with biological warfare. The great historian gives the details in one of his riveting public lectures, once easily available on YouTube, but now confined to Bitchute:

https://www.bitchute.com/embed/C9z1fCgUn5If

Under normal circumstances, I would consider such astonishing claims almost impossible to believe. However, during the notorious 2000 libel trial that wrecked Irving’s career and bankrupted him, his Jewish tormenters drew upon their almost unlimited funding to hire an army of researchers who spent a year or more subjecting Irving’s vast corpus of writings to line-by-line and footnote-by-footnote scrutiny, a degree of hostile fact-checking surely unprecedented in the annals of historiography. And since they never challenged any of these striking statements, I felt confident in accepting that the claims were correct. But I was still gratified to see these facts seemingly confirmed by the Kinzer, Endicott/Hagerman, and Thomas books, which each reported Churchill’s urgent 1944 order for the mass-production of anthrax bombs by his domestic industry and also his successful demand that the Americans ship him another 500,000 from our own stockpile.

One of the odd aspects of America’s informational landscape is that so many of the most controversial historical facts seem to be hidden in very plain sight. Both Nicholson Baker and Stephen Kinzer are fully mainstream and well-regarded authors, with their books heavily praised by prominent reviewers and easily available for purchase on Amazon.com, and the same is true for the much earlier history by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman. The volume by Gordon Thomas is somewhat more difficult to obtain in hard copy, but the Kindle version is priced at just $9.99, and his other books had racked up many tens of millions in sales while being made into seven films. No one could possibly describe these writers as marginalized figures, purged for their controversial historical claims. And the stories they told of America’s extensive use of biological warfare and the lethal experiments conducted upon large numbers of human victims seem quite explosive. We are obviously not living in a totalitarian state that imposes a wall of secrecy upon these sordid facts. Anyone can click a button on Amazon and begin reading the material a day or two later, or buy the Kindle version and open the book within seconds.

Yet sales of such books have probably been limited to the thousands or low tens of thousands of copies, and none of this history is promoted in the mainstream media or incorporated into our standard textbooks, which would allow it to reach many millions of readers. Most importantly, it is entirely ignored by our electronic media, which is the primary source of information for the vast majority of our population. As a consequence, I had been completely ignorant of this material, and when I contacted several knowledgeable and well-read individuals, some of whom are primarily focused upon national security issues, the same was true for them as well. Merely by failing to sufficiently emphasize certain facts, the media is hiding them almost as effectively as if they had been declared official state secrets.

One might easily argue that although quite distasteful these past events had little effect upon the world and are merely details of history, unimportant to our present-day lives. Our biowarfare attacks during the Korean War killed or injured merely the tiniest sliver of the casualties that were inflicted by our massive strategic bombing campaign or the rest of the conventional fighting on the ground. And except for Midwestern farmers whose wheat crops were devastated during the early 1950s or Northeasterners who still suffer the pangs of Lyme disease, the number of Americans impacted by these policies or their unintentional blowback, has been absolutely negligible.

But biological weapons do create enormous potential dangers, as President Nixon had emphasized when he decided to ban them, and playing Russian Roulette may seem absolutely safe until one time when it suddenly isn’t.

Consider the reality of today’s global Covid epidemic. Although still just partway through its second year, the outbreak has already killed perhaps 14 million people worldwide, and together with the efforts at control has heavily affected the lives of nearly all the world’s eight billion people, touching every continent and city. Many hundreds of thousands of Americans have been among the dead, and our own society has been enormously disrupted. By any reasonable measure, the Covid outbreak has already had an impact upon the world many times greater than that of the 9/11 attacks and the two decades of major wars and population displacements that followed, certainly making it one of the three or four most momentous events of the last one hundred years.

From April 2020 onward I have been presenting the strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the disease outbreak was unleashed by an exceptionally reckless American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran). The numerous articles in my series have now been viewed more than 350,000 times, a total perhaps as much as an order-of-magnitude greater than the combined sales of the various major books discussed in this article. Yet for exactly the same reasons—the studious avoidance of the mainstream and electronic media—only the tiniest fraction of those impacted by these disastrous events have become aware of the likely cause of their plight.

Perhaps if the unfortunate historical facts of America’s past decades of biowarfare development and use had become better known over the last couple of generations, our current calamity might have been avoided.

Confronting Covid Crimestop

The Unz Review • December 13, 2021 • 6,400 Words

In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984, one of the many interesting concepts was the notion of “Crimestop,” the ability of well-trained citizens to self-censor their thoughts before they strayed into dangerous and forbidden territory. As conveniently summarized in the Wikipedia entry, Orwell wrote:

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

Given the existing and ever-growing number of forbidden topics in contemporary Western society, this concept may or may not be applicable. Perhaps thoughts are being self-censored or perhaps merely words. Lacking eyes into human souls, it’s obviously difficult for us to distinguish between the two cases.

In any event, that concept entered my mind near the end of November when I began reading a full page of book reviews in the Wall Street Journal entitled “What Happened in Wuhan,” with the descriptive subtitle “Four books pursue theories of possible origins of the Covid-19 virus—and the question of cover-ups.”

Our global Covid catastrophe is probably the most important historical event since the end of World War II, and with its second anniversary now upon us, serious books analyzing the origin have finally begun to appear in print. I have extensively written on exactly this topic since April 2020, so the Journal review afforded me an excellent opportunity to compare my own analysis with those of the leading mainstream authors.

Until recently the media might have relegated any such discussion of Covid origins to the “fever swamps” of the conspiratorial fringe. The scientific establishment uniformly proclaimed that the virus was natural, randomly crossing over from some animal species in late 2019, and that was that. But then in early May, an 11,000 word essay by Nicholas Wade, a longtime science journalist, punctured that ideological bubble and persuaded a large and growing segment of the media that the virus had been the human product of some laboratory, a shocking possibility that launched a fierce public debate on its origins, including the question of who might have created it and why.

- Origin of Covid — Following the Clues

Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

Nicholas Wade • Medium • May 2, 2021 • 11,000 Words

Pride of place in the Journal review was given to a paperback version of Wade’s seminal essay, so only three new books were actually discussed.

Although they took a variety of different approaches, all three supported the so-called “lab-leak hypothesis,” the perceived alternative to the natural virus theory. Under this reconstruction, Covid is believed to have been accidentally released by China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, which contained the closest genetic match of the Covid virus and whose researchers were also known to have been involved in exactly the sort of “gain of function” experiments that might have produced it.

This evidence is purely circumstantial, but fairly compelling nonetheless, and the Journal reviewer certainly seemed to accept it. Given the magnitude of the global disaster, it is hardly surprising that the Chinese government has fiercely denied that any such lab-leak occurred. According to The Economist‘s detailed worldwide analysis of “excess deaths,” the Covid outbreak has already claimed up to twenty million lives, and enormously disrupted the activities of many billions more, so if Chinese government were proven guilty, the world’s geopolitical landscape might certainly shift.

One of the books discussed is by Jasper Becker, a British journalist who had spent 18 years as a Beijing correspondent, and the closing paragraph of the review quotes him as suggesting that a Chinese admission of responsibility could even lead to the downfall of the ruling regime:

The national shame might spell the end of the Chinese Communist Party’s seventy-year rule. It would start a political earthquake which would begin in China but spread around the world.

The reviewer notes that Becker draws upon history to suggest that China’s current denials cannot be trusted, emphasizing that during the Korean War the Chinese Communists had launched a major propaganda offensive, falsely claiming that the American military had used illegal “germ warfare” to attack China’s own forces:

This is one reason why Western intelligence agencies are likely to doubt or at least question official accounts about the origin of the virus and the role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology…While the Chinese and Soviet governments pushed a completely false story of its enemies waging war with bioweapons against civilians, they actively pursued their own germ warfare programmes in secrecy.

Becker and the reviewer both reasonably argue that if a government has been caught lying in the past about biological warfare, its current claims about the Covid outbreak cannot be trusted.

I am sure that the vast majority of readers simply nodded their heads at all of these statements and earlier this year I would have done the same. But several months ago I had carefully investigated the history of American biological warfare and discovered that the story I had casually absorbed from our media was the exact opposite of the historical truth. Based upon declassified government documents and other fully mainstream sources, there was actually overwhelming evidence that the Chinese had been telling the truth during the Korean War while our own denials had been false. America had indeed used illegal biological warfare during that conflict.

- American Pravda: Waging Biological Warfare

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 9, 2021 • 7,500 Words

I have no doubt that Becker was being entirely sincere, and his statements on that specialized historical question were simply due to his acceptance of the conventional media narrative rather than any deliberate deception. But suppose we now apply his own standard. Once we recognize that China had been truthful in the past, while America had both employed illegal bioweapons and then lied about their use, these disturbing facts must inform our own analysis of the Covid outbreak.

Perhaps Covid was a natural virus and perhaps it accidentally leaked out of a Wuhan lab. But there is also a third logical possibility, that it was deliberately released in one of China’s largest cities as a planned biowarfare attack. The Covid outbreak occurred at the height of China’s ongoing international conflict with America, so elements of our own hostile government would be the obvious suspects. None of the three books seemed to recognize the existence of this hypothetical possibility even merely to dismiss it, an enormous blind spot that may or may not be due to the constraints of the American publishing industry.

Becker’s own book is entitled Made in China, and seems to focus very heavily upon the real or imagined iniquities of America’s giant global adversary, while glossing over contrary or contextualizing material.

His major blunder regarding our own biowarfare attacks during the Korean War comes early in the book and sets the general tone. A little later he criticizes the damaging adulteration of Chinese consumer products, highlighting the deaths of several infants in the notorious Melamine scandal, while entirely ignoring America’s own Vioxx disaster a few years earlier, whose forgotten body-count had been more than 10,000 times larger.

- Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison

Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 17, 2012 • 1,800 Words

One of Becker’s areas of particular interest is China’s biowarfare development efforts, but although such a program probably exists, he seemed to provide little hard evidence demonstrating that fact. Meanwhile, America’s own biowarfare infrastructure, certainly the largest in the world, went entirely unremarked, except for those erroneous Korean War denials. Indeed, I noticed that his lengthy index contains no mention of our own Ft. Detrick, which certainly ranks as the world’s oldest continuous biowarfare facility, now approaching its eighth decade.

The author also seems quite credulous in accepting evidence supporting his lab-leak hypothesis, swallowing highly-implausible suggestions that by September 2019 the Covid epidemic in Wuhan had already reached such an enormous size that it could be detected by satellite imagery, which I’ve demonstrated seems very likely to be an intelligence hoax.

My own rather dismissive appraisal of this book may have been shared by others. Except for this combined Journal review, I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere else, and with a current Amazon sales rank of over 400,000, few copies seem to have been purchased.

Equally hostile to China is What Really Happened in Wuhan by Sharri Markson, an Australian journalist for Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV network and his flagship newspaper in that country.

The Journal reviewer suggests that her “whodunit” with its “fast-paced narrative” might be attractive to a Hollywood movie studio, and the story told by this television journalist does seem to feature numerous James Bond elements. Although the book lacks any individual source notes or index, it fills its text with dramatic speculation intensely hostile to China. In the very first chapter, a couple of Chinese exiles speculated that Covid was a Chinese bioweapon deliberately released by its own government, perhaps due to an internal power-struggle, a suggestion repeatedly presented at length elsewhere in the narrative; but such a notion was so wildly implausible that even the author’s own hard-line anti-China government and intelligence sources uniformly rejected it.

The key figures in the anti-China faction of the Trump Administration seem to have provided much of Markson’s information, with Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo and his top aides being especially important conduits, which raises all sorts of doubts.

For example, on the 30th anniversary of the notorious Tienanmen Square Massacre, Markson breathlessly reported Pompeo’s fierce denunciation of that horrific atrocity, including his claims that up to 10,000 innocent Chinese civilians had been slaughtered in the incident. Yet as I have repeatedly noted, more than twenty years ago the former Beijing Bureau Chief of the Washington Post, who himself had personally covered the event, published a short article in the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review admitting that the supposed massacre had probably never happened and amounted to a Western media hoax.

There are even more serious problems with her apparent heavy reliance upon Pompeo and his senior staff. Biowarfare is a major element of Markson’s account, which is replete with suggestions that Covid was designed as a bioweapon. But nowhere does she ever consider the possibility that it may have been an American bioweapon, deliberately released in Wuhan. And if such an attack had taken place, Pompeo would certainly rank near the very top of the list of likely suspects, so his role in guiding her investigation seems extremely problematic.

Although her book does provide a good deal of useful testimony indicating that Covid is probably an artificial virus, her lack of a science background weakens the credibility of such reporting, and most of the same material has also been presented in the work of Wade and others. Given all these flaws, I’m not surprised that the only major media review I located was a generally negative one published in the Guardian.

The third book in the set is far more limited in scope than the other two but also far more effective for that same reason. While there is obviously a market for broad-brush attacks on China’s government and policies, such an audience tends to cluster in a particular ideological niche, so that most of the readers probably agree with the conclusions before they have even opened the first page.

By contrast, Viral, co-authored by molecular biologist Alina Chan of the Broad Institute and British science journalist Matt Ridley, seems aimed at winning over fair-minded neutrals rather than providing additional ammunition to true believers. Released in mid-November, the text is much more scrupulous and careful in the material it presents, and focuses narrowly on mustering the strong arguments against the virus being natural, together with suggestive indications that it may have been a product of the Wuhan lab, from which it accidentally leaked. There has been considerable coverage of the book and its authors especially Chan in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Reason, and other publications, some of these hostile but others quite friendly. The current Amazon sales rank is around 1,300, hardly making it a bestseller, but still a factor of seven better than the Markson book.

Credibility may be severely damaged by major errors of fact, and I noticed almost none of these, with my complaints being limited to errors of omission. At one point, the authors do acknowledge the swirling Internet accusations that Covid was a bioweapon—a Chinese bioweapon—but only to dismiss that notion as a “distraction.” Given the often lurid nature of such claims, this approach is quite understandable, but it also automatically excludes any consideration that Covid might have had American origins.

Even merely raising that possibility would have obviously required such lengthy and specialized discussion that the book’s tight focus would been completely disrupted. We must also recognize that Chan is a young researcher, in the early stages of her scientific career, which had already suffered a near-death experience last year when she challenged the official dogma of a natural virus, and she would naturally be reluctant to suggest that an illegal American bioweapon has now killed 20 million people worldwide. However, completely ignoring that possibility does sometimes undercut the book’s analysis.

For example, the first scientific paper discussing the genetic structure of the virus was published in late January by a group of Wuhan lab researchers, and the authors consider it extremely odd and suspicious that these expert virologists ignored the remarkably unusual aspects of the genetic structure that seemed to imply an artificial origin. But at that point in time, the dangerous viral disease was already spreading into other parts of their country and threatening to become an uncontrollable national epidemic, so suggesting that it was bioengineered would have been tantamount to declaring that China was under deadly biowarfare attack, obviously the sort of momentous public decision that must be deferred to China’s top political leaders.

Consider the broader aspects of that same issue. The authors of all these books and numerous other Western scientific observers have repeatedly stressed the highly-suspicious behavior of China’s researchers and its government, arguing that the Chinese have been insufficiently willing to open the doors of all their research facilities and make available all confidential information that might be connected with the Covid outbreak.

But suppose that the evidence for the virus being artificial is actually as strong as most of these analysts claim. The Chinese would know perfectly well that their own labs had not created the virus, so a biowarfare attack would be the only possible explanation, a blatant act of war with America as the obvious suspect. However, the West totally dominates the global media landscape, so leveling such incendiary accusations without solid proof would probably achieve nothing while being both dangerous and counter-productive, leaving silence as the wisest policy. But would it be rational for a country that knows it had suffered a potentially devastating biowarfare attack to open all its own scientific installations to teams of investigators and intelligence agents from the country that had probably launched that deadly attack?

Numerous puzzling issues become less puzzling under this biowarfare scenario. Mutational and epidemiological evidence strongly suggests that Patient Zero of the Wuhan outbreak probably became infected sometime during the period from mid-October to mid-November 2019. The authors note that the Wuhan lab’s public virus database had been taken offline on September 12th, and they consider this quite suspicious, perhaps indicating that a lab-leak had just occurred. The official explanation provided was that the database had been repeatedly attacked by hackers, but they reject this as implausible: why would hackers have targeted the database months before the world learned of any outbreak? However, such an attempted hacking would make perfect sense in the context of a forthcoming biowarfare attack against China, which was intended to be blamed upon the Wuhan lab. Being scientists and science journalists, Chan and Ridley fail to consider events through the eyes of intelligence operatives or military planners.

I found another omission far more serious. Based almost entirely upon circumstantial evidence and speculation, the two authors have constructed a gossamer narrative that the Wuhan lab secretly created the Covid virus, which then accidentally escaped due to the poor laboratory safety conditions. Yet there exists a highly-credible Western eye-witness who directly contradicts all these claims. On June 27th, Bloomberg published a long interview with experienced Australian virologist Danielle Anderson, who was actually working at the Wuhan lab during exactly the period in question.

- The Last—And Only—Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out

Virologist Danielle Anderson paints a very different picture of the Wuhan Institute

Michelle Fay Cortez • Bloomberg • June 27, 2021 • 2,200 Words

Contrary to the claims of the book, Dr. Anderson described the Wuhan lab’s safety protocols as outstanding, so good that she actually recommended that they be adopted at her own facility. She also encountered absolutely no rumors or other indications of any lab-leak nor any evidence that the Covid virus had been created at the facility, and she strongly believed that this information would have come to her attention while she was working there. Some Trump Administration intelligence operatives have floated the accusations that several lab workers became infected with Covid during 2019, but she said that nothing like that actually happened.

The book publishing industry involves long production lead-times, and although the crucial Anderson interview had appeared nearly five months before the book’s release, perhaps the manuscript could not easily be modified to incorporate that important new factual information. But I have also Googled Anderson’s name together with those of Chan or Ridley, and found no indication that they have ever acknowledged the existence of her eye-witness testimony, which seems so potentially damaging to their thesis. By failing to respond to this important development they tarnish their own credibility.

Other omissions are also quite serious, though perhaps more understandable. In describing the global spread of the epidemic, they write “Italy was devastated by the virus. Iran and the United States would soon follow.”

But this is incorrect, or at least extremely misleading. The Iranian and Italian outbreaks occurred around the same time, while the US followed weeks afterward, and aspects of the Iranian outbreak were extremely unusual. As I wrote last year:

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 Northern Italian outbreak began with little media notice in a region containing 300,000 Chinese workers, many of whom had recently returned from their Lunar New Year travels to their home country, including the city of Wuhan. Meanwhile, the Iranian outbreak occurred in the Holy City of Qom, containing very few Chinese, and was centered upon the country’s highest-profile political elites, which soon attracted worldwide attention.

These very strange circumstances aroused considerable suspicion in Iran, and led some of its top political and military leaders to publicly declare that they suspected that Covid was an American biowarfare attack against their own country and China, with their former president even lodging a formal complaint with the United Nations.

Although fully reported in our leading media outlets at the time, that extremely early and highly suspicious Iranian outbreak has long since been flushed down the media memory hole, and since both of the authors are narrowly focused on scientific matters rather than geopolitics, it seems quite possible that they are unaware of those facts, which anyway would be part of the biowarfare “distraction” they have explicitly excluded. But an early section of their Prologue is entitled “The importance of finding the origin of Covid-19” with the first sentence being “How the Covid-19 pandemic started may be the keenest mystery of our lifetime.” Biowarfare may be a lurid subject that invites wild allegations, but completely excluding all such discussion may render that mystery insoluble.

We must place the important work of Chan and Ridley within its proper context. Both viral microbiology and national security matters are highly technical subjects that require a great deal of expertise, and individuals who focus on the one may naturally tend to avoid the other, which is fine so long as we acknowledge that necessary division of labor. The first and most important question about the Covid virus is whether it came from nature or from a human lab, but once the microbiologists have had their say on that matter, I think their role is greatly diminished. Perhaps they can then argue that some of the scientific evidence points toward one particular lab rather than to another, but surely any professionals planning a biowarfare attack would have made considerable efforts to conceal its origins, and this might involve laying down false trails.

America’s top virologists had long enjoyed a close working relationship with their Wuhan lab counterparts. Our leading biowarfare experts had regularly paid friendly visits and the American government had funded some of the lab’s crucial research, so surely obtaining some Wuhan viral samples over the years would not have been difficult. And our biowarfare developers might then have decided to engineer Covid from one of those Chinese viruses as an ideal means of throwing suspicion in a different direction.

America’s enormous and longstanding biological warfare program remains the elephant in the room for the media coverage of our global Covid epidemic, and almost no journalists nor authors are willing to acknowledge its presence, let alone finger it as a prime suspect. This state of Orwellian crimestop thinking is really quite remarkable, though occasionally hints of those dangerous and submerged thoughts do manage to poke through.

The Wall Street Journal review of these books on the origins of Covid seems the most comprehensive such discussion that has yet appeared in the major media. And although the text contains absolutely no suggestion that Covid might have been designed as a bioweapon, just above the title of the print version there appears the curious framing quote “Whenever you have a novel outbreak, it could be a bioweapon…” That statement was by Robert Kadlec, an individual whose name appears nowhere in the body of the review nor even in any of the books under discussion. So apparently some Journal editor actually knows far more about the subject than was covered in the books written by these particular authors. And as I’ve emphasized in my own writings, Kadlec’s activities during the last few years certainly do raise all sorts of questions:

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.

None of these books on the origins of Covid seems likely to reach a mass audience except through secondary media coverage. However, a colossal current bestseller by a prominent national figure falls into a different category. These days, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. may best be known as a leading critic of our vaccination programs, but his #1 Amazon bestseller The Real Anthony Fauci devotes one of its longest chapters to the history of America’s biological warfare programs and their close connection to the Covid epidemic, and Kadlec is one of the central figures in that narrative. When Kennedy was recently interviewed by Tucker Carlson, he pointed to that chapter on biowarfare as the most important in his book.

The Kindle edition of this crucial work is priced at just $2.99, but those who seek a briefer discussion can read my own recent review of the material:

- American Pravda: Vaxxing, Anthony Fauci, and AIDS

The Hidden Background of American Biological Warfare Programs

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 6, 2021 • 6,100 Words

Several other books are also worth mentioning, as supplements to those already discussed.

Jeremy Farrar served as Director of Britain’s Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest funders of public health projects, and he played a crucial role in organizing the immediate measures taken to contain the Covid epidemic. Spike, co-authored by journalist Anjana Ahuja, is his short narrative account of those important events beginning in the last days of 2019, and it provides the useful perspective of a leading insider. I was also particularly interested to discover that Wellcome’s chair was the former head of MI-5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, who may have helped provide the author with some important insights on certain matters.

In his account, Farrar repeatedly emphasized that the Covid outbreak had hit China at the absolute worst possible time, appearing on the eve of Chinese Lunar New Year, when 450 million Chinese might be traveling. This seemed likely to spread the disease to every corner of the huge country, and that gigantic, looming disaster was only averted by an immediate public health lockdown unprecedented in all of human history.

Farrar is the most respectable of establishmentarian figures, and I was surprised to discover that in the early days of the epidemic he and his circle of leading scientific experts freely discussed whether the virus had been bioengineered, with some of them thinking that likely, and he even mentioned the speculation that it might have been a bioweapon, deliberately released. But as the practical needs of the terrible public health crisis facing Britain and the rest of the West began absorbing all of his concentration, these theoretical issues understandably faded from their discussions.

Josh Rogin is a Washington Post foreign policy columnist, who seems intensely hostile to China and its government and has broken a few Covid-related stories based upon intelligence leaks, which may or may not be reliable. I found his book Chaos Under Heaven to be a rather gossipy account of all the factional infighting of the Trump Administration with regard to its China policy, and only the last chapter focused on the Covid epidemic. Most of that material seemed similar in tone and content to what appears in the Becker and Markson books.

If the author’s account can be credited, Trump was just as disengaged a president as many other journalists have alleged, with his top aides often ignoring his wishes or running circles around him in support of their own policies. This greatly magnifies the possibility that “rogue operations” of a potentially momentous nature might have been organized behind his back.

Is COVID-19 a Bioweapon? caught my eye because the cover style was identical to that of the Kennedy book, whose publisher it shared. Since it also featured the endorsement of a leading anti-vaxxer, I mistakenly assumed that author Dr. Richard M. Fleming was somehow associated with Kennedy. Unfortunately, I found this very short book heavily padded and largely useless, with one third of the pages merely being print-outs of government funding grants.

Despite the overwhelmingly “conspiratorial” tone, the author oddly enough still seems to shy away from any focus on America’s own biological warfare programs, so that the “bioweapon” emphasized in the title must necessarily be a Chinese one.

Ideologically antipodal to several of the books already discussed is When China Sneezes, a collection of republished Internet essays, released in late 2020 and edited by Cynthia McKinney, a former Congresswoman and the 2008 Green Party presidential candidate.

Most of her contributors are intensely skeptical of American policies or even explicitly hostile to our government. Several of the pieces do focus on the origins of the epidemic, including claims that the Covid outbreak was an American biowarfare attack, though the arguments provided are of very mixed quality and have sometimes been swept away by subsequent events. For example, the suggestion is made that Covid was designed to be uniquely deadly to Asians and Chinese in particular, with Caucasians being largely immune, speculation that was once quite common but soon disappeared after Caucasians became the overwhelming majority of worldwide victims.

Among the essays, I would particularly recommend investigative journalist Whitney Webb’s important discussion of the history of American biowarfare programs, which we ran on our own website, and the gripping, first-hand accounts of China’s desperate effort to control the sudden disease outbreak by Larry Romanoff and other Chinese local residents.

For unknown reasons, some of what I regard as the strongest evidence implicating America in the Covid outbreak has been almost totally ignored outside of my own series of articles, which began making those points in April 2020 and have continued to do so since.

As already mentioned, Iran’s ruling elites were struck down by Covid so soon after the virus had first appeared in China that the country’s political leaders publicly accused America of a biowarfare attack, but that important history has completely disappeared from our media memory.

Furthermore, in April 2020 several American sources inadvertently disclosed crucial information that I have repeatedly highlighted in my writings, revelations that some have characterized as the “smoking gun” proof of an American role:

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.

EPub Format • Mobi/Kindle

Published over the last eighteen months, my Covid series now consists of more than a dozen articles and columns, and has been viewed a total of nearly 400,000 times, while attracting more than 10,000 comments, totaling over 1.5 million words.

The most substantial articles in the series have also been collected together into an eBook, conveniently available for downloading in both EPub and Mobi/Kindle formats, and I think this constitutes a very useful supplement to both the mainstream and alternative books on the origins of Covid that have been discussed above.

Given the volume of this apparent readership and the time since the series first began, it is difficult to believe that too many individuals strongly interested in the origins of the Covid epidemic have remained entirely unaware of this material, but any mentions elsewhere, even highly critical ones, have been extremely rare.

In our increasingly Orwellian world, any hints that certain thoughts are even imaginable may sometimes be considered a fatal slip, and one noted public policy analyst flatly told me that even merely criticizing my analysis might seriously impact his career.

Such concerns are hardly implausible. A few years ago when Razib Khan was a blogger on our website, he was hired as a regular Opinion Columnist by the New York Times, then fired from that prestigious position less than 24 hours later after a hostile Slate journalist revealed that Khan had once left a lengthy, critical comment on the VDare website, thus fatally demonstrating that he was aware of its existence and sometimes read it. And a couple of years later, the writer who had denounced him, Jamelle Bouie, became a Times columnist in his stead.

This situation has surely grown worse under the current climate of deplatformings. Individuals who stray outside particular boundaries may sometimes be banned from the most basic Internet services, severely handicapping their ordinary activities, and this greatly increases the need to carefully maintain defensive crimestop. Days after I published my first Covid article, our entire website was banned by Facebook and all of its pages deranked by Google, with the latter action reducing our Google search traffic by around 99%.

Under these difficult conditions, even the boldest writers and analysts must necessarily choose to pick their fights carefully, avoiding the risk of squandering their influence and credibility on matters where they may have little chance of prevailing. But I suspect that when and if an opening arises, they would be fully prepared to take advantage of it.

Consider Glenn Greenwald, one of the world’s most courageous investigative journalists, who abandoned his position at the top of the Intercept because of his refusal to bow to the party line on Russiagate and the 2020 presidential election.

- American Pravda: Giants Silenced by Pygmies

Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 22, 2021 • 12,200 Words

A few days after the appearance of the Journal review article on Covid’s origins, he published a strong 4,100 word column sharply criticizing the Times, the Post, and other pillars of the mainstream media for their continuing use of dishonest arguments in support of their rear-guard effort to maintain that Covid was a natural virus, a viewpoint increasingly challenged by new disclosures and declassified documents. But although the title and text solely focus on the “lab-leak theory” as the only alternative, Greenwald must surely be aware that there is a third possibility as well, a possibility far more likely to be true but also vastly more dangerous to articulate.

- To Deny the “Lab Leak” COVID Theory, the NYT and WPost Use Dubious and Conflicted Sources

Glenn Greenwald • Substack • December 5, 2021 • 4,100 Words

I have hardly been alone in suggesting that no event since the end of the Second World War has had a greater global impact than the Covid outbreak, which continues to reshape both national destinies and personal lives, and challenging the accepted narrative of such enormous events can often become a hazardous undertaking.

For example, more than twenty years after the start of World War II, A.J.P. Taylor wrote a classic account that carefully analyzed the origins of that conflict and this had unfortunate consequences for his career, as I discussed a couple of years ago:

Yet in revisiting Taylor’s ground-breaking study, I made a remarkable discovery. Despite all the international sales and critical acclaim, the book’s findings soon aroused tremendous hostility in certain quarters. Taylor’s lectures at Oxford had been enormously popular for a quarter century, but as a direct result of the controversy “Britain’s most prominent living historian” was summarily purged from the faculty not long afterwards. At the beginning of his first chapter, Taylor had noted how strange he found it that more than twenty years after the start of the world’s most cataclysmic war no serious history had been produced carefully analyzing the outbreak. Perhaps the retaliation that he encountered led him to better understand part of that puzzle.

Challenging America's Lords of Illusion

Reaching a Million Contrary Rumble Views

The Unz Review • August 22, 2022 • 2,700 Words

In Roger Zelazny’s classic 1967 science fiction novel Lord of Light, humans on a distant planet have employed technological devices to establish themselves as gods of the Hindu pantheon, each having particular aspects and attributes. Mara is the Lord of Illusion, able to reshape the perceived world in the minds of all those around him. Such an ability is powerful but not invincible since the physical reality remains unchanged, and Mara is slain in the very first chapter.

I think that story stands as an effective metaphor for America’s strengths in today’s world. Our country is so utterly dominant in the distribution of information and propaganda, including the electronic and social media, that we can easily persuade most of the world to accept as truth our manufactured illusions. But we cannot alter the underlying reality, perhaps leading to disastrous ultimate consequences.

Russia possesses a nuclear arsenal equal to our own and its revolutionary hypersonic weapons provide it considerable superiority in delivery systems. Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov serves as the head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defense Forces, and a couple of weeks ago he held a public briefing at which he suggested that elements of the American government had probably been responsible for unleashing the global Covid epidemic.

I mentioned his explosive accusations in a column, but otherwise they seem to have been almost entirely ignored in both the American mainstream and even alternative media. Instead, the only significant American response was that Twitter suspended the official account of the Russian Foreign Ministry after it distributed the remarks of that top Russian general.

Once again, except for a column of my own, the censorship Twitter had suddenly imposed upon the Russian government for such accusatory statements passed almost entirely unnoticed by American mainstream and alternative media outlets alike.

Major declarations by top Russian military leaders surely receive extensive coverage in Russia’s own domestic media, so I’d assume that a substantial fraction of the Russian population now believes that the Covid virus which has killed more than 15 million people worldwide may have been an American product, engineered and released by our national security apparatus. But a near-total media embargo—extending to alternative outlets—has ensured that such notions remain completely excluded from American minds. Apparently, our editors follow the principle “What we don’t know can’t hurt us.”

Over the last couple of years I have been repeatedly struck by the complete unwillingness of virtually any mainstream or alternative Western journalist to take notice of the very strong evidence of America’s culpability in the Covid epidemic, evidence that I have presented in a long series of articles first beginning in April 2020.

Earlier this month I sent this plaintive note to a member of America’s elite establishment with whom I’ve been friendly for many years:

…the whole situation just staggers the imagination.

For the same of argument, let’s assume I’m correct and there’s at least a pretty good chance that the blowback from an unauthorized biowarfare attack has now killed a million Americans.

Can you think of anything in the history of the world let alone the history of America that’s comparable to that? As I argued in one of my recent articles, it’s probably 1000x a greater worldwide disaster than Chernobyl.

And the notion that absolutely no one is willing to discuss it is just unbelievable. It’s not like Stalin’s NKVD will ship them off to the Gulag if they say anything. I mean it’s one thing if people are fearful of being shot, but it’s another thing if they’re merely fearful of being criticized on Twitter …

I just can’t understand why absolutely no one is willing to take a public stand on this issue. Once all the facts came out more than a year ago, I assumed the dam would break any week.

And his reply:

It is quite amazing.

From the very beginning of the epidemic, our media and propaganda organs, whether mainstream or alternative, have successfully insulated the American public from the crucial information that might allow them to properly understand what had happened in their lives. As I noted in my original April 2020 article:

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?

In a later article I emphasized that Iran’s top leadership had certainly recognized these obvious facts at the time:

By early March 2020, the Iranian general overseeing his country’s biowarfare defense had already begun suggesting that Covid was a Western biological attack against his country and China, and a couple of days later the semiofficial Iranian news agency FARS quoted Iran’s top Revolutionary Guards military commander as declaring:

Today, the country is engaged in a biological battle. We will prevail in the fight against this virus, which might be the product of an American biological [attack], which first spread in China and then to the rest of the world …America should know that if it has done so, it will return to itself.

Soon afterward, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei took the same public position, while populist former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became especially vocal on Twitter for several months, even directing his formal accusations to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Just a single one of his numerous Tweets drew many thousands of Retweets and Likes.

Iranian radio and television and its international news service repeatedly carried these stories, backed by supportive interviews with a top political aide to Malaysia’s former prime minister. But America’s overwhelming domination over the English-language global media ensured that this major international controversy never came to my attention at the time it occurred.

The blockade preventing these Iranian charges from reaching the English-speaking world was further facilitated by American control over the basic infrastructure of the Internet. Just one month earlier, Iran’s PressTV channel for Britain had been deleted by YouTube, following the earlier removal of its main global channel. Most recently, the American government took the unprecedented action of seizing PressTV‘s Internet domain, completely eliminating all access to that website.

The original Covid outbreak had struck Wuhan at the height of China’s confrontation with the United States. By March 2020 official Chinese media was reporting that the virus might have been brought to that city by American military personnel when they participated in the World Military Games held there, with an official spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry creating a diplomatic incident when he Tweeted out those accusations.

I’ve been told that such theories of American responsibility have become endemic on Chinese social media, and last year China’s second largest official news agency briefly summarized my own views on its website.

Similarly, Sputnik News, a mainstream Russian media outlet with 20 million visits per month, recently published a short interview with me regarding the likely origins of Covid. Around the same time, a leading Iranian television channel interviewed me for five hours in preparation for a series they plan to broadcast in the near future.

Government officials and the general public of Russia, Iran, and China both seem increasingly aware of these important facts and the controversial scenario they suggest, so I find it difficult to understand how legitimate American national interests are served by keeping that same information away from the American people. Yet this continuing climate of near-absolute censorship has been maintained not only within the mainstream media but also by nearly all alternative journalists and outlets. Even when American figures of the greatest public stature and credibility have broken their silence, their statements have been ignored across almost the entire alternative media landscape.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University is the very high-ranking American academic who had served as the chairman of the Covid Commission established by the Lancet, a leading medical journal. In May he co-authored an important article in the prestigious PNAS journal arguing that the virus had probably been produced in a lab and calling for an independent inquiry into its true origins.

- A call for an independent inquiry into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus

Neil L. Harrison and Jeffrey D. Sachs • PNAS • May 19, 2022 • 2,800 Words

This bombshell declaration, which should have reached the front pages of the New York Times, was instead ignored by virtually every mainstream and alternative media outlet.

The following month, he reiterated his views while speaking at a small think-tank gathering in Spain, and a short clip of his remarks went super-viral, being retweeted out more than 11,000 times and attracting over a million views.

With the exception of an article in the London Daily Mail, this further bombshell was again entirely ignored by all outlets in both the mainstream and alternative press.

Finally, earlier this month he gave a lengthy and remarkably candid interview to Current Affairs, a small alternative media webzine, in which he focused on the strong evidence he had encountered of an apparent cover-up of Covid’s possible origins by individuals associated with the American government:

- Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic

Jeffrey Sachs • Current Affairs • August 2, 2022 • 4,300 Words

Once again, virtually no alternative journalist reported those astonishing allegations by the academic figure who had been best placed to make them.

When I brought his recent interview to the attention of several prominent mainstream individuals whom I personally know, they found it absolutely stunning. But apparently nearly every journalist in America thought otherwise, so its impact on the public debate has been almost nil.

Last week I published an account of the shocking McCain/POW scandal uncovered by the late Sydney Schanberg. Despite his stellar journalistic reputation and the mountain of evidence he had accumulated, his findings were totally ignored by the entire media, including by the Times, where he himself had previously served as one of the top editors. This notion of a story being too big or too dangerous for the media to cover certainly applies to the origins of the Covid epidemic.

Furthermore, the strategies used to suppress challenges to establishmentarian dogma may have grown much more sophisticated and effective. A couple of weeks ago I discussed this possibility in the aftermath of the Alex Jones trial, suggesting that techniques of “cognitive infiltration” may have been deployed against alternative organizations and activists, diverting them into blind alleys that dissipate their energies and severely damage their public credibility:

- American Pravda: Alex Jones, Cass Sunstein, and “Cognitive Infiltration”

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 8, 2022 • 5,400 Words

I speculated that the huge, sudden rise of a massive anti-vaxxing movement in America might be an example of this. A couple of years ago, vaccine issues were almost invisible, but soon after questions arose regarding the true origins of the Covid virus, the vaccination controversy moved to the absolute center stage of American public life, completely dominating the thoughts of most of those willing to challenge official orthodoxy on any other matter.

As a result, I suspect that a thousand times as much time and effort has recently been devoted to debating the safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines than to investigating the true origins of the disease that made them necessary. And individuals or organizations who proclaim their fear that Bill Gates is the architect of a diabolical plot to exterminate most of the human race are hardly likely to be taken seriously by credible journalists or academics on any other matters.

The difficult year or two of lockdown conditions under which so many Americans had suffered fostered the social isolation that naturally allowed even the most fantastical ideas to take root among the fearful. Such an environment would have been ideal for the successful promotion across the Internet of debilitating nonsense promoted by organized propaganda-operatives.

Thus, since early 2020, the likely reality of an event of monumental historical importance—the unauthorized release of a military bioweapon that has killed so many millions worldwide—has been successfully suppressed within America and the rest of the West. In the past, other dramatic events such as the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks quickly sparked large-scale movements of citizen-activism challenging the questionable official narrative, but there currently exists no similar “Covid Truth Movement.”

Despite this unfortunate situation, there are some signs of hope, indications of a few embers that might eventually burst into flame.

First, growing coverage in the Russian, Iranian, and Chinese media may help pierce the wall of silence maintained by Western outlets, especially because the latter have become so severely discredited by their extremely skewed coverage of the conflict in Ukraine and the confrontation over Taiwan. At the very least, alternative journalists may finally gain the necessary courage to begin seriously exploring the origins of Covid.

In addition, Jeffrey Sachs, an extremely senior figure in the mainstream Covid firmament, has seemingly become willing to break the conspiracy of silence and raise issues that have been suppressed for more than two years. Although media outlets have scrupulously avoided publishing his statements, his public stature raises the possibility of successfully circumventing such gatekeepers.

EPub Format • Mobi/Kindle

Meanwhile, the facts are still out there. I recently reread my original April 2020 article that first raised these issues, and although more than two years have passed I found little in the text that I would wish to change.

Just days after that piece ran, our entire webzine was banned by Facebook and all our pages were deranked by Google. But although those harsh actions successfully suppressed what had been the viral spread of that article, they also underscored the potential importance of the arguments being made.

Over the next two years, I greatly expanded that first work into a lengthy series of articles, comprehensively covering the topic. Taken together, those pieces have now been viewed more than a half-million times, and the entire collection is now available both as a freely downloadable eBook and also as an Amazon paperback.

- Covid/Biowarfare Series

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 2020-December 2021 • 60,000 Words

Even more heartening has been the growing viewership of my video presentations. Back in February, just before the outbreak of the Ukraine war diverted all attention in a different direction, I was interviewed several times by small podcasters, and these shows have attracted considerable audiences. Totaling around four hours of discussion, they have now accumulated over a million views on Rumble, with more than half of these coming during the last few weeks. Circumventing media gatekeepers is a crucial step in piercing the veil of ignorance maintained by the West’s reigning Lords of Illusion, and recognizing the reality of our global disaster.

Kevin Barrett, FFWN • February 16, 2022 • 15m

Geopolitics & Empire • February 1, 2022 • 75m

Red Ice TV • February 3, 2022 • 130m

Jeffrey Sachs as Righteous Rogue Elephant

The Unz Review • October 10, 2022 • 3,500 Words

Until just a few months ago, I doubt there were many American academics more solidly situated in the topmost ranks of our elite mainstream establishment than Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University.

In 1983 he gained Harvard University tenure at the remarkably young age of 28, then spent the next 19 years as a professor at that august academic institution; by the early 1990s the New York Times was already hailing him as the world’s most important figure in his field. Lured to Columbia University in 2002, he has spent the last couple of decades teaching there and also directing a couple of its research organizations, most recently the Center for Sustainable Development. TIME Magazine has twice ranked him among the world’s 100 most influential individuals, and for nearly twenty years he served as Special Advisor to several Secretary-Generals of the United Nations, while publishing many hundreds of articles and op-eds on a wide variety of subjects in our most influential media outlets.

It would be difficult to construct a more illustrious and establishmentarian curriculum vitae for an international academic figure, so in 2020 he was a natural choice to serve as chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission, established to investigate all aspects of the deadly worldwide pandemic.

Yet as he has subsequently explained in his interviews, over the course of the last couple of years he became increasingly suspicious that the true origins of the viral disease were being concealed. More than eighteen million people have died worldwide including over a million Americans, and rather than acquiescing in what he came to believe was an ongoing official cover-up, he broke with the establishment and made the courageous decision to bring the true facts to widespread public attention.

Although he has retained the subdued manner and careful phraseology of a mild academic, in recent months the incendiary content of his published articles and his public statements have exploded across the global landscape, reaching many millions who might otherwise never have questioned what they were so uniformly being told by all our mainstream media organs. His critics defending that orthodoxy must surely believe that he has gone dangerously rogue, and given the enormous weight of his past credibility, I suspect that the phrase “rogue elephant” has sometimes entered their thoughts.

From the earliest days of the Covid epidemic, an official narrative was promoted that the virus was natural and editors of the leading scientific journals closed their pages to any submissions that suggested otherwise. With no reputable academic papers challenging their perspective, the natural origins advocates were able to cite this silence as proof that their position represented the overwhelming scientific consensus, thereby intimidating most mainstream journalists into toeing that same line. A massive propaganda-bubble had been inflated and maintained by such administrative means.

However, as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Prof. Sachs had publication privileges in the prestigious PNAS journal, so in May he and a co-author published an important article documenting the highly suspicious characteristics of the Covid virus and calling for further investigation. This constituted a breakthrough, becoming the first and only paper published in a major journal that presented the very strong evidence of Covid bioengineering.

- A call for an independent inquiry into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus

Neil L. Harrison and Jeffrey D. Sachs • PNAS • May 19, 2022 • 2,800 Words

Given his role as chairman of the Covid Commission, Sachs’ paper should have been treated as a bombshell, reaching the headlines of all our leading newspapers. But instead, it was almost totally ignored, as was the author’s public statements on the subject. However, the following month, Sachs attended a small Spanish thinktank gathering, whose proceedings were soon made available on Youtube. Russia’s RT eventually ran a brief item highlighting Sachs’ presentation, and a short clip of his remarks soon went super-viral, retweeted out almost 11,000 times and accumulating over a million views.

A video clip that is viewed a million times has attracted an audience of cable news proportions, and Britain’s muck-raking Daily Mail could not resist covering the explosive story, though harshly slanting it against the suddenly controversial academic. Top Russian generals soon began citing Sachs as an authority in their public Defense Ministry briefings.

Although nearly all Western media outlets maintained their strict boycott of Sachs and his explosive accusations, a couple of prominent alternative journalists were willing to offer him a platform. During August, he began describing the outrageous Covid cover-up in interviews with Nathan Robinson of the Current Affairs webzine and on the popular podcast of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

- Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic

Jeffrey Sachs • Current Affairs • August 2, 2022 • 4,300 Words

- Origins of the Covid Virus with Jeffrey Sachs

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. • The Defender • August 20, 2022 • 54 minutes

I was very impressed with Sachs’ forthright statements, and I summarized the developments in a column of my own.

- Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on the Covid Origins Cover-Up

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 29, 2022 • 1,400 Words

No sooner had the reverberations of Sachs’ Covid accusations died down than his remarkable candor engulfed him in an entirely different and even more immediate media controversy.

Having publicly broken ranks with the political establishment over Covid, he soon began doing the same on other important issues. During July and August he published a couple of opinion columns condemning our reckless policies towards Russia and China, with the former having already provoked a bloody and dangerous war in Ukraine and the latter periodically threatening to do the same over Taiwan.

- Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster

Jeffrey Sachs • Consortium News • July 1, 2022 • 1,300 Words

- The West’s Dangerously Simple-Minded Narrative About Russia and China

Jeffrey Sachs • Common Dreams • August 23, 2022 • 1,000 Words

In recent years our once-independent NATO allies have increasingly been treated as American vassals, with their seemingly-compromised political leadership regularly sacrificing their own national interests to support our demands, including our extremely aggressive policies against Russia. Such European subservience became most obvious in their wholehearted support of the severe anti-Russian economic sanctions imposed after the beginning of the Ukraine war, sanctions that have resulted in the devastating loss of the inexpensive Russian energy supplies so necessary to their industries.

With more than half of all German businesses fearful that they might be forced to permanently shut down, massive political pressure was mounting on that country’s leadership to reopen the Nord Stream pipelines with Russia. There were reports of secret negotiations under way to do exactly that, which would have produced a severe political defeat for NATO. However, that possibility was suddenly foreclosed after a series of underwater explosions severely damaged the Russian pipelines, a blow seemingly intended to render them completely inoperable. As I discussed in a recent column, America almost certainly played the central role in those attacks, which possibly represented the greatest peacetime military destruction of civilian infrastructure in the history of the world.

- American Pravda: Of Pipelines and Plagues

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 3, 2022 • 3,900 Words

But although the evidence of American culpability was immediate and overwhelming, much of our lick-spittle Western media illogically blamed the Russians for the destruction of their own pipelines, and the story anyway never received a fraction of the coverage it warranted, with even much of the supposedly fearless alternative media avoiding the topic. An excellent segment on Tucker Carlson’s show set forth the crucial facts, but aside from his particular slice of the FoxNews audience, I suspect that the vast majority of Americans either remained largely unaware of the massive pipeline attacks or even vaguely blamed them on Vladimir Putin.

Then a few days later, Bloomberg TV invited Sachs to share his concerns over the Ukraine war. His hosts were flabbergasted when he flatly declared that America had probably destroyed the Russian pipelines, even mentioning that top journalists had privately told him the same thing, although none of those vital facts could ever appear in their own newspapers.

As a consequence of Sachs’ candor, the interview was cut short—with Sachs “yanked off air” in the words of the hostile New York Post—but the entire segment was watched at least a couple of hundred thousand times on Youtube and the short clip of Sachs’ Nord Stream remarks soon went super-viral on Twitter, viewed more than 4 million times in one Tweet and another million times across a couple of others.

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Ironically enough, Bloomberg TV may have been prompted to interview Sachs because the latter had suffered a ferocious attack a few days earlier in the Atlantic. Neocon writer James Kirchick had bitterly denounced Sachs for being a member of the “Anti-war Camp,” grouping him together with a long list of other prominent figures across the ideological spectrum—ranging from Ron Paul to John Mearsheimer to Noam Chomsky—all of whom had become very concerned about our growing military confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.

A perfect example of the bizarre state of the American media landscape was that although Kirchick himself possessed no serious foreign policy expertise, being primarily focused upon Gay Rights activism, he was provided a major platform to revile and ridicule individuals whose distinguished careers in that field had begun before he was even born. More than a dozen years earlier, Kirchick had similarly flagellated leading critics of George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War.

Although the bulk of the Atlantic hit-piece was aimed at demonizing the prominent academics, journalists, and public policy experts fearful of war with Russia, a couple of paragraphs of opprobrium were also heaped upon the Grayzone, a left-leaning alternative media website and Youtube channel run by Max Blumenthal and focused upon foreign policy issues. Although quite popular, the Grayzone appears to operate on a tiny shoestring budget, relying upon the small donations of its viewers, so it was quite churlish for Kirchick to smear it as “opaquely financed,” given that he was leveling that insinuation from a media platform under tight Neocon control but owned and lavishly funded by the multi-billionaire widow of Steve Jobs.

- How the Anti-war Camp Went Intellectually Bankrupt

Critics of U.S. foreign policy from both ends of the ideological spectrum have found common cause in supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

James Kirchick • The Atlantic • September 29, 2022 • 2,500 Words

The scurrilous Atlantic denunciation may have helped get Sachs invited onto Bloomberg TV, ultimately allowing millions to discover the true facts of the Nord Stream pipeline attacks. There may have been another unforeseen consequence of its simultaneous attacks against both the Grayzone and Sachs, with the former soon arranging an interview of the latter. On Sunday morning, the media outlet released two outstanding segments with the Columbia professor, separately focused on the Ukraine war and the Covid origins controversy, and these have already accumulated more than 100,000 views after less than a day. The Grayzone possesses a great deal of influence and credibility in alternative media circles, and I would hope that these interviews lead to an avalanche of additional coverage for Sachs in other outlets, many of which seem to have previously shied away from the explosive charges he had been making.

The first Grayzone segment was descriptively entitled “End Ukraine Proxy War or Face Armageddon,” and some of Sachs’ crucial points may have surprised his listeners. As he emphasized, America is actually already at war with nuclear-armed Russia in Ukraine, given that we are providing all the funding, military equipment, and command and control facilities for the forces fighting and killing Russian troops on Russia’s own border, as well as supplying unknown numbers of direct combat participants. This is an extraordinarily dangerous situation that would have been considered almost unimaginable during the days of our original Cold War, and our recent destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines was merely the latest manifestation of this undeclared but very real conflict.

Although American leaders may seek to hide their responsibility behind the supposedly independent decisions of the Ukrainian government, this is a transparent fig-leaf. Ukraine’s political leadership is merely our puppet regime, totally financed and controlled by our own government, and pretending otherwise is simply a propaganda-ruse aimed at deceiving our gullible public.

The second, slightly shorter Grayzone segment focused on the Covid origins issue, and provided Sachs the best opportunity he has yet had to present the important facts he uncovered while running the Covid commission. Just a couple of days earlier, he had also been interviewed on physicist Steve Hsu’s podcast discussing the same subject. I would highly recommend both these interviews to anyone interested in understanding the true origins of the viral epidemic that killed more than a million Americans and disrupted the lives of many billions around the world during the last couple of years.

When I’d previously discussed Sachs’ remarkable Covid disclosures back in August, I’d closed with a few paragraphs summarizing the role he seems to be playing in the public discussion and how his positions related to my own. After carefully listening to his most recent interviews, I think my analysis still remains almost unchanged:

Although the mainstream media has almost totally ignored Prof. Sachs’ important views on Covid issues, that boycott may also eventually be broken if he continues to gain attention elsewhere. The many alternative podcasters and websites provide an effective channel for disseminating such controversial ideas, especially when the advocate is a public figure with such strong credibility on the subject.

My entire knowledge of Sachs’ views is based upon his public statements, and he has never suggested the deliberate biowarfare attack hypothesis that I have been publicly proposing for more than two years. But I do find it quite intriguing that nowhere in any of his lengthy, extended discussions does he ever direct any blame towards China for creating the virus nor does he even mention the Wuhan lab, the alleged site of the supposed Covid lab-leak.

Instead, he focuses like a laser upon America’s very extensive bioengineering efforts aimed at producing such modified Covid-like coronaviruses and also upon the concentrated effort by scientists in the orbit of the American government to disguise Covid’s obviously artificial characteristics. He discusses our heavily-funded biowarfare efforts, and how these programs were shifted a couple of decades ago from direct military authority over to Anthony Fauci’s NIH. And he mentions the apparent intelligence-gathering role of Peter Daszak’s Pentagon-funded EcoHealth Alliance, which had worked with the Wuhan lab and many other biolabs worldwide.

Sachs is a public figure of the highest establishment reputation and it would be grossly irresponsible of him to even hint at an explosive hypothesis such as my own unless and until far more solid evidence became available. Moreover, he is currently playing an absolutely crucial role in using his reputation to draw attention to the bioengineered nature of the Covid virus and the massive ongoing attempt by the media and scientific communities to conceal that reality, so provoking any additional controversies might be a fatal distraction.

However, as chairman of the Covid Commission, he has been a crucial insider on all of these matters, and I do find his important information entirely consistent with my own analysis, as presented in my series of articles over the last couple of years.

While the opponents of Prof. Jeffrey Sachs may regard him as a rogue elephant, trampling underfoot the official narratives so carefully constructed by our government and its media allies, I think the American people owe him an enormous debt of gratitude for his righteous pursuit of the truth on these enormously important matters.

Although Sachs seems to deliberately avoid discussing any suggestion that the Covid virus might have been created in the Wuhan lab, I recently came across another lengthy public presentation focused entirely upon that hypothesis.

In June 2021, the Neoconservative Hudson Institute thinktank in DC hosted an hour-long event entitled “Uncovering the Origins of COVID-19: A Scientific Discussion”. The session was led by Dr. David Asher, who had served as a top aide to Mike Pompeo in the Trump Administration, known as a leading proponent of the Wuhan Lab-Leak theory, and the main speakers were Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley and Dr. Steven Quay, who together had written several articles arguing that the Covid virus had probably been bioengineered and pointing to the Wuhan lab as the likely source. Most of the hour was spent mustering the evidence that Covid was artificial, an analysis that I would strongly endorse, but I took issue with some of their closing conclusions.

Prof. Muller is an eminent physicist, but over the years he had also become heavily involved in a variety of other scientific areas, including those related to biodefense, and he seemed quite familiar with many of the crucial aspects of that subject. Towards the end of his remarks, he suggested that the particular aspects of the Covid virus—its extremely high communicability but low lethality—rendered it an ideal “anti-economy bioweapon,” which could severely disrupt the society of a targeted country without inflicting the gigantic loss of life that might provoke nuclear retaliation.

Indeed, Muller seemed to explicitly assume that Covid had been developed as a bioweapon by China, but he then argued that the release in Wuhan had obviously been accidental. After all, he said, if the Chinese had decided to deliberately attack the US with Covid, they surely would have “done something clever” like sending an operative to spread the virus near Ft. Detrick so that America itself would be blamed for the deadly viral epidemic, and the other participants nodded their heads at the obvious point he was making. I found it quite ironic that none of these three biowarfare discussants recognized that he was describing a scenario that was the perfectly analogous mirror-image of what might have actually unfolded in Wuhan during late 2019.

Dr. Muller: Yeah. I think World War III is going to be biologic, not nuclear. I think that it may even be a hidden war. Previous wars you know who you’re fighting. But, I don’t believe China did this one purpose. Yes, they developed this weapon, but I don’t think they released it on purpose. If they wanted to release it on purpose, they would have had an infected person travel to Fort Dietrich[sic] and release it around there. They would have done something clever like that, so it would be blamed on the United States. This was an accident.

But what it illustrates more than anything else is that you can attack another country without killing people. Well, you kill people, but you can attack another country without dropping weapons that blow things up. Economic warfare, I believe, is going to be the next war. And what this has illustrated better than anything else is if you have a bio weapon and you have a vaccine for your own people, that you can wreak devastation on the economies of other countries, of competing countries with very little loss yourself. So yeah, this is a genuine threat. No, it’s not going to be nuclear war in the future, it will be economic bio war.

EPub Format • Mobi/Kindle

Very little of my own work has focused on the biological properties of the Covid virus, but to the extent that we begin to accept that the virus was probably produced in a lab, let alone that it possesses the characteristics of a bioweapon, the analysis I have developed over the last couple of years becomes extremely relevant and is worth carefully considering.

My lengthy series of articles has focused upon the highly-suspicious pattern of the Covid epidemic and the strong evidence of American foreknowledge. Taken together, these facts suggest that the global outbreak was very likely the result of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).

- Covid/Biowarfare Series

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 2020-December 2021 • 60,000 Words

For those who prefer to absorb this same information in a different format, here are three of my video podcast interviews from earlier this year, which have now accumulated well over 1.3 million total views on Rumble, with the first of these having passed the half-million mark:

Kevin Barrett, FFWN • February 16, 2022 • 15m

Geopolitics & Empire • February 1, 2022 • 75m

Red Ice TV • February 3, 2022 • 130m

The Alt-Covid Community Begins Unraveling the Origins of Covid

The Unz Review • January 16, 2023 • 4,500 Words

Although much of my research and writing over the last three years has been devoted to the global Covid epidemic, I’ve paradoxically paid very little attention to most of the various Covid-oriented websites.

That’s because I have narrowly concentrated on the origins of the epidemic while they have focused almost entirely upon the details of the disease and the controversial public health measures adopted to control it. I’ve had only slight interest in those latter topics, and partly for that reason most of my views have been vaguely mainstream, not too different from what I have regularly read in the pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Economist.

However, the daily lives of billions of individuals around the world have been tremendously disrupted by these government-imposed policies, which included lockdowns, masking, and social distancing, mandates that were often tremendously unpopular and had enormous social and economic consequences. Moreover, faced with a life-and-death situation, substantial portions of the public together with some medical professionals claimed that various treatments for Covid such as the use of HCQ and IVM were safe and effective but wrongly suppressed, a position loudly attacked and denounced by the outraged medical and media establishments. These battles grew even fiercer once a massive Covid vaccination drive began at the end of 2020, with critics noting that the mRNA vaccines being employed were based upon an entirely new biotechnology and had required the use of emergency waivers to circumvent what would have otherwise been a long and cautious clinical trial process.

During this entire period, the establishment media provided nearly lockstep support to the governmental positions on all of these hugely controversial issues, and this naturally fostered the growth of what might be called the alt-Covid community, a network of websites, bloggers, and podcasters who argued that many of these official policies were completely incorrect, often based more upon propaganda than science.

One of the more prominent nodes in this dissenting ecosystem was founded in April 2020 by Toby Young, a longtime British journalist and public intellectual, conservative-leaning but generally well-regarded. He launched Lockdown Sceptics, an Internet newsletter critiquing what he considered an ill-conceived public health measure as well as other Covid-related issues. Over time, he gradually expanded and extended its coverage, also taking on board Will Jones and Noah Carl, a couple of younger Ph.D.’s, with the former eventually serving as editor. By the time the British lockdowns finally ended in July 2021, his readership and impact had expanded to the point that he decided to rechristian his publication the Daily Sceptic and keep it in operation, providing careful analysis of other public policy issues, especially those avoided or mishandled by the mainstream media, though still with a strong emphasis on Covid-related matters.

Although I might not necessarily agree with all of his webzine’s conclusions, the articles that they run seem very sober and carefully reasoned, often based upon published scientific papers or quantitative analysis, a welcome change from the wild speculation and fear-mongering found on these subjects across much of the Internet. My impression is that the website has become quite influential within alt-Covid circles, while also being taken seriously by many mainstream journalists and scientists. According to SimilarWeb, its traffic has been growing rapidly, recently reaching over 7 million pageviews and 200,000 hours of readership per month, totals that are several times larger than those of Quillette, where Young had once served as Associate Editor, and substantially greater than our own.

Despite its growing visibility, the website’s subject matter and British focus meant that I’d been only slightly aware it until a few weeks ago when someone brought to my attention one of its articles that had been republished on Alex Jones’ conspiratorial InfoWars website, hugely popular but hardly reliable.

To my considerable surprise, the very solidly argued 3,200 word piece by Daily Sceptic Editor Will Jones directly addressed one of the absolutely critical questions that had been scrupulously avoided for nearly three years by our entire mainstream media, an issue that podcaster Kevin Barrett had appropriately dubbed the “Smoking Gun” of the Covid epidemic.

The opening paragraph asked an obvious question.

Here’s something that’s been bugging me. How did U.S. intelligence analysts pick up on what they deemed a dangerous novel virus in China at a time when there’s no good evidence China had picked up on it or was concerned? How did they spot the signal in all the noise of a normal Chinese flu season?

After carefully analyzing all of the fragmentary and somewhat contradictory evidence, the piece closed by very courageously presenting an explosive possible answer, highlighted with a telling quote from Dr. Robert Kadlec, a senior Trump Administration official and longstanding biowarfare advocate.

There is, it should be noted, one straightforward way to explain all of this, but it’s implications are disturbing to say the least. It is that the virus was deliberately released in China by some group or groups within the U.S. intelligence and security services. The purpose of such a release would be partly to disrupt China and partly as a live exercise for pandemic preparedness – which is, as we know, how the pandemic was in practice treated by those in the U.S. biodefence network. While shocking, this is not outside the bounds of possibility. Consider what Robert Kadlec wrote in a Pentagon strategy paper in 1998.

Using biological weapons under the cover of an endemic or natural disease occurrence provides an attacker the potential for plausible denial. Biological warfare’s potential to create significant economic loss and subsequent political instability, coupled with plausible denial, exceeds the possibilities of any other human weapon.

If this were the case, it may be that the addition of the furin cleavage site to the virus would be to enhance its infectiousness in order to increase the chance of a pandemic occurring (perhaps they’d tried before with a less infectious virus and it hadn’t worked so well). The virus would be deliberately relatively mild so it didn’t do too much harm, but severe enough to have the desired impact – at least when assisted with psyops and propaganda. Very few individuals would likely know the origin – most would be part of the live exercise.

Such a scenario would neatly explain how U.S. intelligence personnel were closely ‘following the spread’ in November despite China being oblivious. It would also explain why U.S. biodefence people were far more alarmist than the Chinese authorities from the get-go; why they have denied the virus could be engineered and squashed all efforts to investigate origins (and clung to discredited theories); and why they have followed through on the whole lockdown-and-wait-for-a-vaccine biodefence plan despite the virus plainly not warranting it (and the measures not working), and generally treated the whole thing like a live exercise. It’s uncontentious to point out that the pandemic was a golden opportunity to put their long-prepared plans into practice. But what if it was an opportunity they didn’t leave to chance?

None of us wants to draw this conclusion, of course. To disprove it, at least as far as this argument is concerned, we would need to see considerably more detail about what U.S. intelligence analysts were seeing and saying in November 2019, which would explain how they knew what China did not and why they were so concerned when China was not.

Short of this, it’s hard not to wonder: what if releasing the virus in China to disrupt the country and see how the world responds could have been some hare-brained scheme cooked up in the deeper recesses of the U.S. biosecurity state?

- How Did U.S. Intelligence Spot the Virus in Wuhan Weeks Before China?

Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • December 12, 2022 • 3,200 Words

I passed this important article along to a few friends of mine, noting that it had been Tweeted out by Young to his 240,000 followers. As it happens, one of them knew Young and introduced me, so I was soon directly in touch with the author and we began a fruitful correspondence. Not long afterwards, he published a strong follow-up piece, which concluded by noting the extremely implausible aspects of the claims made by the analysts at America’s Defense Intelligence Agency.

Thus this Harvard report, intended to show how U.S. intelligence analysts spotted the virus in November 2019 in China even though China itself had not noticed it yet, has ended up inadvertently revealing there was no signal of a respiratory viral outbreak in Wuhan at that time and thus no way that U.S. intelligence analysts could have spotted one.

Naturally, this does nothing to diminish the growing suspicions about how U.S. intelligence came to be following the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, and only Wuhan, at a time when no one else, including the Chinese, were even aware of its existence.

- 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

America’s Brownstone Institute is another leading alt-Covid website, and it regularly cross-publishes articles with Britain’s Daily Sceptic. Perhaps prompted by the suspicions raised in one of those pieces, Editor Jeffrey A. Tucker soon produced an article on America’s Crimson Contagion exercise, run by Kadlec and held just prior to the sudden appearance of the Covid virus in Wuhan. He presented all the details and closed by noting the extremely suspicious timing.

What does it all mean? Perhaps it is all just a series of coincidental data points, that what is called the worst pandemic in 100 years came only a few months after an elaborate multi-agency trial run of the same in which former high officials of the Trump administration participated. And perhaps the best person to run the Covid response also happened to be the very person who organized and managed the trial run in the previous season.

Many people will surely say there is nothing to see here. There is so much not to see these days.

- What Is Crimson Contagion?

Jeffrey A. Tucker • The Brownstone Institute • December 22, 2022 • 1,300 Words

Tweeting out the article to his 137,000 followers, Tucker described it as “the most intriguing element” he’d found in three years of writing about the Covid issue:

Since the early days of the outbreak, a topic of very heated debate had been the source of the virus, with most of the scientific and media establishment claiming it was natural, but a strong and vocal minority arguing that it had been bioengineered, presumably leaking from the Chinese virus research lab located in Wuhan.

For most of the first year, the dissenting perspective had been harshly repressed in scientific publications and social media, even being banned from Facebook, but then in May 2021 a seminal article by former New York Times Science Editor Nicholas Wade revived it. More recently, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission, has strongly argued that the virus seemed artificial and denounced what he described as a governmental cover-up aimed at suppressing that reality.

This ongoing debate took an important turn last week as Jones published another excellent article analyzing that issue, a piece that was soon republished by the Brownstone Institute and excerpted by LewRockwell. But unlike nearly all the previous writers on that subject, he focused not on the evidence for or against a lab-leak itself but instead on the crucial implications of a related matter. His analysis is sufficiently important that I will excerpt it at considerable length.

Where did the lab leak theory come from? Who first promoted the idea and why? The answer to this question is surprising – and may be the key to unlocking the mystery of the origin of COVID-19.

The first known mention of the idea that the coronavirus may have originated in a Chinese lab appeared on January 9th 2020 in a report by Radio Free Asia (RFA). This was just days after the virus had first entered public consciousness, and at the time, no deaths had yet been reported and few people were worrying about the virus – including, it seems, the Chinese, who were claiming it wasn’t even clear whether it was spreading between humans.

Seemingly unhappy about the lack of alarm, RFA ran a comment from Ren Ruihong, former head of the medical assistance department at the Chinese Red Cross, who said she was confident it was spreading between humans. She also asserted it was a “new type of mutant coronavirus”, and immediately, without pausing for breath, raised the possibility it was a result of a Chinese biological attack on Hong Kong using a virus developed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Bear in mind this was before a single person had been reported as dying from the virus, and no solid evidence was presented for the claim. It is the first time the WIV and the idea of a lab origin of the virus are mentioned in the media. The report then implies the WIV is hiding its involvement – though the basis for this insinuation is tenuous, to say the least.

Over the following two weeks RFA pushed hard on the idea of a Chinese biowarfare lab origin, and its reporting was picked up by the Washington Times on January 24th, which quoted Dany Shoham, an “Israeli biological warfare expert”.

The deadly animal virus epidemic spreading globally may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory linked to China’s covert biological weapons programme, according to an Israeli biological warfare expert.

Radio Free Asia this week rebroadcast a local Wuhan television report from 2015 showing China’s most advanced virus research laboratory known [as] the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Radio Free Asia reported.

The laboratory is the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses.

Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biowarfare, said the institute is linked to Beijing’s covert biological weapons programme.

“Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese [biological weapons] alignment,” Mr. Shoham told the Washington Times.

Why did Radio Free Asia and the Washington Times introduce and promote the idea of Covid as a Chinese bioweapon? RFA appears to have done so in order to counter the Chinese lack of concern about the virus, hence the heading: “Experts Cast Doubts on Chinese Official Claims Around ‘New’ Wuhan Coronavirus.” The Washington Times report indicates at one point it is in response to rumours “circulating on the Chinese Internet claiming the virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons”, citing an unnamed “U.S. official”.

One ominous sign, said a U.S. official, is that false rumours since the outbreak began several weeks ago have begun circulating on the Chinese Internet claiming the virus is part of a U.S. conspiracy to spread germ weapons.

That could indicate China is preparing propaganda outlets to counter future charges the new virus escaped from one of Wuhan’s civilian or defence research laboratories.

Why is the report anticipating “future charges” of a lab leak – particularly when it is in the process of making such charges?

The words of the anonymous U.S. official appear to state the Chinese rumours began “several weeks ago”, right back at the beginning of January or end of December; however, oddly, the article was soon updated to delete the words “since the outbreak began several weeks ago”, for reasons that are unclear.

In any case, the really strange thing about these “rumours circulating on the Chinese Internet” is that no evidence of them has ever been produced or found. Indeed, all the places you might expect to mention them do not. For instance, in February 2021 the DFRLab of the Atlantic Council published a lengthy document in conjunction with the Associated Press summarising all the “false rumours” and “hoaxes” regarding the origins of Covid. Its large research team scoured the internet for all rumours connected with Covid origins – yet the section on China doesn’t mention anything about these alleged January rumours of U.S bioweapons.

Another example is Larry Romanoff, an activist who writes on various ‘conspiracy theories’ and who has lived in China for many years. His columns in early 2020 on the Global Research website attacking the American position were tweeted out by senior Chinese figures, but he never mentions anything about these alleged early rumours on the “Chinese Internet”, which he surely would have done.

In addition, the rumours claim has never been repeated by any intelligence sources; this was the only time it was made.

Why then did RFA introduce the lab-engineered virus narrative, even before the first death? Why was it trying to ratchet up alarm? And why did the unnamed U.S. official claim to be responding to Chinese rumours that turned out not to exist?

The plot thickens when you realise that Radio Free Asia is a U.S.-Government-funded media outlet that is essentially a CIA front, once named by the New York Times as a key part in the agency’s “worldwide propaganda network”. As Whitney Webb pointed out right back in January 2020, though RFA is no longer run directly by the CIA, it is managed by the Government-funded Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which answers directly to the Secretary of State – who, at the outset of the pandemic was Mike Pompeo, whose previous job was as CIA Director.

This means we can see that the Covid lab origin narrative originated with the U.S. Government’s security services, and did so very early, prior to the first death, as part of a deliberate effort to increase alarm in China and elsewhere. It was also designed to counter the anticipated claims, which had not yet been made (though the anonymous U.S. official falsely claimed they had been), that the virus was a U.S. biological attack.

That the U.S. Government would be the source of the lab origin theory is no doubt surprising to many people, given that within weeks the same theory would be dismissed by Government officials as a ‘conspiracy theory’ and forcibly suppressed. In its place, official U.S. channels would endorse the wet market natural origin theory and seek to close down further debate and investigation. So what’s going on?

Here’s one possible explanation, which makes sense of all the known facts – though is admittedly highly disturbing. It may not be correct, but I confess I cannot currently think of a better one. Perhaps someone else can.

The explanation is that the Chinese lab origin narrative was put out by U.S. intelligence in early January as a cover story. A cover story for what? For a U.S. biological attack on China. As a cover story for an attack, it serves four key purposes. First, it preempts allegations of a U.S. attack (and indeed the anonymous U.S. official falsely claimed these had already been made). Second, it anticipates the need to explain the non-natural origin of the virus, which would be expected to be discovered, as a natural origin manifests differently to a non-natural origin – a natural origin should have animal reservoirs, early genetic diversity and evidence of adaptation to humans, which are lacking for SARS-CoV-2. Third, it spreads alarm in China – one of the purposes of the attack. And fourth, it justifies the U.S. and other countries activating biodefence protocols to defend themselves from any blowback – which we know is exactly what they did, treating it as a matter of national security, not public health.

The idea that the U.S. might deliberately release a virus in China might seem far-fetched to some. However, it’s well known that the Pentagon intensified its research into bat-borne viruses in the years approaching the pandemic. Though it said this was solely for defensive purposes given the supposed risk of bats being used as “bioweapons”, scientists have previously warned, in the journal Science, that another supposedly defensive Pentagon programme, DARPA’s “Insect Allies” programme, appeared really to be aimed at creating and delivering a “new class of biological weapon” and that it revealed “an intention to develop a means of delivery of HEGAAs for offensive purposes”. In addition, the Iranian Government was so convinced that its early COVID-19 outbreak in February 2020, which killed a significant number of its senior leaders, was due to a U.S. biological attack that it lodged a formal complaint with the UN. Such allegations don’t prove anything of course. But together these concerns do suggest that such an attack is not outside the realm of possibility and should at least be considered as an explanation for the origin of the virus.

But if the lab leak was the intended cover story, why was it shortly afterwards suppressed as a ‘conspiracy theory’? It is a matter of public record that this occurred largely due to the efforts of Anthony Fauci, Jeremy Farrar and other Western scientists, who organised a scientific cover-up of evidence that might implicate their complicity in the gain-of-function research that they suspected may have created the virus. Did they know about the attack? There’s no evidence they did. Which means they would also have been in the dark about the intended cover story. Indeed, one of the conspirators, Christian Drosten, in one of the disclosed emails directly asks the group where the “conspiracy theory” of a lab origin has come from. Farrar and Fauci, for their part, appear to be genuinely exploring the origin questions in their emails (while clearly aiming for a particular answer).

The fears of this group of scientists about being implicated in the creation of the virus led them to organise a highly effective effort to dismiss and suppress the lab origin theory. This intervention greatly complexified the cover story, with the result that the output from the U.S. intelligence community (IC) became confused and inconsistent.

The official endorsement by the intelligence community in late April and early May 2020 of the wet market theory [4] would then have occurred because of a switch amongst most of the intelligence community to the narrative created and endorsed by Anthony Fauci, Jeremy Farrar etc. Those in the IC not involved in the attack (likely the vast majority) had probably figured out what was going on, i.e., the lab leak theory was a cover story put out by reckless colleagues, and would be very aware of the terrible fallout should the truth become known. Hence also the suppression around this time within the U.S. Government of all Covid origins investigations, which a senior Government official said would only “open a can of worms“.

This tension between IC elements then continued with the 2021 declassified intelligence report [5], with most of the IC claiming not to know anything, but the NCMI still believing the lab leak was the best cover story and wanting it back in play.

By the time of the October 2022 Senate report [6] the natural origin theory was clearly collapsing. This report then represents an effort by some within the intelligence community to bring back the lab leak as the cover story, while directing all attention to China and the WIV and away from the U.S.

How plausible is all this? It certainly fits the evidence, though perhaps there is another, more innocent way of explaining it all.

However, those who would like to exclude the possibility of a U.S. biological attack – and indeed, I would like to exclude this – need to answer at least two key questions:

1. Why was the U.S. concerned about and following an outbreak in Wuhan in November 2019 which all the available evidence shows was not detectable at the time? Why did the U.S. falsely claim there was a signal of a large, worrying outbreak and brief allies about it?

2. Why did U.S. security services begin spreading rumours about the virus being engineered in China at the beginning of January, even before the first death had been reported, when they had no evidence of this (at least, they have never explained how they knew it) and no one else was worried about it, and based on the false claim that rumours were already being spread in China about a U.S. bioweapon?

Let’s be honest: it’s not looking good.

- 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

Millions or tens of millions of people worldwide ultimately draw their Covid information from the alt-Covid community, in which both the Daily Sceptic and the Brownstone Institute are major publications, whose contents may be widely circulated.

Dr. Robert W. Malone is a towering figure in those circles and he seemed to judge this Covid origins analysis as important as I did, tweeting out the article to his 900,000 followers and getting nearly 1,400 retweets.

EPub Format • Mobi/Kindle

If the tens of millions of individuals who have been concentrating their attention on the consequences of the Covid outbreak now also begin to consider its likely origins, I believe that the existing cover-up may collapse, with potentially enormous political ramifications.

Well over a million Americans died in the epidemic and if this tragedy came to be seen as the blowback from a botched American biowarfare attack, the impact might be staggering. Such a catastrophe would be a thousand times greater than the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that helped bring down Soviet regime that ruled the USSR.

Meanwhile, I’d also recommend my own long series of articles on the subject and several of them in particular:

- Covid/Biowarfare Series

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 2020-December 2021 • 60,000 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

But for those who prefer to receive the same information presented in a different format, three of my podcast video interviews from last February have been doing very well on Rumble, picking up a total of nearly 300,000 additional views during just the last couple of weeks.

Kevin Barrett, FFWN • February 16, 2022 • 15m

Geopolitics & Empire • February 1, 2022 • 75m

Red Ice TV • February 3, 2022 • 130m

Secret Intelligence Leaks vs. Basic Common Sense

The Unz Review • August 28, 2023 • 4,500 Words

Historical Examples

During 1940 the determined efforts of President Franklin Roosevelt to involve America in the war against Hitler’s Germany were blocked by the overwhelming opposition of the American people, running at 80% according to some polls. A group of young Yale Law School peace activists had launched the America First Committee and it quickly attracted 800,000 members, becoming the largest grassroots political organization in our national history. The leadership of the AFC included many of our most prominent business and journalistic figures, and famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, one of our greatest national heroes, served as its top spokesman.

With American antiwar sentiment so seemingly strong and resolute, various political stratagems were employed to reduce it. In late October 1941, just few weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor finally settled the issue, FDR announced in a nationwide radio broadcast that he had obtained a German map that revealed the secret Nazi plans to seize control of Latin America, which Hitler would then use as a base to attack the United States as part of his bold plan of world conquest.

Our President declared:

Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean. I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government – by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it…This map makes clear the Nazi design, not only against South America but against the United States as well.

Probably millions or even tens of millions of Americans believed FDR’s words about that direct threat to our national security and therefore softened their resistance to our country’s involvement in the European war. But as historians have long since acknowledged, the map was a forgery, probably produced by FDR’s own close British collaborators. In an earlier private conversation with the British ambassador, FDR had warned that his secret activities with the British would probably lead to his impeachment if they were revealed.

I think few Americans at the time were willing to publicly accuse our President of such major falsehoods, but from a distance of more than eighty years, what strikes me is the sheer absurdity of FDR’s accusation. Germany had no significant navy and had been stymied for over a year by the barrier of the English Channel, only 18 miles wide. Yet apparently a large majority of the American media and the American public were willing to believe that the Germans could easily cross the thousands of miles of the Atlantic Ocean and gain control of the countries of South America, whose total population was considerably larger than that of Germany itself. So the excitement of being privy to a secret intelligence document seems to have triumphed over rational thought in the minds of many people, including eager journalists.

FDR’s illegal efforts to involve us in a totally unnecessary war outraged many of our Military Intelligence professionals at the time, but they were bound by an oath of secrecy, and their views only became known years or decades later when they published their books and personal memoirs. Extensive archival research by Prof. Joseph Bendersky fully uncovered their extremely bitter contemporaneous sentiments, and he noted the “fierce delight” they took in FDR’s eventual death: “Finally, the evil man was dead!”

- American Pravda: Secrets of Military Intelligence

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 10, 2019 • 12,500 Words

Just after the end of the war, Gen. George Patton, one of our most illustrious military commanders, told his colleagues that he intended to resign his commission so that he could begin a nationwide speaking tour to provide the American public with the true facts about the war that they had just fought. Patton soon died in a highly-suspicious vehicle accident, and decades later his self-confessed American assassin revealed that he had killed Patton under direct orders from top figures in our own government.

- American Pravda: Was General Patton Assassinated?

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 22, 2016 • 2,400 Words

Government officials have long recognized that secret information, even if heavily distorted or completely false, can be used to effectively shape media coverage. Many journalists and pundits are always eager to receive leaks, confidential tidbits that they are willing to make the centerpiece of their one-sided stories, thereby allowing themselves to be manipulated.

A perfect example of this process occurred during the run-up to the Iraq War, when leaks of secret intelligence information from Bush Neocons were widely promoted in such elite media outlets as the New York Times and the New Yorker. This persuaded our gullible citizenry that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons and also planned to attack our country with anthrax and other deadly biological weapons, while seemingly being in cahoots with Osama bin Laden, his regional arch-enemy. As I described a decade ago, most of Congress and the American people fully accepted such obvious nonsense, resulting in our disastrous Iraq War, which began the destruction of much of the Middle East:

The circumstances surrounding our Iraq War demonstrate this, certainly ranking it among the strangest military conflicts of modern times. The 2001 attacks in America were quickly ascribed to the radical Islamists of al-Qaeda, whose bitterest enemy in the Middle East had always been Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime in Iraq. Yet through misleading public statements, false press leaks, and even forged evidence such as the “yellowcake” documents, the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies utilized the compliant American media to persuade our citizens that Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs posed a deadly national threat and required elimination by war and invasion. Indeed, for several years national polls showed that a large majority of conservatives and Republicans actually believed that Saddam was the mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq War was being fought as retribution. Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.

An even greater absurdity unfolded last year, after a serious of mysterious underwater explosions destroyed the \$30 billion Russian-German Nord Stream pipelines, probably Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure.

Numerous top American officials had publicly threatened to eliminate the pipelines if Russia invaded Ukraine, but after Russia did so and Nord Stream was destroyed, virtually all the mainstream media outlets both in America and in Europe declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin had probably destroyed his own pipelines, thereby further demonstrating his criminal insanity, and scarcely any other possibility was even considered. When Prof. Jeffrey Sachs was interviewed on Bloomberg TV and pointed to the American government as the obvious suspect, his statement was greeted with horror and disbelief and he was quickly yanked off the air.

- American Pravda: Of Pipelines and Plagues

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 3, 2022 • 3,900 Words

Over the last half-century, Seymour Hersh had established himself as our greatest investigative journalist, and a few months after the attacks, he provided a very detailed account of exactly how our own military had destroyed the pipelines under orders from President Joe Biden, but no mainstream outlets reported his bombshell revelations.

However, Hersh had successfully broken many previous government cover-ups, and his blockbuster revelations left the earlier claim that Russia had destroyed the Russian pipelines looking rather threadbare, so various Western Intelligence agencies soon leaked a replacement cover story. The Nord Stream pipeline attacks probably ranked as the greatest act of industrial terrorism in world history, but the media now began reporting that the attacks had probably been carried out by a handful of shadowy Ukrainian activists operating from a rented sailboat. I’m not sure how many gullible Westerners fell for that particular fabrication, but Hersh quickly explained why the technical details of that new scenario were completely impossible.

- Seymour Hersh: Standing Tall in a Sea of Lies

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 13, 2023 • 2,000 Words

- “But That Newspaper Is Dead”

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 27, 2023 • 2,400 Words

Obviously not all intelligence leaks are false or useless. But we must be very cautious in accepting them, especially if they seem to strongly support the obvious political goals of the leakers.

Covid Origins Leaks

These are some of the points I think we should keep in mind as we consider the recent flurry of discussion regarding the origins of the Covid epidemic.

One of the most important developments may have come in a long Tucker Carlson interview of Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., which according to Twitter might have been watched a couple of million times.

I found myself in strong agreement with most of Kennedy’s views, including his sharp criticism of our Ukraine War policy and the hidden reality of America’s enormous and longstanding biological warfare program. In his #1 Amazon bestseller, Kennedy had devoted a long chapter to that last subject, and he made a good case that after President Richard Nixon had publicly abandoned our biowarfare efforts in 1969, those operations were later reconstituted under the label of “biodefense” and “vaccine development,” while being shifted from the Pentagon to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s division at the National Institutes of Health.

Then in 2014, as Kennedy tells the story, several high-profile leaks at American facilities led Congress to force an end to such dangerous biowarfare work on U.S. soil, forcing Fauci to relocate our bioweapons development research to overseas labs. All of this seems quite plausible.

The problem came towards the end of his 8 minute discussion. According to Kennedy, the Pentagon and the CIA funded and controlled Fauci’s biowarfare development research, which obviously constituted one of America’s most advanced and powerful military technologies. But Kennedy then claimed that our government decided to transfer all of that cutting-edge biowarfare technology to the Chinese. So beginning in 2014, America’s future biowarfare development work would be performed at the Wuhan lab, a facility that he describes as being under Chinese military control.

Does this make any sense whatsoever? In 2012, the Obama Administration had announced its “Pivot to East Asia,” declaring that it would refocus American strategic and military resources against China, which was seen as America’s most formidable long-term competitor and rival. But we are to believe that two years later, the Pentagon and the CIA decided to transfer our most powerful biowarfare technologies—producing bioweapons unmatched by those of any other nation—to the Chinese, selecting a Chinese military lab to develop our own bioweapons. We even paid them a few hundred thousand dollars for that privilege, a tiny fraction of one percent of our large biowarfare budget. Compared to that absurdity, the notion of Nazi Germany conquering most of the Western Hemisphere without the benefit of a navy seems far more plausible.

Furthermore, in 2015 Harvard’s Graham Allison had published a very high profile article arguing that the U.S. and China were almost inevitably headed for open warfare, and a couple of years later, his book on the same subject became a national bestseller, widely discussed and accepted in DC political circles. Yet with many top Pentagon and CIA officials being convinced that we would soon be at war with China, Kennedy seems to believe that these same officials nonetheless continued relying upon Chinese military researchers to develop our most powerful biowarfare technology.

None of these astonishing claims had appeared in Kennedy’s previous book and he doesn’t provide any sources for his interview remarks. But based upon some of his details, I think his information probably came from several stories published two months ago by various journalists, all of which were apparently based upon confidential leaks from anonymous sources.

Back in March, President Joseph Biden had ordered the complete declassification within 90 days of all U.S. intelligence information relating to the origins of the Covid virus. With that deadline approaching in late June, there suddenly appeared a flurry of articles based upon anonymous leaks. These claimed that secret evidence proved that three identified researchers at the Wuhan lab had been the earliest infected individuals or even suggested that Covid had been developed as a Chinese bioweapon whose accidental leakage had killed perhaps twenty million people worldwide, including over a million Americans.

Such explosive charges might seem like the sort of wild conspiratorial claims found in dark corners of the Internet, but they instead appeared in such leading mainstream newspapers as the London Sunday Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, or were co-authored by reputable investigative journalists such as Matt Taibbi.

The first of those outlets had published the earliest and most dramatic account, a long investigative piece that relied upon anonymous American sources to claim that Covid was a leaked Chinese bioweapon. Much of Kennedy’s information seems to have been derived from that article.

- What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted

Fresh evidence drawn from confidential reports reveals Chinese scientists spliced together deadly pathogens shortly before the pandemic, the Sunday Times Insight team report

Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott • The London Sunday Times • June 10, 2023 • 5,500 Words

However, just a couple of days later, the editor of the Daily Sceptic, another British publication, pointed out some of the serious weaknesses in that reconstruction. He noted that the leadership of the Wuhan lab and the Chinese government hardly reacted as if a dangerous Chinese bioweapon had suddenly begun circulating in a city of 11 million that served as a major national transit hub.

- If China Knew COVID-19 Was an Escaped Bioweapon, Why Did it Publish the Genetic Sequence in January 2020?

Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • June 13, 2023 • 1,700 Words

Several other articles appeared over the next couple of weeks, mostly focusing on claims that three specific Wuhan lab researchers had become infected with Covid during November 2019, the earliest such cases anywhere and therefore the likely source of the outbreak. Once again, all these accounts were based upon anonymous government intelligence sources.

- First People Sickened By COVID-19 Were Chinese Scientists At Wuhan Institute Of Virology, Say US Government Sources

The three scientists were engaged in “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses when they fell ill

Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag • Substack • June 13, 2023 • 1,800 Words

- Documents Link Potential Covid Patient Zero to U.S.-Funded Research in Wuhan

New reporting, attributed to U.S. government sources, identified a coronavirus researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in November 2019

Ryan Grim • The Intercept • June 17, 2023 • 800 Words

- U.S.-Funded Scientist Among Three Chinese Researchers Who Fell Ill Amid Early Covid-19 Outbreak

Identification of three who worked at Wuhan Institute of Virology fuels suspicion for proponents of lab-leak theory

Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel • The Wall Street Journal • June 20, 2023 • 1,400 Words

- The Government Must Say What It Knows About Covid’s Origins

Zeynep Tufekci • The New York Times • June 21, 2023 • 1,300 Words

The long WSJ article was the weightiest piece, and two years earlier those same reporters had published a previous very high-profile article making similar claims, probably relying upon the same unnamed government sources.

- Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate on Covid-19 Origin

Report says researchers went to hospital in November 2019, shortly before confirmed outbreak; adds to calls for probe of whether virus escaped lab

Michael R. Gordon, Warren P. Strobel, and Drew Hinshaw • The Wall Street Journal • May 23, 2023 • 1,700 Words

This cascade of articles naturally raised enormous anticipation regarding the intelligence documents about to be released. But the result was a tremendous anticlimax when the declassified DNI report largely refuted all these claims, denying the existence of any solid evidence that Wuhan researchers had been hospitalized with Covid-like symptoms and stating that any reported illness they suffered had not necessarily been suggestive of Covid.

These official DNI conclusions seemed to confirm the personal testimony of the best single Western eyewitness, Australian virologist Danielle Anderson, who had been working at the Wuhan lab during the period in question. In a long 2021 interview, she had told Bloomberg that no one at the lab had become seriously ill with Covid-like symptoms, nor had she heard any rumors of a lab-leak or even any indication that the Covid virus had been developed there.

- The Last—And Only—Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out

Virologist Danielle Anderson paints a very different picture of the Wuhan Institute

Michelle Fay Cortez • Bloomberg • June 27, 2021 • 2,200 Words

So just three days after publishing their explosive article, that same pair of WSJ reporters released a short piece summarizing this new intelligence information, almost amounting to a retraction of their previous story.

- Covid Virus Wasn’t at Wuhan Lab Before Pandemic, U.S. Report Says

Spy agencies remain divided on whether the virus passed to humans via an infected animal or laboratory accident

Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel • The Wall Street Journal • June 23, 2023 • 500 Words

And oddly enough, the byline of the second co-author of that controversial earlier article seems to have now been removed, leaving only the name of Michael R. Gordon. Two decades earlier, Gordon had shared numerous bylines with Judith Miller at the New York Times, when the two of them had eagerly promoted the Neocon hoax of Saddam’s WMDs, also based upon anonymous government leaks.

Vanity Fair‘s Katherine Eban had previously published several long articles generally sympathetic to the lab-leak scenario, and she now summarized this confusing situation, including the angry reactions of several U.S. Senators who claimed that our intelligence agencies had failed to comply with the law by refusing to release other documents.

- A New Intelligence Report Suggests That the Lab-Leak Wars Will Never End

Given a 90-day deadline to share what they know about COVID’s origins, America’s divided intelligence agencies produced a slim report that leaves both major hypotheses on the table—and raises as many questions as it answers.

Katherine Eban • Vanity Fair • June 28, 2023 • 2,700 Words

Since coming into office, the Biden Administration has become extremely hostile to China, denouncing it at every turn, seeking to choke-off its entire technology industry, and repeatedly violating its “red lines” regarding Taiwan. If any half-plausible evidence existed that Covid had leaked from the Wuhan lab, it’s difficult to understand why our government would be working to keep it secret. Yet the official release of all relevant documents provided no evidence of a lab-leak, and the DNI declared that nearly all of our 17 different Intelligence agencies had taken that same position.

This strongly suggests that the wave of lab-leak stories may have been based upon the very same sort of extremely doubtful or even fraudulent evidence as Saddam’s WMDs two decades ago, possibly peddled by anti-China former officials from the Trump Administration, who had repeatedly made such accusations in the past.

A very long NYT Sunday Magazine article late last month by veteran science writer David Quammen summarized much of this new information. He actually seemed quite impressed with some of these recent media developments and was now far more open to the lab-leak theory than when he had published his own book Breathless last year.

- The Ongoing Mystery of Covid’s Origin

We still don’t know how the pandemic started. Here’s what we do know — and why it matters.

David Quammen • The New York Times Sunday Magazine • July 25, 2023 • 9,300 Words

Over the last couple of years, Sherri Markson has become one of the leading media advocates of the lab-leak theory, writing a 2021 book on the subject, though it hadn’t particularly impressed me. Last month she published a long magazine article in the Australian, summarizing the latest evidence, some of which seemed quite intriguing.

- What really happened in Wuhan: new lab leak evidence over the origin of Covid-19

Sharri Markson • The Australian Weekend Magazine • July 28, 2023 • 5,500 Words

Then late last week, she came up with a genuine scoop, revealing on SkyNews and in the Australian that several named Pentagon analysts believed they had found “smoking gun” evidence that Covid had been bioengineered, noting that a particular genetic segment was identical to one found in another Wuhan lab virus, and three other intelligence groups had come to similar conclusions. Moreover, they claimed that their important findings had been excluded from the released intelligence documents in an act of blatant censorship by the Biden Administration:

When the report was published it concluded that most intelligence agencies assessed the virus, even if it had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was natural rather than manipulated in a laboratory.

Sky News can reveal that this was not the assessment made by the four groups within the intelligence agencies that actually engaged in scientific analysis, who concurred that there was either a highly likely or reasonable chance the virus was genetically engineered.

Scientists at the Defence Intelligence Agency’s National Centre for Medical Intelligence (DIA NCMI) had conducted rigorous research on the genomic sequence of the virus and firmly concluded that it was, most likely, a laboratory construct.

In a world exclusive, Sky News can for the first time reveal their story, their research and their discoveries about SARS-CoV-2…

Their internal research at the Pentagon-based agency led to a finding that was described internally as a “smoking gun”.

One of the scientists discovered that the size and location of a fragment of COVID-19 resembled the same fragment in Wuhan Institute of Virology research from more than a decade earlier, in 2008. It was the same technique that the WIV had used in grant applications to make chimeric viruses.

“This paper is the smoking gun of everything. When the team reviewed this data, they thought ‘This is created in the lab. It’s a reverse genetics construct,” a source said.

But their input into the 90-day origins probe was censored…

They [NCMI scientists Robert Greg Cutlip, Jean-Paul Chretien and John Hardham] wrote an unclassified working paper, dated May 26th 2020, titled ‘Critical Analysis of Anderson et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2′. Their paper was circulated within the NCMI and among multiple scientists within the intelligence community. It was also intended for wider publication, so that the public could have a greater understanding of the new virus sweeping the globe. But it was never allowed to be disseminated more broadly, in yet another cover-up of scientists who questioned the natural origins narrative perpetuated by senior officials.

The report was scathing of the Proximal Origin authors’ claim that COVID-19 had a natural origin.

“We consider the evidence they present and find that it does not prove that the virus arose naturally. In fact, the features of SARS-CoV-2 noted by Anderson et al. are consistent with another scenario: that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a laboratory, by methods that leading coronavirus researchers commonly use to investigate how the viruses infect cells and cause disease, assess the potential for animal coronaviruses to jump to humans, and develop drugs and vaccines.”

Their unclassified working paper from May 2020 is available on the Internet and all this important new information was summarized in an excellent Daily Sceptic article:

- Biden Probe Censored Findings of Intelligence Agency Scientists That Covid was Likely Made in Lab

Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • August 25, 2023 • 1,900 Words

Articles that name specific government officials are obviously far more credible than those of the anonymous variety, and I would expect numerous investigative journalists may soon attempt to directly contact and interview those research analysts.

Furthermore, the Republicans and Democrats in Congress can request that they testify under oath regarding their important scientific findings on the true origins of an epidemic that killed more than a million Americans. Given that President Biden had publicly promised to declassify all American intelligence on Covid origins, he could hardly justify blocking such important investigative efforts.

But I suspect that both Markson and nearly all of her readers are missing a crucial aspect of these new revelations. Unlike all those other recent stories, this one focused on the bioengineered aspects of the Covid virus rather than claimed any evidence of a Wuhan lab-leak, two separate issues that have been regularly—and wrongly—conflated by nearly all the journalists covering the story. 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.

- Covid/Biowarfare Series

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 2020-December 2021 • 60,000 Words

If Congress can now confirm that several different scientific groups at our intelligence agencies have concluded that the Covid virus probably came from a laboratory, we can then begin asking the far more dangerous question of which laboratory and how and why the virus was released.

The Forgotten Anthrax Attacks

The Unz Review • October 17, 2023 • 10,100 Words

The Immense Historical Importance of the Anthrax Attacks

We just recently passed the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks, the greatest terrorist strike in human history and an event whose political reverberations dominated world politics for most of the two decades that followed. Our Iraq War was soon triggered as a consequence, a disastrous decision that dramatically transformed the political map of the Middle East and eventually led to the death or displacement of many millions, while our failing twenty-year retaliatory occupation of Afghanistan only finally came to a humiliating end in 2021.

American society also underwent enormous changes, with a considerable erosion of our traditional civil liberties. On the fiscal side, by 2008 Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his collaborators had conservatively estimated that the total accrued cost of our military response had exceeded $3 trillion, a figure that later studies raised to $6.4 trillion by 2019, or more than $50,000 per American household.

In the days after those dramatic events, the images of the burning World Trade Center towers and their sudden collapse were endlessly replayed on our television screens, accompanied by the near-universal verdict that American life would forever be changed by the massive terrorist assault that had taken place. But a tiny handful of skeptics argued otherwise.

The Internet was then in its childhood, with the initial dot-com bubble already deflating, while Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school and social media did not yet exist. But one of the earliest pioneers of web-based journalism was Mickey Kaus, a former writer at The New Republic, who had recently begun publishing short, informal bits of punditry one or more times each day on what he called his “web log,” a term soon contracted to “blog.” Along with his fellow TNR alumnus Andrew Sullivan, Kaus became one of our first bloggers, and was inclined to take contrarian positions on major issues.

Thus, even as a stunned world gaped at the smoking ruins of the WTC towers and the talking heads on cable declared that American life would never be the same again, Kaus took a very different position. I remember that not long after the attacks, he argued that our cable-driven 24-hour news cycle had so drastically shrunk the popular attention-span that coverage of the massive terrorist attacks would soon begin to bore most Americans. As a result, he boldly predicted that by Thanksgiving, the 9/11 Attacks would have become a rapidly-fading memory, probably displaced by the latest celebrity-scandal or high-profile crime, and that the long-term impact upon American public life would be minimal.

Obviously, Kaus’ forecast was wrong, but I think it never had a fair test. Very soon after he wrote those words, our national attention was suddenly riveted by an entirely new wave of terrorism, as the offices of leading media and political figures in Manhattan, DC, and Florida began receiving envelopes filled with lethal anthrax spores together with short notes praising Allah and promising death to America.

Although nearly all Americans had seen the destruction of the WTC towers on their television screens and become outraged at the blow to our country, probably few had felt personally threatened by those September attacks. But now during October, the dreadful spectre of biological terrorism moved to the forefront of popular concerns, staying there for many months.

Those anthrax mailings had targeted particular high-profile individuals and the letters were tightly sealed, but the media soon revealed that rough handling at postal centers during the automatic sorting process had caused the tiny seeds of death to leak through the pores of the envelope paper, contaminating both the buildings and the other mail being processed. As a result, some of the subsequent fatalities were those of random individuals who had received an accidentally-contaminated letter, seeming to place all Americans at terrible risk.

Moreover, despite all the visual scenes of massive destruction inflicted on 9/11, only about 3,000 Americans had died, but then our political and media figures soon warned that terrorists could use anthrax or smallpox to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of our citizens. Indeed, we were told that just a few months earlier during June 2001, the government’s Dark Winter simulation exercise had suggested that over a million Americans could die in a smallpox attack unleashed by foreign terrorists.

According to early news reports, the anthrax in the letters had been highly weaponized using techniques far beyond the rudimentary capabilities of al-Qaeda terrorists, facts that therefore indicated a state sponsor. Numerous anonymous government sources stated that the deadly spores had been coated in bentonite, a compound long used by the Iraqis to enhance the lethality of their anthrax bombs, thereby directly fingering Saddam Hussein’s regime, and although those claims were later officially denied by the White House, large portions of the American public heard and believed them.

As the weeks went by, the FBI and most of the media declared that the anthrax had apparently come from our own domestic stockpiles, suggesting that the mailer was probably a lone domestic terrorist merely pretending to be an radical Islamicist, but much of the public never accepted this.

Indeed, a year later when Colin Powell made his famous presentation to the UN Security Council, attempting to justify America’s planned invasion of Iraq, he held up a small vial of white powder, explaining that even such a tiny quantity of anthrax spores could kill many tens of thousands of Americans. His public focus demonstrated the continuing resonance of the biological warfare attacks that our country had suffered more than a year earlier, and which many die-hard Americans still stubbornly believed had been a combined effort by al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

The handful of anthrax letters had only killed five Americans and sickened 17 more, a tiny sliver of the 9/11 casualties, and the last envelope sent had been postmarked on October 17, 2001. But I think the impact upon American public opinion during the year or two that followed was fully comparable to that of the massive physical attacks we had suffered a few weeks earlier, or perhaps even greater. For all the death and destruction inflicted on 9/11, without the subsequent anthrax mailings, the Patriot Act would never have passed Congress in anything like its final form, while President Bush might not have gained sufficient public support to launch his disastrous Iraq War.

The anthrax mailings were almost totally forgotten within just a few years and today my suggestion that their impact had matched or even exceeded that of the 9/11 Attacks themselves might seem utterly preposterous to most Americans, but when I recently reviewed the articles of that period, I discovered that I had hardly been alone in that appraisal.

Renowned investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald was just beginning his career, joining Salon in 2007. He soon began publishing a number of columns on the anthrax case, with one of the first including this paragraph near the beginning:

The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters — with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 — that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax — sent directly into the heart of the country’s elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets — that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

So I think it’s perfectly possible that without those now long-forgotten anthrax mailings, Kaus might have been proven correct in his predictions and the 9/11 Attacks would have become a fading memory by the end of 2001. Without a handful of small envelopes filled with anthrax, there might never have been an Iraq war nor a Patriot Act nor all the other momentous political and social changes in America during the years after September 11, 2001.

There were also some very direct consequences. American government support for biodefense had been strong under Clinton, then sharply reduced once Bush came into office. But those few deadly envelopes changed everything, and during the years 2002-2011, our government spent an estimated $70 billion on biowarfare and biodefense, vastly more than ever before. These days our total biowarfare outlays have far surpassed the hundred billion dollar mark, but almost all of that gusher of funding was triggered by a handful of envelopes bearing $0.23 stamps. During September 2001, a biological defense contractor named BioPort was on the verge of collapse and bankruptcy, but once the mailings reached the headlines, the company was saved by a flood of anthrax-vaccine government contracts; later renamed Emergent BioSolutions, it played a controversial role in the production of our Covid vaccines nearly twenty years later.

If Americans were asked to name the half-dozen most consequential global events of our young 21st century, I doubt whether even one in a thousand would include the forgotten anthrax attacks of 2001 on that list; but without those mailings our entire history and that of the world might have followed a very different trajectory.

The Assaad Letter as the Crucial Evidence

Although the anthrax letters have never attracted more than a small fraction of the public debate surrounding the associated 9/11 Attacks, they were also shrouded in considerable controversy, with the true perpetrators and circumstances hotly debated from the very beginning. Back then and for many years afterward, I had never seriously questioned the official 9/11 narrative nor even closely investigated its details. But the glaring omissions in the news coverage of the anthrax mailings had always seemed very strange and suspicious to me, and thus had played an important role in my growing doubts about the reliability of our mainstream media. When I published my original American Pravda article a decade ago, I’d given pride of place to the anthrax story and included several paragraphs summarizing my own contrary analysis, which had remained unchanged during the dozen years since 2001:

Consider the almost forgotten anthrax mailing attacks in the weeks after 9/11, which terrified our dominant East Coast elites and spurred passage of the unprecedented Patriot Act, thereby eliminating many traditional civil-libertarian protections. Every morning during that period the New York Times and other leading newspapers carried articles describing the mysterious nature of the deadly attacks and the complete bafflement of the FBI investigators. But evenings on the Internet I would read stories by perfectly respectable journalists such as Salon’s Laura Rozen or the staff of the Hartford Courant providing a wealth of additional detail and pointing to a likely suspect and motive.

Although the letters carrying the anthrax were purportedly written by an Arab terrorist, the FBI quickly determined that the language and style indicated a non-Arab author, while tests pointed to the bioweapons research facility at Ft. Detrick, Md., as the probable source of the material. But just prior to the arrival of those deadly mailings, military police at Quantico, Va., had also received an anonymous letter warning that a former Ft. Detrick employee, Egyptian-born Dr. Ayaad Assaad, might be planning to launch a national campaign of bioterrorism. Investigators quickly cleared Dr. Assaad, but the very detailed nature of the accusations revealed inside knowledge of his employment history and the Ft. Detrick facilities. Given the near-simultaneous posting of anthrax envelopes and false bioterrorism accusations, the mailings almost certainly came from the same source, and solving the latter case would be the easiest means of catching the anthrax killer.

Who would have attempted to frame Dr. Assaad for bioterrorism? A few years earlier he had been involved in a bitter personal feud with a couple of his Ft. Detrick coworkers, including charges of racism, official reprimands, and angry recriminations all around. When an FBI official shared a copy of the accusatory letter with a noted language-forensics expert and allowed him to compare the text with the writings of 40 biowarfare lab employees, he found a perfect match with one of those individuals. For years I told my friends that anyone who spent 30 minutes with Google could probably determine the name and motive of the likely anthrax killer, and most of them successfully met my challenge.

This powerful evidence received almost no attention in the major national media, nor is there any indication that the FBI ever followed up on any of these clues or interrogated the named suspects. Instead, investigators attempted to pin the attacks on a Dr. Steven Hatfill based on negligible evidence, after which he was completely exonerated and won a $5.6 million settlement from the government for its years of severe harassment. Later, similar hounding of researcher Bruce Ivins and his family led to his suicide, after which the FBI declared the case closed, even though former colleagues of Dr. Ivins demonstrated that he had had no motive, means, or opportunity. In 2008, I commissioned a major 3,000-word cover story in my magazine summarizing all of this crucial evidence, and once again almost no one in the mainstream media paid the slightest attention.

- Our American Pravda

Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 29, 2013 • 4,500 Words

When I recently decided to revisit the story of the anthrax attacks and reexamine all the accumulated information from the last couple of decades, I felt that a good starting point might be that TAC cover story by Christ0pher Ketchum that I’d published back in 2008, which effectively summarized what I’d always considered the most crucial information:

As early as November 2001, the New York Times was reporting that the bureau’s “missteps” were “hampering the inquiry.” Indeed, from the beginning, the FBI has been in possession of a key piece of evidence that it apparently ignored.

Among the first suspects to come into the FBI’s sights was an Egyptian-born ex-USAMRIID biologist named Ayaad Assaad. He appeared on the radar because of an anonymous letter sent to the bureau identifying him as part of a terrorist cell possibly linked to the anthrax attacks. Yet, according to the Hartford Courant, the FBI did not attempt to track down the author of the letter, “despite its curious timing, coming a matter of days before the existence of anthrax-laced mail became known.”

Assaad was quickly exonerated by FBI investigators, and the matter swiftly dropped—though the letter may have provided the best piece of evidence in the case. It was sent prior to the arrival of the anthrax letters, suggesting foreknowledge of the attacks, and its language was similar to that of the deadly mail. Moreover, it displayed an intimate knowledge of USAMRIID operations, suggesting that it came from within the limited ranks of Fort Detrick researchers—a relatively small group with access to and expertise in weaponized anthrax.

The FBI has refused to make a copy of the letter publicly available—or even to give one to Assaad himself. It did, however, share the contents with a Vassar College professor and language forensics expert named Don Foster, who famously fingered Joe Klein as the anonymous author behind Primary Colors and helped to catch the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomber. After reading news reports, he requested a copy of the letter, and, following his review of documents written by “some 40 USAMRIID employees,” Foster “found writings by a female officer that looked like a perfect match,” according to an article he authored in the October 2003 Vanity Fair. When he brought this seemingly crucial clue to the attention of the FBI’s anthrax task force, however, the bureau declined to follow up. According to Foster, the senior FBI agent on the case had never even heard of the Assaad letter. (For the record, Foster isn’t an unimpeachable source. He strayed from his area of professional expertise and published unrelated circumstantial evidence in his Vanity Fair piece that wrongly fingered Hatfill, who sued the magazine, which settled on undisclosed terms.)

“The letter-writer clearly knew my entire background, my training in both chemical and biological agents, my security clearance, what floor I work on, that I have two sons, what train I take to work, and where I live,” Assaad told reporter Laura Rozen. Since he was almost immediately cleared, attempting to frame him served no purpose, except to indulge a personal enmity. To that end, Assaad suggested that the FBI question the pair of USAMRIID colleagues most likely to carry a grudge against him, Marian Rippy and Philip Zack, who years earlier had been reprimanded for sending Assad a racist poem. Though the Courant reported video evidence of Zack making after-hours trips to labs where pathogens were stored, there is no record of the FBI ever investigating him or Rippy, a colleague with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

- The Anthrax Files

Christopher Ketchum • The American Conservative • August 25, 2008 • 3,000 Words

The lengthy and detailed Assaad letter demonstrated foreknowledge of the anthrax mailings and very likely had been sent by someone fully aware of those attacks, so it had always seemed the obvious means of cracking the case. Yet it was completely ignored by the New York Times and the rest of the elite media, and only reported in relatively small outlets such as the Hartford Courant and Salon, whose extensive coverage had played an important role in the case.

Media Coverage of the Anthrax Attacks

During the first year or two following the anthrax attacks, I’d tried to keep up with the flood of media coverage, much of it regularly highlighted for me on a daily basis by news-aggregator websites such as Antiwar.com. Under normal circumstances, now locating all those same stories two decades after they originally ran would have been an impossible undertaking given that many of those publications had long since purged their archives or even completely vanished from the Internet.

Fortunately, Edward Lake, a writer with neoconservative leanings, became deeply interested in the anthrax case, and aggregated together most of those early news stories on a website that he created, which served as a uniquely useful resource. Although that website also vanished from the Internet many years ago, its contents remain accessible at Archive.org, and here are links to several of the main sections:

- Articles from the Washington Times • 28 Items • 20,000 Words

- Articles from the Hartford Courant • 33 Items • 36,000 Words

- Other Media Articles, Part 1 • 45 Items • 57,000 Words

- Other Media Articles, Part 2 • 96 Items • 99,000 Words

- Barbara Hatch Rosenberg/FAS Articles • 9 Items • 7,500 Words

Possibly for reasons of copyright, Lake’s website had excluded pieces originally published in the largest national newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Among these, a half-dozen Times columns published in 2002 by Nicholas Kristof had played an especially important role and provoked enormous attention. Kristof had repeatedly charged that the FBI was refusing to arrest an obvious suspect in the case and he ultimately fingered Dr. Steven Hatfill, who turned out to have been wrongly accused and successfully sued:

- Profile of a Killer • Jan 4, 2002

- Connecting Deadly Dots • May 24, 2002

- Anthrax? The F.B.I. Yawns • July 2, 2002

- The Anthrax Files • July 12, 2002

- Case of the Missing Anthrax • July 19, 2002

- The Anthrax Files • August 13, 2002

The important article by Don Foster mentioned above had originally run in Vanity Fair, but was later republished by the UCLA Department of Epidemiology, which also provided a very helpful annotated timeline of the outbreak:

- The Message in the Anthrax

Don Foster • Vanity Fair • October 2003 • 9,500 Words

Beginning in 2007, Glenn Greenwald published a lengthy series of columns in Salon, totaling well over 30,000 words, with most of his pieces sharply challenging the official FBI narrative that blamed the attacks on Ft. Detrick anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins and then declared the case closed:

- The unresolved story of ABC News’ false Saddam-anthrax reports • April 9, 2007

- Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News • August 1, 2008

- Journalists, their lying sources, and the anthrax investigation • August 3, 2008

- Additional key facts re: the anthrax investigation • August 4, 2008

- The FBI’s emerging, leaking case against Ivins • August 5, 2008

- The FBI’s selective release of documents in the anthrax case • August 6, 2008

- What’s the answer to this? • August 10, 2008

- Doubts over the anthrax case intensify — except among much of the media • August 18, 2008

- Key senators dispute FBI’s anthrax case against Bruce Ivins • September 17, 2008

- Remembering the anthrax attack • March 4, 2009

- Unlearned lessons from the Steven Hatfill case • April 21, 2010

- An Army scientist denies the FBI’s anthrax case • April 23, 2010

- Serious doubt cast on FBI’s anthrax case against Bruce Ivins • February 16, 2011

- DOJ casts serious doubt on its own claims about the anthrax attack • July 19, 2011

In 2009 attorney Barry Kissin published a long and influential memo also challenging those FBI conclusions on numerous technical grounds, which he later updated and expanded in 2011:

- The Truth About The Anthrax Attacks and Its Cover-Up

Barry Kissin • April 2, 2011 • 15,800 Words

Kissin heavily referenced a couple of columns that had run the previous year in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times by Edward Jay Epstein and Richard Bernstein respectively. These had pointed out the enormous holes in the case against Ivins, whom they argued could not possibly have created the anthrax in his Ft. Detrick facilities as claimed by the FBI:

- The Anthrax Attacks Remain Unsolved

The FBI disproved its main theory about how the spores were weaponized

Edward Jay Epstein • The Wall Street Journal • January 24, 2010 • 1,400 Words

- Haste Leaves Anthrax Case Unconcluded

Richard Bernstein • The New York Times • February 24, 2010 • 1,100 Words

Finally, Wikipedia also provides a lengthy establishmentarian account of the anthrax attacks, as does the more conspiratorial wikispooks website, which also provides a helpful timeline

- 2001 Anthrax Attacks • Wikipedia • 15,500 Words

- 2001 Anthrax Attacks • Wikispooks • 2,000 Words

- 2001 Anthrax attacks/Timeline • Wikispooks • 5,200 Words

How the Media and the FBI Ignored the Obvious Suspect

I recently spent a few days carefully rereading those two hundred-odd news stories, most of them for the first time in nearly twenty years. Across the more than 250,000 words of text, I found very little to change my original analysis of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

In his numerous columns, Greenwald had described the FBI case presented against Ivins as extremely thin, while Epstein, Bernstein, and Kissin persuasively argued that Ivins could not possibly have produced the anthrax used in the mailings.

Meanwhile, just as I remembered, it seemed very likely that the long Assaad letter had been sent by someone fully aware of the anthrax being sent, and was therefore the most important lead to the culprit. Both the FBI and its strongest critics agreed that the anthrax used had originated at Ft. Detrick and Assaad’s false accuser was clearly a present or former Ft. Detrick staffer. The letter had been mailed just a couple of days after the first wave of anthrax envelopes went out but long before their deadly contents came to public attention and began inspiring any copycats, and just like those anthrax mailings, accusations of Islamic bioterrorism had been the main theme. Such close correspondences seemed far too numerous to have been simply coincidental.

Just as in early 2002, I still found it extremely strange that while the Hartford Courant and Salon had run numerous stories on the Assaad letter, almost none of the 200 other news articles in mainstream outlets had ever mentioned a word about such a central clue to the mystery, perhaps reflecting the influence of their powerful establishmentarian sources, including those near the top of the FBI.

However, in properly assessing the implications of the Assaad letter, we must sharply distinguish between the solid and the speculative. When Assaad had originally been interviewed by the FBI prior to the anthrax outbreak, he had suggested Zack and Rippy as two of the most likely culprits since they had been among his chief personal antagonists at Ft. Detrick, but that was merely speculation on his part. Zack had been an anthrax biowarfare developer and reporters later found that he’d been given improper access to the Ft. Detrick facilities by Rippy, with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Furthermore, around the same time, there was evidence that unauthorized anthrax experiments had secretly been conducted in those labs. Obviously, these facts seemed highly suspicious and the total lack of any coverage in the major news media or apparent FBI investigation was a serious omission.

But as Lake had noted in his sharp rebuttal, all of these events had occurred nearly a decade before the anthrax mailings, and also long before the particular anthrax sent in the letters had been produced at the facility. Both Zack and Rippy had left Ft. Detrick years before the attacks took place and Lake suggested that they were probably no longer living on the East Coast at the time, perhaps giving them strong alibis. Finally, Zack’s apparent deep hostility towards Arabs and Muslims had led to the widespread assumption that he was Jewish, and Lake effectively debunked that mistaken claim.

But none of those points diminishes the importance of the Assaad letter nor clears Zack. As a Ft. Detrick anthrax researcher who had previously been involved in suspicious activity, Zack was certainly an obvious suspect for the FBI to consider, although hardly an exclusive one. Determining the author of the Assaad letter was the crucial path to pursue, and according to Prof. Foster, after reviewing documents written by “some 40 USAMRIID employees,” he had “found writings by a female officer that looked like a perfect match.” It hardly mattered whether or not that individual happened to be Rippy, Zack’s former confederate. Properly interrogating the author of the Assaad letter would probably have cracked the anthrax case, but the FBI refused to do so, or even make a copy of the letter publicly available to Assaad or anyone else, which raises all sorts of troubling issues.

Aside from the Hartford Courant and Salon, one of the very few publications to mention the Assaad letter was the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, whose news editor wrote an article around the first anniversary of the attacks, summarizing the facts and suggesting that the likely culprit was Zack, whom she misidentified as Jewish. Aside from outlining the evidence, her piece also included several puzzling paragraphs based upon her questions to Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a key figure in the anthrax case:

When the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs asked Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Ph.D., a biological arms control expert at the State University of New York, if the allegations regarding Dr. David Hatfill now took the heat off Lt. Col. Philip Zack, she replied, “Zack has NEVER been under suspicion as perpetrator of the anthrax attack.”

It is hard to believe that, with his connection to Fort Detrick, Dr. Zack is not one of the 20 to 50 scientists under intense investigation.

When asked if Hatfill was part of the group that ganged up on Dr. Ayaad Assaad, Dr. Rosenberg answered, “Hatfill was NOT one of the persecutors of Assaad.”

She is convinced that the FBI knows who sent the anthrax letters but isn’t arresting him because he knows too much about U.S. secret biological weapons research and production. But she isn’t naming names. Neither is Dr. Assaad, who did not return calls from the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Reading this exchange more than twenty years later, it’s unclear to me whether Rosenberg was arguing that Zack had never been considered a suspect because he had an ironclad alibi or whether the FBI was simply unwilling to investigate him for some other reason, with the latter possibility obviously being very suspicious if true.

- While Media Spotlights One Anthrax Suspect, Another Is Too Hot to Touch

Delinda Curtiss Hanley • The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs • September 2002 • 2,100 Words

Nine Books on the Anthrax Attacks

Having first established a solid foundation by rereading so much of the original anthrax media coverage, I decided to see what books had been published on the subject. Over the years, I’d read two short works on the anthrax attacks and I now reread those, along with eight others that I managed to locate, together constituting nearly all the available literature. With one very notable exception, I didn’t find the material particularly useful and indeed much of it blurred together in my mind.

First out of the gate in late 2002 was Richard Preston’s The Demon in the Freezer, a non-fiction work by a highly-successful writer of thrillers, which became a national bestseller. The book had obviously been in the works for some time, mostly focused upon deadly pathogens such as smallpox and also discussing bioweapons and Ft. Detrick’s research in that field. The sudden events of October 2001 were then incorporated into the last one-third of the narrative, with the timeliness of those recent headlines boosting sales. According to the Ft. Detrick researchers, the second group of letters had contained highly weaponized anthrax, something far beyond what could have been produced in a simple lab, and Kissin extensively quoted some of author’s descriptions in his analysis memo. However, researchers from Battelle, a different government-affiliated bioweapons facility, had stubbornly—and rather suspiciously—disputed that conclusion. Given Preston’s focus, it’s hardly surprising that there was no mention anywhere of the Assaad letter, and although the other elements of the book were interesting from a broader perspective, they provided little useful additional information on the anthrax mailings, which constituted only a small portion of the text.

The cover jacket on Marilyn W. Thompson’s 2003 book The Killer Strain identified the author as the award-winning Assistant Managing Editor for Investigations at the Washington Post, while noting that her team had won two Pulitzer Prizes for public service, and also included favorable blurbs from such notable journalistic figures as Benjamin Bradlee, Jimmy Breslin, Michael Isikoff, and David Maraniss. The text did a perfectly adequate job of telling the basic story of the attacks, and to its credit devoted three paragraphs of its 250 pages to the Assaad letter, though providing no indication of its potential importance and not even bothering to include the term in the lengthy index. One important fact that I did learn was that prior to the anthrax attacks, the new Bush Administration had planned deep cuts in biodefense preparedness.

Although I had hardly regarded Thompson’s scanty coverage of the Assaad letter as adequate, it was far more than I found in The Anthrax Letters, published that same year by Prof. Leonard A. Cole of Rutgers University, described as an expert on bioterrorism, who entirely excluded the Assaad letter from his 280 pages of text. Like the Thompson book, his work provided a useful account of the basic narrative, attracting favorable blurbs from several major news outlets and Sen. Daschle, but seemed much less useful for someone primarily interested in solving the case. The book had originally appeared in 2003, but was reissued in 2009 following the FBI’s declaration that the case had been closed with Ivins’ suicide, though the author emphasized the extreme skepticism of so many prominent figures, including members of Congress, on that verdict.

Also originally published in 2003 was Amerithrax: The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer by Robert Graysmith, a bestselling author of books on crime and terrorism, whose past works had become the basis for several major motion pictures. This background was apparent in the long text, which seemed to have the strongly fictional feel of an prospective screenplay rather than an analytical work, and also included extensive descriptions of the 9/11 Attacks and the broader history of American, Soviet, and Iraqi biowarfare programs. On the positive side, the author did devote a couple of pages to the Assaad letter, which he described as obviously connected to the anthrax mailings, even claiming that it had been a crucial factor convincing government investigators that the attacks were domestic in origin, but he never emphasized that it could have been used to crack the case. The book was later reissued with an Afterword in 2008, pointing to the deceased Ivins as the apparent culprit and even suggesting that he had written the Assaad letter. That latter notion seemed very unlikely to me since if there had been the slightest evidence for that possibility it would have been promoted as a centerpiece of the FBI case against Ivins.

Edward Lake, whose website usefully aggregated so much of the early media coverage, self-published Analyzing the Anthrax Attacks in 2005. Lake was strongly critical of many of the arguments made by both Rosenberg and Foster, and very briefly mentioned the Assaad letter, arguing that it probably had no connection to the actual anthrax mailings and he therefore dismissed its significance. Although I obviously disagreed with this analysis, the author deserved considerable credit for explicitly arguing this point rather than just ignoring the issue. Lake also provided some interesting speculation that the anthrax killer probably lived and worked in central New Jersey and even suggested that the letters might have been written by a young child acting under adult supervision.

The following year, Harvard University Press released Anthrax: Bioterror as Fact and Fantasy, a short book by Phillip Sarasin, a professor of Modern History at the University of Zurich. His entire approach to the subject was cultural and ideological, including a focus upon popular literature and even videogames, while tying the discussion of biological terrorism to the 9/11 attacks and even broader themes such as globalization. Although I didn’t find the work very useful for my own purposes, others interested in the particular cultural framework under which our society experienced the attacks might react differently.

Subject to severe pressure and facing indictment, Bruce Ivins committed suicide in 2008, allowing the FBI to declare the case closed, though many senior members of Congress and journalists remained extremely skeptical that Ivins had been responsible or had acted alone. With the anthrax mailings temporarily back in the media headlines, new book contracts soon went out, and American Anthrax by Jeanne Guillemin, an academic affiliated with MIT, appeared in 2011. The author devoted a couple of paragraphs to the Assaad letter, and Zack was even mentioned as a subject with a reference to one of the Salon articles, but the author stated that the lead never “panned out,” without providing any source for that supposed fact, so it probably represented her own interpretation of the puzzling later silence. She did mention that under severe FBI pressure an additional suspect besides Hatfill and Ivins apparently drank himself to death, perhaps further indicating that Ivins’ suicide was not necessarily proof of his own guilt.

I was especially disappointed by the most recent book in the collection, Recounting the Anthrax Attacks, published in 2018 by R. Scott Decker, one of the top FBI agents running the investigation. His coverage of the story was overwhelmingly procedural and quite dull, providing little broader perspective despite winning a non-fiction prize from the Public Safety Writers Association. Given his background and role, I was hardly surprised that he fully accepted Ivins’ guilt, minimizing or excluding any contrary evidence, and he never mentioned the Assaad letter, perhaps even being unaware of it. If the enormous FBI investigation did ultimately prove unsuccessful, this book may help to explain that failure.

Considerably superior to most of these other texts was The Mirage Man published in 2011 by David Willman, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times, which ran a hefty 450 pages and heavily focused upon Bruce Ivins, the suspect whose suicide had allowed the FBI to declare the case closed. Willman himself had been given the original Ivins scoop in 2008, so he naturally expressed few doubts about the guilt of the dead vaccine researcher, but he did do his best to refute the extreme skepticism of Greenwald and numerous others, not entirely successfully but more than I had expected. Nearly a decade had passed since the attacks themselves and Willman was portraying the case as fully resolved with Ivins’ guilt, so I couldn’t really fault the author for making no mention of the Assaad letter. Relative to its apparent purpose, the book seemed a very solid work of investigative journalism, including a lengthy personal and family history of its central subject, and it carried a strongly favorable endorsement from Seymour Hersh, a towering figure in the author’s own field.

I personally made some effort to weigh Willman’s arguments against those of Greenwald, Epstein, Bernstein, and Kissin on the other side, but much of the dispute revolved around technical claims made by different experts that were difficult for me to judge. One critical question was whether or not the anthrax sent in the second set of envelopes had actually been “weaponized” with a silicon coating to enhance its effectiveness, with some experts sharply disputing that claim, though I thought that the weight of evidence favored that conclusion. Ivins’ himself had no expertise nor equipment for such weaponization, so such a verdict would probably have cleared him.

When the FBI had originally declared Ivins’ guilty, Greenwald noted that the timeline provided of the suspect’s movements was completely impossible based upon the postmarked date of the letters sent and his own lab time-card. As a result, the Bureau had quickly modified its story to claim that Ivins had actually driven all night on an eight-hour round-trip in order to drop the letter in a Princeton mailbox, a suggestion that Greenwald ridiculed. But Willman strongly defended that theory, noting that Ivins had admitted sometimes taking long drives at night.

Although Willman hardly convinced me on this and other issues, I came away from his long book at least admitting the possibility of Ivins’ guilt, something that I had previously dismissed as almost totally absurd.

Graeme MacQueen and The 2001 Anthrax Deception

These nine books totaled more than a million words and spending a couple of weeks reading them greatly refreshed my memory of those important events of two decades ago. But although they highlighted interesting elements here and there, taken together they added very little to my framework, nor shifted any of my original conclusions. If I hadn’t bothered reading any of them, none of my views about the 2001 anthrax attacks would be any different today.

However, the impact of the tenth book was completely different. Although the shortest of them all, The 2001 Anthrax Deception published in 2014 by the late Prof. Graeme MacQueen drastically transformed my understanding of those events, making a case in its 80,000 words that was entirely different from anything that I had previously read on the subject. MacQueen persuasively argued that first impressions had actually been correct and that the anthrax mailings were directly connected with the 9/11 Attacks of a week or two earlier. This had been the original assumption but was then very soon dismissed as a possibility and afterward completely ignored by almost everyone else analyzing the case during all the years that followed.

MacQueen’s own background allowed him to boldly go where others did not. The authors of the previous nine books I have discussed were mainstream journalists or academics, therefore being quite reluctant to stray too far outside the safe confines of the standard narrative endorsed by establishmentarian sources, and none of them appear to have ever questioned the official story of 9/11. MacQueen himself had very respectable credentials, including a Ph.D. from Harvard and thirty years on the faculty of McMaster University in Canada, being the founder and director of its Centre for Peace Studies. But in the years after 2001, he had become an important figure in the 9/11 Truth movement, serving as co-editor of The Journal of 9/11 Studies. So unlike those other writers, he was willing to explore controversial possibilities and highlight obvious connections that they had carefully ignored.

As I have already emphasized, without the anthrax mailings, the political impact of the 9/11 Attacks themselves might have quickly faded, perhaps being insufficient to reorient our country towards the many years of warfare that followed, including our invasion of Iraq, an invasion justified by Saddam’s alleged stockpile of anthrax and other WMDs. So if we accept that the 9/11 Attacks were orchestrated by a conspiracy for that purpose, it becomes natural to ask whether the accompanying anthrax mailings were an entirely unexpected, fortuitous coincidence benefiting those plotters or whether they were instead an intrinsic element of the original plan. Without those anthrax deaths, Colin Powell’s later UN presentation and the vial of white powder he employed as a stage prop would not have been possible, nor President Bush’s public speeches on the deadly danger we faced from Iraqi WMDs.

MacQueen notes that although the 9/11 Attacks had involved entirely different types of terrorism—large-scale airplane hijackings—our East Coast media and political elites almost immediately began to focus upon the deadly risks of biowarfare attacks by Islamic radicals, especially involving anthrax, and they did so before the first anthrax letter had even been postmarked. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen later revealed that he’d been warned by a high-ranking Bush Administration official to get a prescription for Cipro, the recommended antibiotic treatment for anthrax, and according to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, well-connected NYC residents also began carrying Cipro in the days immediately after 9/11. Not only was there a great deal of such apparent foreknowledge in the weeks before the first reported anthrax case, but fears of a looming anthrax attack by state-sponsored terrorists had actually long predated 9/11 itself. Perhaps this was all purely coincidental, but we should naturally be suspicious when such fearful concerns quietly promoted in elite media circles were immediately followed by actual anthrax mailings to very high-profile members of the same media establishment.

MacQueen and other members of the 9/11 Truth movement have long argued that the very public activities of Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers were intended to lay down a false narrative trail for their supposed plot, and he noted that important elements of that trail seemingly revolved around biological warfare, including the terrorist ringleader’s audacious talk of acquiring a crop-dusting plane that could release clouds of deadly anthrax over a major American city. Indeed, before the first anthrax case was even reported, there were frantic government investigations of all crop-dusters nationwide.

From very early on I had always regarded the Assaad letter as the key to unraveling the anthrax plot, but MacQueen focused my attention upon several other threatening hoax letters that had been sent out almost simultaneously with the first wave of anthrax mailings, letters that were also addressed to leading media figures but filled with harmless white powder instead of anthrax, together with strangely-formulated notes somewhat similar to those of their deadly counterparts. These envelopes had been postmarked St. Petersburg, Florida, and MacQueen argues that they were probably intended to provide an apparent link to the 9/11 Attacks, since most of the hijackers had been living in that state.

An additional connection has been regularly dismissed as merely an astonishing coincidence, but may have been more than that. The first anthrax death was that of Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the American Media offices in Florida, and Mike Irish was the top editor of his publication. Irish’s own wife was a real estate agent, and she had personally arranged the rental home for a couple of the 9/11 hijackers, with whom she’d become friendly, while most of the other hijackers were also living in the close vicinity. As MacQueen notes, in a country of 285 million people, we are forced to believe that mere chance had caused the 9/11 hijackers to have such a direct personal connection to the first anthrax victim. But under his own very different reconstruction, the anthrax mailing to Irish’s publication was meant to falsely suggest that the Islamic terrorists responsible for 9/11 had been directly involved in the biowarfare attacks.

Soon after the 9/11 Attacks, Neocon pundits and media outlets began promoting spurious links between the al-Qaeda Islamicists allegedly responsible and Saddam’s secular, anti-Islamicist Iraqi regime. The anthrax mailings became a central element of their case given that the purity of the deadly spores could only have been produced by a regime possessing sophisticated biowarfare facilities. As Greenwald later noted with outrage, four separate official government sources also soon falsely informed ABC News that the anthrax had been weaponized with bentonite, regarded as proof that it was Iraqi in origin. So the weaponized anthrax represented the crucial evidence connecting the 9/11 Attacks with Saddam.

Unfortunately for those plotters, the FBI quickly determined that the anthrax was of the Ames strain rather than the type used by Iraq, and this pointed to the ultimate source being one of our own bioweapons facilities. MacQueen argues that the conspirators may have assumed that Ames was much more widely distributed internationally than it proved to be. So once their intended narrative of a foreign plot linked to Iraq had collapsed, they quickly shifted gears and began promoting the fallback theory of a lone wolf domestic terrorist, thereby deflecting attention away from any consideration of the sort of organized domestic conspiracy that might have eventually implicated them.

Based upon the facts presented by MacQueen, I would add one important caveat with which the author might or might not have agreed. He opens Chapter 6 by declaring his hypothesis that members of our own executive branch had carried out the anthrax attacks in accordance with their plan, and I support that theory. However, I think that this plot only involved certain elements of our government rather than its leadership as a whole. Later lawsuits revealed that George Bush, Dick Cheney, and other top White House officials had secretly begun taking Cipro immediately after September 11th, indicating that they believed they faced the personal threat of a large-scale anthrax attack rather than the tiny handful of false-flag letters that were actually sent out. I think this suggests that none of them were involved in the conspiracy and they were instead being manipulated by a few of their aides and advisors, just as I believe was the case with regard to the 9/11 Attacks themselves. This framework also helps to explain the contradictory claims and conflicting arguments that soon developed within the executive branch.

MacQueen had spent many years as a leading 9/11 researcher and his deep understanding of those issues allowed him to make this important case in merely a hundred-odd pages of text, perhaps lacking solid proof but in reasonably convincing fashion. His analysis successfully tied together many loose ends that would otherwise remain mysterious, while he also devoted a portion of his short book to sketching out some of the overwhelming evidence that the conventional 9/11 story itself was completely false. And in all fairness, I should mention that MacQueen sometimes drew upon the material in several of the other nine anthrax books that I had personally found much less useful.

Proposing this elegant solution required an author of MacQueen’s own background. There is an official story of the 9/11 Attacks and also an official story of the anthrax mailings, and only someone who completely rejected both of those accounts could have argued that the two events were directly connected. A former UN Assistant Secretary-General urged all thinking Americans to read MacQueen’s book, and I would strongly second that recommendation, given the importance of those events in shaping the history of the decades that followed.

Judith Miller and Germs

My own decision to finally revisit the anthrax attacks after so many years was prompted by a particular book I noticed a couple of months ago at the local Palo Alto library sale.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks, Judith Miller, a longtime reporter at the New York Times, had published numerous front-page stories on Saddam’s non-existent WMDs based upon information fed to her by her Neocon sources. Her falsehoods had played a hugely influential role in setting the political stage for our disastrous invasion, and she was forced to resign from the Times in 2005.

In a remarkably fortuitous example of timing, she had earlier been the lead author of Germs, published with her Times colleagues Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, a book that was released on the very same day that the first anthrax victim was admitted to a hospital. Subtitled “Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War” it purportedly represented a comprehensive history of biological warfare and the dangers America faced, with a major focus on the Iraqi program and its anthrax capabilities. Given such perfect timing, Germs quickly rocketed to the top of the best-seller lists in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax mailings, further propelled when Miller herself received one of the anthrax hoax letters, containing harmless white powder. I’d always been aware of the major role her book had played in shaping the events of that period, so I purchased it for $0.50 and eventually read it, leading me to reexamine the anthrax story. Although the book obviously lacked any discussion of the anthrax letters themselves, I found it revealed much about the ideological biases of Miller and her co-authors.

Over the years I’ve noticed that respectable journalists writing books are reluctant to destroy their credibility by lying outright to their readers; instead, they prefer to mislead by selective omissions, carefully avoiding those items that would force them either to knowingly promote falsehoods or to present facts damaging to the intended sweep of their narrative. And this certainly seemed to be the case in Miller’s very influential book.

Its account of America’s own biological warfare programs and the Ft. Detrick facility correctly began with their establishment during World War II, and discussed America’s plans for the possible use of anthrax against Germany and Japan as well as Japan’s own biowarfare efforts during its invasion and occupation of China. But although the subsequent Korean War was mentioned, the narrative almost entirely skipped over that period, which I found extremely odd.

Surely the authors must have been aware of the very high-profile accusations of illegal “germ warfare” that were made against American forces during that conflict by Russia, China, and their international Communist bloc allies? These were the most serious biowarfare claims made anywhere in the world during the last eighty years, and prompted the establishment of an international commission of distinguished scientists, including Joseph Needham, one of Britain’s most eminent scholars, which eventually published a long report declaring that the accusations were probably true. Admittedly, the American government and its allied media outlets always denied those claims and especially after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, most American academics came to regard them as false. But as I pointed out in an article two years ago, more recent evidence seems to show that the Communist charges had been correct:

- American Pravda: Waging Biological Warfare

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 9, 2021 • 7,500 Words

If Miller and her co-authors had mentioned those accusations only to dismiss them as debunked wartime propaganda, I would not have faulted them since that was a widely-held belief at the time the book was published in 2001. But to completely ignore the greatest international biowarfare controversy of the last three generations in a book focused on exactly that topic was inexcusable. Such total silence seems very suspicious to me and I wonder if the authors’ extensive research had led them to conclude that the accusations had probably been true and the entire subject best avoided.

Similarly, the Middle East was a leading focus of the book’s overall coverage and it repeatedly mentioned the possible development of ethnically-targeted bioweapons, a particularly alarming technological project. But just a couple of years earlier, the London Sunday Times, Wired News, and other international publications had broken the story of Israel’s extensive research in exactly that area, with the Israelis working to develop ethnic bioweapons that would selectively target Arab populations. Yet the authors strangely chose to omit the only such real-life example that had reached the global headlines. Obviously, a book meant to concentrate American public fears upon the terrible threat of Iraq’s biological warfare programs—which actually no longer existed at that point—would have lost much of its effectiveness if it had also included any mention of Israel’s far more advanced capabilities in exactly that same area. Indeed, Israel was almost never mentioned anywhere in the text, a very strange omission given the heavy focus on the alleged biowarfare efforts of its regional adversaries such as Iraq and Iran.

While I have absolutely no reason to believe that Miller’s book had been commissioned and funded by the Israeli Defense Ministry, I don’t think the contents would have been all that different if such had actually been the case.

Timothy Weiner and Enemies: A History of the FBI

Another book I read a month or two ago also contained certain extremely glaring omissions, including some that were directly relevant to the anthrax attacks.

In 2007, Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter Timothy Weiner had published Legacy of Ashes, a widely-acclaimed history of the CIA, and in 2012, he followed it up with Enemies: A History of the FBI, running more than 500 pages and described as the first definitive history of that organization’s intelligence operations. But although he provided a great deal of interesting material, I was less than impressed by the work, which struck me as something of an authorized account, showing signs of the careful trimming of a project produced along such lines.

Some of his early mistakes jumped out at me. He characterized FDR’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau as a “sophisticated economist,” when the latter was actually just a wealthy dilettante and gentleman-farmer, who had never graduated either high school or college and knew little of economics, obtaining his position primarily because he was FDR’s friend and neighbor. Indeed, Morgenthau’s total ignorance had left his powerful department in the hands of his subordinate, Harry Dexter White, a notorious Communist spy.

A page later, the author described famed aviator Charles Lindbergh as “a potential Republican candidate for president in 1940,” a claim I’ve never seen made anywhere else, including in A. Scott Berg’s exhaustive biography. I suspect Weiner may have gotten the idea from Philip Roth’s alarmist 2004 novel The Plot Against America, which had similarly portrayed our greatest national hero as a secret Nazi.

Obviously, such errors were hardly central to Weiner’s subject, but they left me skeptical in accepting some of his far more important assertions. For example, these days it is very widely accepted that founding FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover lived his entire life as a deeply-closeted homosexual, with his long-time partner being Clyde Tolson, who also served as the FBI’s second-ranking official during Hoover’s half-century reign. Such factors would obviously have been very relevant to the Bureau’s operations, not least because syndicate boss Meyer Lansky had allegedly obtained hard proof of those secrets and used them for blackmail purposes; perhaps this explains why Hoover spent decades denying the existence of American organized crime and refusing to allow his FBI to combat it. Weiner attempts to casually debunk this established history in just a few paragraphs, suggesting it was mostly based upon malicious rumors spread by bureaucratic rivals and then emphasizing the statement of one of Hoover’s most loyal lieutenants that the accusations could not possibly have been true. Hoover ran the FBI in autocratic fashion for five decades and he was Weiner’s central figure, so the author hardly gave proper treatment to such a potentially explosive hidden factor influencing FBI policy during that entire period.

In his Afterword, Weiner explained that he heavily relied upon the copyrighted oral histories of the Society of Former Special Agents, which he cited with their permission, so perhaps use of that important resource had imposed constraints upon his treatment of certain delicate FBI topics.

Hoover died in 1972 but my doubts about the author’s candor obviously extended across the last one-third of the text, covering the three decades that followed, and I noticed certain absolutely glaring omissions during those years.

In 1996, TWA Flight 800 suddenly exploded in mid-air soon after taking off from JFK Airport in New York City, leading to widespread suspicions of a terrorist attack and prompting the largest, most comprehensive investigation in FBI history, an effort that involved 500 field agents. But as I explained in a 2016 article, the ultimate result was a notorious FBI cover-up. Weiner completely omitted all mention of that massive case from his lengthy FBI history.

- American Pravda: The Destruction of TWA Flight 800

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 26, 2016 • 2,800 Words

A few years later, the FBI began its six-year investigation of the anthrax attacks, deploying resources completely eclipsing even that previous project. A 2010 WSJ column characterized that new FBI effort as “the largest inquest in its history, involving 9,000 interviews, 6,000 subpoenas, and the examination of tens of thousands of photocopiers, typewriters, computers and mailboxes,” finally ending in 2008 when the Bureau declared Bruce Ivins to be the sole perpetrator and the case closed. Yet not a single word about these events appeared in Weiner’s supposedly comprehensive history published several years later, with no mention of anthrax in his index.

So largest FBI investigation ever conducted was taking place exactly during the period that Weiner was producing his exhaustive volume on the history of that organization but he chose to completely exclude it from his coverage. The likely explanation is that he knew perfectly well that the FBI effort had ended in total failure with Ivins merely being an innocent scapegoat, but he was too heavily dependent upon the goodwill of his FBI sources to mention that fact. I think this example of “the Dog That Didn’t Bark” strongly supports Ivins’ innocence.

Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks themselves, the FBI had rounded up and arrested some 200 Mossad agents, many of them in the New York City area, including five who had been caught red-handed apparently celebrating the destruction of the WTC towers and taking souvenir photos of the burning buildings. Thus, the FBI had successfully broken the largest foreign spy ring ever found on American soil, yet not a word appeared anywhere in Weiner’s FBI history, nor was Mossad even listed in his index. Once again, the reason for such strange silence is not too difficult to guess.

- American Pravda: Seeking 9/11 Truth After Twenty Years

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 7, 2021 • 7,800 Words

Launching a Hundred Billion Dollar Biowarfare Industry

The story of our forgotten anthrax attacks of 2001 is really a quite remarkable one, possessing more strange twists and ironies than we would expect to find in any work of fiction.

Merely the first of these is that an event that had the greatest possible impact upon our society and world history has almost completely vanished from our national memory.

During the decades after World War II, our government had created the world’s largest and most powerful biodefense infrastructure to protect our citizens from such deadly attack. Yet the only documented cases of American bioweapon deaths came in 2001 and resulted from the deadly anthrax spores produced in our own national laboratories, whether these had been deployed by Dr. Bruce Ivins or more likely someone else.

We soon discovered that the bioterrorism responsible for those American deaths and the resulting wave of national panic had actually been the home-grown product of our own biodefense industry, but our political response was to increase the funding for those same government biowarfare labs by ten- or twenty-fold, so that American spending on bioweapons eventually crossed the hundred-billion-dollar mark.

All of those facts are completely indisputable, but I think there may also be an additional twist.

It is obvious that the existence of a massive American bioweapons capability might produce dangerous temptations in the minds of some of our more reckless political leaders, and such temptations may have had disastrous consequences in 2019.

Over the last several years, I have published a long series of articles arguing that there is strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the global Covid outbreak was probably the unintended blowback from a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).

More than a million Americans died as a consequence, along with perhaps 26 million other deaths worldwide, and the lives of many billions were greatly disrupted, including those of our own entire population. So all of this massive death and devastation may have been the ultimate consequence of a handful of letters bearing $0.23 stamps that were mailed out in 2001.

- Covid/Biowarfare Series

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 2020-December 2021 • 60,000 Words

Last year I’d pointed to the analogy of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster that played a major role in bringing down the old Soviet Union.

- A Thousand Times Greater Than the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster

Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 11, 2022 • 2,300 Word