“…Huff also claims that in October 2019, three years after leaving EHA, he was suddenly and repeatedly offered “his former dream job” at the Pentagon’s elite DARPA unit. After the Covid epidemic and the Wuhan lab reached the headlines, he immediately concluded that the intention had been to quickly bind him with secrecy agreements, thereby preventing him from revealing any of his past knowledge of EHA activities. Huff is convinced that this indicates that the American government was well aware of the Covid outbreak in Wuhan at that point, and if his testimony is accurate, such suspiciously coincidental timing does further strengthen the evidence that foreknowledge of the outbreak existed among some elements of the American national security apparatus”
The JFK Assassination & The Covid Cover-Up (Part 2) – By Ron Unz
…Continued from Part 1
….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 opinion. 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.
The successful media suppression of the lab-leak theory came to an end last year with the publication of a lengthy article by Nicholas Wade, former Science Editor of the New York Times, who marshaled the strong evidence that the virus was artificial, and since then the debate has see-sawed back and forth, propelled by both scientific and journalistic volleys from the two camps.
A few months ago, the skeptics of a natural virus gained a powerful advocate in Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission, whose academic writings and public interviews strongly argued that the virus had probably been produced in a lab, and he attracted considerable public attention when he denounced the governmental and media establishments for attempting to conceal this reality.
In mid-October further support for this position came in an important new scientific preprint by three researchers.
The authors noted that when a virus is bioengineered, it is usually broken up into a half-dozen or so pieces for convenience, with most of those segments being of roughly similar size. The splitting is done by a selection of tools that use a number of possible genetic markers. Meanwhile, those same techniques would usually split natural viruses into pieces of much more irregular size.
They therefore tested how the Covid genome would be split under those various tools, and discovered that the largest piece was only a small fraction of the total length, then applied the same test to many dozens of the most closely-related natural viruses, finding that the pieces produced are much more irregular in size. So according to the statistical test they applied, the Covid virus is more regular in its decomposition than roughly 99.9% of natural viruses, strongly suggesting that it was bioengineered.
Although this analysis was taken very seriously by the Economist, the natural virus camp soon sharply challenged the strength of the case, arguing that it was far from conclusive, and the debate is still playing out. But at the very least, this analysis certainly demonstrates the extremely unusual characteristics of Covid compared with nearly all natural viruses of a related type.
However, strangely enough, even as this evidence mounted against the Covid virus being natural, entirely conflicting evidence also appeared on the other side. A couple of weeks before the release of the important Bruttel preprint, award-winning science writer David Quammen published a book supporting the orthodox case that no lab-leak had occurred and that the Covid virus was probably natural. His work received strongly positive reviews in the New York Times and the Guardian, though it attracted a sharp dissent from Nicholas Wade.
Although little of Quammen’s factual material was new to me, I still found it quite helpful that all the information was collected together in one place. But the author is an experienced journalist, long friendly with important individuals in both camps, and probably the greatest value of his book came in the nearly 100 personal interviews he conducted with key figures from both sides of the debate. These subjects included George Fu Gao, head of the China’s CDC, and virologist Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan lab, as well as numerous other Chinese scientists and officials.
According to the lab-leak hypothesis the Covid virus had been created at the Wuhan lab, then accidentally leaked out during late 2019, with the looming disaster concealed by the Chinese authorities; the Trump Administration even claimed that several members of the research staff had been infected with Covid at that time. However, as Quammen says, unless all of the Chinese figures whom he interviewed were remarkably good at deceiving him, absolutely none of these claims were true. The Covid virus had not been developed at the lab, nor had there been any known leak, while no one involved had had any suspicious of a viral outbreak until late December, just as presented in the standard timeline of the outbreak. Moreover, not a single staff member had tested positive for infection even after the circulation of the virus in Wuhan was detected.
Experienced Australian virologist Danielle Anderson had been working at the Wuhan lab during October and November 2019, exactly when the Covid outbreak probably began, and she repeated her strong doubts that the virus had been created there, nor that any lab-leak had occurred, let alone that some of the researchers had become infected.
Obviously, trained Intelligence operatives are experts at deceiving journalists, but the same is much less likely to be true of research scientists, so I consider Quammen’s lengthy interviews fairly compelling evidence against the lab-leak hypothesis, as it has usually been presented.
Moreover, one of central figures in Quammen’s narrative was Eddie Holmes, another leading Australian virologist who had been involved in the Covid outbreak from the very beginning, and the book’s publication prompted a science podcaster to interview Holmes at length regarding the discovery of the Covid virus and the debate over its origins.
Holmes had been a key participant in all the crucial early Covid discussions, and he claimed that the redacted contents of the controversial emails involving Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Peter Dauzek were entirely innocuous, while the widespread accusations against Dauzek seemed utterly ridiculous to him. He also made a seemingly strong case against the possibility that the Wuhan lab had developed Covid or had any connection to it. Although he also made a few glancing arguments against Covid having been bioengineered, these hardly seemed detailed or persuasive. For obvious epidemiological reasons he dismissed all those claims of Covid circulating in Italy and elsewhere during 2019 as false positives, feeling sure that the first appearance of the virus in the world had been in Wuhan during November, with his reasoning and conclusions being identical to my own. Others should watch the 90 minute interview and decide for themselves, but Holmes struck me as completely honest and very credible in his remarks. And if he is correct, much of the lab-leak case disintegrates.
I think that the combined testimony provided in Quammen’s book and Holmes’ interview greatly reduces the likelihood that the Covid virus was developed at the Wuhan lab or that any lab-leak occurred at that scientific facility. This evidence is hardly conclusive, but it considerably raises the presumptive burden against those who argue otherwise.
Furthermore, earlier this year, the highly-authoritative Pekar study had demonstrated that the geographical distribution of the earliest known Covid cases in Wuhan clustered in the vicinity of the Huanan Wildlife Market, many miles distant from the Wuhan lab, which seemed to have no association with the outbreak. Once again, these results are far from conclusive and reasonable arguments have been made to explain away this geographical discrepancy, but we would naturally expect a Covid lab-leak to produce many of its early cases in the approximate vicinity of that lab rather than on the other side of a huge metropolis larger than New York City.
While the issue is hardly settled, proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis should candidly admit that there is simply no solid evidence that Covid was developed at the Wuhan lab or that any lab-leak occurred there, while there is instead a great deal of direct evidence against both of these notions.
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.
Although the Quammen book and the Holmes interview present the absolutely mainstream position of the media and scientific establishments, I found myself agreeing with 90-95% of all their arguments, the sole exception being their skepticism that the virus was bioengineered, representing merely a small slice of their analysis. Yet my own conclusions were radically different.
This apparent paradox arises because Quammen, Holmes, and nearly all their colleagues and sources have been almost exclusively focused upon the scientific aspects of Covid, and seem largely unaware of the broader geopolitical or national security elements, notably those pieces of telling evidence that our Western media has been careful to avoid mentioning.
For example, Quammen naturally discusses the early spread of the virus out of China, noting that Northern Italy, home to 300,000 Chinese, was one of the first places hit very hard. But his index contains no entry for Iran, which was actually hit even earlier than Italy; and that Covid outbreak was centered in the Holy City of Qom, which had a negligible Chinese population but was home to Iran’s elderly religious and political elites, many of whom soon died from the disease. Moreover, that surprising Iranian outbreak began just three or four weeks after America had assassinated Iran’s top military commander, the sort of implausible coincidence that quickly led the Iranian government and media to accuse America of having staged an illegal biowarfare attack and lodge a complaint with the United Nations; but since none of these facts were ever reported in the American media, a science journalist such as Quammen probably never encountered them.
Quammen seems similarly unaware that during the first eight months of 2019, Robert Kadlec, America’s top biowarfare expert, had run the federal/state Crimson Contagion exercise, preparing to defend America against contagion if a dangerous respiratory virus were to suddenly appear in China, which is exactly what happened in Wuhan a few weeks after the conclusion of the drill. Nor does he realize that our Defense Intelligence Agency had prepared and distributed a secret report describing a potentially “cataclysmic” disease outbreak occurring in Wuhan, with that report having been produced in early November, after the Covid virus had probably appeared in that city but before any serious symptoms would have developed in the first handful of infected Chinese.
Scientists and science journalists are naturally focused on their personal areas of expertise, and they can hardly be faulted for failing to notice what virtually all members of the mainstream and alternative media have made such strong efforts to conceal. Even if they did become aware of those facts, they might conclude that mentioning them let alone drawing the obvious conclusions could easily prove fatal to their professional reputations.
There is an ironic additional example of this political myopia among those analysts narrowly focused on scientific issues. Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley has been a prominent advocate of the lab-leak hypothesis, arguing that Covid was developed as a Chinese bioweapon, but then accidentally leaked from the Wuhan lab. In his June 2021 presentation for the Neoconservative Hudson Institute, he explained that if the Chinese had wanted to deliberately deploy such a bioweapon, they surely would have released it in th
e vicinity of our own Ft. Detrick facility so that America would have been blamed for the resulting viral outbreak; and neither he nor either of the other two Covid discussants seemed to recognize that he was perfectly describing the analogous mirror-image of what might have actually unfolded in Wuhan during late 2019.
Beginning in April 2020, my articles have presented all these facts and much additional evidence. Under my scenario, elements of the Trump Administration were responsible for the deliberate release of Covid, but those biowarfare attacks against China and Iran were launched without the knowledge or authorization of the President himself, a proposition that some have dismissed as totally implausible. However, three weeks after the appearance of the Quammen book, the Wall Street Journal published a 10,000 word article on the circumstances of a different American confrontation with China, which provided some fascinating details:
Mr. Bolton, then-national security adviser in the Trump administration, knew Ms. Meng’s arrest could disrupt the summit’s marquee event that evening, a dinner between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Yet Mr. Bolton, a longtime China hawk, felt it was worth the risk. The president didn’t yet know about the plan. White House staffers later debated whether Mr. Bolton had told Mr. Trump or if it hadn’t fully registered with the president…
At the police station, Ms. Meng was fingerprinted, and allowed a phone call to the only Chinese-speaking lawyer Huawei could find on short notice, a patent attorney. As the attorney dashed to the station, Ms. Meng began to gasp for air, worrying officers who sped her to a hospital.
Messrs. Trump and Xi were dining on Argentine sirloin, accompanied by a 2014 Malbec. The goal of the dinner was to reach a truce in an escalating U.S.-China trade war. Neither man appeared aware of Ms. Meng’s arrest. Mr. Bolton, seated near Mr. Trump, didn’t mention it.
Mr. Xi learned shortly after, according to Chinese government officials, and it struck him as deceptive and an insult. He had just agreed to buy more U.S. food and energy.
Mr. Trump questioned Mr. Bolton days later at a White House Christmas dinner, according to people familiar with the conversation. “Why did you arrest Meng?” the president said. “Don’t you know she’s the Ivanka Trump of China?”
Obviously, under normal circumstances the notion that an American biowarfare attack could be carried out by “rogue” elements of the Trump Administration without Presidential approval would be utterly outlandish and ridiculous; but recent circumstances in our government have been far from normal.
Most advocates of the lab-leak hypothesis have suggested that the Covid virus was developed in Wuhan under the direction of the Daszek’s EcoHealth Alliance, which they often portray as a highly-nefarious organization. A disgruntled former EHA employee named Dr. Andrew G. Huff recently came forth as a whistleblower, and some of his claims have been cited in support of those accusations. Although Huff had only worked at EHA for about eighteen months and left in early 2016, years before the events in question, the Daily Mail and other British tabloids gave considerable coverage to his new book The Truth About Wuhan, which seemed to blame EHA and the Chinese for having unleashed the global pandemic.
Dr. Huff’s book is fairly short and makes dismal reading, filled with wild and outrageous accusations, while the extensive personal history he relates hardly strengthens his credibility. Despite his supposed doctorate in Environmental Health Studies, he seems to have had a rather mediocre academic record, dropping out of high school and serving as an infantryman in Central America and Iraq, where he attempted to beat to death one of his combat instructors and later required mental health counseling. More recently, he claims to have been massively persecuted by the government, with teams of 20-30 full-time agents constantly watching him, assisted by mechanical drones the size of small insects, all at an estimated cost of at least $45 million. In the two decades since the 9/11 attacks, our military-industrial complex with its myriad private contractors has received an unprecedented ocean of government funding, and I suspect a considerable fraction of our tax-dollars have gone to pay the salaries of very doubtful individuals such as Huff.
Still, some of the direct statements he makes about the activities of the EcoHealth Alliance are probably worth considering, even coming from such a questionable source. As the Daily Mail article summarized some of his most interesting claims:
…but believes the US-funded project was ‘mostly a global fishing expedition for coronaviruses’ to carry out GOF work or for intelligence collection – rather than preventing future pandemics.
‘At the time, I felt like the project seemed more like intelligence collection than scientific research and development,’ he said in his book.
The scientist said the PREDICT program wasn’t collecting the data it should have been and Huff told The Sun that it appeared to be a ‘giant intelligence operation’.
We know that EcoHealth Alliance was heavily funded by the Pentagon and according to Huff, it largely functioned as an intelligence-gathering operation, using the lure of its small financial grants to the Wuhan lab and other foreign biolabs to monitor them on behalf of our national security apparatus, which seems perfectly plausible. But if EHA was an espionage operation, it hardly seems likely that it would have heavily assisted the Chinese in developing dangerous viruses of their own. On the other hand, EHA might certainly have obtained samples of the natural viruses collected by the Wuhan lab, and passed those along to its Pentagon paymasters, which then used one of them as the precursor to Covid, thus explaining the latter’s close genetic similarity to some of the viruses in the Wuhan collection.
Huff also claims that in October 2019, three years after leaving EHA, he was suddenly and repeatedly offered “his former dream job” at the Pentagon’s elite DARPA unit. After the Covid epidemic and the Wuhan lab reached the headlines, he immediately concluded that the intention had been to quickly bind him with secrecy agreements, thereby preventing him from revealing any of his past knowledge of EHA activities. Huff is convinced that this indicates that the American government was well aware of the Covid outbreak in Wuhan at that point, and if his testimony is accurate, such suspiciously coincidental timing does further strengthen the evidence that foreknowledge of the outbreak existed among some elements of the American national security apparatus.
For almost sixty years, nearly the entirety of the American mainstream media engaged in a conspiracy of silence to avoid discussing the obvious facts surrounding the death of President John F. Kennedy, an information embargo finally broken a few days ago by Tucker Carlson. So perhaps our country will finally begin to understand why that one man had died, a death that occurred before the overwhelming majority of today’s Americans were even born.
But I think it is even more necessary that we break the same conspiracy of silence regarding the Covid deaths of well over a million Americans, deaths that were probably caused by the extremely reckless and illegal actions taken by elements of our own government.
For those who wish to inform themselves of these events and the very considerable evidence regarding what unfolded, I continue to recommend my Covid/Biowarfare series of articles, also conveniently available as a downloadable eBook, as well as several of my podcast interviews from earlier this year, which have already been viewed a couple of million times on Rumble:
RIELPOLITIK 