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FTR #1185 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Continuing discussion and analysis from FTR#’s 1183 and 1184, we finish analyzing an article about Shi Zhengli, Pentagon and USAID funding for her research into bat-borne coronaviruses through EcoHealth Alliance.
The Pentagon funding for these projects must be seen against the background of three overlapping areas of consideration:
- The fact that any virus can be synthesized or modified from scratch. As detailed in a very important article from The Guardian: “ . . . Advances in the area mean that scientists now have the capability to recreate dangerous viruses from scratch; make harmful bacteria more deadly; and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body. . . In the report, the scientists describe how synthetic biology, which gives researchers precision tools to manipulate living organisms, ‘enhances and expands’ opportunities to create bioweapons. . . . Today, the genetic code of almost any mammalian virus can be found online and synthesised. ‘The technology to do this is available now,’ said [Michael] “It requires some expertise, but it’s something that’s relatively easy to do, and that is why it tops the list. . . .”
- Also fundamental to an understanding of the Covid “op” is the devastating nature of bat-borne viruses when introduced into the human body. “ . . . . As Boston University microbiologist Thomas Kepler explained to the Washington Post in 2018, the bat’s unique approach to viral infection explains why viruses that transfer from bats to humans are so severe. . . . ‘A virus that has co-evolved with the bat’s antiviral system is completely out of its element in the human,’ Kepler said. ‘That’s why it is so deadly — the human immune system is overwhelmed by the inflammatory response.’ The bat immune system responds very differently from ours to viral infection. Instead of attacking and killing an infected cell, which leads to a cascade of inflammatory responses, the bat immune system can starve the virus by turning down cellular metabolism. The bat origin of SARS-CoV‑2 may explain the cytokine storms that are hastening some COVID-19 deaths. . . .”
- Analysis presented in the liberal New York Magazine by Nicholson Baker takes stock of the implications of contemporary biotechnology and what we have termed (in past broadcasts) “The Magic Virus Theory.” “. . . . SARS‑2 seems almost perfectly calibrated to grab and ransack our breathing cells and choke the life out of them. . . . Perhaps viral nature hit a bull’s‑eye of airborne infectivity, with almost no mutational drift, no period of accommodation and adjustment, or perhaps some lab worker somewhere, inspired by Baric’s work with human airway tissue, took a spike protein that was specially groomed to colonize and thrive deep in the ciliated, mucosal tunnels of our inner core and cloned it onto some existing viral bat backbone. It could have happened in Wuhan, but — because anyone can now ‘print out’ a fully infectious clone of any sequenced disease — it could also have happened at Fort Detrick, or in Texas, or in Italy, or in Rotterdam, or in Wisconsin, or in some other citadel of coronaviral inquiry. . . .”
Taken together and in the context of the full-court press against China discussed in many programs including FTR#’s 1090, 1091, 1178, 1179, 1180, the Pentagon/USAID funding of EcoHealth Alliance and the research into bat-borne coronaviruses being conducted at the WIV and elsewhere in and around China, the three considerations just enumerated point ominously to the Covid-19 pandemic as an “op.”
The program opens with more material from an article by Alexis Baden-Mayer about Shi Zhengli, which concludes with an interesting, important detail.
The People’s Liberation Army assumed control of the Wuhan Institute of Virology on January 26, 2020–roughly two weeks after the genome for the SARS Cov‑2 was published: ” . . . . The Wuhan Institute of Virology is China’s only biosafety level 4 lab. While it has always been under the control of the Chinese government, since January 26, 2020, it has been under the command of the People’s Liberation Army, specifically its top biological-weapons specialist, a major general named Chen Wei. . . .”
An article in The Asia Times provides more depth on the growing tension between the U.S. and China.
Author Pepe Escobar feels that China became aware that they had been the focal point of a biological warfare attack. This dovetails with the analysis we presented about the WIV being taken over by the People’s Liberation Army on 1/26/2020.
President Xi Jinping has dropped verbal clues as to the Chinese view of the origin of the Covid-19: ” . . . . Beijing is carefully, incrementally shaping the narrative that, from the beginning of the coronavirus attack, the leadership knew it was under a hybrid war attack. The terminology of President Xi Jinping is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a ‘people’s war’ had to be launched. Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means ‘white devils’ or ‘foreign devils’: guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code. . . .”
Escobar also notes Event 201, which we highlighted in FTR #‘s 1111 and 1112: ” . . . . Extra questions linger about the opaque Event 201 in New York on October 18, 2019: a rehearsal for a worldwide pandemic caused by a deadly virus – which happened to be coronavirus. This magnificent coincidence happened one month before the outbreak in Wuhan. Event 201 was sponsored by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the CIA, Bloomberg, John Hopkins Foundation and the UN. The World Military Games opened in Wuhan on the exact same day. . . .”
As noted by Pepe Escobar, Event 201–which began on the same day as the Military World Games in Wuhan–helped to set the PR template for Covid-19.
Avril Haines was a key participant in the event. Former Deputy CIA Director Avril Haines is Biden’s Director of National Intelligence.
The cognitive template for Covid-19 was also set by Peter Daszak, who has widely disseminated the supposition that “Disease X” would overtake the world.
It is our view that the efforts of Daszak, the Event 201 players and others could be compared to the propagandizing that elements of the WACCFL and the intelligence community, as well as elements of the U.S. far right did in the run-up to the JFK assassination.
That propagandizing was a key element in the “Painting of Oswald Red.”
The program concludes with rumination about the possible significance of Daszak’s Ukrainian heritage. This discussion will be fleshed out in our next program, reviewing the constellation of covert “ops” against China and the participation of elements of U.S. intelligence and Ukrainian fascism in the destabilization of Hong Kong and the propagation of the Uighur myth.
1. Centered primarily on the work of respected Chinese scientist Shi Zhengli and her gain-of-function experiments on bat-borne coronaviruses, this article does points out that her work is inextricably-linked with the Pentagon, USAID-funded Ecohealth Alliance.
Although Ms. Baden-Mayer’s article uncritically presents material from dubious sources such as The National Review, it does not shirk on coverage of the importance of Daszak’s organization and the many military and national security links to the work at the WIV performed by Shi Zhengli and her colleagues.
NB: A major–albeit understandable– flaw in Ms. Baden-Mayer’s research is the fact that neither she, nor many of the people she quotes, takes stock of the fact that ANY VIRUS CAN BE SYNTHESIZED OR ALTERED IN A LABORATORY USING CONTEMPORARY TECHNOLOGY!
Key Points of Discussion and Analysis Include:
- A National Institute of Health query of the work at WIV, the questions in which were presented to Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance! ” . . . . The letter with these demands didn’t go to Shi or WIV, it went to EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based non-profit funded by the U.S. government, including [primarily] the U.S. military, to support scientists working in 30 countries. EcoHealth Alliance is listed as a funding source on some of Shi’s most controversial papers. And EcoHealth Alliance scientists, including its president Peter Daszak, often co-author, with Shi, published papers. . . .”
- Review of the operational relationship between Daszak’s organization, and Shi Zhengli’s cooperation with Ralph Baric: ” . . . . Shi’s most infamous EcoHealth Alliance-funded paper is, ‘A SARS-Like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence.’ In this controversial gain-of-function research collaboration with U.S. scientist Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Shi and Baric used genetic engineering and synthetic biology to weaponize a bat coronavirus, maximizing its potential human infectivity. . . .”
- Review of the USAID funding of the EcoHealth Alliance/Shi/Baric collaboration (USAID is a State Department subsidiary which serves as one of CIA’s most common and insidious front organizations. ) ” . . . . Shi’s funding for this study came through a USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats-PREDICT grant to EcoHealth Alliance—but the record for this grant appears to have been scrubbed from the U.S. government’s database. . . .”
- Review of the obfuscation of the USAID funding for the EcoHealth Alliance for this period. “. . . . EcoHealth Alliance was a PREDICT partner during the 2009–2014 funding cycle, but there is no record of a USAID grant to EcoHealth Alliance for this time period among the $100.9 million in grants it has received from the U.S. government since 2003. . . .”
- Discussion of Shi/Daszak collaboration on on a key sequence–the RsShCo14-CoV Sequence: ” . . . . Shi’s contribution to the work she did with Baric was the ‘RsSHC014-CoV Sequence That Was Isolated from Chinese Horseshoe Bats.’ . . . . Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak announced their discovery of RsSHC014 in their 2013 paper, ‘Isolation and Characterization of a Bat SARS-Like Coronavirus that Uses the ACE2 Receptor,’ and stated that it was found during ‘a 12-month longitudinal survey (April 2011–September 2012) of SL-CoVs in a colony of Rhinolophus sinicus at a single location in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China.’ . . . .”
- Funding for the Kunming virus research came from a number of institutions, including the NIH and USAID, which both have collaborated with Pentagon and CIA in the past.
- EcoHealth Alliance helped finance Shi’s research in Mojiang: ” . . . . Shi’s paper, ‘Coexistence of Multiple Coronaviruses in Several Bat Colonies in an Abandoned Mineshaft,’ was written by a team of scientists who were all Chinese nationals working at Chinese institutions. Nevertheless, in addition to funding from the Chinese government, the authors acknowledged support from the U.S. National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease (R01AI110964), a $3.7‑million grant to EcoHealth Alliance for ‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,’ (2014–2025). . . .”
- Further review of Shi’s research funding from the Pentagon, via EcoHealth Alliance: ” . . . . Shi Zhengli and her collaborators are also funded by the U.S. military. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance currently receives more money from the Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for Scientific Research Combatting Weapons of Mass Destruction than any other military contractor—$15 million (25.575 percent) of the $60.2 million dispersed in the last 6 months. . . .”
- More about military collaboration with Shi: ” . . . . In addition to military funding through DTRA, Shi’s paper was co-authored by two U.S. military scientists, Christopher C. Broder and Eric D. Laing of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Department of Microbiology and Immunology. . . .”
- The People’s Liberation Army assumed control of the Wuhan Institute of Virology on January 26, 2020 at the time that the genome for the SARS Cov‑2 was published: ” . . . . The Wuhan Institute of Virology is China’s only biosafety level 4 lab. While it has always been under the control of the Chinese government, since January 26, 2020, it has been under the command of the People’s Liberation Army, specifically its top biological-weapons specialist, a major general named Chen Wei. . . .”
A stunningly important portion of the paper merits highlighting at length: ” . . . . A Google Scholar search produced two papers Shi has published that lists DTRA as a funder.
To see how the first paper, ‘Comparative Analysis of Bat Genomes Provides Insight into the Evolution of Flight and Immunity,’ is relevant to biological weaponry, it helps to understand the military’s interest in bat immunity.
As Boston University microbiologist Thomas Kepler explained to the Washington Post in 2018, the bat’s unique approach to viral infection explains why viruses that transfer from bats to humans are so severe.
This was the subject of a paper, ‘The Egyptian Rousette Genome Reveals Unexpected Features of Bat Antiviral Immunity,’ that he published with military scientists and DTRA funding.
‘A virus that has co-evolved with the bat’s antiviral system is completely out of its element in the human,’ Kepler said. ‘That’s why it is so deadly — the human immune system is overwhelmed by the inflammatory response.’
The bat immune system responds very differently from ours to viral infection. Instead of attacking and killing an infected cell, which leads to a cascade of inflammatory responses, the bat immune system can starve the virus by turning down cellular metabolism.
The bat origin of SARS-CoV‑2 may explain the cytokine storms that are hastening some COVID-19 deaths. According to WebMD:
‘Certain kinds of cytokines trigger cell death. When you have many cells doing this at the same time, a lot of tissue can die. In COVID-19, that tissue is mostly in the lung. As the tissue breaks down, the walls of the lungs’ tiny air sacs become leaky and fill with fluid, causing pneumonia and starving the blood of oxygen.’
Kepler says the military is using its experiments on bat immunity to ‘develop drugs that dampen down inflammation and arrest the virus by depriving it of what it needs to grow rather than trying to kill it outright.’ But, it clearly has another objective, as well: to make viruses more deadly by ‘passaging’ them through bats. . . .”
. . . .Shi’s work involves collecting bat viruses and using techniques of genetic engineering and synthetic biology to enable these viruses to infect human beings.
Since the Biological Weapons Convention took effect, what scientists like Shi do has been called “gain-of-function” research or “dual-use research of concern” (DURC).
In other words, Shi, and other scientists like her, are in the business of weaponizing viruses by genetically engineering or otherwise altering them to make them more lethal, and more easily transmitted, to humans.
Did Shi have a hand in creating the SARS-CoV‑2 virus causing the current COVID-19 pandemic?
The National Institutes of Health is investigating. . . .
. . . . The letter with these demands didn’t go to Shi or WIV, it went to EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based non-profit funded by the U.S. government, including the U.S. military, to support scientists working in 30 countries. EcoHealth Alliance is listed as a funding source on some of Shi’s most controversial papers. And EcoHealth Alliance scientists, including its president Peter Daszak, often co-author, with Shi, published papers.
Shi’s most infamous EcoHealth Alliance-funded paper is, “A SARS-Like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence.” In this controversial gain-of-function research collaboration with U.S. scientist Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Shi and Baric used genetic engineering and synthetic biology to weaponize a bat coronavirus, maximizing its potential human infectivity.
Shi’s funding for this study came through a USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats-PREDICT grant to EcoHealth Alliance—but the record for this grant appears to have been scrubbed from the U.S. government’s database.
EcoHealth Alliance was a PREDICT partner during the 2009–2014 funding cycle, but there is no record of a USAID grant to EcoHealth Alliance for this time period among the $100.9 million in grants it has received from the U.S. government since 2003.
Shi’s contribution to the work she did with Baric was the “RsSHC014-CoV Sequence That Was Isolated from Chinese Horseshoe Bats.”
Where did RsSHC014 come from?
Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak announced their discovery of RsSHC014 in their 2013 paper, “Isolation and Characterization of a Bat SARS-Like Coronavirus that Uses the ACE2 Receptor,” and stated that it was found during “a 12-month longitudinal survey (April 2011–September 2012) of SL-CoVs in a colony of Rhinolophus sinicus at a single location in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China.”
What they don’t mention in their paper is that, in Kunming during this same period (April and May of 2012), six men were hospitalized after removing bat feces from a cave, and that the WIV was involved in their treatment, testing the patients for Serum IgM, the first antibody the body makes when it fights a new infection. . . .
. . . . Shi Zhengli told her version of the story about the miners to Scientific American:
“[In 2012] Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonia like diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. “In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses.
“‘The mine shaft stunk like hell,’ says Shi, who, like her colleagues, went in wearing a protective mask and clothing. ‘Bat guano, covered in fungus, littered the cave.’ Although the fungus turned out to be the pathogen that had sickened the miners, she says it would have been only a matter of time before they caught the coronaviruses if the mine had not been promptly shut.”
This inconsistency between Shi’s story and the master’s thesis is hard to reconcile. Considering WIV’s involvement in the treatment of the miners, how could Shi have not known that the miners died of a SARS-like virus, and not a fungal infection, as she told Scientific American?
The virus Shi says she found in Mojiang was RaTG13. In a paper published on February 3, 2020, Shi announced that RaTG13 was 96 percent identical to the genomic sequence of the novel coronavirus, eventually named SARS-CoV‑2. [This was roughly a week after the genome of the virus was first published and the People’s Liberation Army took over the management of the WIV—D.E.]
Here’s another troubling inconsistency: According to the Genome Sequence Archive, RaTG13 was “was extracted from bronchoalveolar lavage fluid,” which suggests that the virus was taken from a sick person, but RaTG13 is supposedly an RNA sequence taken from a bat fecal swab.
Daszak has his own version of the story of the discovery of RaTG13. Daszak claims they took the virus back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and left it in a freezer for seven years untouched. But, as Boston Magazine reported, this claim was discovered to be untrue by “scientist turned detective” Alina Chan, who fact-checked him on Twitter:
Even though that virus had killed three miners, Daszak said it wasn’t considered a priority to study at the time. “We were looking for SARS-related viruses, and this one was 20 percent different. We thought it was interesting, but not high risk. So we didn’t do anything about it and put it in the freezer,” he told a reporter from Wired. It was only in 2020, he maintained, that they started looking into it once they realized its similarity to COVID-19. But Chan pointed to an online database showing that the WIV had been genetically sequencing the mine virus in 2017 and 2018, analyzing it in a way they had done in the past with other viruses in preparation for running experiments with them. Diplomatic yet deadpan, she wrote, “I think Daszak was misinformed.”. . .
Why the lies? Why won’t Shi and Daszak admit that WIV took samples from the hospitalized miners for diagnosis and study, knowing that the patients died from a SARS-like bat coronavirus? Why do they deny that the bat coronavirus most like SARS-CoV‑2 was collected in the mine where the workers were exposed? Why don’t they acknowledge that this is a virus that was actively sequenced, analyzed and experimented on, not one that had been forgotten in a freezer for seven years?
Are they afraid to admit that the first SARS-like coronaviruses that use the ACE2 receptor was discovered in humans in a hospital, not bats in a cave?
Do they fear the public’s reaction to the idea of gain-of-function researchers taking advantage of the miners’ gruesome deaths to harvest a pathogen uniquely primed to infect human cells? . . . .
. . . . Who funded the Kunming virus hunt?
In addition to funding from China and Australia, the Kunming virus hunt reported in “Isolation and Characterization of a Bat SARS-Like Coronavirus that Uses the ACE2 Receptor,” was supported by:
- National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) award number R01AI079231, a $2.6‑million grant to EcoHealth Alliance for “Risk of Viral Emergence from Bats,” (2008–2013).
- NIH and National Science Foundation (NSF) “Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases” $3.7‑million award from the NIH Fogarty International Center (R01TW005869) to EcoHealth Alliance for “The Ecology, Emergence and Pandemic Potential of Nipah Virus in Bangladesh,” (2002–2013).
- A $300,000 award from the NIH Fogarty International Center supported by International Influenza Funds from the Office of the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (R56TW009502) to EcoHealth Alliance for “Comparative Spillover Dynamics of Avian Influenza in Endemic Countries,” (2012–2017).
- United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT, amount unknown.
Who funded Shi’s virus hunting in Mojiang?
Shi’s paper, “Coexistence of Multiple Coronaviruses in Several Bat Colonies in an Abandoned Mineshaft,” was written by a team of scientists who were all Chinese nationals working at Chinese institutions. Nevertheless, in addition to funding from the Chinese government, the authors acknowledged support from the U.S. National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease (R01AI110964), a $3.7‑million grant to EcoHealth Alliance for “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” (2014–2025).
Shi’s Pentagon funding
Shi Zhengli and her collaborators are also funded by the U.S. military. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance currently receives more money from the Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for Scientific Research Combatting Weapons of Mass Destruction than any other military contractor—$15 million (25.575 percent) of the $60.2 million dispersed in the last 6 months.
A Google Scholar search produced two papers Shi has published that lists DTRA as a funder.
To see how the first paper, “Comparative Analysis of Bat Genomes Provides Insight into the Evolution of Flight and Immunity,” is relevant to biological weaponry, it helps to understand the military’s interest in bat immunity.
As Boston University microbiologist Thomas Kepler explained to the Washington Post in 2018, the bat’s unique approach to viral infection explains why viruses that transfer from bats to humans are so severe.
This was the subject of a paper, “The Egyptian Rousette Genome Reveals Unexpected Features of Bat Antiviral Immunity,” that he published with military scientists and DTRA funding.
“A virus that has co-evolved with the bat’s antiviral system is completely out of its element in the human,” Kepler said. “That’s why it is so deadly — the human immune system is overwhelmed by the inflammatory response.”
The bat immune system responds very differently from ours to viral infection. Instead of attacking and killing an infected cell, which leads to a cascade of inflammatory responses, the bat immune system can starve the virus by turning down cellular metabolism.
The bat origin of SARS-CoV‑2 may explain the cytokine storms that are hastening some COVID-19 deaths. According to WebMD:
“Certain kinds of cytokines trigger cell death. When you have many cells doing this at the same time, a lot of tissue can die. In COVID-19, that tissue is mostly in the lung. As the tissue breaks down, the walls of the lungs’ tiny air sacs become leaky and fill with fluid, causing pneumonia and starving the blood of oxygen.”
Kepler says the military is using its experiments on bat immunity to “develop drugs that dampen down inflammation and arrest the virus by depriving it of what it needs to grow rather than trying to kill it outright.” But, it clearly has another objective, as well: to make viruses more deadly by “passaging” them through bats.
Without stricter enforcement of the Biological Weapons Convention, it is impossible to prevent so-called “defensive” programs from producing biological weapons, especially considering the stealth and plausible deniability with which biological weapons can be used, and how vulnerable labs are to accidents and “missing” agents.
The regulatory challenges associated with trying to prevent defensive biological weapons research from being used offensively were highlighted recently in India’s reaction to Shi’s other DTRA funded paper, “Filovirus-reactive antibodies in humans and bats in Northeast India imply zoonotic spillover,” published in 2019.
The study alarmed the public by finding “the presence of filovirus (e.g. ebolavirus, marburgvirus and dianlovirus) reactive antibodies in both human (e.g. bat hunters) and bat populations in Northeast India, a region with no historical record of Ebola virus disease.”
The Hindu reported that foreign entities operating the study should have been required to seek special permission to access live samples of bats and human bat hunters, but they did not do so. The Indian Council of Medical Research created a five-member committee to investigate.
In addition to military funding through DTRA, Shi’s paper was co-authored by two U.S. military scientists, Christopher C. Broder and Eric D. Laing of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Department of Microbiology and Immunology.
China’s People’s Liberation Army controls the Wuhan Institute of Virology
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is China’s only biosafety level 4 lab. While it has always been under the control of the Chinese government, since January 26, 2020, it has been under the command of the People’s Liberation Army, specifically its top biological-weapons specialist, a major general named Chen Wei. . . .
3. An article in The Asia Times provides more depth on the growing media war between the U.S. and China.
Key points of discussion and analysis:
- China now openly views the U.S. as a threat: ” . . . . For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the U.S. as a threat, as stated a month ago by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference during the peak of the fight against coronavirus. . . .”
- President Xi Jinping has dropped verbal clues as to the Chinese view of the origin of the Covid-19: ” . . . . Beijing is carefully, incrementally shaping the narrative that, from the beginning of the coronavirus attack, the leadership knew it was under a hybrid war attack. The terminology of President Xi Jinping is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a ‘people’s war’ had to be launched. Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means ‘white devils’ or ‘foreign devils’: guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code. . . .”
- A Chinese Foreign Ministry official cited the Military World Games in Wuhan as a possible vectoring point. (We believe this is possible, although we suspect the Shincheonji cult and a USAMRIID association with a Wuhan virological institute as other possible vectors.) IF, for the sake of argument, fascist elements (CIA, Underground Reich or whatever) chose the US military athletes as a vector, it would have been altogether possible to do so without attracting attention. Military athletes are in superb condition and, if infected with one of the milder strains of Covid-19, their robust immune systems might well leave them asymptomatic, yet still contagious, or mildly ill at worst. They could then communicate the virus to other military athletes, who would then serve as a vector for other countries. ” . . . . Zhao’s explosive conclusion is that COVID-19 was already in effect in the U.S. before being identified in Wuhan – due to the by now fully documented inability of the U.S. to test and verify differences compared with the flu. . . .”
- Author Pepe Escobar reiterates the contention that the variants of the virus in Italy and Iran are different from the variants that infected Wuhan, an interpretation whose significance is debated by scientists.
- The article highlights the shuttering of Ft. Detrick, which has now been partially re-opened. ” . . . . Adding all that to the fact that coronavirus genome variations in Iran and Italy were sequenced and it was revealed they do not belong to the variety that infected Wuhan, Chinese media are now openly asking questions and drawing a connection with the shutting down in August last year of the “unsafe” military bioweapon lab at Fort Detrick, the Military Games, and the Wuhan epidemic. Some of these questions had been asked– with no response – inside the U.S. itself. . . .”
- Escobar also notes Event 201, which we highlighted in FTR #‘s 1111 and 1112: ” . . . . Extra questions linger about the opaque Event 201 in New York on October 18, 2019: a rehearsal for a worldwide pandemic caused by a deadly virus – which happened to be coronavirus. This magnificent coincidence happened one month before the outbreak in Wuhan. Event 201 was sponsored by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the CIA, Bloomberg, John Hopkins Foundation and the UN. The World Military Games opened in Wuhan on the exact same day. . . .”
- We note that, although we have not been able to conclusively prove that CIA was one of the sponsors of the event, a former Deputy Director of the Agency was a key participant. Having reached such a level of prominence within the agency, one never “leaves” altogether. It is probable that there was Agency participation.
- Further discussion notes the possible use of a coronavirus as part of a psy-op: ” . . . . The working hypothesis of coronavirus as a very powerful but not Armageddon-provoking bio-weapon unveils it as a perfect vehicle for widespread social control — on a global scale. . . .”
- Escobar alleges that Cuba has developed an anti-viral that is promising against the virus: ” . . . . The anti-viral Heberon – or Interferon Alpha 2b – a therapeutic, not a vaccine, has been used with great success in the treatment of coronavirus. A joint venture in China is producing an inhalable version, and at least 15 nations are already interested in importing the therapeutic. . . .”
- Quoting Italian analyst Sandro Mezzadra, Escobar notes the Covid-19 outbreak as a social Darwinian psy-op: ” . . . .We are facing a choice between a Malthusian strand – inspired by social Darwinism – ‘led by the Johnson-Trump-Bolsonaro axis’ and, on the other side, a strand pointing to the “requalification of public health as a fundamental tool,’ exemplified by China, South Korea and Italy. There are key lessons to be learned from South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. The stark option, Mezzadra notes, is between a ‘natural population selection,’ with thousands of dead, and ‘defending society’ by employing ‘variable degrees of authoritarianism and social control.’ . . .”
- Like many analysts, Escobar–correctly in our opinion–notes that the Covid-19 outbreak threatens the global economy and may collapse the derivative market. That this may be intended to mask an overvalued equities market seems probable to us.
“China Locked in Hybrid War with U.S.” by Pepe Escobar [Asia Times]; Consortium News; 3/18/2020.
Among the myriad, earth-shattering geopolitical effects of coronavirus, one is already graphically evident. China has re-positioned itself. For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the U.S. as a threat, as stated a month ago by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference during the peak of the fight against coronavirus.
Beijing is carefully, incrementally shaping the narrative that, from the beginning of the coronavirus attack, the leadership knew it was under a hybrid war attack. Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means “white devils” or “foreign devils”: guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code.
When Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, voiced in an incandescent tweet the possibility that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan” – the first blast to this effect to come from a top official – Beijing was sending up a trial balloon signaling that the gloves were finally off. Zhao Lijian made a direct connection with the Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019, which included a delegation of 300 U.S. military.
He directly quoted U.S. CDC Director Robert Redfield who, when asked last week whether some deaths by Coronavirus had been discovered posthumously in the U.S., replied that “some cases have actually been diagnosed this way in the U.S. today.”
Zhao’s explosive conclusion is that COVID-19 was already in effect in the U.S. before being identified in Wuhan – due to the by now fully documented inability of the U.S. to test and verify differences compared with the flu.
Adding all that to the fact that coronavirus genome variations in Iran and Italy were sequenced and it was revealed they do not belong to the variety that infected
The terminology of President Xi Jinping is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a “people’s war” had to be launched. Wuhan, Chinese media are now openly asking questions and drawing a connection with the shutting down in August last year of the “unsafe” military bioweapon lab at Fort Detrick, the Military Games, and the Wuhan epidemic. Some of these questions had been asked– with no response – inside the U.S. itself.
Extra questions linger about the opaque Event 201 in New York on October 18, 2019: a rehearsal for a worldwide pandemic caused by a deadly virus – which happened to be coronavirus. This magnificent coincidence happened one month before the outbreak in Wuhan.
Event 201 was sponsored by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the CIA, Bloomberg, John Hopkins Foundation and the UN. The World Military Games opened in Wuhan on the exact same day.
Irrespective of its origin, which is still not conclusively established, as much as Trump tweets about the “Chinese virus,” COVID-19 already poses immensely serious questions about biopolitics (where’s Foucault when we need him?) and bio-terror.
The working hypothesis of coronavirus as a very powerful but not Armageddon-provoking bio-weapon unveils it as a perfect vehicle for widespread social control — on a global scale.
Cuba Rises as Biotech Power
Just as a fully masked Xi visiting the Wuhan frontline last week was a graphic demonstration to the whole planet that China, with immense sacrifice, is winning the “people‘s war” against COVID-19, Russia, in a Sun Tzu move on Riyadh whose end result was a much cheaper barrel of oil, helped for all practical purposes to kick-start the inevitable recovery of the Chinese economy. This is how a strategic partnership works.
The chessboard is changing at breakneck speed. Once Beijing identified coronavirus as a bio-weapon attack the “people’s war” was launched with the full force of the state. Methodically. On a “whatever it takes” basis. Now we are entering a new stage, which will be used by Beijing to substantially recalibrate the interaction with the West, and under very different frameworks when it comes to the U.S. and the EU.
Soft power is paramount. Beijing sent an Air China flight to Italy carrying 2,300 big boxes full of masks bearing the script, “We are waves from the same sea, leaves from the same tree, flowers from the same garden.” China also sent a hefty humanitarian package to Iran, significantly aboard eight flights from Mahan Air — an airline under illegal, unilateral Trump administration sanctions.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic could not have been more explicit: “The only country that can help us is China. By now, you all understood that European solidarity does not exist. That was a fairy tale on paper.”
Under harsh sanctions and demonized since forever, Cuba is still able to perform breakthroughs – even on biotechnology. The anti-viral Heberon – or Interferon Alpha 2b – a therapeutic, not a vaccine, has been used with great success in the treatment of coronavirus. A joint venture in China is producing an inhalable version, and at least 15 nations are already interested in importing the therapeutic.
Now compare all of the above with the Trump administration offering $1 billion to poach German scientists working at biotech firm Curevac, based in Thuringia, on an experimental vaccine against COVID-19, to have it as a vaccine “only for the United States.”
Social Engineering Psy-Op?
Sandro Mezzadra, co-author with Brett Neilson of the seminal “The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism,” is already trying to conceptualize where we stand now in terms of fighting COVID-19.
We are facing a choice between a Malthusian strand – inspired by social Darwinism – “led by the Johnson-Trump-Bolsonaro axis” and, on the other side, a strand pointing to the “requalification of public health as a fundamental tool,” exemplified by China, South Korea and Italy. There are key lessons to be learned from South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.
The stark option, Mezzadra notes, is between a “natural population selection,” with thousands of dead, and “defending society” by employing “variable degrees of authoritarianism and social control.” It’s easy to imagine who stands to benefit from this social re-engineering, a 21st century remix of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”
Amid so much doom and gloom, count on Italy to offer us Tiepolo-style shades of light. Italy chose the Wuhan option, with immensely serious consequences for its already fragile economy. Quarantined Italians remarkably reacted by singing on their balconies: a true act of metaphysical revolt. . . .
. . . . Not even trillions of dollars raining from the sky by an act of divine Fed mercy were able to cure Covid-19. G‑7 “leaders” had to resort to a videoconference to realize how clueless they are – even as China’s fight against coronavirus gave the West a head start of several weeks.
Shanghai-based Dr. Zhang Wenhong, one of China’s top infectious disease experts, whose analyses have been spot on so far, now says China has emerged from the darkest days in the “people’s war” against Covid-19. But he does not think this will be over by summer. Now extrapolate what he’s saying to the Western world.
It’s not even spring yet, and we already know it takes a virus to mercilessly shatter the Goddess of the Market. Last Friday, Goldman Sachs told no fewer than 1,500 corporations that there was no systemic risk. That was false.
New York banking sources told me the truth: systemic risk became way more severe in 2020 than in 1979, 1987 or 2008 because of the hugely heightened danger that the $1.5 quadrillion derivative market would collapse.
As the sources put it, history had never before seen anything like the Fed’s intervention via its little understood elimination of commercial bank reserve requirements, unleashing a potential unlimited expansion of credit to prevent a derivative implosion stemming from a total commodity and stock market collapse of all stocks around the world.
Those bankers thought it would work, but as we know by now all the sound and fury signified nothing. The ghost of a derivative implosion – in this case not caused by the previous possibility, the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz – remains.
We are still barely starting to understand the consequences of Covid-19 for the future of neoliberal turbo-capitalism. What’s certain is that the whole global economy has been hit by an insidious, literally invisible circuit breaker. This may be just a “coincidence.” Or this may be, as some are boldly arguing, part of a possible, massive psy-op creating the perfect geopolitlcal and social engineering environment for full-spectrum dominance.
Additionally, along the hard slog down the road, with immense, inbuilt human and economic sacrifice, with or without a reboot of the world-system, a more pressing question remains: will imperial elites still choose to keep waging full-spectrum-dominance hybrid war against China?
4a. As noted by Pepe Escobar, Event 201–which began on the same day as the Military World Games in Wuhan–helped to set the PR template for Covid-19.
Avril Haines (see below) was a key participant in the event.
“Event 201 Players: Avril Haines;” centerforhealthsecurity.org
Avril Haines is a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University; a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory; a member of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service; and a principal at WestExec Advisors.
During the last administration, Dr. Haines served as Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Advisor. She also served as the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Legal Adviser to the National Security Council.
Dr. Haines received her bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center. She serves on a number of boards and advisory groups, including the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Bio Advisory Group, the Board of Trustees for the Vodafone Foundation, and the Refugees International Advisory Council.
4b. A key participant in Even 201, former Deputy CIA Director Avril Haines is Biden’s director of national intelligence.
The new director of national intelligence [Avril Haines] has been reshaping the office, installing a new official to lead President Biden’s daily briefings by tapping a veteran of the last Bush administration, according to current and former government officials. . . .
5. Peter Daszak voiced the (self-fulfilling?) opinion/prophecy that Covid-19 is indeed “Disease X.”
The cognitive template for Covid-19 was partially set by Peter Daszak, who has widely disseminated the supposition that “Disease X” would overtake the world.
It is our view that the efforts of Daszak, the Event 201 players and others could be compared to the propagandizing that elements of the WACCFL and the intelligence community, as well as elements of the U.S. far right did in the run-up to the JFK assassination.
That propagandizing was a key element in the “Painting of Oswald Red.”
“We Knew Disease X Was Coming. It’s Here Now.” by Peter Daszak; The New York Times; 02/27/2020
In early 2018, during a meeting at the World Health Organization in Geneva, a group of experts I belong to (the R&D Blueprint) coined the term “Disease X”: We were referring to the next pandemic, which would be caused by an unknown, novel pathogen that hadn’t yet entered the human population. As the world stands today on the edge of the pandemic precipice, it’s worth taking a moment to consider whether Covid-19 is the disease our group was warning about.
Disease X, we said back then, would likely result from a virus originating in animals and would emerge somewhere on the planet where economic development drives people and wildlife together. Disease X would probably be confused with other diseases early in the outbreak and would spread quickly and silently; exploiting networks of human travel and trade, it would reach multiple countries and thwart containment. Disease X would have a mortality rate higher than a seasonal flu but would spread as easily as the flu. It would shake financial markets even before it achieved pandemic status.
In a nutshell, Covid-19 is Disease X. . . .
6. We present an obviously speculative–but very important–element of discussion.
In FTR #‘s 1157, 1158, 1159, 1170, 1183 and 1184 we examined Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, which looks disturbingly like a biological warfare front. (Daszak’s last name is pronounced “Daysh-ak,” BTW.)
The EcoHealth Alliance–financed by USAID–partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to research bat-borne coronaviruses. A “chimeric” virus was created by Baric under this program in 2015, and Baric was subsequently selected to create the SARS Cov‑2 virus from scratch.
We have learned that Daszak is of Ukrainian heritage, with his father Bohdan having (apparently) been born in Ukraine and being 19 years old in 1945.
“Parents — Father is Bohdan Daszak (born March 21, 1926)
Mother’s maiden name was “Walton” — [HL0043][GDrive] , born in England (Ashton district)
Siblings — John Daszak”
We wonder if Daszak, Sr. might be part of the OUN/B diaspora which we have covered extensively, and which is at the foundation of a global resurrection of fascism?
Some good COVID-related news was just released by a research team in Tel Aviv: a drug tested on 90 serious coronavirus patients found 93% of them were discharged from the hospital in five days or fewer. It’s the kind of promising results we’ve been hoping to see from remdesivir but never really panned out. Even better, this new drug, CD24, appears to have few side-effects, in part because it’s literally a natural part of the immune system. Specifically, it’s the part of the immune involved with regulating cytokine storms. And as we’ve seen, it’s the induction of cytokine storms that makes SARS-CoV‑2 such a deadly virus in humans. This may be due to the bat-borne nature of the viruses, where bat immune systems have evolved an approach to dealing with coronaviruses focused on starving the virus metabolically. Humans immune systems don’t respond the same way, so when these bat-borne coronaviruses enter a human body they are operating in a very different kind of immunological environment that makes the induction of a cytokine storm far more likely. This new drug appears to blunt that process. So this new therapeutic approach to treating COVID19 involves giving the body more of a substance it naturally produces to regulate the immune system.
Interestingly, the drug delivery mechanism has some parallels to the new mRNA-based vaccines. CD24 is delivered in exosomes, little lipid bubbles used by biological systems to shuttle compounds between cells. So the lipid nanoparticles used as the delivery vehicles in the new mRNA vaccines or kind of like artificial exosomes. It’s another example of the powerful utility of this approach to medicine, as well as a reminder of the pharmaceutical industry’s incredible incentives to ensure this kind of technology is eventually given the green light from regulators for wider use.
Finally, it’s worth noting one of the features about this new drug that the pharmaceutical industry will be decided not pleased about: it’s cheap. So it’s effective and cheap, making it the opposite of remdesivir. The researchers are vowing that, if the positive results from the latest trial is confirmed, it’s going to be available relatively quickly and at low cost. The promise of effective and cheap medicine. Good luck with that:
““Steroids for example shut down the entire immune system,” he further explained. “We are balancing the part responsible for the cytokine storms using the endogenous mechanism of the body, meaning tools offered by the body itself.””
A rebalancing of an immune system thrown out of whack. That’s how they’re describing the approach to this therapy. It’s not a focus on killing the virus. It’s a focus on ensuring the virus doesn’t convince the immune system to kill the host with a lethal cytokine storm:
And note that, as with the mRNA vaccines, this new therapeutic approach of using exogenous exosomes as the deliver the CD24 drug, if proven successful, could be applied to all sorts of other therapies. This really is potentially a very big deal beyond treatments for SARS-CoV‑2. Exosome-based therapeutics, like mRNA-based therapeutics, is an area of medicine that’s just getting started with immense future potential:
Finally, note the promise of low cost COVID therapeutics if the next phase of their study proves successful. It’ll be interesting to see how low those costs ultimately get given the high cost of its less-effective competitor, remdesivir. And how long it takes for the drug to actually get approved in places like the US where remdesivir has received favored government treatment:
This is probably a good time to recall the story of Oya‑1, the well-studied drug that showed immense promise as a safe, effective, and cheap anti-viral. It never received FDA approval for rapid trials and remains languishing in some sort of drug development limbo. We’ll see what kind of fate EXO-CD24 has, but it’s hard to avoid being skeptical that we’re on the verge of seeing cheap and effective COVID therapeutics. But if EXO-CD24 ends up being expensive and effective that will still be a dramatic improvement.