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FTR #1215 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: This program supplements our long series on “The Oswald Institute of Virology.”
A pair of stories in The Wall Street Journal yield understanding of our media landscape and the degree of propagandizing of same.
Reportage about the WHO’s resumption of its inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t received much coverage in the U.S.
What coverage there has been has–predictably–focused on the “lack of transparency/cooperation” by China in the probe.
(We reiterate that–at this point in time and sometime before–the Chinese response would have be governed by the disciplines warranted by a wartime investigation of an enemy attack. In this case, a U.S. biological warfare attack. Something of a “bio-Northwoods” operation.)
A remarkable aspect of the Journal’s coverage concerns a development that has been almost completely excised from the Western press: ” . . . . For months, China’s government has insisted both in public, and in private meetings with Dr. Tedros, that studies on the origins of the virus should now focus on other countries, such as Italy, or on a U.S. military bioresearch facility in Fort Detrick, Md. Dozens of governments aligned with China have sent Dr. Tedros letters in support of Beijing’s position, a person familiar with the letters said. . . .”
“Dozens of governments?” Which ones? This sounds like a major international dialogue/scandal.
WHY aren’t we hearing about it?
I think it affords us some perspective on just how carefully manicured the public perspective is in this country.
In another article in the same issue of the Journal, it was noted that Jeffrey Sachs is disbanding the scientific panel he oversaw on behalf of the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, due to the presence of EcoHealth Alliance chief Peter Daszak and several other members of the panel associated with the organization.
” . . . . Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs said he has disbanded a task force of scientists probing the origins of Covid-19 in favor of wider bio-safety research. Dr. Sachs, chairman of a Covid-19 commission affiliated with The Lancet scientific journals, said he closed the task force because he was concerned about its links to EcoHealth Alliance. . . . EcoHealth Alliance’s president, Peter Daszak, led the task force until recusing himself from that role in June. Some other members of the task force have collaborated with Dr. Daszak or EcoHealth Alliance on projects. . . . .”
EcoHealth Alliance has been heavily involved in coronavirus research–including gain-of-function work–at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We have noted that the DARPA has been heavily involved with that category of research.
As noted in past programs and discussion, the EcoHealth Alliance is funded primarily by the Department of Defense and USAID, a State Department subsidiary that has often served as a cover for CIA operations. One of the principal advisers of the organization is David Franz, the former commanding officer of Fort Detrick.
Worth noting is that Jeffrey Sachs–an American economics professor–was tabbed to select those personnel to serve on a panel of experts assembled under the auspices of The Lancet–a British medical journal.
In addition to his role advising both Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sachs headed the U.S. government-funded Harvard University consortium that advised Boris Yeltsin and, in the process, drove Russia back to the stone age.
In Russia, it is widely believed that Sachs work for the CIA–a theory that is bolstered by his pivotal role in managing the narrative concerning the origins of the pandemic.
We have done many programs underscoring our working hypothesis that Covid-19 is a biological warfare weapon, developed by the U.S. and deployed as part of the destabilization program against China we have covered since the fall of 2019.
(Some of those programs are: FTR#‘s 1157, 1158, 1159, 1170 and FTR#‘s 1183 through 1193, inclusive.)
Next, we highlight a heavily “spun” story about the EcoHealth Alliance and its involvement with Pentagon-linked research into bat-borne coronaviruses may well–when freed from the predictably ideologized journalistic shading to which it has been subjected–yield a “smoking genome” with regard to the SARS CoV‑2 virus causing the Covid-19 pandemic.
(The Intercept is the spawn of Pierre Omidyar, deeply involved in the ascent of the Nazi OUN/B milieu in Ukraine and that of the Hindutva fascist regime of Narendra Modi in India. He has partnered with U.S. intelligence cutouts such as the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID. Omidyar’s protege Glenn Greenwald is to be viewed with a jaundiced eye as well.)
Key points of information in the article:
-
” . . . . Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus. The grant application was made in 2018 . . . .”
- ” . . . . The grant application proposal was submitted by British zoologist Peter Daszak on behalf of a group, which included Daszak EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the University of North Carolina and Duke NUS in Singapore, The Telegraph reported. . . .”
-
” . . . . ‘We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors. ‘Consensus candidate genomes will be synthesised commercially using established techniques and genome-length RNA and electroporation to recover recombinant viruses,’ the application states. . . .”
-
” . . . . The WHO expert told The Telegraph that the process detailed in the application would create ‘a new virus sequence, not a 100 per cent match to anything.’ ‘They would then synthesise the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature but looks natural as it is the average of natural viruses. ‘Then they put that RNA in a cell and recover the virus from it. ‘This creates a virus that has never existed in nature, with a new ‘backbone’ that didn’t exist in nature but is very, very similar as it’s the average of natural backbones,’ the expert said. . . .”
- ” . . . . Experts told the paper that creating an ‘ideal’ average virus could have been part of work to create a vaccine that works across coronaviruses. Last month, it emerged that the US had funded similar research to that outlined in the 2018 grant proposal. . . .”
Key considerations in the context of which this story should be viewed:
- DARPA has been extensively involved in researching bat-borne coronaviruses in, and around China.
- Note that the proposal to DARPA involved extensive discussion of the genome of the virus to be synthesized. Utilizing contemporary technology, this would permit the synthesis of the virus without necessarily approving the proposal!
- Note that the latest innovations in biotechnology permit: ” . . . . 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. . . .”
- Those innovations also permit: ” . . . . 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. . . .”
- Those innovations also permit: ” . . . . Today, the genetic code of almost any mammalian virus can be found online and synthesized. ‘The technology to do this is available now,’ said [Michael] Imperiale. ‘It requires some expertise, but it’s something that’s relatively easy to do, and that is why it tops the list.’ . . .”
- The chief funding sources for the EcoHealth Alliance are the Pentagon and USAID, a State Department subsidiary that commonly serves as a cover for CIA.
- One of Peter Daszak’s chief advisers is David Franz, the former commanding officer of Fort Detrick.
- In FTR#1191, we noted that producing a vaccine for an existing biological weapon or one under advanced development might well be seen as an “offensive” biological warfare maneuver.
- This article, like many others, features commentary from Richard Ebright to the effect that the WIV did, in fact, synthesize the virus. Ebright had a long association with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the former owner of the Hughes Aircraft Company, a firm with profound national security connections. It is more than a little interesting that Ebright, like almost all of the other commenters quoted in the U.S., does not factor in the innovations in biotechnology highlighted above.
- Of interest, as well, is this passage: ” . . . . Experts told the paper that creating an ‘ideal’ average virus could have been part of work to create a vaccine that works across coronaviruses. Last month, it emerged that the US had funded similar research to that outlined in the 2018 grant proposal. . . .”
- The Pentagon has, indeed, been working on such a vaccine: ” . . . . The service is closing in on a ‘pan-coronavirus’ vaccine and on synthetic antibodies that could protect a population before spread. . . .”
Pompeo State Department officials pursuing the lab-leak hypothesis were told to cover it up lest it shed light on U.S. government funding of research at the “Oswald Institute of Virology!”: ” . . . . In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it. . . . In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that. . . staff from two bureaus . . . ‘warned’ leaders within his bureau ‘not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19’ because it would ‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.’ . . . . As the group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a ‘Pandora’s box,’ said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. . . .”
New York Times right-wing columnist Ross Douthat has highlighted the propaganda significance of pinning the “Lab Leak Theory” on China.
In an ironic tragedy worthy of Aeschylus, Douthat has been struggling with Lyme Disease, and has suffered greatly in his attempts to navigate the Lyme Disease treatment labyrinth. We have done many programs on Lyme Disease and its development as a biological warfare weapon.
Interviewed by an indie filmmaker named Tim Grey, Willy Burgdorfer discussed the development of Lyme Disease as a biological warfare weapon. It was Burgdorfer who “discovered” the spirochete that caused Lyme Disease in 1982. As we will see later, it appears that more than one organism is involved with Lyme Disease.
- ” . . . . Willy paused, then replied, ‘Question: Has [sic] Borrelia Burgdorferi have the potential for biological warfare?’ As tears welled up in Willy’s eyes, he continued, ‘Looking at the data, it already has. If the organism stays within the system, you won’t even recognize what it is. In your lifespan, it can explode . . . We evaluated. You never deal with that [as a scientist]. You can sleep better.’ . . .”
- ” . . . . Later in the video, Grey circled back to this topic and asked, ‘If there’s an emergence of a brand-new epidemic that has the tenets of all of those things that you put together, do you feel responsible for that?’ ‘Yeah. . . .’ ”
- ” . . . . Grey asked him the one question, the only question, he really cared about: ‘Was the pathogen that you found in the tick that Allen Steere [the Lyme outbreak investigator] gave you the same pathogen or similar, or a generational mutation, of the one you published in the paper . . . the paper from 1952?’ ”
- ” . . . . The left side of his mouth briefly curled up, as if he is thinking, ‘Oh, well.’ Then anger flashes across his face. ‘Yah,’ he said, more in German than English. . . .”
- ” . . . . It was a stunning admission from one of the world’s foremost authorities on Lyme disease. If it was true, it meant that Willy had left out essential data from his scientific articles on the Lyme disease outbreak, and that as the disease spread like a wildfire in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions of the United States, he was part of the cover-up of the truth. . . It had been created in a military bioweapons lab for the specific purpose of harming human beings. . . . ”
Next, we present discussion of Ms. Newby’s expose of the institutionally and financially incestuous relationship between bureaucratic and corporate entities that both regulate, and profit from, Lyme Disease. Key “experts” involved with diagnosing and treating the affliction run interference for the status quo.
Legal and regulatory rulings have enabled the patenting of living organisms and that has exacerbated the monetizing of Lyme Disease treatment. That monetization, in turn, has adversely affected the quality of care for afflicted patients. ” . . . . All of a sudden, the institutions that were supposed to be protectors of public health became business partners with Big Pharma. The university researchers who had previously shared information on dangerous emerging diseases were now delaying publishing their findings so they could become entrepreneurs and profit from patents through their university technology transfer groups. We essentially lost our system of scientific checks and balances. And this, in turn, has undermined patient trust in the institutions that are supposed to ‘do no harm.’ . . .”
Strikingly, a FOIA suit she filed was stonewalled for five years, before finally yielding the documents she had so long sought.
The “experts” and their agenda were neatly, and alarmingly, summed up by Ms. Newby:
” . . . . The emails revealed a disturbing picture of a nonofficial group of government employees and guidelines authors that had been setting the national Lyme disease research agenda without public oversight or transparency. . . . Bottom line, the guidelines authors regularly convened in government-funded, closed-door meetings with hidden agendas that lined the pockets of academic researchers with significant commercial interests in Lyme disease tests and vaccines. A large percentage of government grants were awarded to the guideline authors and/or researchers in their labs. Part of the group’s stated mission, culled from these FOIA emails, was to run a covert ‘disinformation war’ and a ‘sociopolitical offensive’ to discredit Lyme patients, physicians, and journalists who questioned the group’s research and motives. In the FOIA-obtained emails, Lyme patients and their treating physicians were called ‘loonies’ and ‘quacks’ by Lyme guidelines authors and NIH employees. . . .”
We conclude with review of a chilling set of provocations that were planned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the early 1960s. Although they were not formally instituted at that time, Mr. Emory believes the scenarios discussed below have been adapted to the modern, high-technology available to biological warfare practitioners and instituted as the Covid-19 “op.”
1a. A pair of stories in The Wall Street Journal yield understanding of our media landscape and the degree of propagandizing of same.
Reportage about the WHO’s resumption of its inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t received much coverage in the U.S.
What coverage there has been has–predictably–focused on the “lack of transparency/cooperation” by China in the probe.
(We reiterate that–at this point in time and sometime before–the Chinese response would have be governed by the disciplines warranted by a wartime investigation of an enemy attack. In this case, a U.S. biological warfare attack. Something of a “bio-Northwoods” operation.)
A remarkable aspect of the Journal’s coverage concerns a development that has been almost completely excised from the Western press: ” . . . . For months, China’s government has insisted both in public, and in private meetings with Dr. Tedros, that studies on the origins of the virus should now focus on other countries, such as Italy, or on a U.S. military bioresearch facility in Fort Detrick, Md. Dozens of governments aligned with China have sent Dr. Tedros letters in support of Beijing’s position, a person familiar with the letters said. . . .”
“Dozens of governments?” Which ones? This sounds like a major international dialogue/scandal.
WHY aren’t we hearing about it?
I think it affords us some perspective on just how carefully manicured the public perspective is in this country.
In another article in the same issue of the Journal, it was noted that Jeffrey Sachs is disbanding the scientific panel he oversaw on behalf of the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, due to the presence of EcoHealth Alliance chief Peter Daszak and several other members of the panel associated with the organization.
” . . . . Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs said he has disbanded a task force of scientists probing the origins of Covid-19 in favor of wider bio-safety research. Dr. Sachs, chairman of a Covid-19 commission affiliated with The Lancet scientific journals, said he closed the task force because he was concerned about its links to EcoHealth Alliance. . . . EcoHealth Alliance’s president, Peter Daszak, led the task force until recusing himself from that role in June. Some other members of the task force have collaborated with Dr. Daszak or EcoHealth Alliance on projects. . . . .”
EcoHealth Alliance has been heavily involved in coronavirus research–including gain-of-function work–at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We have noted that the DARPA has been heavily involved with that category of research.
As noted in past programs and discussion, the EcoHealth Alliance is funded primarily by the Department of Defense and USAID, a State Department subsidiary that has often served as a cover for CIA operations. One of the principal advisers of the organization is David Franz, the former commanding officer of Fort Detrick.
Worth noting is that Jeffrey Sachs–an American economics professor–was tabbed to select those personnel to serve on a panel of experts assembled under the auspices of The Lancet–a British medical journal.
In addition to his role advising both Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sachs headed the U.S. government-funded Harvard University consortium that advised Boris Yeltsin and, in the process, drove Russia back to the stone age.
In Russia, it is widely believed that Sachs work for the CIA–a theory that is bolstered by his pivotal role in managing the narrative concerning the origins of the pandemic.
We have done many programs underscoring our working hypothesis that Covid-19 is a biological warfare weapon, developed by the U.S. and deployed as part of the destabilization program against China we have covered since the fall of 2019.
(Some of those programs are: FTR#‘s 1157, 1158, 1159, 1170 and FTR#‘s 1183 through 1193, inclusive.)
The World Health Organization is reviving its stalled investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 virus as agency officials warn that time is running out to determine how the pandemic that has killed more than 4.7 million worldwide began. . . .
. . . . Biden administration officials, including Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, have pressed WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus publicly and privately to renew the inquiry, which is likely to include at least one American. . . .
. . . . In a press conference in August, WHO officials said they were aware of new studies being conducted in China, but weren’t informed about the specifics. It isn’t clear if those studies will be made available to the new team.
For months, China’s government has insisted both in public, and in private meetings with Dr. Tedros, that studies on the origins of the virus should now focus on other countries, such as Italy, or on a U.S. military bioresearch facility in Fort Detrick, Md. Dozens of governments aligned with China have sent Dr. Tedros letters in support of Beijing’s position, a person familiar with the letters said.
A spokesman for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institutes of Infectious Diseases didn’t respond to requests for comment. Few, if any, scientists outside China see the military base as a plausible ground zero for the pandemic. Dr. Tedros has resisted the idea of investigating Fort Detrick, a person with knowledge of those conversations said. . . .
NB: A much longer version of this story appears in the online edition of WSJ. The text below was in a small, “box” story alongside the story above.
Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs said he has disbanded a task force of scientists probing the origins of Covid-19 in favor of wider bio-safety research.
Dr. Sachs, chairman of a Covid-19 commission affiliated with The Lancet scientific journals, said he closed the task force because he was concerned about its links to EcoHealth Alliance. The New York-based non-profit has been under scrutiny from some scientists, members of Congress and other officials since 2020 for using U.S. funds for studies on bat coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research facility in the Chinese city where the first Covid-19 outbreak occurred.
EcoHealth Alliance’s president, Peter Daszak, led the task force until recusing himself from that role in June. Some other members of the task force have collaborated with Dr. Daszak or EcoHealth Alliance on projects.
“I just didn’t want a task force that was so clearly involved with one of the main issues of this whole search for the origins, which was EcoHealth Alliance,” Dr. Sachs said.
1c. A heavily “spun” story about the EcoHealth Alliance and its involvement with Pentagon-linked research into bat-borne coronaviruses may well–when freed from the predictably ideologized journalistic shading to which it has been subjected–yield a “smoking genome” with regard to the SARS CoV‑2 virus causing the Covid-19 pandemic.
(The Intercept is the spawn of Pierre Omidyar, deeply involved in the ascent of the Nazi OUN/B milieu in Ukraine and that of the Hindutva fascist regime of Narendra Modi in India. He has partnered with U.S. intelligence cutouts such as the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID. Omidyar’s protege Glenn Greenwald is to be viewed with a jaundiced eye as well.)
Key points of information in the article:
-
” . . . . Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus. The grant application was made in 2018 . . . .”
- ” . . . . The grant application proposal was submitted by British zoologist Peter Daszak on behalf of a group, which included Daszak EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the University of North Carolina and Duke NUS in Singapore, The Telegraph reported. . . .”
-
” . . . . ‘We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors. ‘Consensus candidate genomes will be synthesised commercially using established techniques and genome-length RNA and electroporation to recover recombinant viruses,’ the application states. . . .”
-
” . . . . The WHO expert told The Telegraph that the process detailed in the application would create ‘a new virus sequence, not a 100 per cent match to anything.’ ‘They would then synthesise the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature but looks natural as it is the average of natural viruses. ‘Then they put that RNA in a cell and recover the virus from it. ‘This creates a virus that has never existed in nature, with a new ‘backbone’ that didn’t exist in nature but is very, very similar as it’s the average of natural backbones,’ the expert said. . . .”
- ” . . . . Experts told the paper that creating an ‘ideal’ average virus could have been part of work to create a vaccine that works across coronaviruses. Last month, it emerged that the US had funded similar research to that outlined in the 2018 grant proposal. . . .”
Key considerations in the context of which this story should be viewed:
- DARPA has been extensively involved in researching bat-borne coronaviruses in, and around China.
- Note that the proposal to DARPA involved extensive discussion of the genome of the virus to be synthesized. Utilizing contemporary technology, this would permit the synthesis of the virus without necessarily approving the proposal!
- Note that the latest innovations in biotechnology permit: ” . . . . 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. . . .”
- Those innovations also permit: ” . . . . 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. . . .”
- Those innovations also permit: ” . . . . Today, the genetic code of almost any mammalian virus can be found online and synthesized. ‘The technology to do this is available now,’ said [Michael] Imperiale. ‘It requires some expertise, but it’s something that’s relatively easy to do, and that is why it tops the list.’ . . .”
- The chief funding sources for the EcoHealth Alliance are the Pentagon and USAID, a State Department subsidiary that commonly serves as a cover for CIA.
- One of Peter Daszak’s chief advisers is David Franz, the former commanding officer of Fort Detrick.
- In FTR#1191, we noted that producing a vaccine for an existing biological weapon or one under advanced development might well be seen as an “offensive” biological warfare maneuver.
- This article, like many others, features commentary from Richard Ebright to the effect that the WIV did, in fact, synthesize the virus. Ebright had a long association with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the former owner of the Hughes Aircraft Company, a firm with profound national security connections. It is more than a little interesting that Ebright, like almost all of the other commenters quoted in the U.S., does not factor in the innovations in biotechnology highlighted above.
- Of interest, as well, is this passage: ” . . . . Experts told the paper that creating an ‘ideal’ average virus could have been part of work to create a vaccine that works across coronaviruses. Last month, it emerged that the US had funded similar research to that outlined in the 2018 grant proposal. . . .”
- The Pentagon has, indeed, been working on such a vaccine: ” . . . . The service is closing in on a ‘pan-coronavirus’ vaccine and on synthetic antibodies that could protect a population before spread. . . .”
US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show.
Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus.
The grant application was made in 2018 and leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group.
‘We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors.
‘Consensus candidate genomes will be synthesised commercially using established techniques and genome-length RNA and electroporation to recover recombinant viruses,’ the application states.
This would result in a virus which had no clear ancestor in nature, a World Health Organization (WHO) expert told The Telegraph.
The expert, who asked the paper not to publish their name, said that, if such a method had been carried out, it could explain why no close match has ever been found in nature for Sars-CoV‑2.
The closest naturally occurring virus is the Banal-52 strain, reported in Laos last month. It shares 96.8 per cent of Covid-19’s genome.
No direct ancestor, which would be expected share around 99.98 per cent, has been found so far.
The WHO expert told The Telegraph that the process detailed in the application would create ‘a new virus sequence, not a 100 per cent match to anything.’
‘They would then synthesise the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature but looks natural as it is the average of natural viruses.
‘Then they put that RNA in a cell and recover the virus from it.
‘This creates a virus that has never existed in nature, with a new ‘backbone’ that didn’t exist in nature but is very, very similar as it’s the average of natural backbones,’ the expert said.
The proposal was rejected and the database of viral strains at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was taken offline some 18 months later, making it impossible to check what scientists there were working on.
The institute’s scientists have consistently denied creating the coronavirus in their lab.
The grant application proposal was submitted by British zoologist Peter Daszak on behalf of a group, which included Daszak EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the University of North Carolina and Duke NUS in Singapore, The Telegraph reported.
Experts told the paper that creating an ‘ideal’ average virus could have been part of work to create a vaccine that works across coronaviruses.
Last month, it emerged that the US had funded similar research to that outlined in the 2018 grant proposal.
Files obtained by The Intercept as part of an FOI request to drill down the possible root of COVID and whether the US had any role in it showed that in 2014, the National Health Institute (NIH) approved a five-year, yearly grant of $666,000 a year for five years ($3.3million) for EcoHealth Alliance, a US research organization, into bat coronavirus.
EcoHealth Alliance, in its proposal to the NIH, acknowledged the risks involved were ‘the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs’ among staff, who could then carry it out of the lab.
The NIH gave them the money anyway — something Dr Anthony Fauci was previously forced to admit when testifying before Congress in May this year. EcoHealth Alliance then gave $599,000 of the money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
At the time and repeatedly since, Fauci has denied that the research constituted what’s known as ‘gain-of-function’ research.
Gain-of-function research is the scientific term given to research that deliberately changes an organism to make give it new functions in order to test a theory.
When applies to studying human viruses, it can mean making the virus more transmissible and or even deadly in order to test what can and can’t survive it.
‘The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful,’ Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, tweeted.
Ebright studied the papers and alleged that the scientists performed ‘the construction — in Wuhan — of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells’.
2. Pompeo State Department officials pursuing the lab-leak hypothesis were told to cover it up lest it shed light on U.S. government funding of research at the “Oswald Institute of Virology!”: ” . . . . In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it. . . . .In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that. . . staff from two bureaus . . . ‘warned’ leaders within his bureau ‘not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19’ because it would ‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.’ . . . . As the group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a ‘Pandora’s box,’ said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. . . .”
. . . . A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step.In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.
In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.” . . . .
. . . . But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. . . .
. . . . In the words of David Feith, former deputy assistant secretary of state in the East Asia bureau, “The story of why parts of the U.S. government were not as curious as many of us think they should have been is a hugely important one.” . . . .
. . . . As officials at the meeting discussed what they could share with the public, they were advised by Christopher Park, the director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government’s own role in gain-of-function research, according to documentation of the meeting obtained by Vanity Fair.
Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” Dr. Richard Ebright said. “It’s three places.”
Some of the attendees were “absolutely floored,” said an official familiar with the proceedings. That someone in the U.S. government could “make an argument that is so nakedly against transparency, in light of the unfolding catastrophe, was…shocking and disturbing.”
Park, who in 2017 had been involved in lifting a U.S. government moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research, was not the only official to warn the State Department investigators against digging in sensitive places. As the group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box,” said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. The admonitions “smelled like a cover-up,” said Thomas DiNanno, “and I wasn’t going to be part of it.” . . . .
3. New York Times right-wing columnist Ross Douthat has highlighted the propaganda significance of pinning the “Lab Leak Theory” on China:
“Why The Lab-Leak Theory Matters” by Ross Douthat; The New York Times; 5/29/2021.
. . . . But if we could find out the truth, and it turned out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology really was the epicenter of a once-in-a-century pandemic, the revelation would itself be a major political and scientific event.
First, to the extent that the United States is engaged in a conflict of propaganda and soft power with the regime in Beijing, there’s a pretty big difference between a world where the Chinese regime can say, We weren’t responsible for Covid but we crushed the virus and the West did not, because we’re strong and they’re decadent, and a world where this was basically their Chernobyl except their incompetence and cover-up sickened not just one of their own cities but also the entire globe. . . .
4. In an ironic tragedy worthy of Aeschylus, Douthat has been struggling with Lyme Disease, and has suffered greatly in his attempts to navigate the Lyme Disease treatment labyrinth. We have done many programs on Lyme Disease and its development as a biological warfare weapon.
“How I became a Science Experiment” by Ross Douthat; The New York Times; 10/30/2021.
. . . . That is part of what happened to me, in the months and then years after the sudden summer-of-2015 descent into insomnia, disintegration and blazing pain that I wrote about last weekend. In that summer I experienced a truncated form of what many people with chronic illness experience over many, many years: not a medical system that offers answers that the patients then bullheadedly reject, but a system full of well-meaning doctors who offer you exactly nothing — no diagnosis whatsoever, just a lot of murmurs about stress and mystery when the blood tests come back negative and a suggestion that you simply wait and hope the pain somehow goes away.
In my case, and I was fortunate, this changed when we moved from Washington, D.C., to Connecticut. Soon I began seeing doctors who recognized my strange situation as a likely case of Lyme disease . . . .
5. Interviewed by an indie filmmaker named Tim Grey, Willy Burgdorfer discussed the development of Lyme Disease as a biological warfare weapon. It was Burgdorfer who “discovered” the spirochete that caused Lyme Disease in 1982. As we will see later, it appears that more than one organism is involved with Lyme Disease.
- ” . . . . Willy paused, then replied, ‘Question: Has [sic] Borrelia Burgdorferi have the potential for biological warfare?’ As tears welled up in Willy’s eyes, he continued, ‘Looking at the data, it already has. If the organism stays within the system, you won’t even recognize what it is. In your lifespan, it can explode . . . We evaluated. You never deal with that [as a scientist]. You can sleep better.’ . . .”
- ” . . . . Later in the video, Grey circled back to this topic and asked, ‘If there’s an emergence of a brand-new epidemic that has the tenets of all of those things that you put together, do you feel responsible for that?’ ‘Yeah. . . .’ ”
- ” . . . . Grey asked him the one question, the only question, he really cared about: ‘Was the pathogen that you found in the tick that Allen Steere [the Lyme outbreak investigator] gave you the same pathogen or similar, or a generational mutation, of the one you published in the paper . . . the paper from 1952?’ ”
- ” . . . . The left side of his mouth briefly curled up, as if he is thinking, ‘Oh, well.’ Then anger flashes across his face. ‘Yah,’ he said, more in German than English. . . .”
- ” . . . . It was a stunning admission from one of the world’s foremost authorities on Lyme disease. If it was true, it meant that Willy had left out essential data from his scientific articles on the Lyme disease outbreak, and that as the disease spread like a wildfire in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions of the United States, he was part of the cover-up of the truth. . . It had been created in a military bioweapons lab for the specific purpose of harming human beings. . . . ”
. . . . “Let’s take your scientific work, studies that I have discovered that were published in 1952 and 1956,” Grey said. “One being the intentional infecting of ticks. The second being the recombination of four different pathogens, two being spirochetal and two being viral. From a simple procedural standpoint, I think it’s safe to assume that the purpose of those studies, at the height of the Cold War, on the heels of World War II, was to ensure that we were able to keep up with the rest of the world from a biological warfare standpoint . . . . Did you question that?”
Willy paused, then replied, “Question: Has [sic] Borrelia Burgdorferi have the potential for biological warfare?” As tears welled up in Willy’s eyes, he continued, “Looking at the data, it already has. If the organism stays within the system, you won’t even recognize what it is. In your lifespan, it can explode . . . We evaluated. You never deal with that [as a scientist]. You can sleep better.”
Later in the video, Grey circled back to this topic and asked, “If there’s an emergence of a brand-new epidemic that has the tenets of all of those things that you put together, do you feel responsible for that?”
“Yeah. It sounds like throughout the thirty-eight years, I may have . . . The [lab] director telephoned me, ‘This is director so and so. I got somebody here from the FBI. Will you come down and we will ask a few questions?’ Exactly the same thing. I recall all these discussions,” Willy said.
Finally, after three hours and fourteen minutes, Grey asked him the one question, the only question, he really cared about: “Was the pathogen that you found in the tick that Allen Steere [the Lyme outbreak investigator] gave you the same pathogen or similar, or a generational mutation, of the one you published in the paper . . . the paper from 1952?”
In response, Willy crossed his arms defensively, took a deep breath, and stared into the camera for forty-three seconds—an eternity. Then he looked away, down and to the right; he appeared to be working through an internal debate. The left side of his mouth briefly curled up, as if he is thinking, “Oh, well.” Then anger flashes across his face. “Yah,” he said, more in German than English.
It was a stunning admission from one of the world’s foremost authorities on Lyme disease. If it was true, it meant that Willy had left out essential data from his scientific articles on the Lyme disease outbreak, and that as the disease spread like a wildfire in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions of the United States, he was part of the cover-up of the truth. He seemed to be saying that Lyme wasn’t a naturally occurring germ, one that may have gotten loose and been spread by global warming, an explosion of deer, and other environmental changes. It had been created in a military bioweapons lab for the specific purpose of harming human beings. . . .
6a. Next, we present discussion of Ms. Newby’s expose of the institutionally and financially incestuous relationship between bureaucratic and corporate entities that both regulate, and profit from, Lyme Disease. Key “experts” involved with diagnosing and treating the affliction run interference for the status quo.
Legal and regulatory rulings have enabled the patenting of living organisms and that has exacerbated the monetizing of Lyme Disease treatment. That monetization, in turn, has adversely affected the quality of care for afflicted patients. ” . . . . All of a sudden, the institutions that were supposed to be protectors of public health became business partners with Big Pharma. The university researchers who had previously shared information on dangerous emerging diseases were now delaying publishing their findings so they could become entrepreneurs and profit from patents through their university technology transfer groups. We essentially lost our system of scientific checks and balances. And this, in turn, has undermined patient trust in the institutions that are supposed to ‘do no harm.’ . . .”
Strikingly, a FOIA suit she filed was stonewalled for five years, before finally yielding the documents she had so long sought.
The “experts” and their agenda were neatly, and alarmingly, summed up by Ms. Newby:
” . . . . The emails revealed a disturbing picture of a nonofficial group of government employees and guidelines authors that had been setting the national Lyme disease research agenda without public oversight or transparency. . . . Bottom line, the guidelines authors regularly convened in government-funded, closed-door meetings with hidden agendas that lined the pockets of academic researchers with significant commercial interests in Lyme disease tests and vaccines. A large percentage of government grants were awarded to the guideline authors and/or researchers in their labs. Part of the group’s stated mission, culled from these FOIA emails, was to run a covert ‘disinformation war’ and a ‘sociopolitical offensive’ to discredit Lyme patients, physicians, and journalists who questioned the group’s research and motives. In the FOIA-obtained emails, Lyme patients and their treating physicians were called ‘loonies’ and ‘quacks’ by Lyme guidelines authors and NIH employees. . . .”
. . . . Thinking back on my research for the Lyme documentary Under Our Skin, I concluded that there was much more money at stake with Lyme Disease. It was the first major new disease discovered after the Bayh-Dole Act and the Diamond v. Chakrabarty Supreme Court decision made it possible for the NIH, the CDC, and universities to patent and profit from “ownership” of live organisms. When the causative organism behind Lyme disease was announced, something akin to the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 began, as scientists within these institutions began furiously filing patents on the surface proteins and DNA of the Lyme spirochete, hoping to profit from future vaccines and diagnostic tests that used these markers–for example, an NIH employee who patents a bacterial surface protein used in a commercial test kit or a vaccine could receive up to $150,000 in royalty payments a year, an amount that might double his or her annual salary. All of a sudden, the institutions that were supposed to be protectors of public health became business partners with Big Pharma. The university researchers who had previously shared information on dangerous emerging diseases were now delaying publishing their findings so they could become entrepreneurs and profit from patents through their university technology transfer groups. We essentially lost our system of scientific checks and balances. And this, in turn, has undermined patient trust in the institutions that are supposed to “do no harm.”
With Lyme disease, there’s no profit incentive for proactively treating someone with a few weeks of inexpensive, off-patent antibiotics. It’s the patentable vaccines and mandatory tests-before-treatment that bring in the steady revenues year after year. . . .
. . . . In the IDSA [Infectious Diseases Society of America] guidelines, chronic Lyme isn’t classified as an ongoing, persistent infection; it’s considered either an autoimmune syndrome (in which a body’s immune system attacks itself) or a psychological condition caused by “the aches and pains of daily living” or “prior traumatic psychological events.” These guidelines were often used by medical insurers to deny treatment, and many of its authors are paid consulting fees to testify as expert witnesses in these insurance cases. In some states, the guideline recommendations take on the force of law, so that Lyme physicians who practice outside them are at risk of losing their medical licenses.
The protestors were angry because, as part of a 2008 antitrust settlement brought by Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal (now a senator), the IDSA guidelines were supposed to appoint an expert panel without biases or conflicts to do a re-review of the guidelines. In the settlement press release, Blumenthal had written, “My office uncovered undisclosed financial interests held by several of the most powerful IDSA panelists. The IDSA’s guideline panel improperly ignored or minimized consideration of alternative medical opinion and evidence regarding chronic Lyme disease, potentially raising serious questions about whether the recommendations reflected all relevant science.”
In response, the IDSA leadership selected a review panel of doctors and scientists, and they determined that “No changes or revisions to the 2006 Lyme guidelines are necessary at this time.”
Lorraine Johnson, JD, MBA, the chief executive officer of LymeDisease.org, and a champion of the IDSA antitrust suit, maintains that the review panel was stacked with like-minded cronies of the original guidelines’ authors and was therefore biased. She cites the recent article by research quality expert and Stanford professor John Ioannidis, MD, DSc, who recommends that “Professional societies should consider disentangling their specialists from guidelines and disease definitions and listen to what more impartial stakeholders think about their practices.”
Today, in 2019, these controversial guidelines and disputed tests are still influencing Lyme patient care.
People often ask me why the IDSA and CDC would support the problematic two-tier Lyme test. During my documentary research, I tried to get an answer to this question with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that solicited emails between three CDC employees and the IDSA guidelines authors. For five years the CDC strung me along with frivolous denials, unexplained delays, and false promises. In essence, the delays became an illegal, off-the-books FOIA denial. Some delays were attributed to understaffing, year-end deadlines, and CDC personnel out for vacation. At one point, my unanswered calls were blamed on a phone “dead zone” in the CDC’s new FOIA office. After the Lyme documentary Under Our Skin was released, I decided to double-down on my efforts to dislodge the FOIA request. My congressperson sent several letters to the CDC. The director of the documentary wrote a letter to President Obama. The FOIA ombudsman in the Office of Government Information Services repeatedly pressured the CDC to fulfill my request. I published blog posts about my plight and enlisted the support of a number of organizations dedicated to ensuring government transparency. Finally, the CDC sent three-thousand-plus FOIA pages, and I then understood its motivation for having delayed their release.
The emails revealed a disturbing picture of a nonofficial group of government employees and guidelines authors that had been setting the national Lyme disease research agenda without public oversight or transparency. Investigative journalist Mary Beth Pfeiffer of the Poughkeepsie Journal was given access to these emails, and on May 20, 2013. She published an expose on this group’s abuse of power.
Bottom line, the guidelines authors regularly convened in government-funded, closed-door meetings with hidden agendas that lined the pockets of academic researchers with significant commercial interests in Lyme disease tests and vaccines. A large percentage of government grants were awarded to the guideline authors and/or researchers in their labs.
Part of the group’s stated mission, culled from these FOIA emails, was to run a covert “disinformation war” and a “sociopolitical offensive” to discredit Lyme patients, physicians, and journalists who questioned the group’s research and motives. In the FOIA-obtained emails, Lyme patients and their treating physicians were called “loonies” and “quacks’ by Lyme guidelines authors and NIH employees.
Because my FOIA request ended up taking five years to process, Under Our Skin had been made and released without answering an important question: Were the government officials responsible for managing Lyme disease health policy being inappropriately influenced by outside commercial interests?
Through my FOIA request, I found that a majority of the authors of the 2006 IDSA Lyme diagnosis and treatment guidelines held direct or indirect commercial interests related to Lyme disease. By defining the disease and endorsing tests or vaccines for which they were patent holders, they and their institutions made more money.
Yet, now Willy’s confession had added another potential dimension to the story, another reason for the CDC to be undercounting Lyme cases—maybe government officials knew that something else, a pathogen in addition to Borrelia, possibly a bio-weapon, was causing the problems, and they wanted to keep a lid on it. . . .
7. We conclude with review of a chilling set of provocations that were planned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the early 1960s. Although they were not formally instituted at that time, Mr. Emory believes the scenarios discussed below have been adapted to the modern, high-technology available to biological warfare practitioners and instituted as the Covid-19 “op.”
. . . . Although no one in Congress could have known it at the time, [Lyman] Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge. According to secret and long-hidden documents obtained for Body of Secrets, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.
Codenamed Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war. . . . .
. . . . Operation Northwoods called for a war in which many patriotic Americans and innocent Cubans would die senseless deaths-all to satisfy the egos of twisted generals back in Washington, safe in their tax-payer-financed homes and limousines. . . .
. . . . The suggested operations grew progressively more outrageous. Another called for an action similar to the infamous incident in February 1898 when an explosion aboard the battleship Maine in Havana harbor killed 266 U.S. sailors. Although the exact cause of the explosion remained undetermined, it sparked the Spanish-American War with Cuba. Incited by the deadly blast, more than one million men volunteered for duty. Lemnitzer and his generals came up with a similar plan. ‘We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,’ they proposed; ‘casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.’ . . . .
. . . . There seemed no limit to their fanaticism.: ‘We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,’ they wrote. ‘The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States . . . We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated) . . . We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized.’ . . . .
. . . . Bombings were proposed, false arrests, hijackings: ‘Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.’. . .
. . . . ‘Advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican [Republic] Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. ‘Cuban’ B‑26 or C‑46 type aircraft could make cane-burning raids at night. Soviet bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with ‘Cuban’ messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and ‘Cuban’ shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach. Use of MIG type aircraft by U.S. pilots could provide additional provocation.’ . . . .
. . . . ‘Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba.’ Among the most elaborate schemes was to ‘create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.’. . .
This next article shows that our good friend, Dr. Ralph Baric was involved in current research that can eventually provide a medical that can treat COVID-19 and mutations. Any related antibody treatment would be used to address a pandemic and for stockpiles. This would give the Pharmaceutical companies opportunities for more profitable drugs to address COVID-19 worldwide.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10182893/Scientists-discover-antibody-protect-people-against-coronaviruses.html
Scientists discover an antibody that can protect people against several coronaviruses
By MANSUR SHAHEEN U.S. DEPUTY HEALTH EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM PUBLISHED: 13:49 EST, 9 November 2021 | UPDATED: 08:49 EST, 10 November 2021
Scientists have identified an antibody that can protect people from COVID-19, its variants and other types of coronaviruses.
The antibody, DH1047, works by binding to the virus’s cells and neutralizing them, preventing them from replicating.
It is effective at both preventing infection and at helping treat a person that has already contracted Covid.
The research team at the University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill (UNC) and Duke University, in Durham, says it believes it has found a key piece that can help combat the current pandemic and future virus outbreaks.
Photo Caption: Researchers have discovered an antibody that is not only just effective against Covid, but against all types of coronaviruses that could have future outbreaks among humans. Pictured: A microscope image of a COVID-19 infected cell
Graphic Display: The antibody, DH1047, showed the ability to 100% neutralize the virus cells of COVID-19, SARS and other coronaviruses that are found in animals
Graphic Display: For comparison, two other antibodies the researchers tested were found to be effective against some, but not all, types of the coronavirus that can infect both animals and humans. The antibody DH1235 (left) was found to be effective against some viruses, while DH1073 (right) was only effective against SARS (orange)
‘This antibody has the potential to be a therapeutic for the current epidemic,’ Dr Barton Haynes, director of Duke Human Vaccine Institute and co-author of the study, said in a statement.
‘It could also be available for future outbreaks, if or when other coronaviruses jump from their natural animal hosts to humans.’
Researchers, who published their findings on November 2 in the Science Translational Medicine journal, identified more than 1,700 coronavirus antibodies.
Of that pool, 50 were identified that could bind to both Covid and SARS — the virus that caused an outbreak in Asia in the early 2000s — cells.
One, named DH1047, was particularly effective, being able to bind to all kinds of viruses, both animal- and human-based.
‘This antibody binds to the coronavirus at a location that is conserved across numerous mutations and variations,’ Haynes said.
‘As a result, it can neutralize a wide range of coronaviruses.’
The antibody was tested in mice, and found to be able to protect the rodents from developing a Covid infection after being exposed to the virus.
It was effective against all types of strains as well, including the highly contagious Delta variant.
Other types of coronaviruses that are believed to have the future potential of infecting humans were also tested, and were neutralized by the antibody.
‘The findings provide a template for the rational design of universal vaccine strategies that are variant-proof and provide broad protection from known and emerging coronaviruses,’ said Dr Ralph Baric, a professor of epidemiology at UNC and co-senior author of the research.
When testing the antibody on animals that were already infected, they found that it was effective at reducing the severity of symptoms related to the lungs.
‘The therapeutic activity even after mice were infected suggests that this could be a treatment deployed in the current pandemic, but also stockpiled to prevent the spread of a future outbreak or epidemic with a SARS-related virus,’ Dr David Martinez, co-lead author and a researcher at UNC, said in a statement.
Currently, monoclonal antibody treatments are considered to be among the most effective at treating Covid.
The treatment pumps a person’s body with Covid antibodies that assist the immune system in neutralizing virus cells and preventing them from replicating.
This treatment is especially valuable for unvaccinated people, who do not have the antibodies necessary to stave off infection or severe hospitalization.
Incorporating this newly discovered antibody into the future of treatment development for coronavirus related diseases could make them much more effective.
While it may be already too late for this pandemic, researchers hope their findings will be crucial to fighting the next virus outbreak that strikes the world.
The ‘lab leak’ narrative just got an update. An update that appears to be part of a coordinated US government effort. At least that’s the picture that’s emerging from a burst of ‘lab leak’ articles this week purporting to show rock solid evidence that the SARS-CoV‑2 virus emerged from Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). But the location of virus’s origin isn’t the only ‘revelation’ we’re receiving with this new wave of reporting. We’re also told that US investigators have concluded that the WIV was secretly carrying out dangerous gain-of-function (GoF) experiments on behalf of the Chinese military as part of a secret biowarfare operation. A secret biowarfare operation that included the insertion of human furin cleavage sites into the chimeras they were creating. Until one of those chimeras infected the lab workers and escape. Yep, that’s the narrative that appears to have extensive US government backing behind it.
First, we got the following report from The Times of London laying out the case made by US investigators into the origins of the virus. A case that concludes that the WIV began a secret collaboration with the Chinese military in 2016 involving dangerous GoF experiments on bat-borne coronaviruses. Dangerous experiments that included animal passaging experiments on humanized mice with human-like lungs. We are also told that these experiments were done without the knowledge of the US government or the WIV’s collaborators at the EcoHealth Alliance, including Peter Daszak. Beyond that, we’re told that the viruses they were using in these dangerous secret experiments were discovered in a Chinese mine shaft in 2012 when three mineworkers were killed after contracting a bar-borne coronavirus, but the importance of these viruses and even knowledge of the deaths they caused were kept secret from the WIV’s US collaborators.
Another part major element of this narrative, which isn’t new, is the observation that three members of Shi’s lab were among the first people in Wuhan to come down with COVID19 in mid-November of 2019. It’s basically the same story we first heard back in May of 2021 when the WSJ first reported on these three members of Shi’s lab getting ill, but with a few additional details. And, importantly, it’s a story that presumes these are the first three people to get sick and therefore no evidence should exist of any outbreak anywhere in the world pre-November 2019. This is a good time to recall that SkyNews 2021 documentary that featured an alleged Chinese defector, Wei Jingsheng, who claims to have been alerting US officials about a possible viral outbreak in Wuhan in October of 2019 and speculating that the Chinese Communist Party was using the Military World Games as a biological warfare superspreader event. It was just one of a number of stories hinting at the virus circulating months before December 2019, including the reports of ill athletes at the Military World Games. All of those stories of pre-November 2019 COVID cases are going to have to be ignored for this new narrative to take hold.
Of course, as we’re also going to see, this narrative basically false apart on closer examination. For example, let’s just look at some of the key events timeline of the collaboration between the WIV and its US collaborators. First, Shi’s lab was working closely with Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, and EcoHealth Alliance in this multi-year collaboration that was focused on characterizing the range of viruses discovered in 2012 in the Shitou Cave in Yunnan province, where a large diversity of bat-borne coronaviruses were found including the two viral closest cousins of SARS, dubbed W1V1 and SHC014. We’re also told that Shi went to Baric to get help in creating the SHC014/SARS chimeras that were reported in a 2015 paper, which was notably a year after the 2014 US ban on GoF experiments was put in place. But 2012 was also the year three mineshaft workers died in Mojiang province, which prompted Shi’s lab to also visit that site and collect another batch of novel bat-borne coronaviruses, including the RaTG13/4491 virus that was later identified as being the closest known viral cousing to SARS-CoV‑2. So we’re now told that that no mention was ever made of made to Shi’s US collaborators of the deaths of these three mine shaft workers and, in turn, the extreme potential importance of RaTG13/4991. Instead, Shi’s lab went on to start its secret collaboration with the Chinese military in 2016, eventually creating chimeras for RaTG13/4991 with human furin cleavage sites, running them through passaging experiments on humanized mice, and then finally creating SARS-CoV‑2 which escaped via an infected lab worker.
But as we’ve seen, the RaTG13/4991 virus was actually first mentioned by Shi’s lab in a 2014 published paper and was further characterized in a 2016 paper that mentioned Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance USNIAID grant in its acknowledgments. That 2016 paper made clear that RaTG13/4991 stood out from the rest of the novel coronaviruses from an evolutionary perspective. The entire genome of RaTG13 was eventually sequenced and used for a masters thesis published by one of Shi’s students in June of 2019. Givan all that, what are the odds that the importance of RaTG13/4991 was somehow kept hidden from the WIV’s US collaborators? It doesn’t seem plausible, and yet this narrative hinges on it.
In May of 2016, Shi’s lab appeared to be applying Baric’s cutting-edge chimera-creating experiments and managed to create two chimeras of its own. This was reported in Peter Daszak’s May 2016 report to the US government. In that report, Daszak also mentioned how the WIV was planning on creating a chimera created by combing bat coronaviruses with MERS. This alarmed the US government because Daszak was describing what was then still-banned GoF experiments. Daszak argued that, no, it wasn’t a GoF experiment because the experiment was unlikely to make a virus more virulent than the original viruses. That resulted in a ‘compromise’ with the US government, where the experiments were approved, but only if they didn’t result in a virus that was more than 10 times as virulent as the original viruses. So the US government gave a ‘winky winky’ green light to what were basically GoF experiments conducted in Shi’s lab in 2016, the same year we are now told the secret Chinese military experiments with Shi’s lab allegedly began.
In 2017, Shi published a paper on the creation of eight mutant viruses from the Sars-like coronaviruses found in the Shitou cave in Yunnan province. Peter Daszak is a co-author on the paper. Two of these viruses showed an ability to infect human cells. The paper also mentioned that this work was carried out under BSL‑2 conditions, below the required BSL‑3 safety standards for working with coronaviruses. Chimeric mutants created with W1V1 were injected into the noses of humanized mice, resulting in viral loads up to 10,000 times about the native W1V1 virus and a 75% death rate.
We are told the US embassy found out about these experiments in Wuhan being carried out until BSL‑2 conditions and sent diplomats with scientific expertise to inspect the institute in January 2018, where they observed “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory”. Keep in mind that early 2018 this would overlap with the time we are told Shi’s lab was carrying out secret biowarfare experiments for the Chinese military. So it’s pretty remarkable that’s true and yet US diplomats were given access to the WIV to carry out these inspections and find all these lapses. But that’s the narrative we’re getting.
In March of 2018, Peter Daszak made a pitch to DARPA for $14 million over three years that would entail Shi and Baric creating large numbers of new chimeric viruses from W1V1 and SHC014. One of the experiments involved the creation of a furin cleavage site. DARPA ultimately rejected the pitch.
In April of 2018, Daszak filed a progress report with the NIH that mentioned the humanized mouse experiments with the chimeric viruses but doesn’t mention the mouse deaths at all. Instead, it referred to “mild Sars-like clinical signs”. Don’t forget the ‘compromise’ Daszak arrived at with the US government on these putative GoF experiments. So it would appear that Daszak was trying to avoid acknowledging that they were violating that agreement.
That’s all part of what is admitted about what the US government knew about what the WIV was up to and forms the basis for the assertion by these investigators that Shi’s lab was secretly running these same kinds of experiments on the RaTG13/4991 virus for the Chinese military as part of a secret biowarfare program. Interestingly, the one US investigator who is actually named in the following article, Dr Steven Quay, speculates that SARS-CoV‑2 basically came from these same kinds of animal passaging experiments on humanized mice, but with the RaTG13 virus. But Quay also asserts that these investigators suspect even Peter Daszak was also kept in the dark about furin cleave site and animal passage GoF research being done on RaTG13 and other ‘secret’ viruses from the Mojiang mine. Experiments that were basically the part of the 2018 grant proposal that was rejected by DARPA!
But it gets more curious when we note the sources below for the claims that the WIV was secretly inserting furin cleavage sites into RaTG13 and then carrying out animal passaging experiments on these viruses with humanized mice: two unnamed researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. So somehow Daszak was kept in dark while these two unnamed US researchers who were collaborating with the WIV somehow knew about this. Yep.
Finally, beyond just the secret creation of SARS-CoV‑2 on behalf of the Chinese military, we are also told that US investigators believe the WIV began work on some sort of coronavirus vaccine in the fall of 2019. This is good time to recall that Moderna claims to have been working with the NIH on mRNA coronavirus vaccines as far back as 2015 and even claimed to have invented the idea of using mRNA vaccines for the betacoronavirus family of viruses. So when we hear about coronavirus-related vaccine research taking place at the WIV in 2019, we almost have to ask whether or not China was trying to keep up with the advances the US had already made on that front years earlier.
So that’s the new narrative, which is really just the same old narrative we’ve been getting for a couple of years now, but with a few additional twists. Twists seemingly designed to ensure we focus extensively on alleged secret Chinese military experiments no one has proven even happened and largely ignore the well document Pentagon-funded experiments no one is even denying anymore:
“The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.”
The Sunday Times is clearly one of the media outlets that’s been tapped to help propagate this narrative, with hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports and interviews with US officials involved with the investigation. And as we can see, the narrative that is emerging is one of secret GoF experiments being conducted by the WIV, but NOT as part of its collaboration with the Pentagon and EcoHealth Alliance. No, no, these secret experiments that ultimately created the SARS-CoV‑2 virus were done by the WIV in secret collaboration with the Chinese military. So we can just ignore all the non-secret experiments involving the Pentagon-funded GoF creation of novel coronaviruses done in collaboration with the EcoHealth Alliance. Or any GoF experiments taking place on coronviruses in labs around the world. Just ignore all of that and focus on the alleged secret experiments done at the behest of the Chinese military.
And in this evolving narrative, 2016 is the year when the WIV’s secret Chinese military collaboration began. According to these unnamed US investigators, the Chinese military decided to weaponize the novel coronaviruses that killed three miners in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province. Now, based on this report, it almost sounds like these three miners died from a virus discovered in that mineshaft in 2016 and the Chinese military decided at that point to cover it up. But it’s actually referring to the three mine workers killed in 2012 in the Mojiang region. 2012 was the same year when Shi’s team discovered a large pool of bat coronaviruses in a cave in Yunnan province, including the closest discovered relatives to SARS, which they dubbed WIV1 and SHC014. That Yunnan cave discovery was happened while the collaboration with the EcoHealth Alliance, started in 2009, was still ongoing. This collaboration, in turn, led to the now notorious project with Ralph Baric involving the creation of a chimeric version of the original SARS with a SHC014 spike protein, in a paper published in 2015...after the 2014 US ban on GoF research. So this narrative about how the Chinese never shared with the world that the three workers died from a virus they were exposed to in that cave in 2012 assumes that this extremely relevant information was somehow kept secret from Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, and all of the other international collaborators they were working with during this time on the characterization of these viruses:
This conclusion by US investigators of a secret Chinese military research program focused on the deadly RaTG13 (originally dubbed 4991) was arrived at in a report published in early 2021. Of course, as we’ve seen, the RaTG13/4991 virus was actually first mentioned by Shi’s lab in a 2014 published paper and was further characterized in a 2016 paper that mentioned Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance USNIAID grant in its acknowledgments. The entire genome of RaTG13 was sequenced and used for a masters thesis published by one of Shi’s students in June of 2019. Beyond that, note the sources below for the claims that the WIV was secretly inserting furin cleavage sites and then carrying out animal passaging experiments on these viruses with humanized mice: two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. Yep:
And note how the one US investigator, Dr Steven Quay, asserts that these investigators suspect even Peter Daszak was kept in the dark about furin cleave site and animal passage GoF research being done on RaTG13 and other ‘secret’ viruses from the Mojiang mine. Experiments that were literally part of the 2018 grant proposal that was rejected by DARPA, just with a different virus! So somehow Daszak was kept in dark while these two unnamed US researchers who were collaborating with the WIV somehow knew about this:
Also note how Shi’s lab appeared to be learning its cutting-edge chimera-creating experiments from Ralph Baric, and it was Baric’s techniques that were to be used in a May 2016 report to the US government from Daszak describing how the WIV was planning on creating a chimera created by combing bat coronaviruses with MERS. This alarmed the US government because Daszak was describing what was then still-banned GoF experiments. And yet Daszak argued that, no, it wasn’t a GoF experiment because the experiment was unlikely to make a virus more virulent than the original viruses. That resulted in a ‘compromise’, where the experiments were approved, but only if they didn’t result in a virus that was more than 10 times as virulent as the original viruses. So the US government gave a ‘winky wink’ green light to what were basically GoF experiments conducted in Shi’s lab in 2016, the same year we are now told the secret Chinese military experiments with Shi’s lab allegedly began:
It was this period in 2017 when we are told that Shi’s lab carried out what Richard Ebright describes as the most dangerous coronavirus experiment ever undertaken. Highly infection chimeric mutants created with W1V1 and injected into the noses of humanized mice with incredible resulting in viral loads up to 10,000 times greater than the W1V1 virus, killing 75 percent of the mice. Experiments were partly-funded with EcoHealth Alliance funds, and yet, in Peter Daszak’s April 2018 annual progress report to the NIH, no mention of the mouse deaths and referred to “mild Sars-like clinical signs”. Keep in mind the ‘compromise’ Daszak arrived at with the NIH to get the approval for these experiments: they couldn’t created a virus that was more than 10-times more virulent than the original virus. Was that why Daszak covered up the potency? Either way, these experiments carried out in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance in 2017 was being covered up by Daszak in that 2018 report:
Also note the interesting timing of Daszak’s April 2018 progress report that left out the humanized mouse deaths in relation to the March 2018 pitch Daszak made to DARPA for more US funding. It was a pitch for $14 million over three years that would entail Shi and Baric creating large numbers of new chimeric viruses from W1V1 and SHC014. One of the experiments involved the creation of a furin cleavage site. DARPA rejected the pitch:
Then we get to the alleged evidence of a shadow project being run at the WIV. Shi’s lab and the Chinese government hid the fact that three of the six who fell ill on the Mojiang mineshaft in 2012 died from EcoHealth Alliance and the US government, presumably to research the deadly virus in secret. It’s unclear why it is that investigators have concluded that Daszak didn’t know about those three miners’ deaths. That seems to just be an assertion at this point. Then, in 2016, Shi published a scientific paper on the discovery of new coronaviruses at the site, including RaTG13/4991. But, again, the RaTG13/4991 virus was actually first mentioned by Shi’s lab in a 2014 published paper. And that 2016 paper describing the discovery of 4991 not only pointed out how 4991 stuck out from the rest from an evolutionary perspective, but it also mentioned Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance USNIAID grant in its acknowledgments. The entire genome of RaTG13 was eventually sequenced and used for a masters thesis published by one of Shi’s students in June of 2019. It’s hard to see how RaTG13/4991 was somehow being kept hidden from Shi’s US collaborators:
And note the timing of alleged shadow experiments at the WIV conducted at the behest of the Chinese military: according to an unnamed investigative source, the secret military-funded experiments on RaTG13/4991 began in 2016. This would have been at the same time the EcoHealth Alliance collaboration was ongoing. And don’t forget that Daszak reportedly pitched to DARPA a $14 million proposal for mixing the two SARS cousins brought back from the Shitou cave in Yunnan province — WIV1 and SHC014 — with large numbers of new viruses they’ve discovered. Was RaTG13/4991 one of those new viruses? We don’t know, but that seems like an obvious possibility.
Also note how the Chinese military authors published a book in 2015 that explicitly discussed the biowarfare potential of SARS. That’s quite a thing to publish for a military that we are told began secret experiments to create a SARS-like bioweapon the following year. And more generally, what are the odds that the lab with many international collaborators who are also close friends would be the lab chosen for this highly secretive military work? It seems like quite a security risk. But that’s the narrative we’re getting:
And then we get the allegations about how China was working on some sort of coronavirus vaccine in the fall of 2019. This is good time to recall that Moderna claims to have been working with the NIH on mRNA coronavirus vaccines as far back as 2015 and even claimed to have invented the idea of using mRNA vaccines for the betacoronavirus family of viruses. So when we hear about coronavirus-related vaccine research taking place at the WIV in 2019, we almost have to ask whether or not China was trying to keep up with the advances the US had already made on that front years earlier:
And that’s all part of the evolving narrative we’re seeing emerge about the origins of the SARS-CoV‑2 virus. A narrative describing a years-long close collaborative relationship between the WIV and the US government that went all the way up to that March 2018 proposal for creating chimeric viruses with human furin cleavage sites and running animal passaging experiments on humanized mice and then ended. At that point, it was all a diabolical secret Chinese biowarfare scheme that went horribly awry. It’s a highly convenient narrative for the US government. Except for the difficulty in swallowing it. That part is inconvenient.
following up on last week’s Times of London piece that appeared to be the roll out of an updated narrative from the US government about the origins of SARS-CoV‑2 — a narrative that pins the blame for the pandemic on a purported secret shadow project started in 2016 between Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the Chinese military — here’s an article by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag published a few days later on the Public Substack account that appears to be part of the media campaign to push this new narrative. The piece is particularly focused on the conclusion that three members of Shi Zhengli’s lab were the ‘patient zeros’ for the pandemic. It’s not the first time we’ve seen reports coming out based on US government sources highlighting these three ill workers, with Michael R Gordon publishing a piece on this back in May of 2021 in Wall Street Journal. But it’s a detail that has taken on greater significance now that the ‘secret Chinese biowarfare experiments run out of Shi Zhengli’s lab’ narrative is underway. And, in turn, all of the evidence of existence of this virus pre-November 2019 has to be systematically ignored, like the reports of ill athletes with COVID-like symptoms arriving at the Military World Games in Wuhan in October of 2019. These three lab workers are set to be defined as the ‘patient zeroes’, hence this new report filled with unnamed government sources who are now for the first time identifying the three lab workers: Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. An anonymous source says they are “100%” certain the three came down with COVID19, based on the logic that people in their 30s don’t get severe cases of the flu. As Jamie Metzl, a former member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing put it, “It’s a game changer if it can be proven that Hu got sick with COVID-19 before anyone else. That would be the ‘smoking gun.’ Hu was the lead hands-on researcher in Shi’s lab.” And that’s how this is being treated, like ‘smoking gun’ evidence.
The article also indicates that the Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified material, which may include the names of these three lab workers. Beyond that, the article mentions how a bill signed by President Biden earlier this year specifically called for the release of the names and roles of the sick researchers at the WIV, their symptoms and date of symptom onset, and whether these researchers had been involved with or exposed to coronavirus research. Yes, there was literally a law passed this year calling for the identities of these three workers to get released. And that’s why we should expect to be hearing a lot more about Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu and the coronavirus research they were working on. And much less about the years of US government support for that research:
“According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus, “patients zero,” included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the WIV’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses.”
The anonymous officials are talking to the media with a story to tell. A story that purportedly lays out the smoking gun evidence that the virus emerged from Shi Zhengli’s lab at the WIV. According to these US government sources, three members of that lab were among the first people in Wuhan to come down with COVID19 in mid-November of 2019. It’s basically the same story we first heard back in May of 2021 when the WSJ first reported on these three members of Shi’s lab getting ill, but with a few additional details. This is a good time to recall that SkyNews 2021 documentary that featured an alleged Chinese defector, Wei Jingsheng, who claims to have been alerting US officials about a possible viral outbreak in Wuhan in October of 2019 and speculating that the Chinese Communist Party was using the Military World Games as a biological warfare superspreader event. It was just one of a number of stories hinting at the virus circulating months before December 2019, including the reports of ill athletes at the Military World Games. All of those stories are going to have to be ignored for this new narrative to take hold:
And as this article points out, it’s not the only article slated to be published on this topic on the near future. Instead, these unnamed US investigators are bringing this narrative to multiple media outlets, including last week’s Times of London article alleging a secret shadow project being run by Shi Zhengli’s lab in collaboration with the Chinese military. And next week, the US Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified information including the names of these three WIV workers. Names that were already just published in this report:
And then there’s the fact that the US government passed a law specifically calling for the released of the names and roles of these sick WIV workers. This is the like official consensus narrative for the US government:
And as part of that narrative, we’re going to be seeing frequent references to how the research at the WIV was conducted in BSL‑2 conditions. And while those facts aren’t really in dispute at this point, it’s important to keep in mind that the WIV was effectively built and trained by the international community. Beyond that, the safety protocols used for the experiments being conducted by Shi’s lab probably wouldn’t have been a secret to the WIV’s EcoHealth Alliance collaborators. Also recall the June 2019 Masters Thesis focused on the RatG13/4991 virus — the closest known natural viral cousin to SARS-CoV‑2 — published by a student in Shi’s lab that described the BSL‑2 conditions used for the project. That includes the BSL‑2 conditions that were used for work involving the creation of chimeric bat coronaviruses that was published in 2017 and co-authored by Peter Daszak. So while those BSL‑2 conditions were indeed problematic, they weren’t a secret:
And then we get to this very interesting detail discussed in the Times of London piece: in March of 2018, a project was proposed by the WIV, EcoHealth Alliance, and Ralph Baric’s lab at Chapel Hill to engineer “furin cleavage sites” into SARS-like viruses. DARPA rejected the grant but we are told the WIV went ahead with the research anyway. It’s clearly being put forward as key point in the ‘China did it!’ narrative being constructed by the US government...and yet it simultaneously just underscores how deeply involved the US government was in Shi Zhengli’s research. We are expected to believe that the Chinese government had its top biowarfare lab make a pitch to DARPA for the kind of work that was allegedly going on in parallel with secret military experiments on hidden viruses:
So as we can see, this ‘patient zero’ narrative is rapidly taking shape, with more details presumably on the way after the Directorate of National Intelligence releases more classified information. Along with more articles citing unnamed government sources insisting on how these newly declassified details further support the “100%” conclusions of the US government’s investigation. We’re clearly out of the “we have no idea how this happened” stage of the coverup and have now entered the “we know entirely what happened, trust us on this one” phase.
@Pterrafractyl–
Apart from the indications of “Consciousness of guilt” highlighted in, among other programs, FTR#1256 (https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr1256-pandemics-inc-part‑6/), none of the narrative takes into account a fundamental element of the discussion:
“Synthetic biology raises risk of new bioweapons, US report warns” by Ian Sample; The Guardian; 06/19/2018
The rapid rise of synthetic biology, a futuristic field of science that seeks to master the machinery of life, has raised the risk of a new generation of bioweapons, according a major US report into the state of the art. . . .
“ . . . 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] Imperiale. “It requires some expertise, but it’s something that’s relatively easy to do, and that is why it tops the list. . . .”
The entire debate is anachronistic.
Keep up the great work!
Best,
Dave
Sometimes the narrative just won’t budge, despite all the efforts. We got a reminder of that early this month with the recent declassification of a US intelligence community report on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. A report that more or less downplays the many assertions we heard during last month’s full court press push in the media hinting at US intelligence that reveals the origins of the SARS-CoV‑2 virus as the fruits of a secret Chinese military biowarfare collaboration with Shi Zhengli’s lab. As the following ProPublica piece describes, the declassified report specifically addresses the activity at the Wuhan Institution of Virology (WIV) in November of 2019 that has become a focal point for the ‘WIV lab leak’ narrative: the three ill WIV workers and WIV safety training that took place that month. According to the declassified report, the three ill workers had symptoms that were not consistent with COVID19 and the safety training that month was just run-of-the-mill.
So instead of indicating a big new narrative that we were going to be hearing from the US government, all those reports instead seem to reflect the ongoing divisions within the US intelligence community and a public relations narrative fight playing out. A public narrative fight that had a big new twist this week, seemingly accidentally: the House Republicans on the subcommittee probing the origins of the pandemic released a subcommittee report last week focused on the question of what the research community actually suspected in the early months of the pandemic. Specifically, the now notorious “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV‑2” letter to Nature Medicine back in March of 2020 that attempted to preempt any serious discussion of a possible lab leak. The released subcommittee report contains a number of cropped images of email and Slack exchanges between the authors of that Nature letter. But it also turns out the PDF document still contains the full image information for those cropped images, meaning anyone with the proper software can take the PDF and recover the complete images of those email and Slack screenshots. Which is precisely what The Intercept proceeded to do. As the uncropped screenshots make clear, the the possibility of “lab leak” or some sort of lab based origin weighed heavily on the authors, along with pressure from “on high” to squash any discussion of the possibility.
Was the release of this PDF report containing these damning conversations truly a mistake? Or is this just the latest phase in the ongoing narrative battle? Time will tell, but the narrative battle only seems to be heating up at this point. Ok, first, here’s that ProPublica report on the surprising tame declassified intelligence report:
“The intelligence report was issued in June in response to a law, passed unanimously, that required the director of national intelligence to declassify information regarding the origins of COVID-19. The report confirmed prior news accounts that the intelligence community is divided about the cause of the pandemic, but it did not provide specifics about how different agencies reached their conclusions. While some believe the virus likely first infected a human through a research-related accident, others say it’s more likely that the contagion naturally spilled over from animal to human. The report stated that “all agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible.””
As we can see, the recently declassified intelligence report was a surprisingly non-accusatory document. Surprising given the media push we witnessed last month with reports asserting the US intelligence community has evidence of a secret Chinese biowarfare program operating out of Shi Zhengli’s lab and the fact that the interim report by the Republican oversight staff of a Senate committee last year concluded the safety training at the WIV in November 2019 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident”. But instead of following up on those allegations, the declassified report dismisses the November 2019 safety training as just run-of-mill and not reflective of an emergency response:
As we also saw, those ill WIV workers have become one of the focal points of the new narrative about secret Chinese military biowarfare experiments. The report similarly asserted that the symptoms of the three ill WIV workers were not consistent with COVID19:
It’s basically a 180 reversal from narratives we were seeing pushed by elements of the US government and intelligence community last month. An intelligence community that still remains divided in terms of their official best guess as to the origins of the pandemic. Are we seeing some sort of public relations turf war play out? It’s looking like that’s the case. And that brings us to another story about 180 COVID narrative reversals: The Intercept appears to have obtained rock solid evidence of something we’ve had reason to suspect all along. Evidence that the leading virologists who authored the “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV‑2” letter to Nature Medicine back in March of 2020 that attempted to preempt any serious discussion of a possible lab leak were actually very open to a lab leak at the time. That evidence came in the form of a PDF document released by House Republicans serving on the committing probing the pandemic’s origins. The report contained limited cropped images of emails and Slack exchanges between the authors as they were formulating that Nature letter. But it turns out those cropped images in the report still contained the complete images of the emails and Slack exchanges, which could be recovered using various PDF manipulation techniques. Which is exactly what The Intercept proceeded to do, exposing a number of highly revealing conversations and a complete 180 reversal:
“Much of Tuesday’s hearing focused on a critical few days in early February 2020, beginning with a conference call February 1 that included the eventual authors of the paper and Drs. Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, then head of its parent agency, the National Institutes of Health. Later minutes showed that the consensus among the experts leaned toward a lab escape. Yet within days, they were circulating a draft — including to Fauci and Collins — that came to the opposite conclusion, the first draft of which had been finished the same day of the conference call. How and why that rapid turnaround occurred has been the subject of much debate and interrogation.”
A complete reversal of the expert consensus. The leading virologists who eventually authored the “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV‑2” Nature Medicine letter dismissing any possibility of a lab leak were actually highly suspicious of a lab leak just a month earlier. That’s what the available evidence points towards. Evidence that was apparently accidentally released by congress in the form of a congressional report that contained a number of cropped images of emails and Slack messages from early February 2020. Cropped images that were recovered by The Intercept showing conversions that run highly contrary to the public message that was released the following month. Who knows if this was an intentional ‘whoops’ by Congress, but it happened:
And note how Kristian Andersen didn’t just see a lab leak as plausible but described it as “highly likely” in response to colleagues who wanted to conclusively rule out the scenario:
Then there’s Eddie Holmes’s reference to “pressure from on high”. Pressures presumably from someone higher up at the NIH:
Finally, note how the “pressure from on high” was coming from another source: the anonymous reviewers for their “Proximal Origin” Nature letter:
This is a good time to recall how the authors of that Nature letter were Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes & Robert F. Garry. And all but Lipkin are co-authors on a Feb 2022 paper asserting two separate zoonotic events in Wuhan the fall of 2019 as the likeliest origin for the pandemic. Why two zoonotic events instead of one? Because two events would explain the genetic diversity of the virus observed in the earliest cases. It’s further evidence that any seriously investigations into a man-made virus scenario remains highly contentious for this particular research community.
With House Republicans and at least some segment of the US intelligence community still clearly trying to find a way to push the ‘Chinese bioweapon’ narrative, at the same time the declassified intelligence report has already been released and directly contradicts that narrative, we’re presumably going to be in store for a more intense battle of the narratives in coming months. So it’s worth keeping in mind that, at this point, the narrative battle is exclusively between ‘did China do it?’ vs ‘no one did it’. No other possibilities are under serious consideration. Which is a pretty big meta-narrative win for all parties involved.
This could get very interesting. Or be a complete dud: A group of families just filed lawsuits in New York over the COVID deaths of their loved ones. The targets of the lawsuit? Manhattan-based EcoHealth Alliance, and its president Peter Daszak. According to the suit, EcoHealth Alliance knew the pandemic was the result of a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and worked to cover that up. How did the EcoHealth Alliance know that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak from the WIV? Because it helped develop the virus as part of its collaboration with Shi Zhengli’s lab at the WIV. Those are the accusations in the new lawsuit. Significant accusations that both threaten powerful interests — like the unofficial component of the biowarfare establishment that exists through dual use endeavors like the EcoHealth Alliance — while also protecting them by keeping the focus squarely on research in China. And that’s why this is the kind of lawsuit that could get tossed out and fizzle right out of the gates. Or the kind of lawsuit that opens up a can of worms that could be very difficult to close:
“Despite partially-funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the virus originated, EcoHealth failed to make sure critical safety measures were in place — then worked to cover up the origins of the outbreak they claimed in court papers.”
The SARS-CoV‑2 virus emerged from Shi Zhengli’s lab at the WIV from research done in partnership with EcoHealth Alliance, the EcoHealth Alliance knew it, and they all worked to cover it up. That’s the core of the lawsuit. Or, rather, lawsuits, since it sounds like this same legal time has filed separate related suits in both Nassau and Rockland Counties:
So given that the lawsuit specifically claims that the virus escaped from the WIV as part of the EcoHealth Alliance-sponsored research, and doesn’t seem to include the possibility of a lab (or release) from any of the other labs around the world engage in similar coronavirus research at the time, it’s going to be interesting to see if the existence of other labs conducting similar kinds of research comes up at all during the course of the lawsuit.
And that brings us to the following Time interview of a figure who is most assuredly going to come up should that lawsuit go to trial because he was a central player in the EcoHealth Alliance’s coronavirus research network: Ralph Baric, whose Chapel Hill lab has been leading the way on coronavirus research since the early 80s. And as we’ve seen, Baric’s lab has also been leading the way in gain-of-function or gain-of-function-adjacent research, and done so in collaboration with Shi Zhengli’s lab. Baric was working on developing coronavirus therapeutics back in 2017 using gain-of-function-created coronaviruses in collaboration with Shi Zhengli’s lab at the WIV. And Baric also helped test the Moderna covid vaccine in 2020. And as we’ve also seen, Baric and Daszak were in direct communication and agreement in the early months of the pandemic on the need for the virology community to communicate to the public that a lab leak was highly unlikely. A stance that looks increasingly deceptive based on recently revealed emails and communications. This is a lawsuit that can’t really happen without an understanding of the leading role Baric had played in the overall effort.
And that’s also all part of what makes it rather remarkable that Baric has been pointing an accusatory finger at the WIV and calling for a stronger investigation into China’s role in the creation of the virus. Accusatory fingers are being flung in a lot of directions. Including, as the following article notes, China’s calls for an international investigation of Baric’s lab as part of the hunt for COVID’s origins. Despite all that, Baric is apparently working on a pan-coronavirus vaccine currently undergoing trials in primates. Should the tests go well, human trials could be started later this year:
“A decade later, as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, the long-simmering debate around gain-of-function research spilled into public view, and Baric’s work became an easy target. After Rand Paul’s fiery congressional hearing speech opened the floodgates, the Chinese government—increasingly under pressure about the origins of the pandemic and sensing an opportunity to deflect blame—followed suit. In an open letter to the director of the World Health Organization released on Aug. 25, 2021, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations demanded that Baric’s lab be subject to a “transparent investigation with full access” to trace the origins of COVID-19. That placed Baric in rarefied air: a scapegoat for politicians in both the U.S. and China.”
China called for an investigation of Barci’s lab as part of the investigation into the origins of COVID-19. It’s not something we’ve heard much about. Will the new lawsuits change that?
But even more directly related to the lawsuit is Baric’s own criticisms of the relatively lax BSL‑2 safety protocols that Shi Zhengli’s lab was reportedly conducting these experiments under, along with his insistence that governments are the main responsible parties in this story. These were experiments done in collaboration with the international research partnership funded by the US government and headed up by EcoHealth Alliance, after all. An international research partnership in which Baric has long played a key role:
And keep in mind that Baric’s collaboration with Shi Zhengli’s lab goes back to at least 2013, when SARS-related viral genomes collected in China were sent to Baric’s lab, at which point those genomes were used in a variety of experiments that included gain-of-function studies. You can’t really separate what happened at the WIV from the research at Baric’s lab:
And as we can also see, Baric’s collaboration with Shi Zhengli’s lab didn’t just involve the study of coronaviruses. It also involved the study of coronavirus vaccines. In fact, that now notorious study involviong the creation of a chimeric virus using the SHC014 virus and a mouse-adapted SARS virus — which was allowed to continue even after the 2014 US GoF research ban — was part of this vaccine development work. Work that apparently convinced Baric of the need to develop a pan-coronavirus vaccine. Baric now predicts he’ll begin human trials on such a vaccine later this year:
And while it’s unclear if this lawsuit will include any allegations of injuries from the mRNA vaccines themselves, and not just the SARS-CoV‑2 virus, it’s also worth noting that Baric was apparently playing a leading role in Operation Warp Speed. And it was in that role that Baric was deeply impressed by the ability of mRNA vaccines to include an immune response in elderly and immunocompromised individuals that isn’t triggered by more traditional vaccines. It’s the kind of observation that is being touted as a clear positive feature by Baric and other today, but could be seen in a very different light as the research into vaccine side effects continues to play out, along with any associated lawsuits:
And then we get to this rather notable historic perspective: when Baric first start working in this area, coronaviruses were thought of as benign, quirky viruses with little potential to ignite a deadly pandemic. That was in fact part of their appeal as a platform for learning about how viruses work. It was only after years of this kind research that we saw the first coronaviruses capable of creating deadly pandemics emerge. Is that a coincidence? That question is implicitly at the heart of this lawsuit:
And then, finally, there’s this anecdote that can’t help but fuel dark speculation: the eerily prescient predictions Baric made back in May of 2018, including the prediction that the upcoming pandemic was designed by scientists:
Were those eerily prescient May 2018 comments merely a reflection of Baric’s insights about the unfolding risks facing the world? Or were they part of some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that resulted from his collaboration with the EcoHealth Alliance? That’s presumably what this new lawsuit is going to be investigating. Along with all the other lawsuits that inevitably emerge as this all plays out.
There’s an interesting new narrative about the origins of COVID we’re hearing from US officials. The kind of narrative that is a great example of how many parallels there are to the biological mysteries like COVID and hacking incidents like the DNC hack. Parallels like the fact that our understanding of these events is heavily shaped by narratives that don’t actually have very much evidence to back them up:
US officials recently spoke with Bloomberg about a previously unknown hacking incident. Although it wasn’t an incident so much as it was a highly unusual months-long denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeting the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The DDoS attack started in October of 2019 and continue into March of 2020. So a five month long DDoS attack targeting US agencies involved with health and pandemics wasn’t launched just a couple months before the formal outbreak of the COVID pandemic. But the DDoS attack wasn’t about blocking off access to these agency networks. It was, instead, designed to study the US’s response to the attack in order to better understand how these networks operate, in anticipation of more intelligence gathering down the line. That’s what we are now being told by US officials.
Who was behind it? Well, while there doesn’t appear to any hard evidence backing this up, US officials are suggesting it was China behind the attack. That’s not the official conclusion of investigation conducted by HHS and the Office of Inspector General (OIG), which didn’t reach any conclusion about who was behind it. And yet, we are told that US officials strongly suspect China was behind it due to the scope, complexity, and timing of the attack.
And that timing angle brings us to how this narrative is playing into the broader ‘Chinese lab leak’ narrative. According to Robert Kadlec, who was assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS from 2017 to 2021, it’s significant that the attacks started earlier than December 2019, the month the Chinese government has said COVID began spreading in the country. Kadlec conducted an investigation into the origins of COVID for former North Carolina Republican Senator Richard Burr and concluded in his report that the virus likely emerged in Wuhan in late October/early November. Kadlec is now suggesting that this could explain why the DDoS attack started in October. As Kadlec puts it, “Was it to try and break in and see what we know? Or was it to impede or affect our ability to conduct HHS activities, maybe even response activities?”
So we have a narrative about China being behind the hack based pretty much exclusively on timing and supposition that the virus emerged in Wuhan in October 2019. But it’s not like there’s no evidence available at all regarding who was involved with the hack. Instead, it turns out OIG, working with Ukrainian authorities, linked the attacks to an organization and at least one person connected to Ukraine. We are told it’s unclear whether the OIG had concluded that the attack originated there or just involved Ukrainian people or equipment. So we have a vague statement from OIG about someone in Ukraine being involved with the attack, along with the OIG’s formal lack of any conclusion as to who was behind it, and yet we have US officials now peddling these story about how it was actually China.
Now, when it comes to the feasibility of the virus emerging in Wuhan in October of 2019, it’s worth keeping in mind that we’ve seen a number of reports from a variety of sources pointing in this direction. For example, there was the whole story about the World Military Games hosted in Wuhan that month and concerns about sick athletes like the Italian military athletes who reported COVID-like symptoms at the World Military Games in Wuhan in late October 2019. And then there was that Italian study that found evidence of SARS-CoV‑2 circulating in Italy in the last quarter of 2019. And the study by a private satellite image analysis company that looked at satellite imagery of hospital parking lots around Wuhan hospitals and detected some sort of unseasonal increased hospital traffic in Wuhan as early as October 2019. And while that study was largely dismissed as highly speculative and not at all conclusive, it raised the point that hospitals around the world were experiencing unusually heavy cases of flu-like illnesses in the fall of 2019, including hospitals in places like Louisiana. Finally, the study put out by that team in Cambridge estimated the date of the initial infection in humans to have taken place some time between September 13 and December 7. The middle of that date range would be the last week of October, right when these World Military Games were taking place. This study confirmed the findings of an earlier Chinese study that found that there appears to have been an older strain of the virus that mutated to a more virulent form in Wuhan that nearly completely replaced the older strain. It’s not hard to imagine the virus was spreading in Wuhan in October of 2019 given all the evidence that the virus was already percolating around the globe by the that point.
At the same time, the idea that China became super alarmed in October of 2019 over a lab leak contradicts those other narratives we got about WIV workers first falling ill in November of 2019, since these workers would presumably have to had fallen ill at least a month earlier for China to initiate some sort of massive hacking campaign in response to a lab leak. We have ‘China leaked it!’ narrative conflicts here. Did China leak it in October or November of 2019? Pick your narrative?
But for this particular ‘China was behind the HHS narrative’, it appears that we are supposed to assume that, yes, the virus emerged in China in October and, in response, China in waged an unprecedented DDoS campaign against the US’s systems associated with health, disease and biological research. A five month long DDoS attack that was masking a broader intelligence gathering operation. Which is a fascinating narrative given the context of US/Chinese collaboration on the coronavirus research at the WIV. Because it’s the kind of narrative that would, if anything, be in keeping with the idea that the Chinese government suspected the US somehow knew something about the virus that was suddenly emerging in Wuhan.
And, and there’s a fun follow up hacking story in relation to all this: Back in April of 2022, we are told that China was behind a hacking campaign targeting systems in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Poland. The campaign started on February 23, 2022, the eve of the Russian invasion. And according to US officials, China launched the attacks from Western infrastructure and did so in an unusually ‘noisy’ manner that suggested to these officials that China was waging a false flag attack intended to implicate Western governments in the hack. No actual evidence was provided for the Chinese attribution.
So in October of 2019, China launched a massive DDoS attack on US health and disease related infrastructure out of Ukraine, and then in 2022, China hacked Ukraine from the US. Or at least those are the narratives we are told. Based on basically zero evidence, but a lot of conviction from the largely unnamed officials. And according to this latest narrative, the virus emerged in Wuhan right around the time of the World Military Games, resulting in China suddenly becoming extremely paranoid about what the US might know about this emerging disease. The US officials may not have put it in quite those terms, but that’s more or less what they are suggesting with this new narrative:
“A DDoS attack isn’t usually the signature of sophisticated hackers; it’s sometimes likened to vandalism. The HHS attackers did distinguish themselves, though, by sheer scale. They sent billions of fraudulent connection requests, making the incident in March 2020 the largest DDoS attack the US government had ever experienced, according to the documents reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek. It was the culmination of a series of attacks that began the previous October, an unusually long time for a DDoS campaign.”
That’s quite a claim. So the department of HHS experienced a DDoS that seemingly peaked in March of 2020 but started in October of 2019. Following the initial DDoS attacks, the hackers then moved on to more narrowly focused attacks on the CDC, FDA, and NIAID. And for reasons that have yet to be fully explained, US officials suspect China was behind it. Or at least that’s what we are told from the articles sources, although the HHS-OIG’s official investigation didn’t actually arrive at a conclusion. Why China? Well, these officials have concluded it must be a state actor based on the duration and scale of the attack. That appears to be much of the basis for the ‘China did it’ narrative here:
But then we get to the other part of the apparent basis for attribute this hack to China: Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS from 2017 to 2021, conducted an investigation into the COVID pandemic’s origin for former North Carolina Republican Senator Richard Burr and concluded that the virus likely emerged as early as October in China from a lab leak. So the DDoS campaign started in October 2019 allegedly by China allegedly was started in response to the COVID lab leak, according to this narrative. Again, recall the Italian military athletes who reported COVID-like symptoms at the World Military Games in Wuhan in late October 2019. And then there was that Italian study that found evidence of SARS-CoV‑2 circulating in Italy in the last quarter of 2019. And the study by a private satellite image analysis company that looked at satellite imagery of hospital parking lots around Wuhan hospitals and detected some sort of unseasonal increased hospital traffic in Wuhan as early as October 2019. And while that study was largely dismissed as highly speculative and not at all conclusive, it raised the point that hospitals around the world were experiencing unusually heavy cases of flu-like illnesses in the fall of 2019, including hospitals in places like Louisiana. Finally, the study put out by that team in Cambridge estimated the date of the initial infection in humans to have taken place some time between September 13 and December 7. The middle of that date range would be the last week of October, right when these World Military Games were taking place. This study confirmed the findings of an earlier Chinese study that found that there appears to have been an older strain of the virus that mutated to a more virulent form in Wuhan that nearly completely replaced the older strain. It’s not hard to imagine the virus was spreading in Wuhan in October of 2019 given all the evidence that the virus was already percolating around the globe by the that point.
At the same time, the idea that China became super alarmed in October of 2019 over a lab leak contradicts those other narratives we got about WIV workers first falling ill in November of 2019, since these workers would presumably have to had fallen ill at least a month earlier for China to initiate some sort of massive hacking campaign in response to a lab leak. But for this particular ‘China was behind the HHS narrative’, it appears that we are supposed to assume that, yes, the virus emerged in China in October and, in response, China in waged an unprecedented DDoS campaign against the US’s systems associated with health, disease and biological research. A five month long DDoS attack that was masking a broader intelligence gathering operation. Which is a fascinating narrative given the context of US/Chinese collaboration on the coronavirus research at the WIV. Because it’s the kind of narrative that would, if anything, be in keeping with the idea that the Chinese government suspected the US somehow knew something about the virus that was suddenly emerging in Wuhan:
And it only gets more puzzling: the OIG’s investigation included working with Ukrainian law enforcement authorities because at least one person connected to the attacks was in Ukraine. So the one person the US and Ukrainian authorities connected this DDoS attack to was in Ukraine, but they are still blaming China. Keep in mind that hackers don’t typically need to physically be in another country to make it look like the attack emerged from that country. Why would someone have to be inside Ukraine for this attack? We are given no explanation:
Finally, note this admission: “There’s not an intelligence agency on Earth that didn’t get in on this.” So every intelligence agency on the planet ‘got in on this’, and yet they still insist it was China behind it:
It will be interesting to see how this narrative evolves. But it’s worth noting the parallels to another story about an alleged hack by China involving the US and Ukraine. A story first published in April of 2022, a month and a half into the war in Ukraine, about an alleged Chinese hack of Ukrainian networks that took place on February 23, 2022, the eve of the Russian invasion. The hack didn’t exclusively target Ukraine and also targeted systems in Russia, Belarus, and Poland. A hack notable for how ‘noisy’ and ‘amateurish’ it was but also for be launched from Western infrastructure. Western officials go on to suggest that the hack was an intentional ‘false flag’ intended to implicate Western governments in the hack.
So what is the evidence that it was Chinese hackers behind this? No evidence is given. We’re just told that Western officials allege it was Chinese false flag attack intended to frame the West, and that’s it:
“The Times first reported that hackers, alleged to be based in China, began targeting Ukrainian websites on 23 February, the day before the invasion.”
And now it’s Ukraine’s turn to get hacked by China, we are told. This time on the eve of the Russian invasion. But Ukraine wasn’t the only target. Russia, Belarus, and Poland were also hit. At least that’s the claim we were getting from unnamed ‘western intelligence officials’ in April of 2022. A claim that couldn’t be verified. And, interesting, a claim that Ukraine’s security services denied or downplayed:
But then we get to the fun twist on this story: the alleged Chinese hackers not only launched the hacking campaign from Western infrastructure, but did so while acting more amateurish and ‘noisy’ than normal. Based on these details, it is suggested that this was part of an intentional ‘false flag’ attack to pin it on Western governments. This is a good time to recall how, in July of 2016, US intelligence officials were suggesting that the amateurish and ‘noisy’ hack of the DNC — filled with Cyrillic characters, etc — was an indication that the alleged Russian hackers wanted to get caught. But in this case, the amateurish and noisy behavior of these hackers is part of some sort of Chinese false flag attack. It’s an example of how amenable these hacking mysteries are to pretty much any narrative one might want to tell. It’s easy to make up narratives when it’s all a bunch of guess work taking place in a digital hall of mirrors, after all:
And as we always have to keep in mind with these kinds of flimsy hacking attribution stories, whenever governments come out make allegations like this that appear to be driven more based on politics and wishful thinking than any real evidence, that only encourages more hacks like this. It’s one thing to live in a world where all sorts of groups have the ability to execute effectively anonymous hacks. It’s another thing to live in a world where all sorts of groups have the ability to execute effectively anonymous hacks and governments routinely peddling to the public stories about who was behind it. In other words, either these narratives are correct or these narratives are running cover for the real hackers.
And, again, there doesn’t appear to be any substantive evidence that China was indeed behind the October 2019 DDoS attack. But if China was behind it, that only points more heavily towards the World Military Games serving as a kind of superspreader event for Wuhan. It’s obviously not the narrative these US officials were intended to promote. But it is what it is.
@Pterrafractyl–
Recall that the CIA’s cyber-weaponry is designed to imitate Chinese hackers, among others.
Keep up the great work!
Best,
Dave