On the Condemnation of "Conspiracy
Theories" as a Device for Protecting Officialdom’s Lies, Disinformation,
and Obfuscation
The Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic of 2019-20 is moving many markers where
life merges into death, where truth merges into lies. At age 34, Dr. Li
Wenliang drew attention in Wuhan to these moving markers. The disease Dr. Li
sought to warn against ended up taking his life as the epidemic gained fatal
traction.
Before going down himself in the line of duty, Dr. Li faced a harsh
reprimand from representatives of the Chinese Communist Party. Dr. Li was
accused of spreading rumors and illegally threatening the social order with his
tweets and posts and personal interventions. Nevertheless, Dr. Li was soon
vindicated in calling attention to the coming plague.
It did not take long before the appalling force of the illness
demonstrated that Dr. Li was anything but a wayward conspiracy theorist.
Instead, the evidence proved him right even as it proved his powerful
detractors were both wrong and negligent in the face of a genuine menace.
Dr. Li Wenliang is a martyr. It
remains to be seen, however, how far the shadow of Dr. Li’s martyrdom will be
cast.
The Novel Coronavirus,
COVID-19, is cutting a broad and deep swath though
epidemiological history with uncertain impact on the viability of many
families, communities, institutions, economies, and even countries starting
with the most heavily populated nation on earth. Many fates are hanging in the
balance, not the least of which is that of the communist government that has
ruled China since the Maoist Revolution brought it to power in 1949.
The new strain of Coronavirus
has added novel genetic features to the same family of pathogens that brought
the world the SARS crisis in 2002-3 and, a decade later, the less lethal MERS
outbreak. This Novel Coronavirus strain, COVID-19, is showing itself to be much
more contagious and lethal than was SARS and MERS.
Some have anticipated that, if
not dramatically countered, the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic could be headed in
the direction of the Spanish
flu outbreak of 1918. This prediction flows from the assessment
of, for instance, Prof. Gabriel Leung, Chair of Public Health Medicine at Hong
King University. Looking at the very fast rate of COVID-19’s spread from human
to human through the air, Dr. Leung challenged any residual sense of
complacency. He anticipated a possible 60 per cent infection rate of the
world’s entire population with deaths numbering in the many tens of millions.
The so-called Spanish flu has
set the bar for how severe and widespread a contagious plague can become. The
pandemic of 1918 took more lives in one year than all deaths due to World War
II. The Spanish flu of 1918 engendered more mortality in one year than the four
peak years of the notorious Black Death Bubonic Plague that decimated Europe in
the middle years of the fourteenth century. The worldwide pandemic of 1918
infected over a quarter of all people on earth. About 65 million people died
from the illness.
News reports from the ground
zero area of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic demonstrate that the effects of the
viral infection cut far and wide. Every facet of Chinese society is being
challenged to the limit by a fast-spreading plague disseminating germs of
destruction disrupting many biological, political, economic, and knowledge
systems simultaneously.
Questions about how to interpret the epidemic and how to explain to the
public what is known or not known are quickly coming into focus. Who should be
believed? Who is credible and who is not credible as the epidemic unfolds. What
should be the role of social media and of whistle blowers in the process of
deciding how to respond? What happens when genuine whistle blowers like Dr. Li
are too quickly dismissed and reprimanded by ruling authorities as “conspiracy
theorists”?
An essential task that must be
faced in this initial phase of this crisis is to develop an accurate
explanation of where contagion came from and how the first victims of the Novel
Coronavirus came to be infected. The need for some degree of certainty about
the origins of the virus and its subsequent genesis is absolutely essential to
the development of sound and appropriate responses. It would be highly
irresponsible to rush ahead with the development of an overall strategy for
dealing with the plague without making an honest attempt to get at the truth of
how the contagion first came into existence.
The importance of getting to
the factual roots of what happened to put humanity on this epidemiological
trajectory should be especially clear after the debacle of September 11, 2001.
Without any sustained investigation of the 9/11 crimes, Americans were rushed
into cycles of seemingly perpetual warfare abroad, police state and
surveillance state interventions at home. This cycle of fast responses began
within a month of 9/11 with a full-fledge military invasion of Afghanistan, an
invasion that continues yet.
When two US Senators, Patrick
Leahy and Tom Daschle, sought to slow the rush of the US executive into
emergency measures and war, they and the US Congress they served were hit hard
by a military grade bioweapon, anthrax. The violent tactic of the saboteurs
proved effective in easing aside close scrutiny that might have slowed down the
fast approval by the end of October of Congress’s massive Patriot Act.
Since then a seemingly endless
cycle of military invasions has been pushed forward in the Middle East and
Eurasia. The emergency measure powers claimed by the executive branch of the US
government extended to widespread illegal torture, domestic spying, media
censorship and a meteoric rise in extrajudicial murders especially by drones.
This list is far from complete.
All of these crimes against humanity were justified on the basis of an
unproven official explanation of 9/11. Subsequent scholarly investigations have
demonstrated unequivocally for the attentive that officialdom’s explanations of
what transpired on the fateful day in September were wrong, severely
wrong. The initial interpretations are
strongly at variance with the evidentiary record available on the public
record.
We must not allow ourselves to
be hoodwinked in the same manner once again. The stakes are too large, maybe
even larger than was the case in 2001. The misinterpreted and misrepresented events of 9/11 were
exploited in conformity with the “Shock Doctrine,” a strategy for
instituting litanies of invasive state actions that the public would not
otherwise have accepted.
The conscientious portion of
humanity, many of whose members have done independent homework of their own on
the events of 9/11, will well understand the importance of identifying the actual
originating source of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic.
No less than in the wake
of the 9/11 debacle,
there are grave dangers entailed in being too quick or too naïve or too
trustful in immediately accepting as gospel fact the Chinese government’s
initial explanations of the COVID-19 outbreak. Why not take the time to
investigate and test the current interpretations of the authorities that proved
themselves to be so wrong in their decision to reprimand Dr. Li?
Especially when the stakes are
extremely high, the need is great for objective, third-party adjudication to
establish what really happened irrespective of official interpretations.
History provides abundant evidence to demonstrate that official interpretations
of transformative events often veer away from the truth in order to serve and
protect the interests of entrenched power.
All semblance of due process
and the rule of law can quickly evaporate when powerful institutions advance
interpretations of catastrophic events used to justify their own open-ended
invocation of unlimited emergency measure powers. The well-documented examples
of the misrepresentation and exploitation of the 9/11 debacle demonstrate well
the severity of the current danger. The origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus
epidemic have yet to be adequately addressed and explained by a panel of
genuinely independent investigators.
The Chinese Ambassador to the United
States, Cui Tiankai, acknowledged on Feb. 9 on CBS’s Face
the Nation that there is no certainty about the origins of COVID-19.
When asked by CBS’s Margaret Brennan where the virus came from, the Chinese
Ambassador responded, “We still don’t know yet.”
Although media giants like
the Washington
Post have run interference to
justify the claims of established authority in this fiasco, there is still a
high level of uncertainty about what COVID-19 is, where it came from, and why
it spread so quickly. What factors resulted in the genetic modifications
determining the biological structure of the new Coronavirus strain? What
happened in the biological journey from the SARS Coronavirus to the Coronavirus
strain that triggered the epidemiological bombshell starting in Wuhan?
Did the Chinese communist
government have a role in creating COVID-19 either purposely or inadvertently?
What did the Chinese government know when did its leadership know it? Such
basic questions have yet to be objectively considered by a panel of genuinely
independent experts not beholden to any centers of established authority,
funding, publicity and political networking.
The need to transcend all
conflict of interest in the formal investigation of this matter must somehow be
realized if objectivity is to prevail in the process of unearthing, organizing
and assessing the evidence. The primary objective of this process must be to
bring out the truth, no matter how embarrassing such illuminations might be to
the interests of entrenched power. A process must be initiated without any
pandering to the political biases of institutions and individuals with much to
protect, with major interests in determining the outcome of the investigations.
One version of events is that
the contagion began when some mutated viral disease strain jumped from a bat or
a snake into the biological workings of one of more humans. This animal to human leap is
supposed to have taken place in the precincts of Wuhan’s open-air traditional
food market where bats, snakes, cats, raccoons, fish, possums and the like can
be bought and sold.
A growing perception of
disbelief is developing in the face of the idea that all this mayhem started
with a few people chomping down on some fatally infected critters purchased
an open-air market.
In fact, this explanation is becoming the subject of much satire and ridicule
even as the horrifying nature of the unfolding of events is intensifying.
Another possible source of the
contagion is the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, one of China’s most
high-tech installations designed for biological research into the most deadly
forms of viruses known to humankind. This research facility, with top level 4
containment capacities, emerged from the expansion and elaboration of an older
agency known as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory
As shall be demonstrated, the
Wuhan Institute of Virology is thought by some experts, including a prestigious
group at the South China Technological University in Guangzhou, to be the
probable source of the contaminant. As shall be demonstrated below, the Wuhan
Institute of Virology and its outgrowth, The National Biosafety
Laboratory, are thought by some to
be integrated with more secretive sites where the military operations of
China’s alleged biological warfare program are centered.
A focus on the kind of
procedures that take place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology begs the question
of whether an accidental viral escape from this agency forms the primary origin
of the epidemic. Another possibility is that some sort of power play within China’s
ruling elite might have led to the decision to create and release a bioweapon
in the heart of one of the most heavily populated zones on earth.
Yet another possibility is that
the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic is part of some agenda of “hybrid warfare” by
the US government against China. Speculation surrounding
this scenario emphasizes that hundreds of US soldiers were
in Wuhan in late October of 2019 for the World Military Games.
As Mark Episkopos has argued in The National Interest, the theory that the US
government is behind the spread of the COVID-19 Coronavirus has been well
reported in some mainstream media venues in Russia. This “rumor” is also one
that Chinese Ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, specifically referred
on CBS’s Face
the Nation when
he fended off the allegation that China’s biological warfare program was
somehow implicated in the epidemic’s origins.
One of those interviewed on the
subject is Igor Nikulin. Mr Nikulin has argued, “Wuhan was chosen for the attack
[by US military officials] because the local presence of the Wuhun Institute of
Virology offers the Pentagon and CIA a convenient cover story about
bio-experiments gone awry.”
If it turns out the source of
the Novel Coronavirus epidemic is a biological warfare weapon, yet another
question concerns whether the attack germ is genetically engineered to target a
specific ethnic group. Drawing on his observations of US biological research in
some of the former republics of the Soviet Union, Nikulin remarked,
the supposedly Pentagon-funded
U.S. laboratories in Eurasia have been collecting and treating genetic material
from Russian and Chinese populations to allegedly create an “ethnically
specific” virus that only targets certain peoples.
Episkopos adds that Nikulin’s
observation are consistent with the position of Russian military expert, Viktor
Baranets. Baranets has affirmed that biological warfare has
become a new weapon “in the American fight for global supremacy against its
main adversaries.” There is much evidence to indicate that one of the main
thrusts of genetic research in biological warfare has long involved efforts to
target specific ethnic groups for sickness and death. There are obvious reasons
why those engaged in the development of biological
weaponry would want to narrow their aim to envisaged
enemies rather than breed germs to kill indiscriminately all humans in their
path whether friend or foe.
Lance Welton covers some
supposedly unmentionable yet nevertheless contested topics in an article entitled,
“Asians Far More Susceptible to Coronavirus Than Other Races, More Likely to
Die.”
Welton leaves aside the
question of why it is that the COVID-19 seems to pack a much more virulent and
lethal punch when it comes to the targeting of people sharing Chinese-Asian
ancestry. The other side of the same coin is people of predominately European
ancestry seem statistically to be much less at risk when it comes to succumbing
to the epidemiological force of COVID-19.
Welton has observed how
difficult it is has become in the Occident even to raise issues publicly
concerning the different vulnerabilities of different ethnic groups to certain
diseases. He cites anecdotal evidence that, so far at least, all the deaths
outside China have mostly taken the lives of ethnic Chinese people. From this
observation Welton concludes that racial characteristics are a significant
factor in determining vulnerability to COVID-19-inflicted disease.
The fact that this subject is
being so assiduously ignored by those engaged in the quest for political
correctness leads Welton to comment,
“It only goes to show how
pathological our taboo on “race” has become. Race denial is so strong that
possible race differences in the incidence of a disease cannot be mentioned, or
even suggested.”
The Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic
of 2020 is causing the once-firm ground beneath many
established institutions to shake uncontrollably. One of those institutions,
the Chinese communist government, is encountering its Chernobyl moment.
There are many consequences and
implications of the epidemic that are already extending beyond China to the
whole world. The epidemic is having significant implications for, for instance,
the state of the Chinese and global economy, the future of the transportation
industry, the future of tourism, the conditions of international relations, the
state of censorship, the interaction between academic and military research, as
well as the ongoing breakdown of trust in government. This list is far from
complete.
The remainder of this 6 part
essay highlights the implications of the COVID-19 crisis for communicative
interactions, especially in the public sphere. The issues to be addressed
extend across social media and mainstream media. They touch on public education
and different conceptions of the public interest.
The analysis of the breakdown
in public health raises questions about law enforcement. It raises related
questions about the governance of professional associations, academic
institutions as well as the public and private agencies with significant responsibilities
in the arenas of certification and scientific publication.
One of the primary areas of professional contention arising from the
COVID-19 crisis involves the close connections between biological research
aimed at finding preventions and cures for diseases and research aimed at
creating biological weapons. Biological weapons can be designed with the goal
of bringing about indiscriminate mass murder. They can also be used to bring
about the targeted murder of specific human populations sharing common genetic
attributes.
Gradually a portion of the public is becoming aware that a conflict of
interests exists between the military and public health applications of the
microbiology field within the so-called life sciences. How many practitioners
of the so-called life sciences are really devoting themselves to the death
sciences? The public has reason to question, for instance, the procedures
involved in the production of vaccines by an industry with one foot in the
health care field and another foot in military research.
Why should the public not fear
that some practitioners in the field of microbiology might confuse their dual
responsibilities in projects aimed at both saving and killing people? What is
to be said of the development of vaccines, in some cases by the same people
involved in genetically engineering the very diseases that vaccines are meant
to protect against?
Similarly, why should the
public trust that we are being well served by systems of research primarily
driven by the quest for lucrative patents to enrich their owners? Why shouldn’t
the public suspect that we are being used as guinea pigs in experiments on
human beings that continue to be perpetuated in the course of applied medical
research regardless of the prohibitions that have been enacted? Did the Wuhan Coronavirus
epidemic begin as an experiment on human subjects that got out of control?
How many times can the public
trust be betrayed before the habit ceases of giving possible professional
offenders, including those in white lab coats, the benefit of the doubt? Where
does the protection of the public interest and the common good fit into this
complex and internally contradictory picture?
Where is there genuine
accountability to a public required to support with our tax dollars scientific
research that can result in both good and bad outcomes? Why does the financial
return on this public investment so often end up in corporate and private hands
whereas the liabilities and collateral damages accrued are expected to be
absorbed by the public?
The fact that ground zero of
the Novel Coronavirus is Wuhan, home of China’s newest and most sophisticated
microbiology laboratory, naturally casts a shadow of doubt over narratives
minimizing the role of human agency in creating the new strain of Coronavirus.
Wuhan’s important role as a major Chinese research center, much of it secret
and covert, has to be taken into account. Moreover, Wuhan just happens also to
be the medical headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army.
The possible bioweapon was
originally labeled 2019-nCoV. Then the UN’s World Health Organization changed
the formal name to COVID-19. Is the World Health Organization a PR adjunct of
Big Pharma? How tight is the relationship between the WHO and the Chinese
Communist Party?
In an era of proliferating
genetic engineering, how are governments and their Big Pharma partners dividing
up the field of microbiology? How are they handling the divide between
initiatives done in the name of public health and initiatives done to produce
biological weapons for national governments including those of the United
States, China, and Israel? How are the partners handling the apportionment of
new wealth derived from securing patents?
These issues are finding
expressions in the many legitimate questions that are coming to light in the
course of the Novel Coronavirus emergency. Some of these questions arise
because of a history of largely unexplained relations between the Wuhan
National Biosafety Laboratory and the National Microbiology Laboratory in
Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada (NML). It has been well reported that both
institutions share the same top-level 4 certification assigned to containment
facilities in research labs where staff can pursue high-level studies of the
most dangerous pathogens known to humankind.
Built with French assistance
between 2015 and 2017, the Wuhan facility at ground zero of the current
epidemic is one of the premier pathogen research facilities in a country that
is thought by some to be developing significant capacities for biological
warfare. Similarly, the federal research facility in Winnipeg may well have an
attending or indirect role in military research to advance capacities for
biological warfare in collaboration with Canada’s two main allies, Israel and
the United States.
Immunologist and Medical Doctor, Xiangguo Qiu,
is the principal professional link at the nexus of relations between the Wuhan
and Winnipeg facilities. Until recently Dr. Qiu was the head of the Vaccine
Development and Antiviral Therapies Section of the Special Pathogens Programme
of the NML. The NML in Winnipeg is administered by Canada’s federal Public
Health Agency.
Qiu Xiangguo was one of the first scientists to develop a
treatment for Ebola. Credit: Handout
Dr. Qiu received her
medical degree in China. In 1996 she moved from the Taijin area of China to the
United States while already being subsidized as participant in China’s Thousand
Talents Program. She soon moved to Canada from the US continuing her
graduate work at the University of Manitoba. Dr. Qiu continued her professional
life in both Canada and China, apparently visiting the Wuhan Biosafety
Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Science at least five times, each for
two-week periods in 2017 and 2018. In each case an undisclosed Chinese entity
paid her travel expenses.
After 2006 Dr. Qiu’s research
specialty became the study of a variety of Ebola wild strains. The most
virulent of these strains has an 80% death rate for those that contract the
virus. An outbreak of Ebola from 2013 to 2016 took the lives of over 11,000
people in West Africa.
Along with Dr. Gary Kobinger, Dr. Qui was said to be instrumental in developing
the ZMapp treatment for Ebola using a cocktail of antibodies. In 2018 the duo
received an Innovation Award from the Governor General of Canada for developing
treatments for those infected with Ebola virus.
In March of 2019, Dr. Qiu and
her research team sent off to China via Air Canada a package of deadly virus
strains said to include Ebola and Nipah organisms. The shipment is said to have
triggered an unexplained negative response from officials in China. The flagged
problem probably involved an alleged failure to follow proper procedures in the
transfer of materials that can be used for the manufacturing of bioweapons as
well as in the making of vaccines to prevent the spread of infection.
The episode led to the decision
of Canada’s Public Health Agency to call in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
(RCMP) to investigate. This investigation was directed at Dr. Qiu and her
husband, Cheng Keding, who is also an acknowledged expert in the field of
virology.
Chinese bacterial thief Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Chen Keding
As a result of these
developments an episode occurred that was reported on July 14 by the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation, CBC. In her CBC article,
Karen Pauls reported,
A researcher with ties to China
was recently escorted out of the National Microbiology Lab (NML) in Winnipeg
amid an RCMP investigation into what’s being described as a possible “policy
breach.” Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, her husband Keding Cheng and an unknown number of
her students from China were removed from Canada’s only level-4 lab on July 5.
The CBC acted pretty much as a
stenographer of official sources whose clear mission was to keep a lid on the
potentially explosive story. The story would become even more explosive with
the inception in December of 2019 of the Coronavirus crisis in China. Rather
than trying to go around the official platitudes by engaging in some
independent sleuthing known as investigative journalism, CBC did what most
mainstream venues do these days. CBC acted as a xerox machine to relay the
tepid pronouncements of a timid and ill-guided bureaucracy.
Paul cited, for instance, an
official in Canada’s Public Health Agency referring to the removal of Dr. Qiu,
her husband and her research team as an “administrative matter” that will be
“resolved expeditiously.” Several officials including a RCMP spokesman,
indicated, “There is no threat to public safety at this time.”
A federal media relations
officer continued the effort of deflection by trying to make a really unusual,
complex and many-faceted story seem unremarkable. The commentator affirmed,
“the work of the NML continues in support of the health and safety of all
Canadians.” Leah West, an International Affairs Professor at Carlton University
of Ottawa, went as far as venturing that “national security” issues might be
involved. This statement calls for explanations that Canadian reporters have so
far not seriously attempted.
Lt. Colonel Dr. Dany Shoham is
one of the most attentive figures outside Canada who responded especially
quickly and skeptically to the perplexing questions raised by Dr. Qiu’s
activities. Dr. Shoham is a reserve member of the IDF. He continues his
military responsibilities in the fields of biological and chemical warfare as a
senior researcher in the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Israel.
Dr. Dany Shoham. Credit: Wiki/ Shalom magazine
In 2014 Dr. Shoham was a
visiting scholar at the New Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and
Analysis (IDSA). There he collaborated professionally with the IDSA’s Deputy
Director, Brigadier Rumel Dahiya. Dr. Shoham devoted much of his time in India
to studying what he refers to as China’s Biological Warfare Programme.
Dr. Shoham published his
findings in 2015 in an “integrative study” where he commented at significant
length on the makeup and structure of China’s secretive military R and D
initiatives in the alleged development of bioweapons. He maintains that these
secretive military operations have been blended into the operations of
“ostensibly civilian facilities” where public health initiatives in disease
prevention and treatment are often highlighted
Dr. Shoham notes that
the government of China became a signatory in 1984 to UN’s Biological Weapons
Convention of 1972. The Israeli academic alleges, however, that China, a target
of US biological war in the Korean War in the early 1950s, opted to secretly
retain some continuing capacities in this military field.
Dr. Shoham has cast himself as
an insistent whistle blower calling attention to the provocative circumstances
attending the shipment from Canada to China of virulent pathogens. Dr. Shoham
indicated that Dr. Qiu’s research has been conducted not only on behalf of the
governments of Canada and China. Dr. Qui has also collaborated with three
scientists from the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
in Maryland. Much of her success, however, is connected to her obtaining many
grants from China, all on the “national level.”
But the collateral Chinese
plexus cannot be ignored. Married to a Chinese scientist – Dr. Keding Cheng,
also affiliated with the NML (specifically the “Science and Technology Core”),
and primarily a bacteriologist who shifted to virology – Dr. Qiu frequently
visited and maintained tight bonds with China, generally speaking, and many
Chinese students joined her works in the NML during the recent decade, coming
from a notable range of Chinese scientific facilities. Nonetheless, among the
latter there are four facilities that have been regarded to possess parts of
the Chinese biological weapons alignment, namely
·
Institute of Military Veterinary, Academy of Military Medical
Sciences, Changchun.
·
Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Chengdu Military
Region.
·
Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hubei.
·
Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.
All of the four mentioned
facilities collaborated with Dr. Qiu within the context of Ebola virus, yet the
Institute of Military Veterinary joined a study on the Rift Valley fever virus,
while the Institute of Microbiology joined a study on Marburg virus too.
Noticeably, the drug used in the latter study – Favipiravir – has been earlier
tested successfully by the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences, with
the designation JK-05 (originally a Japanese patent registered in China already
in 2006), against Ebola and additional viruses.
However, the studies by Dr. Qiu
are considerably more advanced and fruitful, in certain aspects. They are
apparently vital for the Chinese biological weapons developing, in case Ebola,
Nipah, Marburg or Rift Valley fever viruses are included therein, which is a
plausible postulation; let alone the wild type viruses in themselves. And it is
of note that only Nipah virus is naturally found in China or neighboring
countries. Collectively, then, the interface between Dr. Qiu and China has a
priori been highly suspicious. On top of it, the shipment of the two viruses
from NML to China apparently generated an alarm, beyond its seeming
inappropriateness. And an unavoidable question is whether previous shipments to
China of other viruses or other essential preparations, took place from 2006 to
2018, one way or another.
It has not gone unnoticed that
this episode at the National Microbiology
Laboratory in Winnipeg may be intertwined with the mounting
diplomatic tension between the governments of Canada and China. The controversy
is unfolding in a way that adds new uncertainty to the controversy instigated
in December of 2018 with the Canadian government’s decision to arrest, detain
and put on trial the Huawei cell phone company’s executive, Meng Wanzhou.
Many have questioned the dubious nature of the decision to arrest the Huawei
official in Vancouver for allegedly violating US law pertaining to sanctions
against Iran.
The future role of the Huawei system for 5G wireless communications, a
frightening and largely untested public health hazard in its own right, has
emerged as a core issue in the conflict between the United States and China. To
conceive of this conflict as a trade war alone is to underestimate the full
scope of the antagonisms. These antagonisms over the future of wireless
communications extend, for instance, far into the shape and form of future
international espionage. Since the era began nearly 20 years ago of the 9/11
psychological operation, much international espionage has taken place by means
of backdoor spying on digital flows of information. Israel has become
especially closely identified with this type of digital spying throughout the
Internet.
The Chinese strategy for
achieving traction in this competitive milieu is to apply breakthroughs in
digital computation and communications. The strategy is to integrate
innovations in Artificial Intelligence, AI, with cutting edge developments in
biotechnology. This methodology is understood by some Chinese students of
geopolitics as integral to the military process of “preparing a new domain for
warfare.”
In this digital and biological theatre of
rivalry, the new gene splicing capacities of CRISPR technology
constitute a formidable new tool for major and irreversible interventions into
life’s most fundamental cycles of death and renewal. The ability to alter the
genetic makeup of organisms, including human organisms, is thereby becoming a
key facet in establishing new domains for warfare, including various forms of
hybrid warfare.
More elements in China’s
geopolitical strategy have come to light as the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic
gathers momentum especially in the ground zero region. The decision of Canadian
federal officials, including federal police, to intervene by removing Dr. Qiu
and her research team from the NML was to some extent mirrored in the United
States.
In January of 2020 police in
the United States arrested Prof. Charles Lieber, Chairman of Harvard
University’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department. Dr. Lieber has been
placed on indefinite administrative leave and charged under US criminal law
with lying to officials in the Defense Department and in the National
Institutes of Health. These agencies funded Dr. Lieber’s research at Harvard in
the field of nanoscience to the tune of $15,000,000 in grants.
Prof. Charles Lieber, former Chairman of Harvard University’s
Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department
Dr. Lieber is alleged to have
misled federal officials and Harvard officials about the extent of his
contractual relations with several Chinese entities including, most
prominently, the Wuhan Technological University. Among the allegations pointed
his way are those that accuse Dr. Lieber of failing to reveal his participation
in China’s controversial Thousand Talents program.
According to the FBI,
“China’s talent recruitment plans, such as the Thousand Talents Program, offer
competitive salaries, state-of-the-art research facilities, and honorific titles,
luring both Chinese overseas talent and foreign experts alike to bring their
knowledge and experience to China, even if that means stealing proprietary
information or violating export controls to do so.” The Chinese-Canadian
researcher, Dr. Qiu, is reported to be, like Harvard’s Dr. Lieber, a
participant in China’s Thousand Talents program.
In its report on the case, Bloomberg News described the work at Dr.
Lieber’s Harvard lab as being dependent on “a pipeline of China’s brightest
Ph.D. students and postdocs, often more than a dozen at a time, to produce
prize-winning research.”
The North American research
activities of Dr. Lieber and Dr. Qui seem to have been similarly dependent on
China’s financial backing, collaboration and constant supply of promising young
practitioners of scientific research. Both Dr. Lieber and Dr. Qiu clearly ran
into a major sea change in the conditions of their work with major
ramifications for the conduct of national security, international relations,
law enforcement and academic governance.
No doubt administrators have
been sent reeling behind-the-scenes at Harvard University, at the University of
Manitoba and at institutions of higher learning throughout the world. These
institutions depend heavily on international networks of academic
collaboration. Suddenly the viability of many of these academic networks has
been called into question though interventions by the criminal justice system
in Canada and the United States.
Indeed, the sudden global
spotlight on anything that might help shed light on the still-shady background
of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic must be given its due. The startling
developments associated with a major plague quite possibly cultivated in stages
in both test tubes and animal hosts calls into question many things. It calls
for explanations about the role of many corporations, government agencies and
philanthropic foundations. The rules seem to be changing fast for entities that
regularly sponsor scholarly research even as they participate in the process of
applying research findings to technological innovations.
The arrest of Dr. Lieber
followed the arrest in mid-December of 20019 of Zaosong Zheng at Logan
International Airport in Boston for trying to smuggle to Beijing 21 vials of
biological material. The vials were taken from Harvard University’s Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Centre where Zaosong Zheng was a visiting graduate student in
pathology.
Commenting on his ongoing
investigation of the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Benjamin Tolkoff remarked,
“Zeng’s theft and attempt to smuggle biological specimens out of the U.S. was
not an isolated incident. Rather it appears to have been a coordinated crime,
with likely involvement by the Chinese government.”
A tight set of right-wing
activists and agencies with deep-rooted antipathies to Chinese communism have
provided a particular genre of criticism in the course of the current debacle.
These agencies include Radio Free Asia, a former CIA-backed outlet now governed
by a federally-funded Board of Governors answerable directly to the current
Secretary of State and former CIA Director, Mike Pompeo. The criticisms of Radio Free
Asia have been integrated into a matrix of criticism of the
Chinese government highlighted especially in the Washington Times and The Epoch Times.
The Epoch Times emerges from an
international group of newspapers published in several languages. It has a
strong focus on China and on Chinese people globally. The Epoch Times was founded in 2000 by
John Tang with a group of Chinese Americans associated with Falun Gong.
The Falun Gong organization is
in the grips of an antagonistic relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.
Falun Gong combines Taoism, Buddhism and meditation. It became so independently
influential in China that in 1999 the Communist government declared it a
heretical organization. The antagonism between Falun Gong and the Chinese
government quite likely involves covert infiltration by the US CIA and related
US agencies.
Whatever is happening behind
the scenes, The Epoch Times has
been running an unrelenting critique of the Chinese government’s handling of
the Novel Coronavirus crisis. The journalistic coverage of the crisis is often
been incisive and bold. The consistent message is that the Chinese government
is not reporting on the epidemic honestly. Nor is The Epoch Times holding back from
criticizing the Chinese government for secretly engaging in the violent
repression of Chinese citizens especially in the most hard-hit regions.
Some managers of the dominant
cartels’ media thought police try to ridicule and harass those publicly posing
essential questions. The Epoch Times, however, has no hesitation in asking, “Is the Coronavirus a
Bioweapon?” In explaining the position of those opposed to open
debate on the geopolitics of biological warfare, The Epoch Times Steven W. Mosher has
commented, “Much ink has been spilled by The Washington Post and other mainstream
media outlets to try to convince us that the deadly coronavirus is a product of
nature rather than nefariousness, and that anyone who says otherwise is an
unhinged conspiracy theorist.”
Like The Epoch Times, the Washington Times is rooted in the politics
of anti-communism. One of the primary journalists at the venue is the national
security correspondent, Bill Gertz. Gertz is a career China expert who is
sometimes invited to lecture for the FBI and CIA.
The Washington Times grew out of the
controversial career of the Korean-American, Sun Myung Moon. Moon is founder of
the Unification Church sometimes dubbed “the Moonies” by its detractors.
The Washington
Examiner is
also known for its related right-wing orientation to news coverage. One of the
lead authorities frequently highlighted in the output of this genre of
anti-communist reporting is Dr. Dany Shoham.
Recall that Dr. Shoham was
one of the most insistent critics of the Wuhan-Winnipeg axis revealed in the
summer of 2019.
Rev. Sun Myung Moon speaking in Las Vegas, NV, USA on April 4,
2010
Dr. Shoham was quoted, for
instance, in the 26 January edition of the Washington Times asserting “Certain
laboratories in the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] have probably been engaged,
in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least
collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese Biological Weapons
alignment.”
Elsewhere Dr. Shoham, who is
sometimes described as
“a former Israel intelligence officer,” asserted his understanding that “China
had intentionally leaked the new coronavirus from the Wuhan Institute of
Virology.”
Tom Cotton, Republican Party
Senator for Arkansas, has emerged as another significant voice criticizing the
role of the Chinese government in the Novel Coronavirus epidemic. In
introducing the Senator’s position to its readership, Newsweek reported on 16 February,
“Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas on Sunday accused China of lying
about the severity of the coronavirus outbreak and suggested that the new
disease may have originated from a biosafety super laboratory in Wuhan.”
Senator Cotton has praised US
President Donald Trump for his decision to temporarily cancel flights between
China and USA. This cancellation, however, was seemingly contradicted by
records revealing the continuation of much air traffic between China and USA in
spite of the presidential pronouncement.
Senator Cotton referred
to evidence pointing
to the fact that some of the early victims of the disease had no contact
whatsoever with the Wuhan open-air food market.
The deadly virus, Senator Cotton insists, “went into the food market before it
came out.”
Senator Cotton has unwaveringly
underlined his contention that the Chinese authorities have from its inception
withheld the truth about the crisis. According to the Senator, Chinese
officials have been especially deceptive about the extent of the illnesses and
mortality. “They’re still lying today,” he was reported as telling Newsweek. The young Arkansas politician
has insisted on the need for some kind of reckoning on the part of the Chinese
government leading to a full and proper investigation with full disclosure.
Newsweek’s interpretive angle is similar
to that of other media survivors of the Mockingbird era of US propaganda. Most
Big Media venues including Newsweekemployed writers and editors who happily accepted extra money from the CIA to
tell the US government’s side of the story during the Cold War.
The common denominator in much
of the dinosaur-style of reporting that characterizes a discredited old guard
is to describe any interpretation that challenges established conventions and
interests as “conspiracy theories.” As Lance DeHaven-Smith has demonstrated in his book of the same
name, the CIA led the way in the conceptual tweeking of the term, “conspiracy
theories,” with the goal of discrediting interpretations considered menacing to
established interests.
Again and again the media
conglomerates most deeply integrated into dominant matrixes of power deploy the
weaponized terminology with the goal of limiting public discourse. They invoke
the boogeyman of “conspiracy theories” as a meme to flippantly discredit
skeptical journalism questioning the honesty of official sources.
Newsweek reported,
Cotton’s remarks came amid the
proliferation of various conspiracy theories surrounding coronavirus’ origins,
one of which suggests it may have come from a laboratory tied to Beijing’s
biowarfare program. In response, Facebook and
other social media platforms have cracked down on the reach of posts that
perpetuate these unsubstantiated allegations.
There is much irony in Newsweek’s supportive account of
Facebook’s intervention aimed at blocking open exchange on a major undecided
topic. The irony occurs because of the propensity of some MSM venues to condemn
the Chinese government for their imposition of censorship including the blocking
of their critics on social media.
The heavy-handed crackdown in
the Occident on the increasingly vandalized domain of violated free expression
on the Internet is quite comparable to communist crackdowns on dissident news
and views especially during the peak of the Cold War.
The US claim to be the heartland of the “free world” has long since
become ludicrous in the extreme given many factors including the ailing
superpower’s generation of an unrelenting flood of power-serving
disinformation. Part of this agenda is to control the narrative no matter how
deceptive. It is to engage in digital vandalism aimed at discrediting or
altogether silencing dissident voices on the Internet.
One of the targets of Internet
censorship on the Wuhan Coronavirus story is the web site, Zero Hedge. Zero Hedge was permanently
deplatformed by the corporate censors at Twitter for reporting on
interpretations that might be characterized as consistent with Senator Cotton’s
skeptical critique of officialspeak on many aspects of the current Coronavirus
debacle. One of the thought police agencies behind the attack Zero Hedgeis the Internet venue, BuzzFeed News.
Twitter’s decision to
deplatform Zero Hedge came in the wake of its 29 January post that included the
following comments by Tyler Durden:
..the official theory for the
spread of the Coronavirus epidemic, namely because someone ate bat soup at a
Wuhan seafood and animal market… … is a fabricated farce, and that the real
reason behind the viral spread [of the disease] is because a weaponized version
of the coronavirus (one which may have originally been obtained
from Canada), was released by Wuhan’s Institute of Virology
(accidentally or not), a top, level-4 biohazard lab which was studying “the world’s most dangerous
pathogens.”
India, and especially India’s
capital of New Delhi, have been important bases where challenging
interpretations of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic have been formulated and
distributed. In some circles in India there is a high level of attentiveness
and concern about China’s interest in biological warfare. This concern was
expressed in Tehelka, an important English-language publication based in New Delhi.
China’s national strategy of
military-civil fusion has highlighted biology as a priority, and the People’s
Liberation Army – PLA could be at the forefront of expanding and exploiting this
knowledge… China’s Biological Warfare Programme is believed to be in an
advanced stage that includes research and development, production and
weaponization capabilities. Its current inventory is believed to include the
full range of traditional chemical and biological agents with a wide variety of
delivery systems including artillery rockets, aerial bombs, sprayers, and
short-range ballistic missiles.
As we have seen, New Delhi’s
Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis hosted Dr. Shoham during
a study leave in 2014. During his time in India, the Israeli intelligence
officer devoted his study leave with the approval of his Indian hosts to
investigating China’s alleged biological warfare program.
Not surprisingly, Indian
scientists were especially fast off the mark in trying to understand the nature
of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic. Some in India well remember that the Chinese
government was slow in releasing information on the SARS infection of 2002-3.
Some, including Dr. Dany Shoham, believe this delay had to do with the
importance of SARS in the Chinese program of bioweapon research.
Dr. Shoham has maintained that Coronaviruses, but particularly SARS, have been
studied in the Wuhan Institute of Viriology. He adds, “SARS is included in the
Chinese Bioweapons program, and is dealt with in several pertinent facilities.”
During January of 2020 a team
of nine high-level researchers at the University of Delhi’s Kusuma School of
Biological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology investigated the RNA
side of the genetic blueprint of the COVID-19 virus. These Indian researchers
collaborated in the analysis of the organism that some have taken to calling
the Wuhan supervirus.
The initial findings of the
researchers have been published on line in a paper entitled, “Uncanny
Similarity of Unique Inserts in the 2019-nCoV Spike Protein to HIV-1 gp120 and
Gag.” At the time of writing this essay, the University of Delhi’s much-smeared
contribution to COVID-19 research continues to be available on the line even
though it is still making its way through the process of peer review with
possible future revisions.
The main finding of the study
so far is that the genetic structure of the virus has “4 insertions in the
spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV [COVID-19] and are not
present in other coronaviruses.” These “4 inserts have identity or similarity
to those in HIV-1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag.” This finding “sheds light on the
evolution and pathogenicity of this virus.”
The authors of the paper find that the
genetic inserts into the virus “have identity/similarity to amino acid residues
in key structural proteins of HIV-1.” These characteristics are “unlikely to be
fortuitous in nature.” This key phrase indicates that in the opinion of the
researchers the presence of HIV genes in COVID-19 was not the result of some
process of random mutation in nature. Instead, the insertion of the HIV genes
into the new coronavirus probably took place through an engineered intervention
by experts in microbiology.
The finding that
HIV genes are integral to the genetic structure of COVID-19 has not been
seriously challenged. The fact that HIV treatments are being widely used to
ease the symptoms of those suffering the effects of the new infection is highly
suggestive. It implies that some of the analysis of the Kusuma School of
microbiologists was quickly seized upon and applied in clinical situations.
The main subjects of the
controversy that has been generated so far arise mostly from the question of
whether or not the insertion of the HIV genes could
have occurred without human intervention, without genetic engineering. That
issue is bound to attract much scientific attention in the weeks and months
ahead.
The work of the Kusuma
microbiologists at the University of Delhi has become important in the
interpretation of the epidemic advanced by Zero Hedge. The size of the group
following Zero
Hedge’s coverage of the Coronavirus
crisis of 2020only became larger after the censorious thought
police at BuzzFeed and Twitter intervened. The public is not taking well to
corporate intervention aimed at dictating what can or cannot be communicated,
viewed, considered or debated.
The hysteria aroused by the
“Uncanny Resemblance” paper captured the attention of a site called
GreatGameIndia. This operation publishes a regular “Journal of Geopolitics and
International Relations.” The co-founders and editors of GreatGameIndia, an
especially lively and edgy publishing venue, are Raja Sekhar and Shelly Kasli.
The interpretive bent of this
venue begins with the surprising observation that the English East India
Company was the most influential and large-scale business venture in all of
history. According to Raja Sekhar,
this history established patterns of Western kleptocracy in Asia that continue
to this day.
The publication of
GreatGameIndia on the background of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic has
attracted positive attention from Tehelka and from many other publications throughout the world. The
venue, unfortunately, is not always completely transparent. For instance the
names of specific authors of specific essays are sometimes not published.
GreatGameIndia describes itself as “India’s
one-of-a kind portal on international affairs providing global intelligence… in
a geopolitical and historical framework to better understand international
developments and the world around us. Experts in the field of Geopolitics and
International Relations, we bring in fresh perspective to the otherwise
redundant academic approach. We are read, recommended and published by decision
makers, renowned personalities and organisations around the world.”
GreatGameIndia did indeed bring
“fresh perspective” in highlighting a possible role for Canada in China’s
alleged military program to develop bioweapons. This story was developed in a
rapid-fire series of articles, most of which appeared in January and February
of 2020. These items brought together intertwined news on the possible roles of
the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory
in the genesis of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic.
This juxtaposition of the two
institutions highlights the work of Israeli intelligence expert, Dr. Dany
Shoham. It seems he may have had some role in shaping the overall narrative.
Dr. Shoham’s oft’ republished essay highlighting the role of Dr. Xiangguo in
the Winnipeg-Wuhan axis of biotechnology was republished by GreatGameIndia.
A number of issues are raised
by Dr. Shoham’s possible involvement in the genesis of the stories run by
GreatGameIndia and by other related venues on the Wuhan Coronavirus crisis. Is
Dr. Shoham to be understood as an agent of Israel in the discussions and
debates? Is his consistently critical stance on China’s alleged bioweapons
program together with his relative silence on similar US programs a significant
sign of an Israel-US or an Israel-US-India alignment on this issue?
One could legitimately ask, for
instance, if the series of narratives highlighting the Chinese-Canadian
connection might have been meant as a diversion? Might such a diversion have
been mounted to point attention away from the possibility that a germ warfare
attack was covertly mounted in Wuhan by US soldiers taking part in the 7thWorld Military Games? Over 300
US military personnel took part in this event organized in Wuhan from October18-27,
2019.
In an interview with Jeff
Brown, a veteran of US special operations in China, “Uriah Heep,” aka “Metallicman,”
has speculated about the possibility that the US government was responsible for
a biological attack resulting in the COVID-19 epidemic.
The GreatGameIndia essays are
premised on a very harsh picture assessment of the Chinese government’s
intentions as directed especially at North America. J. R. Nyquist is the author
of the article in GreatGameIndia outlining the historical background of China’s
emphasis on biotechnology, including the development of the means to conduct
biological warfare.
A version of Nyquist’s
GreatGameIndia essay also appeared in the Falun Gong-backed Epoch Times. Nyquist writes frequently
for The Epoch Times. Many of his essays
emphasize very critical assessments of communism in a variety of contemporary
and historical settings.
The heart of the essay
introducing readers to the genesis of China’s biological warfare capacities
highlights a speech given in 2005 by Chi Hoatian, an important General in the
People’s Liberation Army. Between 1993 and 2003 General Chi was also China’s
Minister of National Defence. The full text of the speech is available here.
The essence of the presentation
is based on the premise that by 2005 China had become severely overpopulated, a
problem that entailed a growing degradation of the national environment. The
solution to this problem, General Chi decided, was to colonize a portion of the
globe as a second China. Chi observed that the region neighboring China was
already densely populated. He added, “only
countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia have the vast land to
serve our need for mass colonization.”
General Chi indicated that is
was Deng Xioping who was the most instrumental figure in the decision to build
up his country’s arsenal of biological weapons in spite of China’s formal
adherence to the Biological Weapons Convention. Deng is best known as the
Chinese leader who oversaw the dramatic transformation of the Chinese economy
beginning in the 1980s. Said General Chi
When Comrade Xiaoping was still
with us, the Party Central Committee had the perspicacity to make the right
decision not to develop aircraft carrier groups and focused instead on
developing lethal weapons that can eliminate mass populations of the enemy
country. Biological weapons are unprecedented in their ruthlessness, but if
Americans do not die then Chinese have to die. If the Chinese people remain strapped
to the present land, a total societal collapse is bound to take place.
As General Chi saw it, from the
Chinese perspective biological weapons have advantages over nuclear weapons.
According to his way of seeing things,’ “only by using non-destructive weapons
that kill many people will we be able to reserve America for ourselves.”
GreatGameIndia did little to
explain how average people in China have responded to General Chi’s surprising
explanation of a perceived need to colonize a portion of the world for a second
China. How seriously were General Chi’s words received in China? How many in
China today consider General Chi’s analysis to be still relevant?
The account by GreatGameIndia of
the strange viral infection starting in Wuhan depends on some documented
evidence mixed in with speculative accounts of things that might have taken
place. The essence of the scenario presented to the public is identified by the
title of the core essay in the series. Published on 26 January, 2020 this title
is “Coronavirus Bioweapon: How China Stole Coronavirus from Canada and
Weaponized It.”
The authors mix sheer
conjecture with an evidence-based chronicle of certain events. The aim seems to
be to stimulate thinking about what is known to be happening while encouraging
concurrently reflections on what might be taking place or what might be about to take place.
Hence the overall nature of the
narrative outlined by GreatGameIndia can best be described as an SOS about
quickly deteriorating developments containing warnings about possible unseen
factors or possible dangers up ahead. The GreatGameIndia project can be
conceived, therefore, as a psychological operation meant to shift and enliven
public attitudes, behavior and actions. Psychological operations, sometimes
innocuously identified as PR campaigns, are very prominent in the media
coverage of many events and topics these days.
What is actually known about
the condition of Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory during the period
when Dr. Qiu’s team of China’s researchers conducted themselves in ways that
led to the removal of their security passes, followed by their physical removal
from the facility? Recent media reports in Winnipeg have painted a picture of
the breakdown of decorum at the NML. In September of 2019 the Winnipeg Free Press reported,
The lab, known as NML, is a
source of pride for its role in creating the Ebola vaccine. It’s one of the few
facilities in the world accredited to handle the most deadly pathogens. It
officially opened in 1999 to much fanfare, after political wrangling had it
ultimately placed in Winnipeg.
Yet numerous people who work
there have told the Free Press of a workplace rife with intimidation, alcohol
abuse and clashes between officials in Winnipeg and Ottawa, which was partially
revealed this summer in an administrative breach that has the RCMP investigating
a shipment of dangerous substances to China.
“The sad thing is, they do
world-class science, but internally they’re almost self-destructing, in terms
of how they treat their employees,” said Todd Panas, national president of the
Union of Health and Environment Workers.
“The collateral damage to get
that science is pretty remarkable.”
As far as the specifics of the
RCMP investigation into the much highlighted shipment of deadly viruses from
Winnipeg to China, all that has been reported in MSM is that it may have had
something to do with “rules around copyright, patents and published works.”
The reporter,
Dylan Robertson, went further, indicating, “multiple sources who spoke with
the Free
Press on
the condition of anonymity, say the shipment lacked an agreement spelling out
intellectual property rights, which is critical for protecting scientific
research.” According to Robertson, the RCMP still will not say if its
investigation is going forward in the organizational realm of either national
security, or organized crime, or forensics.”
The GreatGameIndia essays
highlight the role of Frank Plummer,
a former Scientific Director of the Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory
and a leading researcher on HIV-AIDS. Prof. Plummer conducted much of his
primary HIV research in Kenya. He focused especially on the heterosexual spread
of AIDS in Africa, developing in the process a joint project between the
University of Manitoba and the University of Nairobi.
GreatGameIndia included in
their lineup of intertwined stories one describing Frank Plummer as
the “key to the coronavirus investigation” who “was assassinated in Africa.”
There is nothing but conjecture behind the assertion that Dr. Plummer was
assassinated. It was widely reported in MSM that Prof. Plummer died quickly of
an unexpected heart attack in Nairobi on 4 February of 2020 just as coverage on
the Wuhan epidemic was reaching a point of critical mass.
The conjecture of assassination
gave the story a contemporary resonance that captured considerable attention.
This twist invested the larger narrative with sensationalist connotations. It
strongly implied that some malevolent group of saboteurs had eliminated Dr.
Plummer so he could not bear witness to what had apparently happened at the NML
in Winnipeg to pour oil on the inflamed crisis in China.
No proof is offered that Dr.
Plummer did not die of natural causes. The spotlight put on his career by
GreatGameIndia, however, does call attention to the rather exotic career of a
significant Canadian involved in many original types of genetic study and
alteration totally new to medical and military science. The report serves to
stimulate reflections on the types of intrigue that would probably arise on a
regular basis in Dr. Plummer’s unusual line of work.
The account by GreatGameIndia
of the Canadian connection to the Wuhan plague stresses the role of Dr. Plummer
in the process that is said to have brought into Winnipeg’s level 4 pathogen
lab a particular SARS strain that initially came from Saudi Arabia. Before
arriving in Winnipeg, the strain of SARS said to be investigated by Dr. Plummer
passed along a chain of custody involving collaboration with colleagues in
Jeddah, Egypt and Rotterdam.
We learn from the narrative
that the NML has a “long history of offering comprehensive testing services for
Coronaviruses”; that it “isolated and provided the first genome sequence of the
SARS Coronavirus and identified another Coronavirus as NL63 in 2004.” We learn
that the “Canadian lab grew up stocks of the virus [originating in respiratory
illnesses infecting Saudi Arabian victims] and used it to assess diagnostic
tests being used in Canada. Winnipeg scientists worked to see which animal
species can be infected with the new virus.”
The article uses provocative
language calling Dr. Qui “a Chinese Bio-Warfare Agent.” After referring to Dr.
Shoham, whose comments appear consistently throughout a wide array of reports
critical of the alleged biowarfare program run by the Chines government, a
reference is made to James Giordano. a is identified as a neurology professor
at Georgetown University and a senior fellow in Biowarfare at the U.S. Special
Operations Command. Prof. Giordano is reported to have commented,
China’s growing investment in
bio-science, looser ethics around gene-editing and other cutting-edge
technology and integration between government and academia raise the spectre of
such pathogens being weaponized.
That could mean an offensive
agent, or a modified germ let loose by proxies, for which only China has the
treatment or vaccine. “This is not warfare, per se,” he said. “But what it’s
doing is leveraging the capability to act as global saviour, which then creates
various levels of macro and micro economic and bio-power dependencies.”
The authors of the
GreatGameIndia series on the possible Canadian connection to the Wuhan
Institute of Virology speculate that the shipments of viruses from the NML to
China included the specific strain of Coronavirus that originated in Saudi
Arabia. This conjecture caused me to speculate about why it is that the Israeli
specialist in biological and chemical warfare, Dr. Dany Shoman, took such an
active interest in the Winnipeg biolab. I have seen no evidence Dr. Shoham ever
visited the Winnipeg lab but for some unexplained reason he seems well informed
about its activities.
My own speculations cause me to
wonder if Dr. Shoham might have come in contact with Dr. Plummer because of the
latter’s reported work in doing the genetic sequencing of the virus causing the
Saudi-based outbreak of a version of SARS. This speculation arises because of a
serious report in London England highlighting the interests of Israeli
biological warfare experts in an “ethnic bomb” that would specifically target
Arabs.
The existence of such a program
was outlined on 15 November, 1998 in a London Sunday Times story entitled, “Israel
Planning ‘Ethnic Bomb’ as Saddam Caves In.” The story’s authors, Uzi Mahnaimi
and Marie Cohen, explain the existence of such a clandestine research project
on ethnic-specific bioweapons at Ness Ziona Israel near Tel Aviv. The Israeli
research project, which still continues, apparently drew earlier on
investigations on ethnically-targeted biological weaponry that took place in
South Africa during the era of apartheid.
Israel, using research obtained
from South Africa, was developing an “ethno bomb; In developing their
“ethno-bomb”, Israeli scientists are trying to exploit medical advances by
identifying a distinctive gene carried by some Arabs, then create a genetically
modified bacterium or virus… The scientists are trying to engineer deadly
micro-organisms that attack only those bearing the distinctive genes.
As an Israeli military and
medical expert in the field of biological and chemical warfare, Dr. Shoham must
have had some awareness of the founding and genesis of Ness Ziona “ethno-bomb”
project.
What is the past or current
relationship of Dr. Shoham to the Ness Ziona Institute for Biological Research?
Did Dr. Shoham have professional interactions with Dr. Plummer following the
reported cultivation and genetic sequencing by the Winnipeg scientist of the
Saudi-derived strain of SARS. This strain came to be known as MERS. Was Dr.
Plummers’s involvement in a strain of Coronavirus that initially targeted Arabs
a factor in attracting Dr. Shoham’s interest to Winnipeg’s NML.
GreatGameIndia has published a
rich and detailed academic paper presenting a chronicle and an assessment of
the spread of the SARS strain that struck down Arab victims initially in Qatar
and Jordan as well as Saudi Arabia. Some of the victims also spread the illness
to family members in London and Pakistan. The labeling of this strain of
infection as MERS comes from the name, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.
Prof. Gufaraz Kahn is the
author of the paper published on 28 February of 2013 in Vol. 10 (no. 66)
of Virology Journal. Dr. Kahn’s professional base
is the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the College of Medicine and
Health Sciences at United Arab Emirates University.
Dr. Kahn’s rich and erudite
academic account of the early stages of the MERS infections in Virology Journal would almost certainly
have drawn the attention of Israeli agents involved in the country’s alleged
biological and chemical warfare program. This attraction would have been
especially enticing for any Israeli military officials still seeking to target
Arab victims with genetically-engineered viruses.
Did Dr. Plummer knowingly or
inadvertently help Dr. Shoham with his research work based in Israel? How does
the staff of the NHL navigate the inevitable military side of their research
with its applications in Canada, in the US and internationally?
If Dr. Plummer did in some way
collaborate with Dr. Shoham and with other Israeli researchers in
biotechnology, might this activity have been a factor in the decision of the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem to grant Dr. Plummer the Scopus Award? What
level of accountability is owed by the managers of the NML in Winnipeg to the
citizens who fund the research facility? Shouldn’t these managers and their
supervisors in administrative and elected office make a commitment not to hide
research for biological warfare behind veneers of public health research?
In the last year of his life
Dr. Plummer agreed to the insertion of a surgically inserted implant in his
brain meant to help the scientist cope with a severe case of alcoholism that
plagued his life beginning in the 1980s. Dr. Plummer agreed to be a test case
in this new biomedical therapy after he suffered a liver failure followed by a
liver transplant in 2012.
The case was widely publicized by the BBC and
many other media venues in the weeks and days before the death of Dr. Plummer
by heart failure in Nairobi. It is legitimate to ask whether Dr. Plummer’s longstanding
problem with alcoholism contributed to the breakdown of orderly procedures and
civility reported to have overtaken the culture of scientific work at the
Winnipeg’s NML?
On 27 January of 2020 the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation responded to the boisterous response created
on the Internet to the GreatGameIndian series of articles. The CBC article was
written by Karen Pauls and Jeff Yates. As we have seen, some elements of
GreatGameIndia series drew on news conveyed through Karen Paul’s earlier CBC
reports written during the spring and summer of 2019.
The CBC reporting on the
factual lapses in the alleged Winnipeg-Wuhan axis of microbiology failed to
deal with many germane subjects including the role of Dr. Dany Shoham. The
stories featuring comments by Dr. Shoham have tended to develop storylines that
the CBC report deems deceptive.
Dr. Shoham’s media
interventions have been influential in creating the imagery of Chinese
government malfeasance in the handling the COVID-19 crisis. This critical
orientation to the CCP has become common in coverage generated by many venues.
Prominent among them are The Epoch Times, the Washington Times, Steve Bannon’s and Miles Guo’s coverage on War Room: Pandemic, and Simone Gao’s Taiwan-based
coverage on Zooming In.
Another very significant source
of honest news reporting on the COVID-19 crisis has been Trunews, an evangelical Christian broadcasting
operation hosted by Rick Wiles. Rev. Wiles and those who join him on-air
emerged as pioneers in the in-depth coverage of of China in epidemiological
crisis. They conducted their own independent research, crawled down rabbit hole
after rabbit hole, and emerged with some excellent coverage that really does
qualify as Trunews. In the course of their coverage the webcast was removed from the
You Tube/ADL platform. The background of the deplatforming has to do with the
fact that Rev. Wiles is a self-declared Born Again Christian who is highly
critical of the preoccupations and ethics of Christian Zionists.
The CBC intervention labeled
as “Fake” a screen shot of a tweet by a Dallas-based hedge fund manager named
Kyle Bass. Citing CBC News, Bass tweeted that “a husband and wife Chinese spy
team were recently removed from a level 4 Disease facility for sending
pathogens to the Wuhan facility.” CBC reported that this tweet, one that
combines documented facts with speculative supposition, was shared 12,000
times.
The CBC did not attempt to add
background and context to the use made of its own stories formulated months
before the inception of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic. There was no specific
reference in the CBC “Fake News” diatribe to the GreatGameIndia series of
articles. As noted, when taken together the GreatGameIndia publications created
a fairly elaborate narrative by mixing straight reporting of well-documented
facts with speculative interludes.
Bear in mind that this
speculation was delivered pretty much into the vacuum created by the
unwillingness or inability of many mainstream media venues to deal with the
complexities of a fast-moving emergency spreading from China to the world. The
genesis of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic provides an important window into a
whole range of issues that are in many respects quite different from anything
previously faced by humanity.
The recent introduction of the
tools of genetic engineering into the production of food, vaccines, or
bioweaponry is not an easy or familiar subject for many people. When it comes
to introducing audiences to the wide array of new issues involving technologies
integral to the COVID-19 epidemic, the media still has many big jobs of public
education to mount. This public education is the necessary gateway to
well-informed public discourse on the complex array of issues, some of them
life-and-death in nature, that is fast bearing down upon us all.
Instead of conscientiously reporting on the situation, the CBC’s
reporters tend like so many others in their position to fall back on what is
becoming an old canard. Rather than evaluate all the gaping holes and omissions
and silences in their own news coverage, they attribute all problems to some
imagined tribe of malicious know nothings smeared collectively as “conspiracy
theorists.”
By and large, most MSM
reporters equate the concept of “conspiracy theorists” with kooks and losers
who exist in some wayward zone well outside the charmed inner circle of
“authoritative sources”? How are we to interpret what Pauls and Yates mean when
they subjectively refer to a “conspiracy blog,” or to “conspiracy theory blogs”
without giving any explanations, proofs or definitions of what they mean. Where
is the trusted agency that is qualified and empowered to decide without bias or
self-interest what is or is not a “conspiracy blog”? Is any interpretation that
runs counter to the CBC’s often-vapid interpretation of events a “conspiracy
theory”?
Doesn’t the MSM’s serial abuse of
the “conspiracy theory” meme provide a license for lazy, groupthink-inclined
stenographers of power to continue a policy of serving the continued reign of
the status quo?
How often does it happen that
whistle blowers who provide conscientious critiques of official narratives in
many fields are dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”? Wasn’t Wuhan Medical
Doctor, Li Wenliang, initially dismissed by Chinese authorities as a conspiracy
theorist? How often does it happen that those who fall back on the conspiracy
theory meme to discredit their detractors are in fact apologists and gate
keepers for corrupt, self-serving lobbies?
The CBC story presents a screen
shot that attributes to Zero Hedge the asking of the question, “Did China Steal the Coronavirus
From Canada And Weaponize It?” No effort is made by the CBC reporters to put in
context the important story of the attack on Zero Hedge by Twitter in order to protect
the problematic official narrative of the COVID-19 epidemic. No effort has been
made by CBC to identify GreatGameIndia as the source of the story on the
alleged Canadian connection to COVID-19. No effort is made to assess the
background, understanding and possible motivations of the creators of the
GreatGameIndia essays.
If the CBC had held back its
attack on Coronavirus “conspiracy theorists” one day longer, its reporters
would have had before them the story of the arrest of Dr. Charles Lieber, the
Chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Dr.
Lieber is facing serious criminal charges for his failure to communicate to US
authorities the full extent of his commitments in China, including his role at
the Wuhan University of Technology.
The nature of the allegations
against the activities of Dr. Lieber cast an important light on the case of Dr.
Xiangguo Qui, her husband Keding Cheng, and on her many Chinese graduate
students often afforded favorable treatment at the NML and the University of
Manitoba. The clear and detailed explanations given by some US officials
describing the content and broader implications of the Lieber case help clarify
what is not being reported in Canada.
What and who was behind the
attempt to identify and explain a significant Canadian connection to the
COVID-19 crisis? What is the position of the federal government and the
University of Manitoba on the case in Winnipeg that, in general terms, is
seemingly being replicated by some aspects of the scandal that has opened up
the Chemistry Department at Harvard University to considerable skeptical public
scrutiny?
The reporting on the Lieber
case helps clarify the nature information blackout imposed on Canadians by, for
instance, by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, by the federal Public Health
Agency, by the RCMP, and by the Crown’s public broadcaster known as the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
In setting themselves up as
virtue-seeking critics of “conspiracy theorists,” CBC reporters professionally
roughed up an array of writers whose work they probably haven’t read, let alone
considered in a careful and thoughtful way. In creating stereotypical accounts
about a body of work they probably have not evaluated on a case-by-case basis,
the CBC journalists resort to forms of blanket generalizations that have much
in common with the racist caricaturing of ethnic groups.
Hence the CBC reporters
continue down the road of incitement by demonizing interpretations that in many
instances do not conform to their own way of viewing events. Part of this
incitement is expressed in the decision to highlight the comments of Prof.
Fuyuki Kurasawa. Kurasawa is a sociologist and Director of the Global Digital
Citizenship Lab at York University. Kurasawa condemns “conspiracy theories” and
“rumours” for “washing out factual information being reported on line.”
How can genuine “factual information” be credibly determined without
providing space and time for open debate among proponents of competing
interpretations? If the pursuit of truth by means of open debate is being
spurned even by faculty members at academic institutions (which tragically is
often the case these days), where else in society can such rituals of informed
and civil disagreement take place in humanity’s quest for knowledge?
Kurasawa is
one of those academic careerists who has decided to swim along professionally
with a broad array of discredited assumptions underlying the Global War on
Terror.
Kurasawa’s complicity in the
war on terror’s culture of caricature shows up in his convoluted account how
the Coronavirus “vigilantes” of his imagination might think and act. He imagines a
subgroup of “conspiracy theorists” who
will take it on themselves to
become vigilantes, where they’ll try to spot someone who supposedly is either
holding the truth about some hidden truth about the coronavirus or a person who
may be a carrier or supposed carrier of the virus because they appear to have
certain symptoms, and then they’ll ask the general public to take matters into
own hands.
Spiro Skouras, former executive
producer at Newsbud, has emerged as one of the more engaging and
erudite of the young investigative journalists who have been delving into the
Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic. Skouras has documented the position of many
prominent figures that have questioned the dubious claim that the source of
COVID-19 infection was a diseased animal in Wuhan’s open-air food market.
Skouras has argued it would be
“negligent” for researchers to refrain from investigating “the full array of
possibilities” on how the contagion originated and how it spread.
Among the first figures,
Skouras interviewed on the crisis was Francis Boyle, the renowned professor of
international law at the University of Illinois. Prof. Boyle drafted the
Biological Weapons and Terrorism Act, legislation that enabled US ratification of
the UN’s Biological Warfare Convention in 1990.
Prof. Boyle indicated in his
interview with Skouras that COVID-19 is most likely a genetically-engineered
pathogen that escaped from the so-called Biosafety Laboratory in Wuhan. Prof.
Boyle indicated,
It’s clear to me [the
coronavirus] leaked out of the Wuhan Biosafety Level 4 Facility set up by the
Chinese government that is working on every type of dangerous biological
warfare agent you can consider.
Prof. Boyle points to the fact
that the SARS virus leaked out from a Beijing lab in 2004. He describes as
“propaganda” the widely promulgated opinion that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan’s
exotic, open-air food market. Prof. Boyle expanded some of his interpretations
in a subsequent interview published by GreatGameIndia.
Skouras specifically asked Dr.
Boyle about his relationship with mainstream media given his record as one of
the foremost academic experts on international law and military culture
concerning the development of bioweaponry in the United States. Dr. Boyle
responded that he was pretty much blacklisted from commenting on the subject of
biological warfare ever since he publicly shared his interpretation of the
anthrax attacks on two US Senators in October of 2001.
There has been considerable scholarly scrutiny of the anthrax attacks
targeting the US Congress and some media organizations in early October of
2001. The anthrax attacks constitute the most serious assault ever on the
operations of the US Congress, the primary interface between law and politics
in the United States.
These attacks have come to be understood as an integral part of the
large body of crimes committed in Manhattan and Washington DC on 9/11. The
anthrax attacks killed five people including two postal workers. Seventeen
people were injured and Congress was shut down for a few days.
Anthrax-laden letter attacks were specifically directed at two
Democratic Party Senators, Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle. When they received
the contaminated letters both lawmakers were engaged in questioning provisions
of the post-9/11 emergency measures legislation known as the Patriot Act. Both
Senators Leahy and Daschle were hesitant to rubber stamp the enactment that was
seemingly instantly drafted and put before Congress within three weeks of the 9/11
debacle.
The anthrax attacks took place just as the US Armed Forces began
invading Afghanistan where the culprits of the 9/11 crimes were supposed to be
hiding out. The perpetrators of the anthrax attack, who we were supposed to
imagine at the time as al-Qaeda terrorists, succeeded in easing aside the major
locus of opposition to the Patriot Act’s speedy passage in late October. Why,
one might legitimately ask, ask, would Islamic jihadists want the Patriot Act
to be rushed through Congress. In early October the US Armed Forces invaded
Afghanistan at the same time that the US executive branch was seeking with the
Patriot a license to kill and torture and steal without any checks of
accountability.
Once the US Armed Forces went to war with Afghanistan on the basis of a
fraudulent explanation of 9/11’s genesis, there was basically no chance that a
genuine and legitimate evidence-based investigation of the September 11 crimes
would ever take place. To this day the Global War on Terror continues to unfold
on a foundation of lies and illusions that have had devastating consequences
for the quality of life for average people throughout the United States and the
world.
In his 2005 book, Biowarfare and Terrorism, Prof. Boyle’s analysis pointed
to major problems in the FBI’s investigation of the anthrax attacks including
the agency’s destruction of relevant evidence. To Prof. Boyle, the highly
refined military-grade quality of the anthrax made it almost certain that the
anthrax bioweapon was produced within the US Armed Forces at the lab in Fort
Detrick Maryland. Anthrax, or Bacillus anthracis, is a rod-shaped bacteria found naturally in soil.
Looking back at the episode Dr. Boyle observed,
“The Pentagon and the C.I.A. are ready, willing, and able to launch biowarfare
when it suits their interests. They already attacked the American People and
Congress and disabled our Republic with super-weapons-grade anthrax in October
2001.”
Prof. Boyle’s interpretation was later verified and expanded upon in a
book by Canadian Prof. Graeme MacQueen. Prof. Boyle acknowledges the veracity
of Prof. MacQueen’s study of the anthrax deception as part of a “domestic
conspiracy.” He sees The 2001 Anthrax Deception as the most advanced finding of academic research on the topic so
far.
Prof. MacQueen is prominent among a very large group of academics and
public officials who condemn the official narrative of 9/11 for its dramatic
inconsistencies with the available evidence. Those who share this understanding include
former Italian Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga, former German Defence Minister
Andreas von Bülow, former UK Minister of the Environment Michael Meacher,
former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, former
Director of the US Star Wars Missile Defense Program Lt. Col. Bob Bowman,
Princeton International Law Professor Richard Falk, and the author of ten
academic books on different aspects of the 9/11 debacle, Claremont Graduate
University Professor David Ray Griffin.
Prof. Francis Boyle shared the
9/11 skepticism of many when he asked,
Could the real culprits behind
the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, and the immediately-following
terrorist anthrax attacks upon Congress ultimately prove to be the same people?
Could it truly be coincidental that two of the primary intended victims of the
terrorist anthrax attacks – Senators Daschle and Leahy – were holding up the
speedy passage of the pre-planned USA Patriot Act … an act which provided the
federal government with unprecedented powers in relation to US citizens and
institutions?
In his coverage of the Wuhan
Coronavirus epidemic, Spiro Skouras highlighted the proceedings known as Event
201. Event 201 brought together in New York on October 18, 2019 an assembly of
delegates hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic
Forum and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The gathering
anticipated the COVID-19 crisis by just a few weeks. I retrospect it is almost
as if Event 201 announced many of the controversies about to arise with the
outbreak of the real epidemic in Wuhan China. Event 201 performed functions
similar to those of the drills that frequently mimic the engineered scenarios
animating false flag terror events but especially those of 9/11.
A major subject of the meeting
highlighted the perceived need to control communications during an epidemic.
Levan Thiru of the Monetary Authority of Singapore went as far as to call for
“a step up on the part of governments to take action against Fake News.” Thiru
called for recriminatory litigation aimed at criminalizing “bad actors.”
Cautioning against this kind of censorship, Skouras asked, Who is going to
decide what constitutes “Fake News”? If fact checkers are to be employed, “who
will fact check the fact checkers”?
Hasti Taghi, a media executive
with NBC Universal in New York, was especially outspoken in condemning the
activities of “conspiracy theorists” that have organized themselves to question
the motives and methods of the complex of agencies involved in developing and
disseminating vaccines. She frequently condemned the role of
“conspiracy theories” in energizing public distrust of the role of
pharmaceutical companies and media conglomerates in their interactions with
government.
Tom Ingelsby of the Johns
Hopkins Center for Health Security injected an interesting twist into the
discussion. He asked, “How much control of information should there be? By whom
should control of information be exercised? How can false information be effectively
challenged?” Ingelsby then added, “What happens if the false information is
coming from companies and governments?”
This final question
encapsulates a major problem for conscientious citizens trying to find their
way through the corruption and disinformation that often permeates our key
institutions. Those that try to counter the problem that governments and
corporations sometimes peddle false information can pretty much expect to face
accusations that they are “conspiracy theorists.” Too often the calculations
involved in deciding whom or what is credible (or not) depends primarily on
simple arithmetic favouring the preponderance of wealth and power.
Spiro Skouras gives careful
consideration to the possibility that the United States instigated the COVID-19
epidemic starting in Wuhan China.
He notes the precedent set in
1945 on the atomic attacks by the US government on the civilian populations of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Skouras points out that there is proof that since the
Second World War, the US government has conducted at least 239 experiments,
secretly deploying toxic chemical and biological agents against portions of its
own population.
Skouras highlights the window
presented for a covert US bioweapon attack at the World Military Games in Wuhan
China in the second half of October of 2019. He notes that 300 US soldiers
participated as athletes in the Wuhan Military Games together with a large
contingent of American support personnel. The timing and the circumstances of
the event were more or less ideal to open up a new pathogenic front in the US
government’s informal “hybrid war” against China.
On Feb. 15 at the Munich
Security Conference, US Defence Secretary, Mark T. Esper, developed a highly
critical characterization of Chinese wrongdoing in order to seemingly justify
recriminatory actions. Esper asserted,
“China’s growth over the years has been remarkable, but in many ways it is
fuelled by theft, coercion, and exploitation of free market economies, private
companies, and colleges and universities… Huawei and 5G are today’s poster
child for this nefarious activity.
The US antagonism to Huawei’s
leadership in the design and worldwide dissemination of 5 G technology might
well be a factor in the scandal generated by the Chinese connection to
intertwined research in microbiology at the level 4 labs in Winnipeg and Wuhan.
Back in 2000 the notorious report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, a publication brought forward
by the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), proposed
that the US government should refurbish and invoke its capacity to wage
biological warfare. PNAC was the think tank that anticipated the events of September
11, 2001 by outlining a strategic scheme that could only be realized by
mobilizing American public opinion with “a catalytic event like a New Pearl
Harbor.”
After 9/11, the PNAC Team of
related neoconservative activists and Zionist organizations pretty much took
over the governance of the United States along with the build up and deployment
of its formidable war machine. PNAC called for the invocation of “advanced
forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes.” In this
fashion “biological warfare might be transformed into a politically useful
tool.”
The relationship of this
pandemic to internal disagreements within China has been put on full display in
Steve Bannon’s coverage of the crisis entitled War Room: Pandemic. A prominent member of US
President Donald Trump’s inner circle,
Steve Bannon is often accompanied on the daily show by Chinese billionaire
dissident, Miles Guo (aka Guo Wengui, Miles Haoyun, Miles Kwok).
Guo is an outspoken Chinese refugee. He is a persistent
critic of virtually every facet of the policies and actions of the Chinese
Communist Party.
Guo regularly condemns those
who dominate China’s one-party system, a system run by an elite who, he
alleges, are corrupt, incompetent and inveterate liars. Guo regularly asserts
that all of the Chinese government’s numbers on the pandemic, including death
rates and infection rates, can probably be multiplied by 10X or even 100X to
get closer to accuracy.
[On the 10X guestimate of
mortality and infection see this.]
Clearly Bannon and Guo would
like to see the emergency conditions created by the pandemic as a wedge of
division, protest and regime change within China. One of the subjects they
regularly raise, as do others who accuse the Chinese government of systematic
lying and deception, is that the crematoriums in Wuhan and nearby Chongqing are
burning corpses of dead people at a rate far higher than official death
figures. Some reports indicated that portable incinerators were being brought
into the most infected core of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic.
It is troubling, to say the
least, that some reports indicate dead people are being cremated far faster and
at far higher rates than the Chinese government and the World Health
Organization are reporting. Some reckoning with the apparent disparity between
reported and actual deaths has led to widespread suspicions about what is
actually going in the scenes of violent and angry exchanges between people in
the Wuhan area.
Many of these videos show
brutal confrontations between Chinese civilians and Chinese security police.
The displays of desperation by some of those trying to escape apprehensions by
uniformed officials seem sometimes to suggest the severity of a life or death
struggle. It is made to seem that those seeking to escape the
grip of authorities are aware that their failure to do so might lead to a quick
death and a quick exit by incineration. These reflections are,
of course, speculative rather than definitive.
Questions concerning who we are
supposed to believe or not in this crisis are becoming ever more pressing and
volatile. One of the emerging themes in the discourse developed at War Room: Pandemic is the propensity of some
of the core agencies of mainstream media in the United States to accept at face
value the reports they receive from official media outlets answering to the
Chinese Communist Party. To Banning and Guo this pattern makes media
organizations like the New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN essentially propaganda extensions of the Chinese government.
The Chinese people themselves
are clearly grappling in new ways with the problem of how to understand the
information and directives given them by the governing apparatus of the Chinese
Communist Party. Clearly the Party initially failed the people by not
intervening early and decisively enough after the first cases of Coronavirus
illness began to show up. The exit from Wuhan of almost five million people in
prior to the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations had huge implications for
spreading the contagion.
As noted in the introduction,
the death in Wuhan of Dr. Li Wenliang on 7 February has become a flash point
for popular criticism of the Chinese Communist Party led by General Secretary
Xi Jinping. Dr. Li wrote to members of his medical school alumnus group
suggesting that some significant action should be taken in response to the
appearance of SARS-like symptoms that suddenly afflicted his patients.
For sending out this
unauthorized communication, Dr. Li was summoned along with seven other supposed
offenders to the Public Security Bureau. There he was warned by police to stop
“making false statements.” He was ordered to cease and desist “spreading
rumors,” and “acting illegally to disturb social order.”
Dr. Li signed a form indicating
he would refrain from continuing to do what he had been accused of doing. The
chastised professional returned to his medical practice. He took his own advice
and began treating patients exhibiting signs of the new illness. He himself
soon died from COVID-19 when
it was still known as 19-nCoV.
Is Twitter’s permanent
deplatforming of the Zero Hedge web site a North American version of the police intervention in
China with the goal of silencing Dr. Li? Is the censorship of the Internet in
the name of opposing “conspiracy theorists” repeating the Chinese Communist
Party’s effort to silence Dr. Li?
Is Dr. Li to be appropriately
understood as a Chinese version of a “conspiracy theorist”? How different was
his treatment for allegedly “spreading rumours” and “acting illegally to
disturb social order” from the treatment of those in the Occident who have been
deplatformed, smeared and professionally defrocked for attempting to speak
truth to power?
I have developed responses to
these incursions based on hard-won experiences facing the propaganda blows of
an especially powerful political lobby able to seize control of the governing
board of my university. These professional lobbyists seek to discredit academic
analysis of their own violations of law, ethics and civility by labelling
critics of their zealotry as “conspiracy theorists” or worse.
More recently I have been
grappling against a variation on this process in trying to counter the
censorious attacks on the American Herald Tribune. These assaults on free
expression and open debate began with the machinations of military hawks whose
hit job instructions were passed along to the disinformation specialists
at CNNand the Washington Post.
No one can say for sure where
the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic is taking the world. Wherever we are headed,
however, we are leaving behind an era that can never be recreated. Whatever
happened to originate the contagion, this crisis is forcing us to take stock of
the framework of biological warfare as it has been developing in China, Russia,
Israel and probably many other countries.
Nowhere, however, is biological warfare
being more expansively and expensively developed and probably deployed than by
the US Armed Forces. The death and destruction that humanity is presently
experiencing should signal to us that it is time to get much more serious about
inspecting military facilities and enforcing the terms of the Biological
Warfare Convention of 1972. It is, in fact, time to get much more serious about
enforcing all aspects of international criminal law in balanced ways that
transcend the biases of Victors’ Justice.
It is time to throw off the weight of
the pseudo-laws introduced after 9/11 through abhorrent tactics like the
inside-job military anthrax attack on Congress. Most certainly, it is time to
draw a clear distinction between research in the field of public health and
research in the development of lethal bioweapons. Better yet, we should work
towards putting an end altogether to militarization through the massive
expansion of the “death sciences.” The vile activities of fallen practitioners
of the endangered life sciences are, for starters, undermining the integrity of
our besieged institutions of higher learning.
Anthony James Hall has been
Editor In Chief of the American Herald Tribune since its inception. Between
1990 and 2018 Dr. Hall was Professor of Globalization Studies and Liberal
Education at the University of Lethbridge where he is now Professor Emeritus.
The focus of Dr. Hall’s teaching, research, and community service came to
highlight the conditions of the colonization of Indigenous peoples in imperial
globalization since 1492.
(Republished from American Herald Tribune by
permission of author or representative)
