The story of our forgotten anthrax attacks of 2001 is really a quite remarkable one, possessing more strange twists and ironies than we would expect to find in any work of fiction.
Merely the first of these is that an event that had the greatest possible impact upon our society and world history has almost completely vanished from our national memory.
During the decades after World War II, our government had created the world’s largest and most powerful biodefense infrastructure to protect our citizens from such deadly attack. Yet the only documented cases of American bioweapon deaths came in 2001 and resulted from the deadly anthrax spores produced in our own national laboratories, whether these had been deployed by Dr. Bruce Ivins or more likely someone else.
We soon discovered that the bioterrorism responsible for those American deaths and the resulting wave of national panic had actually been the home-grown product of our own biodefense industry, our political response was to increase the funding for those same government biowarfare labs by ten- or twenty-fold, so that American spending on bioweapons eventually crossed the hundred-billion-dollar mark.
All of those facts are completely indisputable, but I think there may also be an additional twist.
It is obvious that the existence of a massive American bioweapons capability might produce dangerous temptations in the minds of some of our more reckless political leaders, and such temptations may have had disastrous consequences in 2019.
Over the last several years, I have published a long series of articles arguing that there is strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the global Covid outbreak was probably the unintended blowback from a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).
More than a million Americans died as a consequence, along with perhaps twenty million other deaths worldwide, and the lives of many billions were greatly disrupted, including our own entire population. So all of this massive death and devastation may have been the ultimate consequence of a handful of letters bearing $0.23 stamps that were mailed out in 2001.
- Covid/Biowarfare SeriesRon Unz • The Unz Review • April 2020-December 2021 • 60,000 Words
Last year I’d pointed to the analogy of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster that played a major role in bringing down the old Soviet Union.
