Origins of the Coronavirus seems to be a moving target
Published on: Sunday, November 07, 2021
By: Ronald Keeva
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Brazil has lost several hundred thousands of its population to Covid-19 and its President Bolsonaro (inset) is facing persecution for ignoring its threat.
“By the same token, we will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress and subjugate us. Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people. [Reported in the Wall Street Journal as: ‘Anyone who tries to do so shall be battered and bloodied from colliding with a great wall of steel forged by more than 1.4 billion Chinese people using flesh and blood]”
These words acquire added significance if recent events touching on China’s relationship with the Western powers are taken into account. Indeed, few world leaders today would have any occasion to complain of being ‘bullied’, but not so with the Chinese leader. Perhaps the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May, 1999 still remains fresh in Chinese memory.
Reported in most Western press at the time as a ‘mishap’ due to the use of ‘out-dated’ maps by military planners, the bombing of the embassy has since been revealed to be a deliberate strike by U.S. bombers supposedly flying under NATO auspices to target the Serbs.
The reason for the attack, it later transpired, was that Serbian forces, which had earlier shot down a US stealth fighter, the F117, had recovered the parts and sold some to the Chinese and some to the Russians.
Those parts were known to have been stored in the basement of the embassy pending shipment back to China. It was said the technical secrets of the plane enabled the Chinese to develop their own ‘stealth’ fighter, the J.20 ten years ahead of time. Those killed in the bombing were later hailed as martyrs.
On record it was later admitted by the US that the attack was purposefully planned and executed. It was also revealed that of the many strikes by NATO this was the only one planned by the CIA.
One US general was later heard to boast how the bombs had even struck the very room they had targeted. Also reported was how the U.S. Republican party Whip, Tom DeLay, blocked the way of the Chinese ambassador as he was leaving a television studio after being interviewed protesting the strike.
DeLay, (as DeLay told it) ‘grabbed his [the ambassador’s] hand and squeezed it as hard as I could and said, nose to nose, “Do-not-take-the –weakness-of this president [Bill Clinton] as the weakness of the American people”.
(‘How it all Began: the Belgrade Embassy Bombing’, Peter Lee, The Unz Review, May 24, 2015,).
The report was cited in Ron Unz’s own article on the Coronavirus , dated April 21, 2020, entitled, ‘American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?’ and forms the backdrop of the piece.
This Biowarfare article was written in response to what Unz perceived as a deliberate silence in the mainstream media on the origin of the coronavirus. In the article he reviewed U.S. – China relations over the years, covering the above bombing incident, the ‘myth’ of the ‘Tiananmen Massacre’ and the rise of the Chinese economy which is expected to overtake that of the United States’ within the next few years, thus setting the scene for the alleged surreptitious offensive.
After reviewing a15,000 word analysis of an American expat who called himself, “TheMetallicman”on the virus outbreak, Unz gives reasons, ‘applying a little common sense’ as he says, as to why his theory of a bioattack on China is plausible.
First, he notes that the virus, though lethal, has caused more havoc economically worldwide than the toll of fatalities, tragic though that may be.
Secondly, he notes the outbreak had happened just before the holiday break for the Lunar New Year celebration in China, and also at Wuhan, the central communication hub of the country. He thought it was more than just pure coincidence that a ‘lab-leak’, if there was one, would occur during that window of opportunity when the virus could cause maximum devastation to the country.
Thirdly, since the recent strengthening of the Chinese military might, no conventional war against China can now succeed. Therefore, an attack on its economy would seem to be the only, and the most logical means to retard the growth of its economy, and hence it competitive edge, economically and militarily, which is the vaunted aim of the US military under Trump (General Jim ‘Mad dog’ Mattis).
Further, Metallicman had pointed out in his article that prior to the recent outbreak, China had been hit with mysterious outbreaks of avian and swine flu which had devastated its food industries and affected its domestic food production, suggesting that they were acts of economic sabotage.
Unz himself noted what he calls another ‘strange coincidence’ in the sudden arrest of one Professor Charles Lieber, one of Harvard’s top scientist who had had decades of close research ties with China. He thought it bizarre that the academic could be dragged away in shackles in a dawn raid on his home by the FBI. He thought it likely the professor had been ‘a little too free in voicing his suspicions that the sudden epidemic might have been an American biowarfare attack’.
Unz’s own suspicions are further vindicated by a 3,400 word article by an individual calling himself “OldMicrobiologist” and claiming to be a retired veteran of American biodefense division. In it Unz found the answer as to how an attack could be launched by the U.S. surreptitiously; it was during the Military Games held in Wuhan in late October 2019.
Finally, if readers are still unconvinced, Unz rolls out his ‘smoking gun’ evidence. He notes that the time-line of the early events of the epidemic in China was well covered in the mainstream media; that the Chinese officials first became aware of the serious outbreak in mid-December, and the first known deaths occurring in late December.
His ‘smoking gun’ is the fact that in late November, latest, a special medical intelligence unit within the Defense Intelligence Agency had widely distributed a secret warning to top ranks in the US government of an out-of-control disease of epidemic proportion that was occurring in the Wuhan area of China and that steps should be taken to protect the US forces in Asia. Unz says this was reported by ABC News and confirmed later by an Israeli television report.
Despite the fact that the first of Unz’s article appeared in April, 2020, his hypothesis made no impact at all in the mainstream media although it carried grave geopolitical implications, if true. On the contrary, Unz noted, a reporter who wrote about his theory in another publication was labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’ and roundly condemned as a ‘super spreader’ of conspiracy theories by the ABC news network.
Unz was however unrepentant. He followed the above article with three more, published on March 15, 2021(Covid-19, Its Impact and Origins After One Year), May 10, 2021(“The Truth” and “The Whole Truth” About the Origin of Covid-19) and May 31, 2021. They further fleshed out his hypothesis of a bioattack on China, and in his latest on May, 31, ‘George Orwell’s Lab-Leak’ he summarizes his reasons, once again.
He also notes the current US President Joe Biden’s order that the intelligence agencies come up with a report on the origin of the virus within 90 days (The Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2021). As if to pre-empt those agencies by posing a more convincing theory, Unz goes on to narrate the way the attack could have happened in his ‘Outline of the Hypothetical Biowarfare Attack Scenario’ in the lab-leak article.
Unz’s hypothesis is persuasive. For instance, in his conjecture that Trump was unaware of what the Neocons in his administration were doing, after naming John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, he appears perhaps to have overlooked a more likely candidate closer to Trump who fits into his hypothesis like a hand in a glove: Trump’s trade advisor, Peter Navarro.
According to Wikipedia, Navarro, a ‘hawkish advisor on trade holding views that are significantly outside the mainstream of economic thought’, had accused both China and Germany of currency manipulation. He has also co-authored a book entitled, Death by China. How hawkish he was as trade advisor is evident from the following incident:
Navarro had argued that no countries would retaliate against the U.S. tariffs “for the simple reason that we are the most lucrative and biggest market in the world.” When the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada would respond in kind, Navarro said that there would a “special place in hell” for the Canadian Premier. He later apologized (Wikipedia). Here was just the kind of person who would advocate an economic war on China, America’s nemesis in his view.
During the final year of the Trump Administration,
“Navarro was in charge of the administration’s Covid-19 response. Early on, he issued private warnings within the administration about the threat posed by the virus, but downplayed the risks in public.” (Wikipedia).
According to CNN (April 10, 2020), Navarro wrote a memo to Trump on January 29 warning that the novel coronavirus could “evolve into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans”, while saying publicly that America had ‘nothing to worry about’. He also warned that the “risk of a worst-case pandemic scenario should not be overlooked.”
Was this evidence of fore knowledge? If there is a confluence in Unz’s hypothesis where a trade war meets a biowar, the most likely person at that very junction would be Peter Navarro.
In ‘Rage’ (Bob Woodward, Simon and Schuster Ltd., 2020) Woodward recorded 17 interviews with Trump over a period of seven months during which the coronavirus broke out of China and spread rapidly to other countries. In the book Trump is quoted verbatim, unvarnished, and often with bluster and boasts. The book thus contains a contemporaneous record of Trump’s response to news of the virus.
According to Woodward, the US CDC was informed of the outbreak of a pneumonia-like disease in Wuhan on the 31st of December, 2020 by a report from the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee. It immediately issued a situation report on the outbreak, and on the 3rd , January communicated with its counterpart in China, volunteering to send expert epidemiologists and etiologists to assist in tracking down the disease.
The Chinese side declined the offer. They published the virus genome on the 10th of January, and on the same day, Fauci immediately proposed a ‘vaccine project’ to arrest the transmission of the virus.
Despite the urgency shown by the CDC, Trump was not informed. In the top secret President’s Daily Briefing (PDB) on the 24th, January, two days before the lock-down in Wuhan, Trump was told that the intelligence community had a ‘benign take’ of the situation in China: “We don’t think it is as serious as the SARs virus, and we don’t think there is going to be a global pandemic.”
When asked by Woodward whether anyone had informed him of the threat of the outbreak to America during the whole month of January, 2020, Trump answered in the negative.
This appears to confirm Unz’s suspicion that Trump was deliberately kept in the dark by his intelligence advisors, given that a secret warning had been issued by the Defense Intelligence Agency as early as November, 2020.
Further, on 6th February, 2020 Trump, concerned with the situation in China placed a call to President Xi. He volunteered assistance to the Chinese effort in coping with the outbreak, not once, but twice, and was surprised when Xi politely deflected the issue. Nevertheless, the conversation ended cordially.
Trump made another call to Xi on the 26th March, 2020, obviously alarmed by the rapidly deteriorating situation in the US. This time he complained to Xi about reports from China accusing the US of spreading the virus during the Wuhan Military games. Woodward reported that Xi appeared to counter with complaints about the US side putting the blame on China for the virus. There appeared to be a stand-off, though the conversation again ended cordially with Xi extending an invitation to Trump for a return visit when things become normal.
Woodward, apparently trying to pin down the cause of the outbreak, put the question of Chinese responsibility to Trump point blank three more times. Trump did not put the blame on the Chinese, and to the final question whether the US had been ‘stiffed’ by the Chinese, Trump replied that the Chinese too were ‘stiffed’ by the virus. Though he had continued to call the virus the ‘Chinese virus’ , Trump warned his staff not to go overboard with it as it could lead to a war with China.
The Chinese response lends credence to Unz’s theory. If they suspected that the virus was indeed a bioweapon, it would be logical for them to down-play the effect on them, simply to mislead the enemy. It would also be a smart strategy (wolf warrior) to let the enemy think they had failed so that they would themselves become complacent, and let down their guard. Indeed, in the book, Trump had speculated that the Chinese having suffered the outbreak, had wanted the West to have a taste of the same medicine by downplaying its effects.
Unz works on all available evidence including getting ideas from other writers in the social media to shore up, as he likes to call it, his ‘thesis’.
However, given his wide field of interests, it is curious that he has not considered in his articles the other more popular ‘conspiracy theory’ of the pandemic; that it was planned by the sinister ‘Globalists’ or a cabal of big tech, big pharma and the big media moguls.
Such a theory would dove-tail neatly with his own and would explain why the Neocons (and Navarro) had proceeded with the plan despite the obvious risk of the virus spreading to the States. They could have been assured by the real plotters that America would be safe, and that there was an antidote. Indeed, it may be noted that Navarro had early in crisis informed Trump that hydrochloroquine, a tried and tested drug, could stop the virus (Wiki).
It is therefore very likely the Neocons were used by the global elites who had all the time planned for the pandemic so that the world’s financial system could be ‘reset’ and at the same time make sure that Trump will not win a second term.
The prompt roll-out of a vaccine, namely, the mRNA based vaccine, which was proclaimed to have been ‘developed at warp speed’ was quickly touted as the answer to the pandemic. The virus, it was reported had jumped from an infected animal. No dissenting voices were allowed in the social media and the mainstream press. It was later revealed that this type of vaccine had been developed earlier, but had not been approved for use due to its unforeseeable side effects, and had only been approved by the FDA for ‘emergency’ use.
This, together with the fact that several types of coronavirus have been developed and patented earlier, has aroused suspicion that a cabal of international oligarchs is behind the pandemic.
A recent book, ‘The Truth about Covid-19, Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports and the New Normal’ by Dr Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins, (Chelsea Green Publisher, 2021), looks at the nature of the new virus, and lays out a somewhat convincing scenario for such a ‘plandemic’.
Unz’s ‘thesis’ might at first have sounded like science fiction, but put side by side with the hypothesis in the book, it seems to make more sense and connects with geo-political reality of the kind that is often censored from public view.
Still, the global geopolitical implications of an undeclared war are ominous if it turns out to be true, and for this reason we have to be cautious and keep an open mind.
The story is, however, still developing.
The German Corona Inquiry Committee formed in July, 2020 after hearing almost 150 scientists, researchers, experts and witnesses, has revealed some very shocking facts and statistics on the coronavirus and the vaccines that urgently call for answers from the various stakeholders. (Youtube, July 9, 2021) This is again greeted with a deafening silence in the mainstream media.
Ninety days have been given to the US intelligence agencies to come out with the facts on the virus. The skeptics among us will wonder whether, and how the findings when they are released, will fit into the rapidly changing situation of the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide, for it looks like the cat has been let out of the bag and effectively belled to boot.
- Ronald Keeva Unz is a theoretical physicist with degrees from Harvard, Cambridge and Stanford, and added to that, a software entrepreneur who founded ‘The Unz Review”. Having depended for years on the mainstream press, he came to realize that they often failed to report on issues of the greatest national (U.S.) importance. So in order to redress the ‘enormous lacunae in what the media [reveal] and the disturbing patterns in what is regularly ignored or concealed’, he started what he called “Our American Pravda” blog in 2013, later to be incorporated into the Review.
The Unz Review contains numerous controversial subjects mainly those that have not been covered by the mainstream press. Some of the topics he covers are the JFK assassination, the alleged assassination of General Patton and the downing of MH17, drawing mainly from the works of other researchers to come to his own conclusions.
He is not one to steer clear of ‘sensitive’ or ‘politically correct’ subjects, as witnessed by his whole hearted endorsement of the book, Final Judgment’ by Michael Piper Collins, which lays out the theory that the Mossad was behind the assassination of JFK because JFK was going to cut off aid to Israel to force it to abandon its development of nuclear weapons.(Final Judgment is out of print, but Unz has a pdf version in his website.)
Ron Unz is a well known personality in California and earlier on was active in promoting social and political reforms. He was notable enough to be featured in a front-page story in ‘The New Republic’ in 1999.
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