So, if you have been following the news for any of the last year you will be well aware that the accepted orthodoxy for many months was that COVID-19 emerged from a bowl of bat soup at a seafood market in Wuhan and somehow made the jump to infecting humans and becoming readily communicable. Any suggestion to the contrary was grounds for being banned from social media and shouted down as a lunatic. Yes, the virus probably came from China, but the Chinese government, which has brought us genocide, forced sterilization, and industrial-scale torture, could never be complicit in something so sinister as a worldwide pandemic.
Recently, that narrative has begun to soften a bit. In the face of overwhelming evidence, even Joe Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, has had to admit that one of the two possible explanations for the origin of COVID-19 would involve an “escape” from a Chinese bio lab in Wuhan. That conclusion is supported by a classified study by Lawrence Livermore Labs.
Yet, still, there remains a hard line on what can be suggested. Maybe the Chinese were sloppy. Maybe they let the virus escape. But, one thing we know for sure is this. Whatever they were doing was innocent and only because the murderous Chinese Communist Party had the best interests of the world at heart.
Really?
Here are some things we know for sure now that might make you want to alter that calculus a bit.
A document obtained by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) that dates to 2015 shows that as of that time Chinese scientists and health officials were discussing a “new era of genetic weapons” that could be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponized and unleashed.
Titled ‘The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons’, the Chinese research suggested fighting a third world war with biological weapons. The specific bioweapon discussed was a form of the SARS virus. COVID-19 is a type of SARS virus. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses, several of which cause respiratory diseases in humans – ranging from a common cold to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
The executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Peter Jennings, described the document as the closest thing to a “smoking gun as we’ve got. I think this is significant because it clearly shows that Chinese scientists were thinking about military application for different strains of the coronavirus and thinking about how it could be deployed,” Jennings was quoted as saying by news.com.au.
“It begins to firm up the possibility that what we have here is the accidental release of a pathogen for military use,” Jennings continued, adding the document may explain why China has been so reluctant for outside investigations into the origins of COVID-19. “If this was a case of transmission from a wet market it would be in China’s interest to co-operate… We’ve had the opposite of that.”
We also know that the United States government takes the possibility of a bioweapons attack from China so seriously that when the U.S. Air Force simulated an attack by the Chinese on American forces in the Pacific last year, the war game began with a hypothetical Chinese biological attack. The exercise ended with the conclusion that the United States would lose the ensuing war and lose quickly.
In an interview in February of this year, former Deputy National Security Advisor (DNSA) Mathew Pottinger said the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had been carrying out biological warfare experiments in Wuhan for years and tried to cover up the COVID-19 outbreak. Pottinger said that U.S. intelligence sources had strong reason to believe that the “Chinese military was doing secret classified animal experiments in that same laboratory [Wuhan Institute of Virology]” as early as 2017. He added that there is “good reason to believe” that an outbreak of a “flu-like illness” had occurred among the scientists in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in the fall of 2019, just before the first cases of a new type of pneumonia were being reported in Wuhan.
Pottinger stressed that although the Wuhan lab bills itself as a “civilian institution,” U.S. intelligence has determined that the lab has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. Pottinger also stated the lab has undertaken “classified research, including laboratory animal experiments,” on behalf of the PLA since 2017. Pottinger noted as well that when the outbreak first began it was the PLA, not some civilian entity, that was put in charge of handling the situation in Wuhan. It was the military that was called in.
Separate reporting from the Daily Mail has shown that the Wuhan lab was the center of a long-standing project, dating to at least 2012 focused on ‘the discovery of animal-delivered pathogens carried by wild animals, which set out to find organisms that could infect humans and investigate their evolution. This project involved both civilian and military investigators. Pursuant to this project, apparently, thousands of new viruses were identified and cataloged. These viruses were stored at the Wuhan lab, the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia.
Speaking earlier this year, David Asher, the State Department’s former lead investigator into the origins of COVID-19 said he believed the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and may have been the result of research that the PLA was doing on a bioweapon.
“The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,” David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute told Fox News. “It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view, and I’m just one person, my view is it was a biological weapons program.”
“And if you believe, as I do, that this might have been a weapons vector gone awry, not deliberately released, but in development and then somehow leaked, this has turned out to be the greatest weapon in history,” Asher said during a panel discussion at the Hudson Institute. “You’ve taken out 15 to 20 percent of global GDP. You’ve killed millions of people. The Chinese population has been barely affected. Their economies roared back to being number one in the entire G20.”
According to Asher, the Chinese stopped talking publicly about their research at the Wuhan lab in 2016. That, he believes, is when the People’s Liberation Army stepped in and shifted from biodefense research to bio-offense.
None of what is detailed above proves that COVID-19 was genetically engineered or originated in a military bioweapons program. What it does do is cast the debate about the origins of the pandemic in an entirely different light from what was accepted as orthodoxy last year. We know now that the most likely point of origin for this disease was a lab known to be working with viruses of exactly this type and doing so in large measure because of the perceived offensive military utility of such viruses in a war with the United States.
You can still choose to accept the word of the thuggish, totalitarian CCP that this whole thing started in a seafood market if you wish. You can certainly still choose to believe that whatever happened was a horrible accident and not some deliberate attack. I for one increasingly find the idea that this virus was the product of a bioweapons program gone astray just a little less crazy every day.
