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Source: CIPD Asia

 

Strong circumstantial evidence points to China’s negligence and dangerous manipulation of the underlying virus as the causes of the Covid-19 pandemic. The U.S. isn’t blameless, either.

 

Covid-19 first hit the news in January 2020. The WHO declared a global health emergency on January 30 and a global pandemic on March 11. Depending on where you live, you’ve been on partial or full lockdown ever since as economies seized up and many millions lost their jobs. More recently, in the first presidential debate on September 29, Donald Trump blamed the U.S.’s economic woes on the “China Plague”. By any measure, 2020 is Covid-19’s year.

 

With the election two weeks away and news outlets as politicized as the candidates they cover, it’s still hard to separate Covid fact-from-fiction. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, famously said, “You can’t make this shit up.” He was referring to the dysfunction of Baltimore, but it equally applies to Covid-19 as various parties have either made shit up, suppressed the truth, or not looked very hard. The principal culprits are the WHO, China, the liberal press, and the U.S. with their motivations differing by actor.

 

The World Health Organization Dances to China’s Tune

 

The WHO has become a China puppet, so much so that Taiwan—a leader in the fight against SARS in 2002-03 and featuring one of East Asia’s best public health capabilities—was dumped off the WHO’s World Health Assembly (“WHA”) in 2016. The WHO’s slavish acceptance of China’s “One China” principle means that Taiwan’s and China’s Covid-19 cases were combined, Taiwan citizens were denied entry to many countries that banned travel from China and, crucially, all WHO information on Covid transmissions could only be accessed by Taiwan via China (which to its credit passed the info along . . . after a delay). What’s puzzling is that China’s contribution to the WHO’s annual budget was $86m in 2018-19, less than ten percent of the $893m contributed by the U.S. However, China-backed Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s election as Director-General in 2017 and Tedros has been beholden to President Xi ever since. Even normally tactful Japan is fed up, with deputy prime minister Taro Aso joking in March that “the WHO should be renamed the ‘Chinese Health Organization’.”

 

China has Locked Down and Locked Up the Truth about Covid-19

 

China at a minimum doesn’t want to shoulder the political and financial repercussions of having been negligent when Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (“WIV”). That explains why the government has put a total ban on releasing any information with regard to the origins of the virus. The Shanghai lab that released details of the Covid-19 genome on January 11 was shut down, and doctors and journalists who were early reporters have disappeared.

 

Still worse would be the discovery that WIV scientists had genetically altered the naturally occurring bat virus before it escaped in a gain-of-function (“GOF”) exercise gone wrong. Totally damning would be evidence that China’s central government ordered the virus re-engineered before its inadvertent release. (That China hasn’t complied with the provisions of Article II of the Biological Weapons Convention accord it signed is a further red flag.)

 

The disastrous confluence of the WHO’s subservience and China’s authoritarianism played out in January and February. Following a meeting with Xi on January 28, Tedros praised China for “setting a new standard for outbreak control” and singled out China’s leaders for “openness to sharing information” after officials in Wuhan had arrested citizens for “spreading rumors” and censored the domestic internet. Worse yet, at China’s urging Tedros allegedly instructed the WHO to delay by one week (from January 23 to January 30) the declaration of a global health emergency. The CIA believes China used this time to buy protective gear and equipment worldwide.

 

Led by Australia, in May 2020 at the annual WHA meeting over one hundred countries in Europe, Africa and worldwide successfully petitioned China to allow for a coronavirus inquiry. However, breaking with precedent, President Xi said the investigation into Covid-19’s origins couldn’t start until after the pandemic ended (years from now?), and that countries other than China would need to be examined, too, for their responses (A poke at the U.S.: see below.) It remains to be seen whether the WHO investigation will ever take place, and, if so, the degree to which the researchers will be allowed unfettered access to people, records and facilities.

 

The Press Downplayed the WHO’s and China’s Failings Rather than Help Trump

 

The international media opposes Trump’s re-election to such a degree that their knee-jerk reaction is to oppose or dismiss anything he asserts. Therefore, when Trump said that the WHO was too “China-centric” and demonstrated “an alarming lack of independence from China” (both statements true), the newsrooms at CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, New York Times and Washington Post downplayed the WHO-China concerns. (There are a few articles on the portals that I’ve reproduced in the bibliography to Part II of this blog, but nothing close to the anti-Trump ink dedicated to documenting his Covid-19 failures.)

 

I understand that the politics of the 2020 presidential election have so colored everyone’s perceptions that pre-November 3 it will be impossible to undertake an impartial investigation into the origins of the pandemic. But in two weeks the election will be over, and irrespective of who wins, for long-term pandemic prevention purposes we need to understand how Covid-19 happened. Otherwise, the next time there’s a more lethal outbreak we’ll pay a much higher price for not learning enough this time around.

 

I don’t expect China to cooperate with the WHO because the screw-ups that unleashed Covid-19 either originated on China’s soil or were perpetrated by China’s crackdowns, coverups and lying. I also don’t expect the WHO to confront China as long as their man Tedros is Director-General. Therefore, it will take a US-government-led multinational effort to unravel what really happened with Covid-19. This is likely to be a task led by the intelligence community rather than open-sourced information gathering by multicultural medical researchers digging through China’s complete medical and scientific records.

 

If Trump wins, his willingness to hit China perhaps will be tempered by trade or diplomatic considerations. I’m doubly concerned that a Biden victory—with U.S. MNCs already lining up to sign big deals in China—will lead the new administration to use a light touch in their efforts to distance themselves from the Trump years as well as keep promises to their Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Fortune 500 backers. One outcome could be a willingness to give China a pass on Covid-19. As explored in more detail in Part II of this blog, the U.S. helped cause Covid-19 by funding the WIV’s gain-of-function coronavirus research and then ignoring its own diplomats’ concerns about the WIV staff and safety.

 

For the health of everyone on the planet, we need to know whether it’s possible for an animal virus to jump to humans while gaining in potency and contagiousness, or whether Covid-19 was the result of artificial manipulation and a lab escape. The difference has huge implications for public health policy and pandemic prevention planning.

 

I’ve updated A Viper’s Nest of Conspiracies, a collection of the non-MH370 articles from the True Lies blog on www.bradleywest.net. First among these is a more detailed investigation of the origins of Covid-19 including the U.S.’s overlooked role in starting the pandemic. If you’d like to find out more (as well as reference an extensive bibliography), click here on Franken-Covid Deep Dive 2020 Oct to enter your email address and I’ll send you a PDF of A Viper’s Nest, v.2.0 and the rest of the Covid-19 origin story. Frankly, no one comes out looking very good.

 

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Dark Cure: A Covid Thriller launches soon and the early bird readers report that it makes for quick reading with plenty of colorful characters and a plot that entertains as well as unsettles. What would you do to safeguard your family if “Covid-20” (the more deadly successor to Covid-19) killed over three-quarters of those it infected and led to the collapse of society?

 

In the meantime, people who look like me actually look better wearing a mask.

 

Bradley West

 

Singapore, October 19, 2020

 

Source: Lorenzo Casalino, Amaro Lab, U.C. San Diego

 

Bibliography

 

See Franken-Covid | Creating the Monster that became China’s Coronavirus for references, accessible only in A Viper’s Nest of Conspiracies, v.2.0 available via www.bradleywest.net when you sign up for the Readers Group, or click on Franken-Covid Deep Dive 2020 Oct .