A Bristling Array of Implausibility: Reflections on the Unz Bio-Warfare Attack Hypothesis

By Sushi for the Saker Blog

Mr. Ron Unz has offered a hypothesis with respect to the origins of the COVID pandemic. He asserts the likelihood of the pandemic originating as a United States biological warfare attack (hereafter BWA)) on China. This essay examines the extraordinary claims of the BWA hypothesis and offers a modified hypothesis which may better fit the available evidence.

The Sagan standard demands that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This evidentiary threshold may be difficult to meet if an alleged perpetrator engages in covert activity and seeks the deliberate concealment of egregious conduct. An investigation of the BWA hypothesis therefore requires contemplation of “spukhafte Fernwirkung,” or spooky action at a distance.

Key Questions

A key question is “what evidentiary standard is accepted?” Or “How do we establish a fact?” Conventional wisdom asserts science to create facts. This is false. Courts of law assert findings of fact. The underlying premise of science is fundamental skepticism toward all assertions of fact. It is reported the ancients explained the world to be supported at each of its four corners by a global elephant, the four global elephants standing on the back of a massive global turtle. Upon what did the global turtle stand? When Justice Scalia gave his opinion on this matter in Rapanos v. United States he stated: “It is turtles all the way down.”

In the contemporary scientific world view “turtles all the way down” has been replaced with “hypotheses all the way down.” Each unique member in this infinite set of hypotheses is subject to falsification at any time with the arrival of new evidence, or an improved interpretation of old evidence. Anyone who disbelieves this has not been paying attention to contemporary issues of quantum entanglement or string theory. Elites and deplorables both fail to appreciate the degree to which their notion of “reality” continues to be shaped by a Californian serial monogamist bongo player, a sleepy English virgin wading in a great ocean of truth, and a hirsute Swiss patent office clerk. The investor class remains blissfully unaware their presumed lifetime accumulation of capital is entirely predicated on a series of interlinked hypotheses still waiting to be tested in a future Minsky Moment.

Persons who object to the above truth propose the existence of “intelligent design.”

If you elect to believe in intelligent design, then you must accept the Intelligent Designer has created a species hell bent on extinction. If not extinction by overpopulation and famine, then extinction by under fornication and a gerontological withering away to cobwebs and dust motes. If these routes to self-destruction prove to be failures, then there exist alternatives: global climate change, forever rising sea levels, and baked Alaska, or death by neutron ray, plutonic residue, and a random mutagenic apocalypso. If none of these modes of self-destruction are sufficient to the task, then there remains the capacity to manipulate the Intelligent Designer’s carefully crafted genome in pursuit of a freakish death by drowning in one’s own pleural fluids courtesy of SARS-CoV-2.

All this begs the question – Why would a presumed Intelligent Designer waste time creating a species exhibiting galactic imbecility and an unconscionable indifference to its own welfare? Most fungi demonstrate an intelligence surpassing that of homo sapiens sapiens. (Readers are welcome to mentally replace the word “homo” with “LGBTQIA” or other appropriate acronym du jour. Peruse this helpful website to select your desired pronoun, term of identity, species, or sexual affiliation.)

Nature or Nurture?

The current pandemic involves a debate between nature and nurture. It is asserted SARS-CoV-2 demonstrates features which can only originate via an intermediate host. The virus is presumed to be transmitted from its originating species, Rhinolophus affinis, the horseshoe bat, to an intermediate species (a hypothetical pangolin), where it undergoes a degree of mutation and adaptation, and is subsequently transmitted to an unsuspecting homo sapiens.

No such intermediate host has been found. Because of this, and a bristling array of other implausibility (Wade’s language) it is therefore argued that these various extraordinary features of the virus cannot have issued from a natural process. Due to this implausibility, it is asserted the virus can only have originated by deliberate human manipulation of the viral genome. This non sequitur of an argument then demands the identification of the laboratory in which this deliberate human manipulation was performed. The Global Megaphone claims this laboratory to be located in the vicinity of the viral outbreak in Wuhan, China. Such an assertion greatly reduces the number of suspect institutions. The absence of evidence in support of this set of hypotheses is advanced as some form of proof or, when the Global Megaphone is cranked to eleven, as evidence of malfeasance on the part of the Chinese authorities who fail to deliver facts in support of the unfounded accusations raised against them.

The above argument is easily falsified. By extension, it is a bristling implausibility to assert inorganic materials fortuitously combine in the creation of self-replicating organisms. It is even more bristly implausible to assert that one of these self-replicating organisms has developed proficiency in the use of tools and techniques and that the ultimate result of this process, a truly fantastic organism, has now obtained the capacity to manipulate the mechanism of self-replication and is therefore capable of creating entirely new, previously unknown, forms of self-replicating matter. If you are still awake, the absurd implausibility of the Wade thesis is demonstrated. If nature is incapable of creating SARS-CoV-2 then nature must be equally incapable of creating a species capable of performing the necessary laboratory modifications asserted to be found in SARS-CoV-2.

This argument is necessary and sufficient to cast serious doubt on the assertions of Wade, Baker, Pompeo, Redfield, Baric, Chan, Iwasaki et al. But there is more.

The opening paragraphs of this essay depict a world of random artifice, a sphere supported upon a bale of turtles upon which events occur without intent or purpose, where the product of two random events may result in a third random event, a fourth, a fifth, and so on. Human beings are resistant to such a viewpoint despite each individual human life being the direct result of a zygote impregnated by a random sperm, a single lucky victor among the 200 to 500 million competing spermatozoa contained in a single ejaculation.

Every living person is therefore the lucky holder of a winning random ejaculatory lottery ticket; this favorable circumstance has granted them a lifetime of opportunity. We should mourn the Brontobytes of potential brothers and sisters denied equal opportunity. (These facts raise the disturbing question of why, if we legislate against a woman’s right to abortion, no similar legislation against onanism has yet been introduced. Would a male hierarchy be made blind by self-pleasure?)

Our species exhibits a preference for imposed order and an unquestioning, unvarying routine which is called “office work,” “bureaucracy,” “marriage,” or “governance”. Homo sapiens is found to impose order on random events where no actual order may exist. This innate desire of the species for an imposed order gives rise to constructions called “contracts,” “law,” and the “state.” The BWA hypothesis is predicated on the assertion that these constructions, intended to deliver order, contain within them “rogue elements.” These rogue elements act in ways over which we exert no public control, and this egregious conduct undermines and threatens our desired imposed order. We are naturally reluctant to accept and give credence to such a preposterous proposition. This “preposterous proposition” lies at the heart of Mr. Unz’ BWA hypothesis.

Supporting Evidence – The Means

Over a period of decades Sy Hersh has established a reputation as an investigative journalist with few equals. In an article titled The Vice President’s Men published in the London Review of Books Vol. 41 No. 2, of 24 January 2019, Hersh describes a secret cadre of military operatives established within the US government “that bypassed the national security establishment – including the CIA – and wasn’t answerable to congressional oversight.” Led by a Vice-Admiral in the position of assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this secret commando “quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most important, perceived Soviet expansionism in more than 20 countries . . .”

This group was established “at a time when it became clear the president was drifting and not an effective leader.” This is a reference to a president other than Biden. “We came to realize that the American intelligence community needed the threat from Russia to get their money. Those of us who were running the operations were also amazed that the American press was so incompetent. You could do this kind of stuff all over the world and nobody would ask any questions.” The Hersh article goes into considerable detail on how this unit was explicitly organized to evade civilian oversight; the article suggests the organization structure formed the template for the current Joint Special Operations Command, (JSOC) a group “essentially out of civilian control.”

In 2018 the JSOC force was composed of 70,000 members, nearly double the 33,000 operators it contained prior to the 9/11 attacks. In 2016 these forces deployed to 149 countries; in the 10 months prior to February 2018 JSOC suffered 144 casualties and 20 killed in action. The Military Times reports JSOC has repeatedly sought significant budget increases to fund capabilities for fighting near-peer threats in compliance with a revamped National Defense Strategy (NDS). As stated by Gen. Raymond Thomas, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, addressing the House Armed Services Committee:

“The NDS calls for a new era, where we compete in what Secretary Mattis calls ‘the contact lair,’ the daily clash of national will that occurs short of armed conflict, where your special operations forces are today building relationships and reducing the enemy,”

The release of pathogens during the Wuhan Military Games merits the description “a clash of national wills that occurs short of armed conflict.” A biowarfare attack represents a clear means of “reducing the enemy,” of “fighting near-peer threats” by disrupting Chinese society and reducing its future economic potential. The revamped NDS, a JSOC expansion in support of a covert clash of wills, and the Hersh reporting on a clandestine special action group controlled by the highest echelons of the Pentagon, all form concrete evidence in support of the BWA hypothesis.

But neither a secret commando, nor a Pentagon cabal, are required. One week after the September 11 terrorist attacks, letters containing weapons grade anthrax were mailed to a variety of targets killing five people and infecting 17 others. According to the FBI, the ensuing investigation became “one of the largest and most complex in the history of law enforcement.”

The initial suspect denied responsibility for the anthrax letters; he claimed: “irresponsible news media coverage based on government leaks” had “destroyed his reputation”. In 2008 the government settled the suspect’s lawsuit with a $5.8 million total payment and officially exonerated him of any involvement in the attacks. The lawsuit was founded on the fact FBI and Justice Department officials had leaked false information to the press. There was no known investigation or prosecution of these leaks.

In April of 2007, a scientist at the government’s biodefense labs located at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, was put under FBI surveillance. An FBI document stated the Fort Detrick researcher was “an extremely sensitive suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks”. In July 2008, the researcher committed suicide and was never formally charged, or brought to trial. The allegations against him therefore remain untested in a court of law.

This case, and the examples of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Jonathan Pollard, and many others, all demonstrate the capacity of an independent lone actor to have a major impact on world events. The possibility of a lone actor being responsible for the alleged BWA attacks cannot therefore be rejected. It must also be acknowledged that “one of the largest and most complex investigations in the history of law enforcement” required more than seven years to identify a possible suspect with access to US government (USG) weapons grade anthrax stocks. The FBI has the capacity to identify miscreants depicted on hundreds of public video streams while engaged in misdemeanor trespass, but it evidently lacks equal capacity to undertake the timely investigation of any unauthorized use of a presumably well secured and highly restricted USG biowarfare agent. As stated by an activist organization: “Gram-for-gram, biological weapons are the deadliest weapons ever produced. Germs don’t respect borders, so biological threats—man made and naturally occurring—can quickly have global impacts.” Global impacts affect the world community. This community is wise to have concerns over the security of USG pathogen stocks, the loyalties of those who manage them, and the competence of the authorities to investigate violations of the necessary security protocols.

While the USG is a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the USG interprets the BWC to have application only to lethal agents. In the opinion of the USG, the BWC has no application to non-lethal agents and the USG is therefore free to develop, produce, stockpile, acquire, retain, and test, all non-lethal agents. The Federation of American Scientists has issued a position paper expressing their view that the present USG position on biological weapons stands in contravention of the BWC: “current non-lethal weapons research clearly exceeds the limits of acceptability defined by Article I.” There exists a clear history of the USG performing biological weapons testing on unsuspecting American citizens. A Business Insider report headlined: “Over and over again, the military has conducted dangerous biowarfare experiments on Americans” describes some of these tests which included the distribution of pathogens within the New York city subway system. The effectiveness of the BWC has been compromised by insufficient institutional support and the absence of a formal verification regime to monitor compliance (what the Regan administration referred to as “trust but verify”). This absence of a formal verification protocol occurs despite a significant global increase in the number of nations hosting BSL-4 laboratories intended to research lethal pathogens.

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) undertook a review of US high-containment laboratories and released a report titled: High-Containment Biosafety Laboratories: Preliminary Observations on the Oversight of the Proliferation of BSL-3 and BSL-4 Laboratories in the United States. (GAO-08-108T release date 04-OCT-07). This October 2007 GAO report found:

A total of 1,356 CDC/USDA registered BSL-3 facilities were identified throughout the United States. Approximately 36% of these laboratories are located in academia. 15 BSL-4 facilities were identified in the U.S. in 2007, including nine at federal labs.

Many of these labs are supported by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the guidance of Director Anthony Fauci, M.D.. NIAID also sponsors and directs the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases Network (CREID).

The NIAID Strategic Plan is found at this URL and the National Biodefense Strategy is found here. A Wikipedia article on Biological Safety Levels (BSL) includes a full listing of global bio-safety labs and gives the date each was established. It is noted that this list is incomplete. It is generally acknowledged that BSL-4 laboratories may operate under the auspices of the military. For reasons of national security these military facilities, and their research activities, may not be publicly disclosed. Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva has investigated these secretive facilities and has reported on them:

The Lugar Center in Georgia is just one of the many Pentagon biolaboratories in 25 countries across the world. They are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program – Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), and are located in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa. Much of their work is classified and includes projects on bio-agents and pathogens with pandemic potential.

A Wall Street Journal article titled Coronavirus Epidemic Draws Scrutiny to Labs Handling Deadly Pathogens raises the issue of “the increased risk of accidents or terrorism as more countries handle exotic microbes, say biosafety experts.” These experts include the following:

Scientists at a specialized Wuhan laboratory have been at the forefront of China’s response to its continuing coronavirus epidemic but are drawing attention to risks associated with the expanding global study of deadly pathogens.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology contributed to China’s fast identification earlier this year of the outbreak’s source as a novel, or previously unknown, coronavirus. It was a monumental achievement for a government that aims to rival the West in high-technology, including bioscience.

The totality of the evidence presented supports the Unz BWA hypothesis and demonstrates the USG has the means to undertake such a covert attack. The identical evidence gives notice of a clear and present danger to the welfare of the entire global community from increased levels of research activity lacking any degree of oversight or verification. Biological weapons have been described as a poor mans’ negligible-cost atomic bomb. The expanding global study of deadly pathogens has clear potential to imperil our own species and the welfare of the manifold other species upon which we make reliance.

Georgian Researchers Dissecting Viral Bats.

Note the BSL standard is lower than that found in a dentist’s office. Source URL

Supporting Evidence – The Motive

Certain aspects of the US motive for BWA have already been presented in this essay. Any exegesis of motive is always subject to attack as an expression of bias. A pillar of the US financial community, an executive faced with the need to advance the interests of his organization and its myriad stakeholders, has clear need for an uncompromising and direct appreciation of contemporary realities. Mr. J.P. Dimon, is such an executive; he has offered his opinion in a letter to shareholders and his views have been quoted in a New York Times article:

CHINESE VIEW OF AMERICA

Coming from the highest echelons of the corporate world, Jamie Dimon, the CEO and chairman of JP Morgan Chase, spoke not of Chinese military advances but instead American political and economic weaknesses. “The Chinese see an America that is losing ground in technology, infrastructure and education—a nation torn and crippled by politics, as well as racial and income inequality—and a country unable to coordinate government policies (fiscal, monetary, industrial, regulatory) in any coherent way to accomplish national goals. Unfortunately, recently, there is a lot of truth to this.”

An America in decline was the fundamental underlying premise of the Trump administration (Make America Great Again) and the Biden administration (Build Back Better). Both administrations followed the path of Obama who in November 2011 articulated a “Pivot to East Asia” strategy, an integrated diplomatic, military, and economic strategy that stretched from the Indian subcontinent through Northeast Asia. The core message: America is going to play a leadership role in Asia for decades to come. This was widely interpreted as an American attempt to contain China, undermine Chinese growth, and enforce the US status as global hegemon, a position threatened by the continued rise of China. Preserving hegemon status is the primary motive for an America in decline to act against China.

Obama’s “Pivot to East Asia” occurred after a change in American military doctrine called Air-Sea Battle (ASB). First outlined in a classified memo in 2009, ASB became official US military doctrine in 2010, the year prior to Obama’s pivot. The central focus of ASB was the creation of an operational doctrine to penetrate and defeat an Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) defense system such as the defense mounted by China.

In a paper titled “Who Authorized Preparations for War with China?” published in the Yale Journal of International Affairs, p. 37, Summer 2013, author Amitai Etzioni asks why the USG is preparing for a war with China, preparations which commenced under Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama.

A 2013 article commenting on the Etzioni paper begins with the comment: “Rarely have relations between China and the United States been so cordial” and then asks: “So why are the two countries’ militaries preparing to do battle with each other?” The Globe and Mail article then goes on to excerpt from the Etzioni paper:

“The United States is preparing for a war with China, a momentous decision that so far has failed to receive a thorough review from elected officials, namely the White House and Congress,” Prof. Etzioni writes. “In the public sphere there was no debate – led by either think tanks or public intellectuals – like that which is ongoing over whether or not to use the military option against Iran’s nuclear program, or the debate surrounding the 2009 surge of troops in Afghanistan.”

And adds: “Soon after assuming power last year [i.e. in 2012], Mr. Xi abandoned his predecessor’s commitment to “peaceful rise,” took direct command of the Central Military Commission and commanded the military to focus on “real combat” and “fighting and winning wars.”

This suggests that during a period of peaceful relations the introduction of an aggressive military doctrine reshaped state policy between the US and China. Obama’s Secretary of Defence Robert Gates openly discussed the need to counter China’s growing military capabilities. In a February 2011 speech to West Point cadets Gates stated that anyone contemplating putting boots on the ground in Asia “should have his head examined.” This suggests a form of confrontation other than a conventional land war – the need to reduce and undermine China in a manner short of war. The covert introduction of biological toxins with the intent to disrupt the economy and destabilize the political structure of China, is therefore seen to be consistent with USG military doctrine and state policy towards China. This evidence provides strong support for the Unz’ BWA hypothesis.

China Surrounds US Military Bases

The 2010 introduction of ASB and the 2011 Obama pivot to Asia were interpreted by Beijing as evidence of the US having hostile intent toward China, part of a broader US effort to encircle China with military bases and pre-positioned forces. It was not until 2012 that China commenced a response to the introduction of this aggressive USG military doctrine, and It was not until 2013 that China commenced reclamation activities in the islands of the South China Sea, defensive works which subsequently became the source of much American (and later international) public complaint. Chinese activity in the South China Sea is more accurately understood as a Chinese defensive response to the US demonstration of hostile military intent. The Global Megaphone, now dialed to 12, refuses to inform the international public of the correct chronological sequence of events or report on the US conduct causing China to reinforce its defensive perimeter.

Mr. Dimon, the Chinese authorities, and this writer, are in general agreement that the source of much international friction derives directly from America’s decline and the incapacity of successive American administrations to positively address the domestic factors underlying this decline. This incapacity to correct American decline provokes a racist response: the creation of an enemy – a devious yellow peril – and the delusional attribution of America’s domestic failures to the evil machinations of a declared external enemy – if not Putin’s Russia, then Xi’s China.

It must be noted that the June 2021 G-7 meeting was a communion of failed colonial powers, a convocation of white privilege representing 45% of nominal global GDP, down from 67% thirty years ago. By implication, 55% of global GDP is now founded in the economies of nations outside the G-7. The United Nations currently recognizes 193 member countries. The G-186, a collection of predominately brown, black, yellow, and red peoples, therefore represents the majority of present-day economic activity. Many of the G-186 nations had their peoples abducted into slavery, their native industries destroyed in favor of increasing Atlanticist exports, their people killed by famine as their sustenance was exported to meet the appetites of the Imperialists, their democratically elected leaders killed and replaced by Atlanticist tyrants, or they were scythed down by an endless hail of machine gun bullets coupled with a genocidal administration, their cities razed by aircraft attack, their citizens murdered and raped, interned in concentration camps, made the subjects of lethal bio-medical research, their very self-worth denied to them in a century of humiliations.

What is being described in the above paragraph is the “rules-based international order” asserted by a self-selected club of G-7 members, an unelected body hardly representative of its own electorates, a group of so called “wealthy nations” which contain large pockets of extreme poverty in excess of any equivalent to be found in the third world. And if you do not believe this then please watch where you place your feet on your next visit to San Francisco.

One of the reasons for this high degree of abject poverty may be found in the communique of Atlanticist major domo Jens Stoltenberg who asserts “we (NATO) now have implemented the biggest reinforcements of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War”. These “reinforcements” represent a collective expense of $1.049 trillion to keep profits up, our electorates confused, and the brown, black, red, and yellow people down. Much of that $1.049 trillion will be spent on US armaments, the last toehold of advanced manufacturing within the United States , a 2018 Pentagon study claiming “all facets of the manufacturing and defense industrial base are currently under threat” and some parts of the military supply chain were “near extinction.”

The Atlanticists have strong motive to vilify any mode of social organization which demonstrates their incompetent governance, and their utter disregard for the welfare of their citizens who fail to obtain membership in the privileged Davos elite: “the people who broke the modern world”. Any contrast with an alternate mode of governance exposes the Atlanticists as being incapable of coordinating government policies (fiscal, monetary, industrial, regulatory) in any coherent way to accomplish national goals. If you contest this assertion, then please provide a coherent explanation of why the USG funded biological research with military application in a country it identifies as a key adversary. Or the fumbling and incompetent G-7 pandemic response in contrast to that of China.

Supporting Evidence – The Opportunity

The section on means gives salient evidence of the USG capacity for covert action concealed from the adversary, the Congress, and from the American people. The section on motive establishes grounds for covert USG destabilization operations intended to undermine China. The literature on USG covert action, the USG history of destabilization of, and interference in, the internal affairs of other nations, and the USG engagement in biological warfare activity, is vast; since this activity has been undertaken on a covert basis (“We lie, we cheat, we steal”) the true extent of relevant USG conduct is likely understated in the literature. Both these prior sections have necessarily been abridged from what would otherwise be a book length exegesis of the available evidence. The present section concerns opportunity – specifically the opportunity for covert action presented by the Wuhan Military Games.

The People’s Republic of China hosted the 7th Military World Games from October 18-27^th, 2019. Titled “Military Glory, World Peace,” the Games included over 9 000 military delegates/athletes from 109 countries competing in 27 military and traditional sports. The USG participated but there was no contingent representing either the UK, or Israel. The Iranian contingent numbered 90 athletes. The athlete participant numbers understate the size of each national contingent. For example, the US athletes numbered 172 but the total size of the US contingent is reported to have been in excess of 300 persons. The additional numbers would comprise administrators, physicians, coaches, trainers, equipment technicians, nutritionists, and the like. In addition to the athletic contingents, approximately 230,000 Chinese volunteers were recruited to support the 35 various event venues.

For the first time in the history of the Military World Games a dedicated housing facility, in the form of a self-contained ”athletes village,” was constructed prior to the start of the Games. The US contingent housed itself at the Wuhan Oriental Hotel, a five-star facility located approximately 300 meters (1,000 feet) from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market and 8 air miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) where the pandemic is alleged to have originated. The area between the Oriental Hotel and WIV is studded with McDonalds, KFC, and Starbucks outlets. Any athlete tired of a diet of pangolin had easy access to the comforting tastes of home. The athlete’s village was located adjacent to the Wuhan College of Economics and Management in the area to the south of South Lake, approximately six air miles from WIV. Athletic activities were distributed around 35 discrete venues located within Wuhan. These locations ranged from the Air Force Early Warning Academy to Hannan Municipal Airport, (not to be confused with Wuhan Tianhe International Airport which is at the geographic center of China’s airline route network making it a key interconnection hub for all of China), Caidian National Defense Park, Ordnance NCO Academy, Army Engineering University of PLA, and the East Lake Hi-Tech Development Zone. It is therefore evident the athletes required daily travel between their accommodations and their sports venues.

Wuhan Metro comprises 9 lines, 240 stations, and 360 km (220 mi) of route length. The maximum recorded daily ridership is 4.465 million persons, the sixth-busiest rapid transit system in mainland China (the NYC subway system of 248 route miles averages 5.6 million daily rides). Five of the Wuhan lines are entirely underground, one line is elevated above ground, and the balance are mixed above and below grade. Line location is important as is it recognized that pathogens typically degrade with UV exposure. As the USG experiments in the NYC subway demonstrated, an enclosed underground system concentrates the agent and increases the exposure time of the pathogen. Less agent is required than would be the case with open-air dispersal.

The Military Games opening ceremony was attended by Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China. The ceremony highlight was an elaborate performance titled “Torch of Peace,” the main motto of the event. The event mascot, named “Bingbing,” has no known connection to Microsoft. On October 18^th, 2019, Microsoft founder Bill Gates participated in “Event 201.” Sponsored by the Gates Foundation and the CIA, among others, Event 201 simulated a novel zoonotic corona virus causing a global pandemic with the lack of an immediately available vaccine resulting in 65 million deaths within 18 months. As of June 12^th, 2021, approximately 18 months after the start of the present pandemic, 3.84 million deaths have been attributed to COVID-19 and the global case count is reported as totaling 177 million persons.

Wuhan’s role as a central transportation hub, coupled with the presence of a high ridership metro system, makes it a suitable site for a biological attack intended to initiate a Chinese pandemic, throw Chinese society into disarray, undermine the political leadership, threaten the economy, damage China’s global reputation and inhibit the nation’s capacity for further growth.

The military games facilitates covert activity. The pathogen is easily disguised as medical supplies, tinctures, and ointments, and the range of events created a need for everything from bicycle pumps to rifle scopes. The containers required to ship the athletic equipment of 170 athletes provides ample means for the covert transport of pathogens. Athletes were free to roam, to visit exotic sights such as the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, to explore the metro and seek out the tastes of home at over 100 American fast-food franchises. These excursions created the opportunity for the covert dispersal of a pathogen by military trained “athlete” operatives. The Chinese complained over the poor performance of the US contingent. They expected to be challenged by the best athletes America had to offer but believed the US sent its second, or third string, athletes.

Evidence of Concern

That something occurred in conjunction with the Wuhan Military Games is found in the following evidence:

• Suspected cases arose among international athletes months before China’s first report to WHO.
• A French military athlete, Elodie Clouvel, claimed that she and other athletes had contracted Covid-19 but that no one knew at the time about Covid-19. The athletes thought they had contracted a severe case of flu.
• The French military airport to which the French athletes returned is reported to have been the first site of COVID infection in France.
• When returning French athletes gave press interviews describing their “COVID” experience, the minister of Defense prohibited any further public statements. A gag order is suspected.
• German volleyball player Jacqueline Brock alleged that she fell ill with COVID-19 – “After a few days, some athletes from my team got ill, I got sick in the last two days. I have never felt so sick, either it was a very bad cold or COVID-19. I think it was COVID-19.”
• Former Italian fencing Olympian Matteo Tagliariol said that when he participated in the Military World Games, he and five roommates all got sick with symptoms often seen in COVID-19 patients and experienced a long recovery time afterward. He said his fever and difficulty breathing continued even a week after returning home, that the symptoms “looked like those of COVID-19″. “I had a very high fever and could not breathe. Antibiotics did not help either. I was sick and very weak for three weeks. Then my two-year-old son Leo fell ill. He coughed for three weeks. My partner also got sick. When I started talking about the virus, I thought I was infected. I recognized the symptoms of COVID 19.“ said Tagliariol.
• Frenchman Amirouche Hammar, a 42-year-old fishmonger, became ill in December 2019 and was retrospectively found to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 despite his having no connection to Wuhan and no travel outside of France. His date of infection preceded the first identification of the disease in China. It is believed he caught the disease from his wife who works in a store at Paris airport and interacts with many travelers.
• Commenting on the Hammar case, WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier encouraged other countries to check their records for pneumonia cases of unspecified origin in late 2019, since this would give a “new and clearer picture” of the outbreak.
• A New York Times report suggests the Hammar case “has the potential of blowing up the previously established chronology” of disease transmission.
• Luxembourg triathlete Oliver Gorges said he fell ill with a flu and is to undergo an antibody test to see if he has COVID-19.
• Swedish pentathlete Melina Westerberg said that many of her compatriots were sick at the Games, but none tested positive for the virus claiming: “It was just a coincidence, we all felt safe.”
• Several Swedish athletes were also reportedly unwell, including swimmer Raphael Stacchiotti. These suspected cases support the view of some Swedish epidemiologists that the virus may have been spreading in Sweden as early as November 2019.
• Five of the US troops developed a fever on Oct. 25^TH, 2019 and were taken to an infectious-diseases hospital for treatment.
• 42 employees of the Oriental Hotel (the hotel which housed the US contingent) were diagnosed with COVID-19, becoming the first cluster in Wuhan.
• The American Military Games team trained at a location near Fort Detrick, the military’s viral lab closed by the CDC in July 2019 for a release of toxins in wastewater discharge (the precise nature of the discharge was classified by the USG for reasons of “National Security.”
• The U.S. team used chartered flights to and from the games via Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Washington was one of the earliest states with COVID-19 cases. The US team went home on October 28, 2019, and within 2 weeks, the first human contact cases of COVID 19 were seen in Wuhan. No records of US team activity were kept.
• Canada sent 114 athletes, 57 coaches and support staff. No news release was issued to notify Canadians of Canada’s participation.
• It is reported that one third of the Canadian athletes, an estimated 34 persons, became seriously ill exhibiting lung issues, coughing, vomiting, and diarrhea, resulting in them being quarantined in the rear of the aircraft returning them to Canada. Their request to be tested for COVID-19 was refused and they were dispersed to their home locations.
• New York Times reporting indicates all of these reported illnesses occurred before the “Wuhan government confirmed on Dec. 31 2019 that the health authorities were treating dozens of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause. Symptoms of the new illness include high fever, difficulty breathing and lung lesions. . . Researchers have been encouraged by the fact that patients’ relatives and hospital workers have not been reported to have gotten sick, signaling that the virus may not spread easily among humans.”
• Researchers estimate the SARS-CoV-2 virus was likely circulating undetected for at most two months before the first human cases of COVID-19 were described in Wuhan, China in late-December 2019. These findings push “human-to-human transmission back to mid-October to mid-November of 2019 in Hubei Province, China, with a likely short interval before epidemic transmission was initiated.” October 18–27 is the period of the Wuhan Military Games.

How to Interpret This Evidence

Apart from the last entry, the quality of this evidence is anecdotal and highly variable. Despite being anecdotal, it does exhibit a degree of face validity. There are multiple independent sources reporting from several different nations. The reports include testament from individuals who describe symptoms similar to those of COVID-19. None are reported to have tested positive for COVID-19; it is unclear what testing was performed.

All those persons reporting sick are from NATO member countries; the sole exception is a Swedish athlete. It is unclear if this is due to a lack of reporting on other national contingents, or due to the outbreak of illness being confined to NATO force members. Searches on Google and Bing for African, Asian, South American military games illness reports proved negative.

The indifferent response of the military hierarchy is also curious. As NATO members, both France and Canada would have been in receipt of the US secret notification transmitted in November 2019 alerting allied Games participants to a potential disease outbreak in Wuhan, China. Despite this alert, and the potential risk to their domestic populations from soldiers returning sick from a known area of infection, returnees who displayed symptoms of serious illness were permitted to disperse to their homes.

Reports suggest that when athletes associated their illness with the Wuhan games, their superiors ordered them to silence. Also curious is the loss of reporting on US participants; this was accessed on-line early in January 2020 but now appears to have been scrubbed from the web.

An Alternate Hypothesis

In his essays outlining the BWA hypothesis Mr. Unz correctly highlights the fact that the truth can be compromised by sins of both commission and omission. If you advance a hypothesis, it is incumbent upon you to address any competing hypothesis.

In the present environment we see the politicization of science in a field where the science is largely unsettled. There exists the danger of cancel culture intruding into the process of establishing a scientific consensus, of a turning away from argument based on evidence toward argument based on ideology, on assigning blame and taking reprisal before the facts are known and the evidence carefully sifted.

In preparing this article over a hundred scientific papers were reviewed. This is a small percentage of the estimated 1,200 recent papers on SAS-CoV-2 and the origins of COIVID-19. By fortuitous circumstance one paper came to hand which contains all necessary evidence and argument. Furthermore, it is written in a manner deserving of a Feynman Medal for clarity and for making the science accessible to those persons who are not professional scientists active in this area of study. This paper, authored by R. Frutos, L. Gavotte and C.A. Devaux, and titled Understanding the origin of COVID-19 requires to change the paradigm on zoonotic emergence from the spillover model to the viral circulation model, is an on-line March 18^th, 2021 pre-proof from the Elsevier publication Infection, Genetics and Evolution (2021) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.meegid.2021.104812

This paper provides an overview of the present science which rebuts the assertions of Wade, Baker, Pompeo, Redfield, Baric, Chan, Iwasaki et al. while also delivering an alternate paradigm which potentially explains the illness reported at the Wuhan Military World Games. Key aspects of the paper are presented here. The reader is urged to review the actual paper (available to read on-line at the above link and also available in PDF format) and the supplemental Word document containing an additional 50 scientific citations.

The highlights are as follows:

• SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally occurring virus
• The dynamic of SARS-CoV-2 does not correspond to the spillover model
• The paradigm for zoonotic emergence must be changed
• SARS-CoV-2 evolved in host
• Viruses circulate in many hosts with no reservoir, intermediaries or zoonotic spillover
• A novel model, the “circulation model” explains the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in a parsimonious way

1.1. SARS-CoV-2: the man-made virus theory

• The supposedly engineered sequences were simply natural features
• Naturally occurring polybasic furin cleavage sites have been described in other lineages of coronaviruses such as MERS-CoV, HKU1, HCoV-OC43 or IBV
• The natural occurrence of furin-cleavage sites in various viruses has been documented for long. We provide a list of 50 selected references as Supplementary Data.
• The selection of SARS-CoV-2 through successive passages in cell culture was refuted
• Altogether, these elements indicate that there is no evidence to support the hypothesis of a man-made origin of SARS-CoV-2.

1.2. SARS-CoV-2: the bat-pangolin recombinant virus theory

• The detection of recombination was deduced from metagenomic data, an approach which can by itself generate artifactual recombinants.
• SARS-CoV-2 is phylogenetically branching at an ancestral level to Sarbecoviruses from pangolins, making it impossible to be a descendant from recombination
• There are currently only in silico predictions from metagenomic data and no factual element to support the recombinant hypothesis.

1.3. SARS-CoV-2: a naturally occurring virus

• The extensive APOBEC-driven mutational bias and adaptation suggest that SARS-CoV-2 might have circulated unnoticed in humans for a long time

1.4. The conspiracy theory of SARS-CoV-2: the voluntarily release from a laboratory

• The marginal conspiracy theory of a voluntary release of an engineered virus forwarded by the press, blogs and politicians (Sutton, 2020; Everington, 2020) is not supported by any data
• There is consensus within the scientific community to consider that SARS-CoV-2 has not been engineered and is a naturally occurring virus.
• It is simply impossible to voluntarily release an engineered virus which does not exist.
• There is thus no voluntary release

1.5. A laboratory accident

• Staff members of the Wuhan Institute of Virology have all been tested negative indicating that no accident occurred
• SARS-CoV-2 was never found in the wild and that RaTG13 does not exist as real virus but instead only as a sequence in a computer
• It is a virtual virus which thus cannot leak from a laboratory.
• Laboratory accident can never be definitively excluded, there is currently no evidence to support it.

1.6. A contamination from rural and wild environments

• The main risk of contact and viral contamination lies in anthropized rural environments and to a lower extent in the recreational human presence in wild environments
• The concentration and diversity of bat-borne viruses is higher in human rural settlements than in the wild

1.7. The dynamic of zoonoses: definitions and concepts

• An emerging disease is recognized as such only after having reached an epidemic stage. Before that, the virus circulates in the population, most likely leading to sporadic cases which are not recognized as a novel disease but confused with a known disease, many early symptoms being indeed similar. This is a latency phase or stuttering phase during which the disease is uncharacterized and the virus is undetected
• Unlike known diseases like influenza, a novel emerging disease cannot by definition be identified until the epidemic/outbreak threshold was reached and the epidemic has actually started.

2. Why is the spillover model not compatible with the observed dynamic of COVID-19?

• No experimental data support a spillover of SARS-CoV-2 from any animal species. Since all research and strategies are based on this model, there is a risk of misled investigations. The main problem associated with the spillover model is that it is a theoretical construction and did not come from evidence.

Figure 1 is reproduced from the Frutos paper. It presents a visual comparison of the Spillover Model and the Circulation Model. Green boxes show observed evidence supporting the circulation model. Since the Frutos paper is in pre-print it has not been subject to critical peer review by persons familiar with the relevant science.

There is one critique which may immediately be made. Section 2.1 includes the following assertion:

In the case of COVID-19, this amplifying loop was the conjunction of major celebrations during the new year period in Wuhan combined with a high concentration and mobility of people which made this amplification loop (Frutos et al., 2020a). This accidental nature of such conjunctions of natural and societal events explains why pandemic are so rare.

The Chinese New Year celebrations (also known as Spring Festival) for the year 2020 commenced on Saturday, January 25^th, 2020. According to the Lancet article (Huang et al 2020, Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30183-5) the first patient was infected December 1st 2019. This is 56 days prior to the first day of Spring Festival. Even if we accept that persons travelling for family re-unification commence to travel 14 days prior to the start of Spring Festival it is evident that the December 1^st, 2019, date is 42 days prior to the most likely early travel period within China.

A news article suggests the earliest COVID-19 infection may be traced back to November 17^th, 2019. This is 59 days before the commencement of the most likely early travel period for Spring Festival. A paper by Pekar et al 2021 Timing the SARS-CoV-2 index case in Hubei province DOI: 10.1126/science.abf8003 used genome data combined with molecular clock inference and epidemiological simulation to push the estimated date of first infection back to mid-October – mid-November 2019. The mid-October date is 101 days prior to the January 25^th, 2020, start of Spring Festival and 87 days prior to the most likely early start date of Spring Festival travel.

The Wuhan Military World Games opening ceremony took place on 18 October 2019 and the closing ceremony was on 27 October 2019. These dates fit with the findings of Pekar et al 2021. Allowing for a 14-day incubation period gives an index victim date of November 10th, 2019 which approximates press reports of the first Chinese victim.

These dates closely match with the Frutos et al 2021 circulation model. The Military Games brought together participants from most nations of the world. These individuals would have brought with them circulating virii. The Games were staffed by almost one quarter million Chinese volunteers likely brought in from all regions of China. In addition to the volunteers there would have been construction staff, event managers, planners, and government officials from different regions.

The Wuhan Military World Games therefore delivers a high degree of host mixing and represents the “societal event” which delivered a “high concentration and mobility of people.” This congregation of human hosts then resulted in a “stuttering event” during which the latent pathogens had the possibility of repeated host to host transmission resulting in improved adaptation to the human host. It is this “stuttering” which resulted in the repeated occurrence of illness among the Games participants, and the reported occurrence within the staff of the Wuhan Oriental Hotel. It was this repeated congregation of human hosts that formed the amplification event required for the circulating pathogen to reach the outbreak threshold and which triggered the pandemic.

That no athletes tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, or were diagnosed with COVID-19, is likely due to the fact the pathogen, in its “stuttering” phase, created numerous sub-optimal human host adaptations. The hosts became seriously ill but the adaptation, while causing illness, did not in every case achieve the necessary degree of successful adaptation to its human host. Since both SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 were unknown to medical science, a new pathogen was not suspected. The existing paradigm of the Spillover Model inhibited discovery of the new pathogen. There was no athlete contact with pangolins, no one ate bat soup, no one ventured into the BSL-4 laboratories of Wuhan Institute of Virology, no one released a novel chimeric virus as there was no such virus to capture or release. It was only in the aftermath of the stochastic period of the amplification loop that the deterministic phase of transmission commenced, and the pandemic ensued. And it was not until recognition of the fact of a new contagion that the medical community was alerted to the problem and commenced the investigation and identification of the cause.

This article is being forwarded to the lead author of Frutos et al 2021 to present the evidence of an amplification loop associated with the Wuhan Military Games.

Does the application of the Circulation Model invalidate the Unz’ BWA? Does it invalidate the proposed alternate hypothesis based on the Unz’ BWA as suggested in the opening paragraphs? These questions are to be addressed in Part II.