As we’ve seen so far, the trail leading to the origins of the Covid pandemic winds back at least as far as 2002, and the SARS outbreak in China. That outbreak showed public health authorities that hitherto mild coronaviruses – mostly associated with the common cold – could and were mutating in the wild into far more lethal forms.
Suddenly, a new river of funding began to flow. Tens of millions of it found its way into the coffers of the formerly obscure Wildlife Trust, and its director, Peter Daszak. The Wildlife Trust was rebranded the EcoHealth Alliance, and began working closely with, and funnelling American money to, Chinese scientist Shi “batwoman” Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But Shi didn’t tell her research partners at EcoHealth Alliance everything, from the sickness and deaths among miners in the cave where she obtained samples of the virus identified as the closest-known wild relative of Covid-19, to the existence of a host of similarly closely related coronaviruses.
In fact, it’s now believed that there was an entire, secret, shadow project – one that the Chinese military were deeply involved in.
US State Department investigators were given access to secret intelligence on what had been happening in China in the months and years before Covid emerged.
More than a dozen investigators were given unparalleled access to “metadata, phone information and internet information” from intercepts collected by the US intelligence services.
That intelligence led to two conclusions. Firstly, the Wuhan scientists were conducting dangerous experiments on “RaTG13”, the Covid-related virus found in a Chinese mine.
Secondly, the shadow project was being funded by the Chinese military.
Like all companies and institutions in China, the line between “civilian” and “military” is hopelessly blurred, because every institution in China is by law a state institution – and China is an authoritarian, military state.
The State Department investigators wrote […] “The Wuhan Institute of Virology has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
One of the investigator sources said the secret military-funded experiments on the mine virus, RaTG13, began in 2016.
A year earlier, in 2015, People’s Liberation Army scientists and senior Chinese public health officials published a document which described the SARS coronaviruses as heralding a “new era of genetic weapons”. Viruses such as those discovered by Shi Zhengli, they said, could be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before”.
The authors of the document were a who’s who of China’s most senior figures in public health and the military. Ten of the authors were scientists and weapons experts affiliated with the Air Force Medical University in Xi’an, ranked “very high-risk” for its level of defence research, including its work on medical and psychological sciences.
With their new coronavirus samples on hand at Wuhan, the military moved in on the WIV, and the shutters came down even harder.
The military was also given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report […] at around that time, the Wuhan institute became even less open about its work and mostly stopped revealing any new coronaviruses it discovered. In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Beijing carefully covered its tracks:
In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base […]
The PLA had its own vaccine specialist, Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist at the academy, who had collaborated with the Wuhan scientists on a study of the MERS coronavirus and was working with them at the time of the outbreak.
The US investigators believe the Chinese military was interested in developing vaccines for the potential bioweapons being hatched in Wuhan.
If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.
The Times
It’s believed that that’s exactly how Zhou was able to produce a patent for a Covid vaccine in February 2020, just over a month after China first admitted the outbreak in Wuhan. A separate report concluded that Zhou and his team must have been working on the vaccine by November 2019 at the latest – right when the first suspected cases broke out in Wuhan. Other scientists suggest that the vaccine work may been going on even earlier.
In an ominous twist, Zhou appears to have died, aged just 54, in May 2020. The only clues to his death are a passing Chinese-media report and a scientific paper with the word “deceased” bracketed after his name.
Witnesses are said to have told US investigators that Zhou fell from the roof of the WIV.
Even if Chinese hadn’t developed a vaccine for their own bio-weapon, their germ warfare plans had a backup which, as things turned out, worked better than they could ever have hoped.
The 2015 Chinese military report said that the impact of bio-weapons could go far beyond “widespread morbidity and mass casualties”, but paralyse China’s enemies through “formidable psychological pressure that could impact combat effectiveness”.
Nearly 80 years after FDR asserted that America had “nothing to fear but fear itself”, fear itself became the most potent weapon in its enemy’s arsenal.
The Chinese military scientists argued that the release of a bio-weapon could have secondary effects by placing enormous burdens on a country’s healthcare system. Given enough cases unexpectedly requiring hospitalisation, the document noted that it could “cause the enemy’s medical system to collapse”. It also outlined the ability for a bio-weapon attack to instil fear and have ongoing psychological and long-term impacts.
Can anyone seriously argue that that isn’t exactly what has happened? Beside the ongoing impact of the Covid surveillance state initiated by too many Western governments, with everything from population-wide lockdowns, to vaccine passports and tracking apps, trust between citizens and states has been indelibly eroded. The psychological impacts are set to play out for years in the lockdown-damaged minds of the young, especially.
With all that in mind, it begs the question of whether the extraordinarily heavy-handed crackdown China showed to the world in Wuhan was just so much psy-op theatre. Certainly, paralysed by fear of a virus whose threat we now know was ridiculously exaggerated, governments around the world rushed to emulate what China was showing them – in direct contravention of decades of pandemic planning.
But the fact that China was almost certainly developing a Covid vaccine right as, or immediately before, the initial outbreak is a likely consequence of the perilous research they had been conducting for years. Research so dangerous that it was banned in the US by the Obama administration.
“Gain of function.”