Elections have consequences and the remarkable return of Donald Trump to the White House has already led to a flurry of major reversals across numerous policy areas. The weekend newspapers revealed that these now included the longstanding Covid origins debate, which had largely disappeared from the headlines over the last year or two.
John Radcliffe, the new incoming CIA director, had long favored the lab-leak hypothesis, claiming that the virus had accidentally escaped from China’s Wuhan lab, and under the influence of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump himself had sometimes taken that same position during 2020. According to articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the CIA has now reversed its previous position and declared that it favors that theory. Although that shift was not based upon any new evidence and was only expressed “with low confidence,” leading China-hawks such as Sen. Tom Cotton eagerly seized upon this announcement to demand that “China pay for unleashing a plague upon the world.”
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Given our bitter ongoing Cold War with China, the practical impact of the new CIA verdict remains unclear. But coming as it did around the fifth anniversary of that huge global catastrophe, I hope the resulting news stories may refocus public attention on that important issue, which had otherwise vanished from the headlines.
My own longstanding interest in this topic had already been rekindled a few weeks ago by a sudden dramatic event of an entirely different type.
On December 17, 2024, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear Defense Troops, was assassinated outside his Moscow home by an explosive device, with Ukraine immediately taking full credit for the killing and the assassin himself caught soon afterwards.
No one could remember the last time such a top-ranking Russian general had died under those circumstances, and given Ukraine’s total dependence upon Western financial and military support, few believed that its government would have undertaken such an extremely provocative operation without at least the tacit approval of its American and NATO paymasters. Indeed, leading British newspapers, closely linked to that country’s intelligence services, quickly celebrated the powerful blow that had been dealt to their Russian adversary.
Kirillov had no direct involvement in the bitter Ukraine fighting, so most assumed that he had been marked for death because of the controversial public positions taken by his organization early in the conflict.
Soon after Russian military forces poured across the border in late February 2022, Russia claimed to have found a network of dozens of biolabs mostly near their border, funded by the Pentagon and working with deadly anthrax and plague. Development of offensive biological weapons was blatantly illegal under international law, and Moscow declared that these posed an obvious threat to Russian society.
I had initially been uncertain whether to believe those accusations, which were so similar to the fraudulent claims of Saddam’s WMDs that we used to justify our own 2003 invasion of Iraq. But a few days later, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, chief architect of our Ukraine policy, seemed to confirm those facts in her Congressional testimony, with both Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald also noting the huge implications of her inadvertent public admissions.
Kirillov’s name had rarely been mentioned in that dispute, but then a few months later on August 4, 2022, he himself attracted even greater controversy when he held a public press conference to declare that there seemed strong evidence that Covid was an illegal American bioweapon, deliberately released against China.
According to many estimates, the Covid virus had already killed around 20 million people by that date, including more than a million Americans, so Kirillov’s accusations were momentous ones. Yet although his statements were heavily covered by the Russian media, they were almost totally ignored by every mainstream and alternative Western outlet, with my own article being nearly the sole exception. Twitter even launched a campaign of active suppression, taking the unprecedented step of suspending the official account of the Russian Foreign Ministry when it Tweeted out some of Kirillov’s information.
Gen. Kirillov was hardly the only prominent foreign leader to declare that the Covid pandemic was probably the result of an American biowarfare attack, and the same tactics of near-total Western media suppression had been regularly employed to prevent ordinary Americans from hearing those claims and wondering whether they might possibly be true.
For example, in my original April 2020 article I had noted the very early Covid outbreak in Iran, erupting in the Holy City of Qom and heavily infecting that country’s ruling elites.
As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hated Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.
Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?
This extremely suspicious combination of factors quickly led the top Iranian leadership and its media organs to accuse America of having launched an illegal biowarfare attack against their country, with Iran’s former president even filing a formal complaint with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
But just as in the case of the later Russian charges, almost none of these explosive accusations were ever reported in the American media or that of other Western countries, so that few people in the West became aware of them at the time.
China had obviously been the main victim of the Covid outbreak and some of its government officials soon suggested that the virus had been brought to their country by the Americans participating in Wuhan’s World Military Games. But the Chinese subsequently went silent after ferocious counter-attacks by the Trump Administration, perhaps also recognizing that making such accusations without solid proof would be counter-productive and leave their country looking weak if they failed to forcefully retaliate. By then, China had already successfully controlled the spread of the virus, while Covid had begun sweeping across America, so they may have decided that since our own country was suffering the blowback from its botched biowarfare attack, no further response was necessary.
Those public statements by senior Russian and Iranian officials, heavily reported in their own media, were hardly based upon overwhelming evidence and failed to prove the accusations were true. But it seemed entirely unreasonable that they were almost totally ignored by our entire mainstream and alternative media, which successfully kept nearly the entire American public in a state of ignorance.
Even more unreasonable was the behavior of the numerous journalists and researchers who had been hotly debating the origins of the the Covid virus since the early days of the outbreak.
The official, establishment position promoted by the bulk of the mainstream media had always been that the virus was completely natural and had randomly infected its first human victim in Wuhan during late 2019. Meanwhile, a small but determined group of contrarian researchers and journalists—the so-called “lab-leakers”—strongly maintained that the virus was artificial and had been bioengineered, accidentally leaking out of a lab at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and starting the epidemic in that city.
But although those latter individuals always claimed that they were exploring all possibilities and sources of evidence, none of them ever extended their discussion to include the biowarfare hypothesis, even after leaders in Russia and Iran had publicly proposed it. Instead, the Western media debate remained rigidly restricted to either the dominant narrative of a natural virus or the insurgent scenario of a Chinese lab-leak, with the third possibility always excluded from any discussion.
That bipolar consensus on the origins of Covid—natural virus or lab-leak—still remains in place today, a consensus now reinforced by the sudden assassination of the most prominent public figure who had challenged it.
Kirillov’s death prompted me to revisit these issues from years earlier, and I recapitulated and discussed these in a December article.
- Assassinating a Top Russian General
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 23, 2024 • 5,600 Words
With my attention to the topic now reawakened, I began exploring additional developments. Earlier this month I devoted a long article to discussing and summarizing the Covid origins analysis of Jim Haslam, an independent researcher who had written a lengthy series of Substack posts over the last couple of years, then recently collected his material together and published it as a book.
Over the last few years, most of the Covid origins debate had taken place on ephemeral Twitter threads, and Haslam very helpfully gathered together and analyzed a great deal of this accumulated mass of evidence, coming to some striking and persuasive conclusions.
First, he mustered the absolutely overwhelming evidence that the virus was bioengineered rather than natural. As he demonstrated, most of the top virologists had quickly come to that same alarming conclusion soon after they began examining its full genome and discovered its very strange structure, while they apparently only reversed that verdict under heavy pressure rather than as a result of any new evidence or strong analytical arguments.
Haslam’s conclusions were based upon a combination of published accounts, leaked information, and declassified documents, and he summarized his reconstruction in a 2023 post:
- KGA was 60-70% lab origin.
- Bob said the RaTG13 alignment was “stunning,” but Tulane had previously been accused of a lab leak…
- Eddie was 60/40% via email and 80% in private…
- Andrew was “agnostic” but noted the unusual furin cleavage site.
- Mike Farzan, who discovered the SARS1 receptor, was 70/30% lab origin…
- Farrar was 50/50% lab origin but also funded self-spreading vaccine research…
What started as KGA’s lab leak ‘report’ slowly evolved into a natural origins paper. On Feb 4th, Eddie submitted the first draft, which speculated about possible reasons for a natural origin…
By Feb 12th, the draft had evolved from KGA’s lab leak report into Eddie’s natural origin paper. Nature Medicine’s editor replied, “Yes, please!” but they had to edit it down to 2,200 words and 30 references. Little space was left for nuance, and by Feb 25th, Eddie had convinced himself and the others that SARS2 had a natural origin…
The entire scientific enterprise (grants, funding, administrators, publication, patents, medals, Scripps 89.5% overhead) rested on the natural origins idea because otherwise, “it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.”
As Haslam emphasized, part of the “smoking gun” evidence that had quickly captured the attention of those virologists was that a very long stretch of the Covid genome exactly matched that of a natural Chinese virus that had been catalogued by the Wuhan lab, the sole difference being the insertion of a short furin cleavage site, an addition that hugely enhanced the infectivity of the virus. Furthermore, this exact bioengineering proposal had previously been suggested in published research papers and grant requests.
Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level – it’s stunning. Bob Garry email to Fauci
However, Haslam sharply departed from the previous lab-leak consensus on several important points. Nearly all of those past advocates had claimed that Covid had been bioengineered at the Wuhan lab, but Haslam argued that this was extremely implausible. None of the virologists at that facility or anywhere else in China possessed the technical expertise to do such work, nor had any of them previously published research papers indicating interest in that sort of project.
Instead, the primary author of the papers and grant proposals that amounted to a recipe for producing Covid had been Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (UNC), one of the world’ foremost viral bioengineers, who had long collaborated with the Wuhan lab and therefore received the genome of the natural Chinese precursor virus so closely matching Covid. So it seemed highly likely that Baric’s lab had produced the Covid virus, without anyone at the Wuhan lab involved in the project, and the behavior of the Chinese virologists strongly supported their claims of innocence.
Haslam also seemed to have cleared up one of the strangest puzzles regarding the pattern of Covid infectivity. A natural virus is almost invariably found in one or more local animal species, whose populations constitute its wildlife reservoirs from which it eventually jumped to infect humans. Yet despite enormous efforts, no such Chinese host species has ever been found.
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Meanwhile, without much effort at all, five different North American animal species were found to have been heavily infected, including deer, and particular species of field mice and bats. Yet based upon other factors, we certainly know that Covid was not a natural virus that had previously been circulating in North America, so this anomaly had long puzzled many observers.
Haslam’s skilled scientific detective work uncovered that exactly these species were used as lab animals in Dr. Vincent Munster’s Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) in Montana. This strongly suggested that after its initial bioengineering, the Covid virus had been tested and had its infectivity tuned at that facility, using those particular animals for that purpose.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University had served as the chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission, and in 2021 he had co-authored the earliest scientific paper arguing that Covid was bioengineered rather than natural, then expanded on that highly-controversial claim in numerous public interviews. Haslam’s arguments seemed to have convinced Sachs, who mentioned the Rocky Mountain Lab in his long March and December interviews with Tucker Carlson, which drew many millions of views on Twitter and YouTube.
I felt that Haslam had made a very strong case that Covid had been bioengineered from a natural Chinese precursor virus, probably at Baric’s UNC lab, then tested and tuned at Munster’s RML facility, and I summarized and quoted much of his analysis in my long article.
