Last April, Josh Rogin – a reporter for the Washington Post – published an explosive article that lent substantial new credibility to the lab leak theory.
Rogin had acquired cables sent in January of 2018 by U.S. diplomats working in China. Those diplomats had recently visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and the cables they sent warned of safety issues at the lab, as well as the work being done there on bat coronaviruses.
One described a “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory”. The diplomats asked for support from the U.S. Government to help the lab fix its problems. However, their requests went unanswered.
Rogin has now published an essay (adapted from his latest book) which provides additional context for his article on the diplomatic cables.
He begins by noting that, contrary to what many in the mainstream media had assumed, the cables were not leaked to him by someone in the Trump administration. Rogin’s story had actually irked Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who’d been trying to “keep up the veneer of good relations” with China.
The author then reveals that, when he called around to get reactions from officials he trusted, he discovered that “a large swath of the government already believed the virus had escaped from the WIV lab”.
As Rogin notes, any theory of the pandemic’s origin has to account for the location of the original outbreak – a large, dense city far away from the bat caves of Southern China. Yet when Dr Shi (the ‘Batwoman’) was interviewed in March, she said she’d “never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan”.
This rather undermines the claim made by critics of the lab leak theory that the location of the original outbreak doesn’t constitute an important piece of evidence in its own right.
As Alina Chan notes, the population of Wuhan was used as a control group in a 2015 serological survey of coronavirus spillover events in China. Among 240 blood donors from Wuhan, precisely zero had antibodies against SARS-related coronaviruses.
Returning to Rogin’s essay, he says that “large parts of the scientific community” criticised his story in the Post, insisting that most viral outbreaks are caused by natural spillovers, not lab accidents. However, many of the scientists who spoke out to defend the Wuhan lab, it transpired, were “Shi’s research partners and funders”.
What about the claim that WIV researchers had done their work out in the open, so we ought to just trust them that there wasn’t any leak? Rogin was apparently told that many U.S. officials came to believe that “these researchers had not been as forthcoming as had been claimed”. (Which makes sense in light of what the ‘internet sleuths’ have turned up.)
He quotes one U.S. official as saying, “We’ll probably never be able to prove it one way or the other”. Whether this is true or not, the debate is still interesting, and Rogin’s essay is worth reading in full.
Stop Press: A Telegraph investigation has revealed that all but one of the scientists who penned a letter in the Lancet dismissing the lab leak as a ‘conspiracy theory’ were linked to the Wuhan researchers, their colleagues or funders.
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The difference between something being a “conspiracy theory” and “fact” is about 6 months, it seems.
I wonder which of today’s “conspiracy theories” will be fact by Christmas.
Probably ‘vaccine passports’ being mandatory for access to pubs and restaurants.
leave your own house…
Wouldn’t put it past them!
They want the UK to be a little bit of Australia. By this time next year, we could be facing restrictions on movement (5km in Australia), wearing masks outside – even when completely alone, 1hr exercise (alone/or housholds only) per day, unvaccinated can only do ‘essential’ shopping, nothing else,
concentration camps, ahem, I mean isolation facilities for those refusing manditory tests, no foreign travel (except for the rich and powerful), etc, etc.The New World Order via BuildBackBetter and Agenda 21/30, brought to you by HM Gov, the MSM, etc in association with:
The World Economic Forum
Microsoft/The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Alphabet (Google/YouTube etc)
Facebook
Twitter
Amazon
Disney
Big Pharma
China
George Soros
i.e. those who favour rent-seeking via title (neo-feudalism) versus working.
Vaccines being “safe and effective”?
My feeling is it was a lab leak. I felt at the time it was used to discredit and destroy President Trump and to acknowledge it was a lab leak is to acknowledge how it was used against Trump.
Amazing how much Trump and his team said and did was now proven correct?
So, why is the Washington Post pushing this out there?
Likely they “believed” it was a lab leak, because it was much more palatable than facing up to the truth.
The UNZ Review
(1) Rogue elements within our large national security apparatus probably affiliated with the Deep State Neocons decided to inflict severe damage upon the huge Chinese economy using biowarfare. The plan was to infect the key transport hub of Wuhan with Covid-19 so that the disease would invisibly spread throughout the entire country during the annual Lunar New Year travels, and they used the cover of the Wuhan International Military Games to slip a couple of operatives into the city to release the virus. My guess is that only a relatively small number of individuals were involved in this plot.
(2) The biological agent they released was designed primarily as an anti-economy rather than an anti-personnel weapon. Although Covid-19 has rather low fatality rates, it is extremely contagious, has a long pre-symptomatic infectious period, and can even spread by asymptomatic carriers, making it ideally suited for that purpose. Thus, once it established itself throughout most of China, it would be extremely difficult to eradicate and the resulting efforts to control it would inflict enormous damage upon China’s economy and society.
(3) As a secondary operation, they decided to target Iran’s political elites, possibly deploying a somewhat more deadly variant of the virus. Since political elites generally tend to be elderly, they would anyway suffer far greater fatalities.
(4) The deadly SARS and MERS outbreaks in East Asia and the Near East had never significantly spread back to America (or Europe), so the plotters wrongly assumed that the same would be the case with Covid-19. Anyway, since international organizations always ranked the US and Europe as having the best and most effective public health systems for combating any disease epidemic, they believed that any possible blowback damage would be very minor.
(5) Only a small number of individuals were directly involved in this plot, and soon after the disease was successfully released in Wuhan, they decided to further safeguard America’s own interests by alerting the appropriate units with the Defense Intelligence Agency, probably by fabricating some sort of supposed “intelligence leak.” Basically, they arranged for the DIA to hear that Wuhan was apparently suffering a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak, thereby leading the DIA to prepare and distribute a secret report warning our own forces and allies to take appropriate precautions.
(6) Unfortunately for these plans, the Chinese government reacted with astonishing determination and effectiveness, and soon stamped out the disease. Meanwhile, the lackadaisical and incompetent American government largely ignored the problem, only reacting after the massive outbreak in Northern Italy had gotten media attention. Since the CDC had botched production of a testing kit, we had no means of recognizing that the disease was already spreading in our country, and the result was massive damage to America’s economy and society. In effect, America suffered exactly the fate that had originally been intended for its Chinese rival.
(7) Again, this is my own hypothetical reconstruction, and people are free to dispute individual elements. But I think it best fits with the very limited amount of solid evidence. My long article from April fleshes out the China/America background in much greater detail: https://www.unz.com/runz/31000-words-missing-from-the-atlantic-and-the-new-york-times-sunday-magazine/
My long article from April
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-our-coronavirus-catastrophe-as-biowarfare-blowback/
The latest UNZ Review articles on this subject
12 Jul 2021 https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-covid-epidemic-as-lab-leak-or-biowarfare/
9 Aug 2021 https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-waging-biological-warfare/
Not sure I agree with this line of reasoning I’m afraid. All governments, right across the world, reacted to this ‘pandemic’ in precisely the same way using the same language, the same self-destructive policies, the same deceptions and exaggerations, the same optics, the same rituals etc etc. Why would almost all governments deliberately overreact to a mild respiratory virus in a way that would inflict the maximum damage to their national economies? I think the answer is staring us in the face: the Ponzi scheme that calls itself the US economy is in the final stages of collapse and the so-called pandemic is an attempt to swiftly make profound changes to the monetary system before the wealthiest and most influential corporations and individuals lose control and we have Weimar-style hyperinflation and total global chaos. The idea of “America” attacking “China” is too simplistic and doesn’t reflect the way things actually work. The financial world is a murky interconnected web that knows no national borders – this project has been carried out by supranational entities like the WEF and the WHO, and in the face of dollar collapse, all governments are desperately trying to institute radical changes in order to save their asses frankly.
So yes, I completely agree that the virus has been engineered and released (there’s documentary evidence to support this in patent filings) but it’s been done, I think, as a means of distracting, fracturing and weakening all of us, in preparation for a new world economic order that we otherwise would never accept.
At least we both agree that it was engineered and released deliberately.
However, the Chinese government and the Iranian government have both accused the US of an attack against them.
I’m not sure these two countries, Russia and all other enemies of the US would go along with the Global Elites push to save the US economy and the US dollar.
It isn’t about saving the dollar! It’s about a complete change in the financial system:
https://odysee.com/@LongXXvids:c/Ernst-Wolf-speech—summary:3
nice to see the BBC reporting this!
“Sweden, which never had a lockdown, now has one of the lowest Covid-19 infection rates in Europe, according to the latest data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.”
“Earlier this week the Swedish government announced it would be removing almost all its Covid restrictions and recommendations at the end of the month, in line with the declining infection rates.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-58511816
Sweden got it right!
or experimenting with masks and lockdown and mass jabbing got it very wrong.
quite
does anyone have any Sweden specific jabbing info? BBC says they are 70% jabbed but I want to know whether they are going for boosters and kiddies
Neighbouring country Denmark also removing COVID restrictions -inlcuding, I believe, vaccine passports, and getting rid of their COVID emergency powers in law.
Not sure if Denmark has the same migrant problems as Sweden – if not, it might be a viable move for me if this country doesn’t come to its senses and dumps all the mainstream political parties for The Reform Party.
Well, well, well – imagine my shock.
i reject most conspiracy theories off hand because human incompetence and inertia explain most things. It’s why Occam’s Razor is so useful. So when you have a virology lab, with known containment issues, located within walking distance of the outbreak? When the bats natural home was hours away by plane? It should show e been assumed a lab leak until proven otherwise.
Of course the one thing that we must remember is that when money and reputation are at risk, throwing shade on the obvious answer becomes normative. Everyone who blew smoke on the lab leak theory with a financial connection to GOF work and WIV should be prosecuted for fraud. But the world is not a place where justice often occurs. Instead Saint Fauci and the rest will walk away heroes instead of corrupt officials.
I may have got Noah wrong but it seems to me that what he is doing is trying to keep alive the natural origin theory while pretending to be interested in the lab leak (which more likely was deliberate). To not believe in the lab leak theory you have to believe in mathematically implausible levels of coincidence, when the lab leak is the Occam’s Razor reality – the virus originated in the Wuhan lab, a US NIH commission implicating both the NIH and the CCP.
I thought most people believe in mathematically plausible levels of coincidence.
What stories are going around, and what is true or not, are completely irrelevant. We are in a post-truth environment.
Government is NOT ‘democratic’. It is run by powerful people who drive their favourite policies – like Climate Change or Vaccination. These people are rarely actual politicians – they are lobbyists, activists, or in Boris’s case, his new wife.
Real data, like CO2 levels, Covid case numbers or predicted HS2 passenger numbers, are infinitely malleable. If you want another lockdown, just change the Covid case numbers. If you want to attack China, wave around a lab-leak story. If you want to be friends with them again, just poo-poo it again…
Given that our governments have spent the last 20 months covering it up why are we still entertaining the incredible theory that it might not have happened?
The overwhelming probability that the virus was a lab created chimera has been with us since the beginning of last year. Journalists, suddenly unable to weigh up evidence, however keep on trying to refloat it as the fanciful theory. None of this has really been news since early last year but for some mysterious reason there is a similar article by Ian Birrell in Unherd today.
Never sure how to pronounce ‘Wuhan’
Is it ‘Porton Down’ or ‘Fort Detrick’?
US Gov report from House Foreign Affairs Committee Aug 2021 is an 84 page compilation of evidence re Wuhan activities:
https://gop-foreignaffairs.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/ORIGINS-OF-COVID-19-REPORT.pdf