I said months ago that this claim from Tom Cotton that the virus is a biological weapon from a lab in Wuhan was set up to go mainstream if the US decided to push for a war against China.
Well, you’re seeing it now.
The U.S. intelligence community is examining whether the coronavirus that caused the global pandemic emerged accidentally from a Chinese research lab studying diseases in bats, current and former U.S. intelligence officials tell NBC News.
Spy agencies have ruled out that the coronavirus was man-made, the officials say. But scientists at a military and a civilian lab in Wuhan, where the virus originated, are known to have conducted ongoing research on coronaviruses, officials say. They say intelligence agencies have gathered and are weighing evidence that an employee of one of the labs could have become accidentally infected and left the facility with the virus.
“It’s a possibility, though not the most likely possibility,” one official said.
Asked about the intelligence on NBC’s “TODAY” show, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said, “this is something we’ve been watching closely now for some time,” adding that the results of the investigation are thus far “inconclusive.”
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley told reporters this week that U.S. intelligence agencies are taking “a hard look” at whether the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan lab.
“We don’t know for certain,” Milley told reporters Tuesday.
President Donald Trump declined to answer a question about the intelligence during a televised briefing Wednesday.
China disputes that the virus could have originated in a Wuhan lab. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Thursday that the head of the World Health Organization has “repeatedly said there’s no evidence” the virus was made in a lab and that “well-known medical experts” believe there is “no scientific basis” for claims of “so-called laboratory leaks.”
Separately, the idea that the virus emerged at an animal market in Wuhan continues to be debated by experts. Dr. Ronald Waldman, a former official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a public health expert at George Washington University, said the theory has fallen out of favor in some quarters, in part because one of the early infected persons had no connection to the market.
I will be the first to admit that I thought this was a bioweapon. I speculated that it would have been released by the US government on the Chinese. Both the Chinese and the Russians have speculated about this as well, and in fact, that belief seems to be guiding their own policies with regards to the virus.
However, as the information has developed, I’m less than convinced and think that this bioweapon talk is not simply a red herring. As far as everyone is able to surmise, there is nothing at all interesting or unique about this virus. Every fall, there are hundreds of different viruses that emerge, new – or “novel” as they say – having mutated from a different virus that existed the year before. Between 7% and 15% of those viruses are of the coronavirus family of viruses.
So there is actually no reason whatsoever to believe that this virus is anything other than a manifestation of the annual flu virus cycle.
A 2007 paper from Penn State concludes that during the summer months, the Influenza A virus travels the world and mixes with other viruses to form a new mutation that is capable of infecting people who have already built up immunities to the previous year’s form. As a 2006 paper from the Journal of Virology states, human coronaviruses were first identified in the 1960s, and are primarily harmless and just cause a common cold. However, they also say that SARS-CoV was probably from bats, and that this made it more deadly.
There is precious little public data on the mutation cycle of coronaviruses, and with as much information as there is on other aspects of the virus family, I have to believe that the reason for the lack of information is that no one really knows. As a non-expert, I see no specific reason to believe that these viruses come from bats, and are not simply mutation strains of a human coronavirus that has become more effective.
Of course, it is possible for a virus to emerge from a strand of the cold/flu virus cycle and be more deadly, but there is as of yet no evidence that this is more deadly than Influenza A or B.
What we still need to try to understand is why China initially said there was no problem with this virus, then decided there was a problem and decided to lock down Wuhan. We do not understand why that happened, and the Chinese have not actually said.
However, one thing we can say for certain is that if it was a bioweapon that had leaked from their own laboratory, they would not have had the delayed response they had. The response appears to have been that the CCP initially said that it was just the flu, but then decided for some reason that maybe it wasn’t, and precautions were needed.
But this has to be said: The other possibility is that they’ve known all along that it was just the flu, and staged a response that they knew would freak out the virologists in other countries, and cause them to recommend massive lockdowns which would destroy Western economies. I don’t really think that is what happened, because the Western response doesn’t really make sense in that context, but it must be mentioned that this is one of the possibilities. If the Chinese did come up with that plan to troll the West into imploding itself, however, I just have to say: wow, that sure is something.
Ultimately, the facts are not particularly relevant to anything, as the US government is going to shape a narrative for whatever purposes they have. Right now, it is clear that their purposes are to provoke hostilities against the Chinese, as they will be blamed for everything that happens as a result of this virus.
The problem that China is facing is that although I can’t really see anything that they’ve done wrong – even if they actually did troll the West with the flu, people who fall for this bullshit deserve it – people don’t like them.
China has done a good job with a lot of things in the last fifty years, but they have not done a good job in presenting the world with a positive image of China. They allowed the West to spread dumb propaganda about their government, and they didn’t make any attempt to familiarize anyone with what they actually do as a race.
When most people think of China, they just think of loud people who eat dogs and spit in elevators.
And some are even brave enough to go against the grain and point out the Chinese hatred for our precious blacks.
People are shocked by this ad but shouldn’t be. China is an extremely racist country. This is a well known fact. Anti-black racism in particular is extraordinarily common and virulent all over Asia
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) April 16, 2020
It takes real bravery to stand up for the blacks, with the mainstream media constantly saying “niggers should all be killed,” but Matt Walsh has what it takes to take a moral stand.
So the Chinese are about as sympathetic in the eyes of the average Westerner as the Moslems, despite the fact that they don’t fly planes into buildings or really do anything at all besides steal patents and violate copyright – which, I mean, who cares.
Even the Chinese world takeover plan is not really very diabolical. What seems to have happened is that in the early 2000s, China saw the US using its superpower status for belligerent, insane objectives, and decided that in order to survive as a nation, they would have to become the dominant global superpower. Otherwise, it was just a matter of time before the Jewish terror machine that is United States foreign policy got around to them.
So, I’m a lot more sympathetic to China than most conservatives because I’m a lot more familiar with them, but I understand that it is going to be very easy for the US government to blame this virus on the Chinese and potentially start an actual war.
That having been said, I hope we can all agree that a war with China would be really, really bad for Americans.
Before we preach doom on the war front, however, we should remember that the Pompeo war apparatus has tried to start three (3) different wars in the last two years, and failed all three times. So I do think we need to focus on the more immediate problem of a collapsed economy and impending cannibal apocalypse.
Other than the UK, I don’t know how many Europeans will go along with “small eye tribe make many people cough!”