US, a Major Suspect Origin of COVID-19

2021-August-1 15:00 By: GMW.cn

Though politically divided, the US has maintained an infamous record of viewing global affairs through the lens of double standard regardless of which party is controlling the White House.

Now the US government is covering the world’s biggest suspect origin of the novel coronavirus – Fort Detrick Lab, the only Level-4 US Army Medical Command facility. On top of that, the US is hyping up the scandal that the “virus was leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan”, and manipulating the World Health Organization for Phase-II origin tracing in China.

US, a Major Suspect Origin of COVID-19

Illustration by Qianli

American media are getting busier these days as well, deliberately hyping up the clichés that “the Chinese government is not transparent” and “the Chinese government does not cooperate with the investigation.

It’s strange why the US government doesn’t cooperate with the investigation and why it is not being transparent at a time when people all across the world, and at home in the US, too, are asking questions about Fort Detrick.

There are good reasons to believe the US is the foremost source of the virus.

(I)

This time it’s not that easy for the US to play the double standard game.

By shifting the limelight onto China in the global origin-tracing efforts, the US has actually exposed its attempt to distract the international community and cover its own flaws. At the very least, it bought more time to cover up the problems at Fort Detrick.

There are actually disagreements within the US government as for whether and how to play the origin-tracing game. In June, the Vanity Fair magazine disclosed that during Donald Trump’s presidency, White House officials issued an internal warning against investigating the origin of the virus, otherwise a “jar full of maggots might be opened.”

Stephen Kanazawa, a former foreign correspondent of The New York Times and a senior researcher at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, said that the Fort Detrick biolab has a “dark history” and has worked with Japanese war criminals, and still remains the center of biological warfare research in the US, and an in-depth investigation of the laboratory “will be very interesting.”

Both kind advices and blunt warnings are clearly ignored by the US government, which chose to engage in totally the opposite – the wicked suing first, muddling the water and shifting the attention elsewhere.

All these will end up as futile because the suspicions are right there:

In 2018, Fort Detrick published a paper showing it conducted in-depth research on the “pathogen characteristics of potential A/B biological warfare agents from community-acquired pneumonia”. “Community-acquired pneumonia” is exactly what the scientific community described at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak.

In July 2019, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention closed the Fort Detrick base and suspended its “research on highly pathogenic pathogens.” Almost at the same time, an unknown respiratory disease broke out in a community of retirees an hour’s drive away from Fort Detrick. Unknown respiratory diseases emerged also in northern Virginia, and large-scale “e-cigarette pneumonia” broke out in Wisconsin, the symptoms of which were almost identical to COVID-19. Towards the end of the month, respiratory diseases of unknown reasons broke out in two nursing homes near Fort Detrick. In September, the number of “e-cigarette pneumonia” cases in Maryland, where Fort Detrick is located, doubled.

Authoritative radiology medical experts analyzed 60 openly published scientific papers on “e-cigarette” and “flu” pneumonia and concluded that there were viral infections in “e-cigarette pneumonia” cases reported in the US in 2019, and the possibility cannot be ruled out that some of these cases were COVID-19 cases.

Researchers from the US CDC tested more than 7,000 blood samples collected from 9 states in the country from December 13, 2019 to January 17, 2020, 106 of which contained antibodies to the novel coronavirus. The National Institutes of Health collected 24,000 blood samples from multiple locations across the US at the beginning of 2020, and SARS-CoV-2 antibodies were found in at least 9 of these samples. This proves that as early as December 2019, the novel coronavirus had started to spread in the US at a low rate. Robert Redfield, the former director of the US C DC, publicly admitted that some of the deaths in the US flu season that began in September 2019 were actually due to the novel coronavirus.

From January to August 2019, the US Department of Health and Human Services conducted a mock drill code-named “Crimson Contagion”, which simulated unsuspecting US tourists returning home carry along a deadly respiratory virus from China and then the virus spread to the whole word. The result of the simulation was “110 million infections and 580,000 deaths in the US”. In October 2019, multiple organizations in the US carried out a high-level epidemic exercise code-named “Event 201” to simulate an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus that eventually becomes a severe pandemic not to be stopped until an effective vaccine comes out. In the second drill, the virus was very similar to the SARS virus but more transmissible.  In November 2019, the US mentioned in intelligence shared with Israel that China was about to have a coronavirus outbreak.

Former US president Trump even went on record saying the country started to develop vaccines for the novel coronavirus on January 11, 2020. On March 16, 2020, Moderna’s experimental vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 carried out the first human test. As experts commented, “this is possible only if Moderna started the experiment from long time ago and obtained the virus strain much earlier”.

In February 2021, Gateway Expert, a US news website disclosed an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) between the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Moderna. The agreement shows that in December 2019, the “candidate mRNA coronavirus vaccine” developed by the two parties was officially transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

(II)

Connecting all the dots would make a gruesome story.

What is the connection between Fort Detrick and the early spread of the novel coronavirus? What does the US government have to do with the virus?

To dodge the questions with a simple line of “it involves national security” will no longer work. The US government has to expose the real reasons behind the closure of Fort Detrick, and disclose the real causes of the pneumonia of “e-cigarette” smokers.

Otherwise, the world can only reasonably suspect that Fort Detrick is where all this originated, and that the US government played an ugly role in this deadly pandemic.

Vanity Fair drew a vivid and impressive analogy – “a jar full of maggots”. As a matter of fact, this is not the first time a maggot was unleashed from the jar. The US not only maintains a dirty record in artificially modifying virus sequences. Public records show that in 2002 it modified the polio virus; in 2004 and 2014 it modified the influenza virus, and in 2011, the H5N1 avian influenza virus was modified in a US lab. In containing virus spread, the US record looks much uglier:

In 1989, a new variant of Ebola spread in parts of the US due to researchers’ negligence.

In 2001, an anthrax attack took place in the US, the strains used by the suspect were all from Fort Detrick, and the high-purity anthrax far exceeded the needs of peaceful research.

In 2002, another leak of anthrax spore occurred in Fort Detrick, causing infections of working staff.

Between 2015 and 2020, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reported 28 lab accidents involving “genetically engineered organisms” to the National Institutes of Health, of which 6 involved man-made coronaviruses.  A science writer from Stanford University revealed in the book “Bitten” that the Lyme disease, which is spread by tick bites and is prevalent in the US, was actually caused by bacteria leakage from Fort Detrick by biological warfare researchers. ……

The world has yet to receive any reasonable explanation from the US for all these.

Now COVID-19 has permanently changed the human society and wreaked havoc on the entire planet. The world deserves an explanation from the US government on its relationship with this global pandemic.

But unfortunately, the US has chosen to remain silent, blind and deaf.

There has been increasing rational voices from the international community criticizing the US for politicizing the origin-tracing and calling for investigation into Fort Detrick. More than 14 million Chinese netizens have signed a letter to the WHO as of Sunday, demanding the organization to investigate the Fort Detrick lab, and interestingly, the server of the petition campaign was hacked by multiple US IP addresses.

Americans deserve to know the truth, too. In March, American people also launched a petition on the White House website, enumerating incidents such as the outbreak of the pandemic and deleted media coverage, and requesting the White House to look into the real reasons for the closure of Fort Detrick. Petitioners also questioned whether the lab was a COVID-19 research base, and whether there was a leak from the lab.

But sadly, these Americans now find themselves in a difficult situation as the world struggles to trace the origin of the virus.

As early as March 2020, George Webb, an independent investigative journalist in Washington, D.C., said in a video that the patient zero who spread the novel coronavirus to Wuhan might be a relative of an American athlete attending the World Military Games. Recently, Webb claimed that he was under multiple death threats after posting the video online. Now the video was removed from major platforms, and some media reports in the US on Fort Detrick were also deleted.

Now who would believe that the US government, which is dodging all the questions with an evasive attitude, is not to blame for this global pandemic?

But is the US has nowhere to hide as the international community strongly demands an investigation into Fort Detrick. The US needs to show a transparent and responsible attitude, by inviting WHO experts to the country to look into the lab, and disclosing the facts the world deserves to know.

Contributed by Yusheng and Datou from the official Wechat account of Poquanle.

Translated by Jiaming Liu.

Editor: WXY
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