This article follows from Part 1: "The US Government Declares War on America", which listed a 70-year history of the US military and CIA having performed secret and deadly Biological, Chemical, and Radiation "Experiments" on Americans and on many other nations.
Current circumstances have caused a paradigm shift in the public's perception of this pandemic, and answers are demanded. One of those circumstances is another more definitive study, this time by experts from the University of Cambridge and their peers from Germany who analyzed 160 virus genomes extracted from human patients around the world. Their major finding was that the coronavirus had three distinct strains, namely A, B, and C. They proved that the type which infected China - B - was not the original virus but a derivative from the parent (A) which existed primarily in the US, at least initially.
They also completed a still-unpublished analysis of another 1,001 genomes, their study providing solid evidence (as have others) that the spread of the disease among humans occurred between September 13 and December 7, 2019, long before it was identified in China.
There is more:
In 2004, the Hong Kong Wenweipo published an article titled, "Earliest SARS outbreak suspected in US", quoting AP and Reuters (3) about a 45-year-old American woman who became gravely ill with typical SARS symptoms a few months prior to the outbreak in Hong Kong and who died within a day, with the entire hospital and about 80 other individuals with whom she'd had contact all being immediately quarantined. Wenweipo, Chinese researchers, Russian virologists, and military experts speculated the SARS virus was necessarily man-made and almost certainly released from a US military lab, the US leak being covered up. It is still a puzzle to explain how the Western (US) media immediately and unanimously knew SARS was caused by civets when for months nobody on the ground knew anything factual.
MERS first exploded in South Korea at the JUPITR-ATD bio-weapons lab on the US Airbase at Osan, with more than 100 South Korean soldiers suddenly quarantined on the base. Today the US military seems to be taking a strong lead in the COVID-19 outbreak in South Korea, with US servicemen having suspiciously frequent contact with the fanatic Shincheonji religious cult who have been the source of most COVID-19 infections in South Korea. It is not easy to explain the coincidence of both MERS and COVID-19 appearing to have perhaps originated from the same labs at the Osan Airbase. Similarly, Ebola emerged simultaneously in three different locations thousands of kilometers apart, each within a stone's throw of a US military bio-weapons lab. HIV-AIDS also originated in the US, its simultaneous spread to two other continents still a matter of fierce debate.
In the months prior to COVID-19 (and again during the epidemic), China was hit with 4 unexplained viral outbreaks in succession, animal viruses that destroyed much of the nation's livestock and poultry, causing much economic damage and necessitating the purchase of large volumes of US agricultural products. It would seem that Mother Nature decided to align herself with US foreign policy, not only joining Trump's trade war and assisting his effort to 'bring China down' but her apparent unprecedented complicity in choosing the worst possible time of the year and perhaps the worst possible location. Were these merely coincidences, a run of bad luck, perhaps? The swine flu that devastated China's livestock in 2019 was not an act of god or nature but was done by unknown persons flying small drones over the country's pig farms and infecting thousands of locations, resulting in the culling of more than 100 million pigs. It is still a puzzle how the Western media immediately and unanimously knew this was caused by "Chinese gangs" and "pork speculators", when it appears more likely a replay of the US attack on Cuba.
The original outbreak of COVID-19, like SARS, appeared to be Chinese-specific, 99.5% affecting only ethnic Chinese, with no infected foreigners in Wuhan or China, which naturally raises questions. Harvard University - with funding from the US military - conducted a series of illegal and outrageously unethical "studies" in China (after having been specifically forbidden to do so), surreptitiously collecting hundreds of thousands of Chinese DNA samples, then illegally removing them from the country. (2)Many questions were raised about the (military) application of those samples.
And it wasn't only Harvard University collecting Chinese DNA. The US State Department, beginning with Hillary Clinton, and continuing until today, has been tasked with collecting fingerprints, passwords, PIN numbers - and DNA - from all world leaders and dignitaries. China and the world deserve an answer to the question of "Why?"
If it were China with the above history and SARS, MERS, AIDS, EBOLA, bird flu, swine flu, and COVID-19 first erupted in the US, the Americans would claim this as 100% proof that China was responsible. It cannot be a surprise that much of the world today is naturally tending to lay these outbreaks at America's doorstep.
Matters the US government needs to address:
Why did the CDC shut down the Fort Detrick USAMRIID bio-weapons lab? Was it due, as the media claimed, to a simple "lack of procedure"? Barring massive contamination and/or infections, why was that huge (80,000 sq. meters) site kept sealed for six months of testing and decontamination before being permitted to only partially resume work? Also, why were most English-language news websites suddenly scrubbed of all reference to the closure of Fort Detrick when the coronavirus erupted in Wuhan?
It has been conclusively proven that COVID-19 did not originate at the Wuhan market, nor in Wuhan at all, nor in China. Further, the virus strains in Italy, Iran, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, are different from the one that contaminated Wuhan. Since only the US has all the various strains, it would seem those infections must have originated there. How would this happen? As well, the entire world is wondering why there were two large waves of global infection, the first infecting 25 countries at the same time around January 25, and the second with 85 countries simultaneously experiencing explosive domestic multiple outbreaks within a few days of each other around February 25 - and mostly different from the strain in China.
Japan, South Korea, Italy and Iran reported that their domestic outbreaks of COVID-19 were not from China but instead showing connection to the US. Australia claims 80% of its infections came from the US, other countries also identifying infections that were Made in America. Japan and Taiwan have documented proof that several Japanese became infected in Hawaii in late September of 2019. As well, the huge pent-up eruptions in Washington and New York were domestic in origin, having no proven connection with China. How to explain this? (4)
Two years ago, John Bolton fired the entire executive group responsible for pandemic response coordination, eviscerating the nation's infectious disease defense infrastructure, and also cut funding for the CDC, eliminating 80% of the department that could have helped other nations detect and control the epidemics they later suffered. More specifically, a CDC epidemiologist embedded in China’s disease control agency was eliminated shortly before the virus outbreak in Wuhan. In light of current events, how can these actions be explained?
Virologists are unanimous that the first act after an outbreak is to hunt down the 'patient zero', so as to stop the infection at its source. All major countries made great efforts in this regard - except the US who made no apparent effort of any kind. The US must explain why this was so. Chinese, Italian, and Iranian authorities have been calling for international collaboration to trace the precise genetic trail of the global outbreaks and identify the true origin of the virus. Since all of humankind desperately wants the answers, why isn't the US cooperating in this effort?
The WHO emphasised the most important thing was to "test, test, test", but the US is the one country that steadfastly refused to do so, forbidding testing even for those already in an ICU and on a ventilator, with excuses that appear both lame and suspicious in retrospect. Why was Dr. Helen Chu issued a threatening "cease and desist" order to stop testing nasal swabs her flu research team had taken in Washington State from October 2019 onward? The only possible result would be to prevent the knowledge emerging that the virus had already been circulating months earlier. As a rule, the reason we don't ask a question privately is because we already know the answer, and the reason we don't ask the question publicly is because we don't want anyone else to know the answer.
And on April 9, United Biomedical, who began testing and offered to pay the cost to test every resident of San Miguel County in Colorado for COVID-19 antibodies, was suddenly shut down by the health authorities claiming the company had lost 40% of its staff and was unable to complete the testing, a claim the company firmly disputed. The US government needs to explain why much testing is still forbidden.
The internet is now being flooded with posts by Americans - including many physicians - claiming infections from September, 2019 onward, all describing similar symptoms consistent with COVID-19. I have many received messages from Americans in Washington, New York, California, Maryland, Virginia, and other states, as well as from Germany and Italy, claiming similar infections as early as late September, claims too numerous, too detailed, and too similar to be ignored.
China, Italy, and several other nations in Asia and Europe have documented proof that COVID-19 was circulating in their populations for several months before the outbreak in Wuhan. Dr. Giuseppe Remuzzi, director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, stated that many strange pneumonia cases were discovered in late November and December in northern Italy, in patients who had been vaccinated against seasonal influenza, and also that Wales was found to have what clinically appeared to be COVID-19 patients in November.
The US government needs to address the now-certain existence of the virus being widespread in America and much of the world from September, 2019. Yet Mike Pompeo issued a circular instructing the global State Department staff to blame China for COVID-19.
Perhaps most startling of all, an ABC News Report stated, "Concerns about [COVID-19] were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents. The timeline of the intel side of this may be [even] further back than we’re discussing," the source said of preliminary reports from Wuhan." The intelligence source quoted by ABC said further, "Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event". And the Washington Post wrote that ". . . reports from US intelligence agencies starting in January that warned of the scale and intensity of the coronavirus outbreak in China, [in Wuhan] could develop into a "full-blown pandemic"."
CNN had this report: "The US military's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) compiled a November intelligence report in which "analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event," one of the sources of the NCMI's report told ABC News. The source told ABC News that the intelligence report was then briefed "multiple times" to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's Joint Staff and the White House. The Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and White House National Security Council, originally declined to comment." They later denied knowledge of the report, but ABC was sufficiently secure in the reliability of its four unrelated sources that they repeatedly republished the article for days after the NCMI disavowal.
Interestingly, CNN also made this statement: "US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said Sunday that he 'couldn't recall' if the Pentagon received an intelligence assessment on the novel coronavirus in China." We need to think here. An intelligence report of a potential worldwide pandemic that could kill millions of Americans, and Mr. Esper 'couldn't recall' if he'd even heard of it. Is that believeable?
China can demand a response to this question: HOW could US 'intelligence sources' possibly have known in November - or even October - of a potential pandemic of COVID-19 that would erupt specifically in Wuhan two months later? I believe the entire world would demand the answer to this. And once again it is a puzzle to explain how the Western (US) media immediately and unanimously knew - from day one - that the virus was COVID-19 and was caused by bats when for months nobody on the ground knew anything factual, and the animal source is still unproven.
CDC Director Redfield admitted that US flu deaths were actually from the coronavirus. How many of the 35 million infections and 20,000 deaths were misdiagnosed? Was this accidental? When the cause of death was discovered in autopsies, why was the information kept secret? Why were deceased victims' families told they died of influenza when the death certificates read "coronavirus"?
In early March the US government declared as classified all COVID-19 information, with all communication to be rerouted through the White House and coordinated with NSC officials. Only specified individuals with security clearance are permitted to attend secret meetings, with no mobile phones or computers allowed. Excluded staff members claimed they were told virus information was classified "because it had to do with China". The US needs to explain the need for such extreme secrecy (while condemning China for lack of transparency), and how coping with a domestic virus epidemic would involve China.
Mike Pompeo and the US media have repeatedly accused China of cover-ups and delays in the virus epidemic, claiming China "cost the world two months" of defense. But the White House has now admitted that China informed the US of the virus on January 03, 2020, within about one week of identifying the new pathogen. ABC News ran a story titled, "US 'wasted' months before preparing for virus pandemic", stating, "After the first alarms sounded in early January . . . the Trump administration squandered nearly two months that could have been used to bolster the federal stockpile of critically needed medical supplies and equipment . . . federal agencies waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment . . ." China deserves an explanation, and an apology.
The US media accused China of punishing its so-called whistle-blower Li Wenliang, some inventing false claims he was forced into a confession and even imprisoned. The official narrative is that America treasures its whistle-blowers while the Chinese are mean to theirs. But today, Li Wenliang is a national hero in China. The US needs to address this issue openly, and compare Li's position with those of Edward Snowdon, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. Also with that of Captain Brett Crozier of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, who was recently fired for leaking the news of spreading infections on his warship, and the firing Inspector General Michael Atkinson whose job duties led to Trump's impeachment.
It is documented that America's Radio Free Asia created and promulgated widely the falsehoods that the University at Wuhan is a bio-weapons lab and the coronavirus leaked from there. Radio Free Asia is an integral part of America's misinformation machine reporting to Mike Pompeo.
Mr. Pompeo also issued specific orders to the global State Department staff to paint the US "in every interview" as "The greatest humanitarian nation in the history of the world". But he recently increased sanctions on both Iran and Cuba, preventing the purchase of critical medical supplies, and ensured the World Bank would decline Venezuela's plea for financial medical assistance. While China, Russia, and Cuba have sent medical supplies and physicians to nearly 100 nations around the world, the USA has provided assistance to nobody, and even denied critical supplies to Canada, actions inconsistent with a 'great humanitarian nation', instead appearing to the world as almost savagely inhuman, with many people in Iran and Venezuela dying every day as a direct result of US policies.
Epilogue
On April 11, 2020, Gilad Atzmon published an excellent article titled "A Viral Pandemic or A Crime Scene?", in which he suggests circumstances have now created 'a paradigm change' in the perception of the current viral pandemic. He wrote that "While scientists and medical experts find it difficult to explain exactly how Covid-19 operates or how it came about, a few critical voices within the scientific community and the dissident media have pointed to alternative explanations that seem more explanatory than anything conventional medical thought has so far offered."
Atzmon wrote that medical diagnoses and investigations are concerned with the nature, cause, and manifestation of a disease, while "Criminal investigations are primarily engaged with the human element", seeking to ascertain "the methods, motives, and identities of criminals", as well as to "search for and interrogate witnesses". He states: "Since we do not know its provenance, we should treat the current epidemic as a potentially criminal act as well as a medical event. We must begin the search for the perpetrators who may be at the centre of this possible crime of global genocidal proportions." I concur.
All Americans (and others) who believe in China's culpability for the emergence of this virus, should welcome such an investigation. And Mr. Pompeo, who so firmly plants the full responsibility on China's doorstep, would receive vindication of his claims. I believe that the governments and the people of China, Italy, Spain, France, and Iran, especially would like to know the results of such a criminal investigation. All nations of the world should band together now, and proceed jointly with this endeavor. It needn't be approached with presumption of cause or intent, but simply to uncover the entire truth of this event. That will be sufficient, and it is possible the results of this worldwide investigation will prompt others into similar past events which have to date gone unquestioned and unexamined.
I believe there are yet many truths about COVID-19 (and many other epidemics) still to emerge. Perhaps one of the many people with personal knowledge of the source and method of distribution will be sufficiently brave to come forward, perhaps another Edward Snowdon or Chelsea Manning. We will then see how truly the US treasures its whistle-blowers.
For more supporting information on COVID-19, you can refer here to 15 background articles by the author, which contain much detail and an additional 100 or so references.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Notes:
(1) William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II [Common Courage Press, 1995]).
Current circumstances have caused a paradigm shift in the public's perception of this pandemic, and answers are demanded. One of those circumstances is another more definitive study, this time by experts from the University of Cambridge and their peers from Germany who analyzed 160 virus genomes extracted from human patients around the world. Their major finding was that the coronavirus had three distinct strains, namely A, B, and C. They proved that the type which infected China - B - was not the original virus but a derivative from the parent (A) which existed primarily in the US, at least initially.
They also completed a still-unpublished analysis of another 1,001 genomes, their study providing solid evidence (as have others) that the spread of the disease among humans occurred between September 13 and December 7, 2019, long before it was identified in China.
There is more:
In 2004, the Hong Kong Wenweipo published an article titled, "Earliest SARS outbreak suspected in US", quoting AP and Reuters (3) about a 45-year-old American woman who became gravely ill with typical SARS symptoms a few months prior to the outbreak in Hong Kong and who died within a day, with the entire hospital and about 80 other individuals with whom she'd had contact all being immediately quarantined. Wenweipo, Chinese researchers, Russian virologists, and military experts speculated the SARS virus was necessarily man-made and almost certainly released from a US military lab, the US leak being covered up. It is still a puzzle to explain how the Western (US) media immediately and unanimously knew SARS was caused by civets when for months nobody on the ground knew anything factual.
The US Government Declares War on America
Biological, Chemical, and Radiation "Experiments" on Americans
By Larry Romanoff
This article is Part 1 of 2. It provides the background and some necessary context as an introduction for what follows, an environment of secret US military activity conclusively supported by thousands of pages of documented evidence.
For the past 70 or so years, the US government waged a war against its own citizens, a reprehensible history of illegal, unethical and immoral experiments exposing countless millions of US civilians to deadly procedures and pathogens. According to a US Congressional investigation, by the late 1970s "at least 500,000 people were used as subjects in radiation, biological and chemical experiments sponsored by the US Federal Government on its own citizens". The truth is in the tens of millions.
The United States Government Accountability Office issued a report on September 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, the United States Department of Defense and other national security agencies studied hundreds of thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances.
A quotation from the study:
From the document: American nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three decades of radiation experiments on U.S. citizens: Report prepared by the Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power, of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives, November, 1986: U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1986, 65-0190
Few Americans seem aware of their own government's programs of human experimentation, an unconscionable litany of atrocities performed by the CIA and military on an innocent and uninformed population, always without consent and most often with tragic results. These included extensive programs of mind-control experiments, interrogation/torture experiments, deliberate infection with deadly or debilitating diseases, exposure to severe radioactivity and every manner of biological, bacteriological and toxic chemical pathogens. They encompassed brainwashing, torture, electroshock, nerve agents, drugs and exotic hypnosis and surgical experiments including lobotomies, and a wide range of pharmacological "research", all conducted on innocent, uninformed and helpless civilian victims ranging from newborn babies to adults.
The substances used - the "tools of their trade" - included LSD, heroin, morphine, Benzedrine, marijuana, cocaine, PCP, mescaline, Metrazol, ether, nerve gases VX and Sarin, toxic chemicals such as zinc cadmium sulfide and sulfur dioxide, a variety of biological agents, sulfuric acid, scopolamine, mustard gas, radioactive isotopes, and various dioxins from Dow Chemical. They also included electroshock, synthetic estrogens, live cancer cells, animal sexual organs transplanted into humans, cow blood transfusions and much more. Deliberately-transmitted diseases included syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, cancer, bubonic plague, beriberi, cholera, whooping cough, yellow fever, dengue fever, encephalitis and typhoid, Lyme Disease, hemorrhagic fever and much more.
Experiments were performed on children, orphans, the sick and mentally disabled, the poor, the black, and prisoners who were given no choice in participation. Hospital patients were often told they were receiving medical treatment, but instead were used as subjects in deadly experiments. We will never know the total number who died. If you don't mind nightmares, do some research on the CIA's MK-ULTRA program. Many of these experiments continued until the late 1990s and beyond, and many people claim - and provide evidence - that they still continue today.
These human research programs were funded by the US government and performed mostly through the CIA and the military, but with full cooperation from most major universities and hospitals. They were highly secretive, their existence undiscovered until after many years of operation. Faced with court orders to release the records, the CIA and military instead destroyed most of the documents, a few records surviving only by filing and communication errors, the available evidence covering only a minuscule portion of the violations and atrocities committed.
"From 1960 until 1971, Dr. Eugene Saenger, a radiologist at the University of Cincinnati, exposed poor and mostly black patients to whole body radiation. They were not asked to sign consent forms, nor were they told the Pentagon funded the study. Patients were exposed, in the period of one hour, to the equivalent of about 20,000 x-rays worth of radiation." Most of the patients died, but Dr. Saenger recently received a gold medal for "career achievements" from the Radiological Society of North America.
From the 1950s onward, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of infected patients. Saul Krugman of New York University promised the parents of mentally disabled children that their children would be enrolled into Willowbrook in exchange for signing a consent form for procedures that he claimed were "vaccinations." In reality, the procedures involved deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis.
Lauretta Bender: The Psychiatrist From Hell. Lauretta Bender was a neuropsychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in the 1940s and early 1950s who pioneered electroshock therapy on small children who inevitably regressed into violent and catatonic states, most ending dead or in prison. Bender later expanded her treatments to include LSD and, in spite of her inhuman brutality, the NYT published a glowing obituary when she died - as it did for the many dozens of such persons.
Beginning around 1950, the US Army conducted at least 240 open-air bio-warfare attacks on American cities, releasing deadly nerve agents and bacteria from Alaska to Hawaii. The CIA released whooping cough bacteria from the sea near Tampa Bay, Florida, causing an epidemic that left tens of thousands of people extremely ill and killing many others. The US Navy simulated biological warfare attacks by spraying large quantities of a bacteria over San Francisco, in which many citizens died and countless contracted severe pneumonia-like illnesses. When the information was leaked, military sources insisted the bacteria were harmless, but countless thousands incurred serious urinary tract and respiratory infections, pneumonia and other illnesses, infections which were permanent: "To this day, these bacteria are a leading cause of death among the elderly in the San Francisco area".
The US military conducted around 1,000 above-ground nuclear tests to determine the effects of radiation on a population. The Public Health Service was instructed to tell citizens downwind from nuclear bomb tests that the increases in cancers were due to neurosis, and Eisenhower ordered that women with radiation sickness, spontaneous abortions, hair loss, leukemia and brain cancer be told they were suffering from "housewife syndrome".
A secret AEC document dated April 17, 1947, titled Medical Experiments in Humans stated: "It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such fieldwork should be classified Secret."
An indication of the callous and obscene nature which has always pervaded the US government:
Kodak began receiving customer complaints about fogged film, the cause traced to packaging material - Indiana corn husks contaminated with radioactivity. The US government secretly agreed to provide Kodak with advance information on all future nuclear tests, including "expected distribution of radioactive material in order to anticipate local contamination". The victims now tell us, ". . . the Government warned the photographic industry and provided maps and forecasts of potential contamination. Where were the warnings to parents of children in these areas? The Government protected rolls of film, but not the lives of our kids. Why did they do that when they had all the information about hot spots and fallout, and yet they did not warn the people of this country about the dangers inherent in radioactive fallout?" Their government didn't tell them because they were the guinea pigs in the tests.
You can read about some of the more prominent cases here, here, here, and here. Also Robert McNamara's infamous Project 100,000, Operation DEW, Operation LAC, Project SHAD, Project 112, Lyme Disease, Nerve gas and Dead Sheep at Dugway.
And it wasn't only War on America
The accumulated evidence of the American use of biological weapons in China and North Korea is beyond dispute, but the US government has lied about it for 70 years.
It is also documented beyond dispute that the US conducted a decades-long campaign of biological warfare against little Cuba, including the distribution of hemorrhagic fever, and the swine flu that caused Cuba to kill all 500,000 pigs in the country. The Americans not only lied about this for 70 years but accused Cuba of being "a pariah state" with a biological warfare program. (1)And not only Cuba. The US has deployed Chemical and Biological weapons on Canada, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Columbia, Brazil, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and more.
The US has some 400 military bio-weapons labs scattered in (mostly poor and backward) countries around the world, including new ones in Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, several nations now demanding these labs be dismantled and removed to the US where they belong.
The media have been conspicuously silent on the US record of biological pathogen leaks, but the CDC verifies that between 2005 and 2012 the US had 1,059 instances of theft or leaks of dangerous pathogens which broke containment. One every three days for seven years. This needs addressing because there is considerable evidence the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in the US in 2009 was caused by one of these leaks, which was almost certainly why the CDC refused for 6 months to even identify the pathogen or warn the citizenry, silently permitting it to spread worldwide. This appears to have been the same pathogen that hit Russia in 2016 from the US military's Lugar bioweapons lab in Georgia.Trump recently claimed he could kill the entire population of Afghanistan within days.
"Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone and this is not using nuclear. It would be over in - literally, in 10 days."
Biological weapons would seem the only alternative. Hemorrhagic Fever and Hantavirus worked for the US in North Korea; perhaps also Afghanistan. Mr. Trump later denied intention to carry out his threat, but let's dispense with the fiction of the US having no biological weapons, of Fort Detrick and the 400 foreign bio-labs performing only benevolent "peace medicine" functions.
* * * Proceed to Part 2
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
Notes:
(1) William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II [Common Courage Press, 1995]).
COVID-19 - Two Major ‘Waves’ of Global Infection, Towards Global Contamination?
The US Government Declares War on America
Biological, Chemical, and Radiation "Experiments" on Americans
By Larry Romanoff
This article is Part 1 of 2. It provides the background and some necessary context as an introduction for what follows, an environment of secret US military activity conclusively supported by thousands of pages of documented evidence.
For the past 70 or so years, the US government waged a war against its own citizens, a reprehensible history of illegal, unethical and immoral experiments exposing countless millions of US civilians to deadly procedures and pathogens. According to a US Congressional investigation, by the late 1970s "at least 500,000 people were used as subjects in radiation, biological and chemical experiments sponsored by the US Federal Government on its own citizens". The truth is in the tens of millions.
The United States Government Accountability Office issued a report on September 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, the United States Department of Defense and other national security agencies studied hundreds of thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances.
A quotation from the study:
A quotation from the study:
Many experiments that tested various biological agents on human subjects, referred to as Operation Whitecoat, were carried out at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in the 1950s. The human subjects originally consisted of volunteer enlisted men. However, after the enlisted men staged a sit-down strike to obtain more information about the dangers of the biological tests. No follow-ups of note were done, nor were records kept, of the participants. The US military later claimed it had contact information for only about 1,000 of the original participants. [The] United States biological defense program contains scores of divisions, departments, research groups, bio-intelligence and more, by no means all related to "defense" in any sense.
From the document: American nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three decades of radiation experiments on U.S. citizens: Report prepared by the Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power, of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives, November, 1986: U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1986, 65-0190
"The human subjects were captive audiences or populations that experimenters might frighteningly have considered "expendable": the elderly, prisoners, hospital patients suffering from terminal diseases or who might not have retained their full faculties for informed consent. ... no evidence that informed consent was granted. ... the government covered up the nature of the experiments and deceived the families of deceased victims as to what had transpired. ... subjects received doses that approached or even exceed presently recognized limits for occupational radiation exposure. Doses were as great as 93 times the (maximum) body burden recognized". The paper then proceeds: "Some of the more repugnant or bizarre of these experiments are summarized below."
Few Americans seem aware of their own government's programs of human experimentation, an unconscionable litany of atrocities performed by the CIA and military on an innocent and uninformed population, always without consent and most often with tragic results. These included extensive programs of mind-control experiments, interrogation/torture experiments, deliberate infection with deadly or debilitating diseases, exposure to severe radioactivity and every manner of biological, bacteriological and toxic chemical pathogens. They encompassed brainwashing, torture, electroshock, nerve agents, drugs and exotic hypnosis and surgical experiments including lobotomies, and a wide range of pharmacological "research", all conducted on innocent, uninformed and helpless civilian victims ranging from newborn babies to adults.
The substances used - the "tools of their trade" - included LSD, heroin, morphine, Benzedrine, marijuana, cocaine, PCP, mescaline, Metrazol, ether, nerve gases VX and Sarin, toxic chemicals such as zinc cadmium sulfide and sulfur dioxide, a variety of biological agents, sulfuric acid, scopolamine, mustard gas, radioactive isotopes, and various dioxins from Dow Chemical. They also included electroshock, synthetic estrogens, live cancer cells, animal sexual organs transplanted into humans, cow blood transfusions and much more. Deliberately-transmitted diseases included syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, cancer, bubonic plague, beriberi, cholera, whooping cough, yellow fever, dengue fever, encephalitis and typhoid, Lyme Disease, hemorrhagic fever and much more.
Experiments were performed on children, orphans, the sick and mentally disabled, the poor, the black, and prisoners who were given no choice in participation. Hospital patients were often told they were receiving medical treatment, but instead were used as subjects in deadly experiments. We will never know the total number who died. If you don't mind nightmares, do some research on the CIA's MK-ULTRA program. Many of these experiments continued until the late 1990s and beyond, and many people claim - and provide evidence - that they still continue today.
These human research programs were funded by the US government and performed mostly through the CIA and the military, but with full cooperation from most major universities and hospitals. They were highly secretive, their existence undiscovered until after many years of operation. Faced with court orders to release the records, the CIA and military instead destroyed most of the documents, a few records surviving only by filing and communication errors, the available evidence covering only a minuscule portion of the violations and atrocities committed.
"From 1960 until 1971, Dr. Eugene Saenger, a radiologist at the University of Cincinnati, exposed poor and mostly black patients to whole body radiation. They were not asked to sign consent forms, nor were they told the Pentagon funded the study. Patients were exposed, in the period of one hour, to the equivalent of about 20,000 x-rays worth of radiation." Most of the patients died, but Dr. Saenger recently received a gold medal for "career achievements" from the Radiological Society of North America.
From the 1950s onward, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of infected patients. Saul Krugman of New York University promised the parents of mentally disabled children that their children would be enrolled into Willowbrook in exchange for signing a consent form for procedures that he claimed were "vaccinations." In reality, the procedures involved deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis.
Lauretta Bender: The Psychiatrist From Hell. Lauretta Bender was a neuropsychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in the 1940s and early 1950s who pioneered electroshock therapy on small children who inevitably regressed into violent and catatonic states, most ending dead or in prison. Bender later expanded her treatments to include LSD and, in spite of her inhuman brutality, the NYT published a glowing obituary when she died - as it did for the many dozens of such persons.
Beginning around 1950, the US Army conducted at least 240 open-air bio-warfare attacks on American cities, releasing deadly nerve agents and bacteria from Alaska to Hawaii. The CIA released whooping cough bacteria from the sea near Tampa Bay, Florida, causing an epidemic that left tens of thousands of people extremely ill and killing many others. The US Navy simulated biological warfare attacks by spraying large quantities of a bacteria over San Francisco, in which many citizens died and countless contracted severe pneumonia-like illnesses. When the information was leaked, military sources insisted the bacteria were harmless, but countless thousands incurred serious urinary tract and respiratory infections, pneumonia and other illnesses, infections which were permanent: "To this day, these bacteria are a leading cause of death among the elderly in the San Francisco area".
The US military conducted around 1,000 above-ground nuclear tests to determine the effects of radiation on a population. The Public Health Service was instructed to tell citizens downwind from nuclear bomb tests that the increases in cancers were due to neurosis, and Eisenhower ordered that women with radiation sickness, spontaneous abortions, hair loss, leukemia and brain cancer be told they were suffering from "housewife syndrome".
A secret AEC document dated April 17, 1947, titled Medical Experiments in Humans stated: "It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such fieldwork should be classified Secret."
An indication of the callous and obscene nature which has always pervaded the US government:
Kodak began receiving customer complaints about fogged film, the cause traced to packaging material - Indiana corn husks contaminated with radioactivity. The US government secretly agreed to provide Kodak with advance information on all future nuclear tests, including "expected distribution of radioactive material in order to anticipate local contamination". The victims now tell us, ". . . the Government warned the photographic industry and provided maps and forecasts of potential contamination. Where were the warnings to parents of children in these areas? The Government protected rolls of film, but not the lives of our kids. Why did they do that when they had all the information about hot spots and fallout, and yet they did not warn the people of this country about the dangers inherent in radioactive fallout?" Their government didn't tell them because they were the guinea pigs in the tests.
You can read about some of the more prominent cases here, here, here, and here. Also Robert McNamara's infamous Project 100,000, Operation DEW, Operation LAC, Project SHAD, Project 112, Lyme Disease, Nerve gas and Dead Sheep at Dugway.
And it wasn't only War on America
The accumulated evidence of the American use of biological weapons in China and North Korea is beyond dispute, but the US government has lied about it for 70 years.
It is also documented beyond dispute that the US conducted a decades-long campaign of biological warfare against little Cuba, including the distribution of hemorrhagic fever, and the swine flu that caused Cuba to kill all 500,000 pigs in the country. The Americans not only lied about this for 70 years but accused Cuba of being "a pariah state" with a biological warfare program. (1)And not only Cuba. The US has deployed Chemical and Biological weapons on Canada, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Columbia, Brazil, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and more.
The US has some 400 military bio-weapons labs scattered in (mostly poor and backward) countries around the world, including new ones in Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, several nations now demanding these labs be dismantled and removed to the US where they belong.
The media have been conspicuously silent on the US record of biological pathogen leaks, but the CDC verifies that between 2005 and 2012 the US had 1,059 instances of theft or leaks of dangerous pathogens which broke containment. One every three days for seven years. This needs addressing because there is considerable evidence the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in the US in 2009 was caused by one of these leaks, which was almost certainly why the CDC refused for 6 months to even identify the pathogen or warn the citizenry, silently permitting it to spread worldwide. This appears to have been the same pathogen that hit Russia in 2016 from the US military's Lugar bioweapons lab in Georgia.Trump recently claimed he could kill the entire population of Afghanistan within days.
The substances used - the "tools of their trade" - included LSD, heroin, morphine, Benzedrine, marijuana, cocaine, PCP, mescaline, Metrazol, ether, nerve gases VX and Sarin, toxic chemicals such as zinc cadmium sulfide and sulfur dioxide, a variety of biological agents, sulfuric acid, scopolamine, mustard gas, radioactive isotopes, and various dioxins from Dow Chemical. They also included electroshock, synthetic estrogens, live cancer cells, animal sexual organs transplanted into humans, cow blood transfusions and much more. Deliberately-transmitted diseases included syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, cancer, bubonic plague, beriberi, cholera, whooping cough, yellow fever, dengue fever, encephalitis and typhoid, Lyme Disease, hemorrhagic fever and much more.
Experiments were performed on children, orphans, the sick and mentally disabled, the poor, the black, and prisoners who were given no choice in participation. Hospital patients were often told they were receiving medical treatment, but instead were used as subjects in deadly experiments. We will never know the total number who died. If you don't mind nightmares, do some research on the CIA's MK-ULTRA program. Many of these experiments continued until the late 1990s and beyond, and many people claim - and provide evidence - that they still continue today.
These human research programs were funded by the US government and performed mostly through the CIA and the military, but with full cooperation from most major universities and hospitals. They were highly secretive, their existence undiscovered until after many years of operation. Faced with court orders to release the records, the CIA and military instead destroyed most of the documents, a few records surviving only by filing and communication errors, the available evidence covering only a minuscule portion of the violations and atrocities committed.
"From 1960 until 1971, Dr. Eugene Saenger, a radiologist at the University of Cincinnati, exposed poor and mostly black patients to whole body radiation. They were not asked to sign consent forms, nor were they told the Pentagon funded the study. Patients were exposed, in the period of one hour, to the equivalent of about 20,000 x-rays worth of radiation." Most of the patients died, but Dr. Saenger recently received a gold medal for "career achievements" from the Radiological Society of North America.
From the 1950s onward, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of infected patients. Saul Krugman of New York University promised the parents of mentally disabled children that their children would be enrolled into Willowbrook in exchange for signing a consent form for procedures that he claimed were "vaccinations." In reality, the procedures involved deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis.
Lauretta Bender: The Psychiatrist From Hell. Lauretta Bender was a neuropsychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in the 1940s and early 1950s who pioneered electroshock therapy on small children who inevitably regressed into violent and catatonic states, most ending dead or in prison. Bender later expanded her treatments to include LSD and, in spite of her inhuman brutality, the NYT published a glowing obituary when she died - as it did for the many dozens of such persons.
Beginning around 1950, the US Army conducted at least 240 open-air bio-warfare attacks on American cities, releasing deadly nerve agents and bacteria from Alaska to Hawaii. The CIA released whooping cough bacteria from the sea near Tampa Bay, Florida, causing an epidemic that left tens of thousands of people extremely ill and killing many others. The US Navy simulated biological warfare attacks by spraying large quantities of a bacteria over San Francisco, in which many citizens died and countless contracted severe pneumonia-like illnesses. When the information was leaked, military sources insisted the bacteria were harmless, but countless thousands incurred serious urinary tract and respiratory infections, pneumonia and other illnesses, infections which were permanent: "To this day, these bacteria are a leading cause of death among the elderly in the San Francisco area".
The US military conducted around 1,000 above-ground nuclear tests to determine the effects of radiation on a population. The Public Health Service was instructed to tell citizens downwind from nuclear bomb tests that the increases in cancers were due to neurosis, and Eisenhower ordered that women with radiation sickness, spontaneous abortions, hair loss, leukemia and brain cancer be told they were suffering from "housewife syndrome".
A secret AEC document dated April 17, 1947, titled Medical Experiments in Humans stated: "It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such fieldwork should be classified Secret."
An indication of the callous and obscene nature which has always pervaded the US government:
Kodak began receiving customer complaints about fogged film, the cause traced to packaging material - Indiana corn husks contaminated with radioactivity. The US government secretly agreed to provide Kodak with advance information on all future nuclear tests, including "expected distribution of radioactive material in order to anticipate local contamination". The victims now tell us, ". . . the Government warned the photographic industry and provided maps and forecasts of potential contamination. Where were the warnings to parents of children in these areas? The Government protected rolls of film, but not the lives of our kids. Why did they do that when they had all the information about hot spots and fallout, and yet they did not warn the people of this country about the dangers inherent in radioactive fallout?" Their government didn't tell them because they were the guinea pigs in the tests.
You can read about some of the more prominent cases here, here, here, and here. Also Robert McNamara's infamous Project 100,000, Operation DEW, Operation LAC, Project SHAD, Project 112, Lyme Disease, Nerve gas and Dead Sheep at Dugway.
And it wasn't only War on America
The accumulated evidence of the American use of biological weapons in China and North Korea is beyond dispute, but the US government has lied about it for 70 years.
It is also documented beyond dispute that the US conducted a decades-long campaign of biological warfare against little Cuba, including the distribution of hemorrhagic fever, and the swine flu that caused Cuba to kill all 500,000 pigs in the country. The Americans not only lied about this for 70 years but accused Cuba of being "a pariah state" with a biological warfare program. (1)And not only Cuba. The US has deployed Chemical and Biological weapons on Canada, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Columbia, Brazil, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and more.
The US has some 400 military bio-weapons labs scattered in (mostly poor and backward) countries around the world, including new ones in Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, several nations now demanding these labs be dismantled and removed to the US where they belong.
The media have been conspicuously silent on the US record of biological pathogen leaks, but the CDC verifies that between 2005 and 2012 the US had 1,059 instances of theft or leaks of dangerous pathogens which broke containment. One every three days for seven years. This needs addressing because there is considerable evidence the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in the US in 2009 was caused by one of these leaks, which was almost certainly why the CDC refused for 6 months to even identify the pathogen or warn the citizenry, silently permitting it to spread worldwide. This appears to have been the same pathogen that hit Russia in 2016 from the US military's Lugar bioweapons lab in Georgia.Trump recently claimed he could kill the entire population of Afghanistan within days.
"Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone and this is not using nuclear. It would be over in - literally, in 10 days."
Biological weapons would seem the only alternative. Hemorrhagic Fever and Hantavirus worked for the US in North Korea; perhaps also Afghanistan. Mr. Trump later denied intention to carry out his threat, but let's dispense with the fiction of the US having no biological weapons, of Fort Detrick and the 400 foreign bio-labs performing only benevolent "peace medicine" functions.
* * * Proceed to Part 2
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
Notes:
(1) William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II [Common Courage Press, 1995]).
COVID-19 - Two Major ‘Waves’ of Global Infection, Towards Global Contamination?
* * * Proceed to Part 2
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
Notes:
(1) William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II [Common Courage Press, 1995]).
COVID-19 - Two Major ‘Waves’ of Global Infection, Towards Global Contamination?
Global Research, March 26, 2020
The US State Department and media are heavily promoting as theology that COVID-19 is “a Chinese virus and China spread it around the world”, demanding apologies and more. One American law firm in Florida filed a class action lawsuit against the Chinese government, seeking compensation for ‘damages’. (1) I have reviewed and analysed the details available of all first and subsequent confirmed infections in all countries, including infection source, virus strain, and timeline, which data provide ample evidence that this American theology is not supported by the facts. There appears to have been two major ‘waves’ of global infection, the first around the end of January, the second a month later. (2) (3) (4)
Source: Geology.com
This article appeared first at https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-two-major-waves-of-global-infection-towards-global-contamination/5707588
COVID-19: Targeting Italy and South Korea? “The Chain of Transmission of Infection”
Global Research, March 21, 2020
A high-level Italian virologist, Giuseppe Remuzzi, has published papers in the Lancet and other articles in which he states facts not hitherto known. (1)
The doctor stated that Italian physicians now recall having seen:
Then suddenly there appeared new infections that were unrelated to China. On February 19, the Lombardy Health Region issued a statement that a 38-year-old Italian man was diagnosed with the new coronavirus, becoming the fourth confirmed case in Italy. The man had never traveled to China and had no contact with the confirmed Chinese patients.
Immediately after this patient was diagnosed, Italy experienced a major outbreak. In one day, the number of confirmed cases increased to 20 and, after little more than three weeks, Italy had 17,660 confirmed cases.
The Italians were not idle in searching for their patient zero. They renamed the “patient 4” “Italian No. 1”, and attempted to learn how he became infected. The search was apparently fruitless, the article stating that “America’s pandemic of the century has become the subject of suspicion by Italians“.(4)
The mystery of South Korea’s “Patient No. 31”
South Korea’s experience was eerily similar to that of Italy, and also to that of China. The country had experienced 30 imported cases which began on January 20, I believe all of which were traceable to contact with Hubei and/or Wuhan.
But then South Korea discovered a “Patient No. 31”, a 61 year-old South Korean woman diagnosed with the new coronavirus on February 18. This ‘local’ patient had no ties to China, had had no contact with any Chinese, and no contact whatever with any of the infected South Koreans. Her infection was a South Korean source.
Just as with Italy, the outbreak in South Korea exploded rapidly after the discovery of Patient 31. By the next day, February 19 (Italy was February 21, for comparison), there were 58 confirmed cases in South Korea, reaching 1,000 in less than a week. After little more than three weeks, South Korea had 8,086 confirmed cases. It would now seem likely (yet to corroborated) that South Korea and Italy could have been ‘seeded’ at approximately the same time.
Like the Italians, South Korea performed a massive hunt for the source of the infection of their “Korean No. 1”, combing the country for evidence, but without success. They discovered the confirmed cases in South Korea were mainly concentrated in two separate clusters in Daegu and Gyeongsang North Road, most of which – but not all – could be related to “Patient 31”. As with Italy, multiple clusters and multiple simultaneous infections spreading like wildfire – and without the assistance of a seafood market selling bats and pangolins.
For both Italy and South Korea, I could also add that there is no supposed “bio-weapons lab” anywhere within reach (as was claimed for China), but that wouldn’t be accurate. There are indeed bio-weapons labs easily within reach of the stricken areas in both Italy and South Korea – but they belong to the US Military.
Korea is particularly notable in this regard because it was proven likely that MERS resulted from a leak at the American military base at Osan. The official Western narrative for the MERS outbreak in South Korea was that a Korean businessman became infected in the Middle East then returned to his home in Gyeonggi Province and spread the infection. But there was never any documentation or evidence to support that claim, and to my best knowledge it was never verified by the South Korean Government.
Pertinent to this story is that according to the Korean Yonhap News Service, at the onset of the outbreak about 100 South Korean military personnel were suddenly quarantined at the USAF Osan Air Base. The Osan base is home to the JUPITR ATD military biological program that is closely related to the lab at Fort Detrick, MD, both being US military bio-weapons research labs.
The Korean path is similar with that of Italy. If we look at a map of the virus-stricken areas of Italy, there is a US military base within almost a stone’s throw of all of them. This is of course merely a case of circumstance arousing suspicion, and by no means constitutes proof of anything at all.
However, there is a major point here which cannot be overlooked, namely the fact of simultaneous eruptions of a new virus in three different countries, and in all three cases no clear epidemiology, and an inability to identify either the original source or a patient zero
Multiple experts on biological weapons are in unanimous agreement that eruptions in a human population of a new and unusual pathogen in multiple locations simultaneously, with no clear idea of source and cases with no proven links, is virtually prima facie evidence of a pathogen deliberately released, since natural outbreaks can almost always be resolved to one location and one patient zero. The possibility of a deliberate leak is as strong in Italy and South Korea as in China, all three nations apparently sharing the same suspicions.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West.He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Notes
(A) This is an aside, but Italy has experienced a fatality rate nearly twice that of Wuhan, but there may be an external contributing factor. Observations were made that, in most cases especially among the elderly in Italy, ibuprophen was widely used as a painkiller. The Lancet published an article demonstrating that the use of ibuprophen can markedly facilitate the ability of the virus to infect and therefore to increase the risk of serious and fatal infection. (YY)
(B) “The mean age of those who died in Italy was 81 years and more than two-thirds of these patients had . . . underlying health conditions, but it is also worth noting that they had acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) caused by . . . SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia, needed respiratory support, and “would not have died otherwise.”
Global Research, March 26, 2020
The US State Department and media are heavily promoting as theology that COVID-19 is “a Chinese virus and China spread it around the world”, demanding apologies and more. One American law firm in Florida filed a class action lawsuit against the Chinese government, seeking compensation for ‘damages’. (1) I have reviewed and analysed the details available of all first and subsequent confirmed infections in all countries, including infection source, virus strain, and timeline, which data provide ample evidence that this American theology is not supported by the facts. There appears to have been two major ‘waves’ of global infection, the first around the end of January, the second a month later. (2) (3) (4)
It is true that – in the very early stages, the first wave – 22 countries had their first confirmed infections in travelers from China but, soon after this, in the second wave, 34 countries obtained their first confirmed infection in travelers from Italy, and another 16 from Iran. However, so-called “first infection” in these countries, from Chinese citizens or other travelers, proved in all but perhaps two cases to be irrelevant because these first external infections proved to have no links to the subsequent local outbreaks, and because the virus strain in many of those explosive local eruptions did not exist in China but only in the US.
What this means is that while Italy discovered its first two infections in Chinese tourists, these two were unrelated to the subsequent virus outbreak because the strain infecting Italy is different from that in China and in those two Chinese tourists. Italy, like almost all other countries, did not obtain its infection from China and indeed could not have done. The only country with Italy’s variety of the virus is the US, and thus the infection must have originated in America, not in China. Similarly, the locations near China – South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, even Taiwan Province, share an entirely different common strain. China had only a tiny pocket of that strain, and very far from Wuhan. These were not infected by China, either. I have dealt with this in an earlier article. (5)
Much was made in the American media of the “first American virus infection” being a Chinese traveler from Wuhan, but that was also irrelevant because the massive underlying epidemic waiting to break free (as it soon did) was unrelated to that Chinese citizen, the thousands of infections in Washington, California and New York clearly stemming from unidentified (and unsought) local sources.
Given the high volume of Chinese passenger traffic around the world, it isn’t surprising that some infections would have been discovered in Chinese nationals in other countries and, since the first outbreak occurred in China, it was natural to test travelers from China. Because of that focus, few countries thought to check travelers from the United States. Australia did check, the country’s Prime Minister recently stating that 80% or more of all infections in his country occurred in the US, then traveled home. (6) Similarly, Iceland confirmed that some of their coronavirus infections have been traced to Denver. (7) (8) I have a strong suspicion that if all countries review the travel history of their early infections, they will discover more US traffic in the mix, perhaps predominantly so.
If you can get people focused on asking the wrong question, you don’t care about the answers. The wrong question is whether the original virus came from a bat or a pangolin or a banana, but that’s irrelevant. It wasn’t a bat or a banana that infected the people in Wuhan, but a live person – or a person carrying a live virus in a pail. The right questions to ask relate to the identity of that person and the source of the contents of that pail, and those answers seem to lead us to the USA. Certainly, they are not to be found in China.
Let’s take a quick look at those two waves of infections that circled the globe.
The First Wave simultaneously infected 25 nations or territories within a few days centered around January 25. The infected areas: Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, South Korea, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Cambodia, Nepal, Malaysia, Australia, Thailand, Canada, the US, Germany, Italy, the UK, France, Spain, Belgium, Russia, Finland, and the UAE.
One month later. The Second Wave simultaneously infected 85 nations within a few days centered around February 25. The infected countries: Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal, Luxembourg, Monaco, San Marino, the Vatican, Liechtenstein, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Bhutan, Andorra, Bulgaria, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Latvia, Croatia, Estonia, North Macedonia, Georgia, Romania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Slovakia, Serbia, Moldova, Albania, Egypt, Iraq, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Palestine, Iceland, Ecuador, Armenia, Norway, Denmark, Costa Rica, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Togo, Cameroon, Senegal, Algeria, South Africa, Morocco, and Tunisia. Kosovo, Namibia, Uruguay, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Bolivia, Panama, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mongolia, Burkina Faso, Brunei and Cyprus were simultaneous around one week later.
Source: Geology.com
I make no claim to being a virologist, but this is beginning to look damned peculiar. A natural virus hasn’t the ability to simultaneously infect 85 different countries on all continents of the world, with outbreaks in multiple locations in each country – and to do it without the vehicle of a seafood market full of bats and bananas.
More peculiar is that these countries were by no means all infected with the same variety of the virus, which means the simultaneous infections in these 85 countries were not from the same source. Even more peculiar is that most countries, at least the major ones, reported simultaneous outbreaks in multiple locations, and to date while some nations have been able to identify one or more of their ‘patients zero’, I am aware of no country that was able to definitively identify all their several ‘patients zero’. Considering the above information in light of the known basic facts of virus transmission, intuition suggests at least the possibility of there having been many people carrying a pail of live viruses.
It is interesting to note that high fatality rates are entirely within Italy, Iran, and China. For approximate figures, China’s fatality rate is between 3% and 4%, that of Iran at about 7% and Italy the highest at around 9%. Even more interesting is that if these countries did pass their strain of the virus to other nations, those strains abandoned their lethality when they left home. Of the 34 countries supposedly infected by Italy, for example, all exhibit very low mortality, the same being true of Chinese or Iranian infections. The natural conclusion is that these viruses prefer their ‘home populations’ and pose at best a minor threat to others.
*
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Notes
(1) https://www.prweb.com/releases/the_berman_law_group_files_class_action_complaint_against_the_chinese_government_for_their_alleged_failures_to_contain_the_coronavirus/prweb16981743.htm
(2) https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/features/coronavirus-outbreak-the-countries-affected/
(3) https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/features/coronavirus-countries-with-suspected-cases/
(4) https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/features/
(5) https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-usa-targeting-italy-and-south-korea/5707042
(6) https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-03-22/PM-Morrison-80-percent-Australia-cases-are-imported-mostly-from-U-S–P41uG3CfWU/index.html
(7) https://www.denverpost.com/2020/03/13/iceland-coronavirus-traced-denver/
(8) https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2020/03/13/three_covid_19_cases_in_iceland_traced_to_denver/
This article appeared first at https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-two-major-waves-of-global-infection-towards-global-contamination/5707588
COVID-19: Targeting Italy and South Korea? “The Chain of Transmission of Infection”
Global Research, March 21, 2020
A high-level Italian virologist, Giuseppe Remuzzi, has published papers in the Lancet and other articles in which he states facts not hitherto known. (1)
The doctor stated that Italian physicians now recall having seen:
“a very strange and very severe pneumonia, particularly in old people in December and even November [2019]. This suggests that the virus was circulating, at least in Lombardy, and before we were aware of this outbreak occurring in China.“(2)
Chinese medical authorities have determined the same underlying phenomenon, that the virus had been circulating among the population for perhaps two months before it finally broke out into the open.
Further, according to the Italian National Health Service (ISS):
“It is not possible to reconstruct, for all patients, the chain of transmission of infection. Most cases reported in Italy report an epidemiological link with other cases diagnosed in Lombardy, Emilia Romagna and Veneto, the areas most affected by the epidemic.” [translation from Italian] (3)
The above statement is of crucial importance since it supports in itself the assertion of several simultaneous infection clusters and several ‘patients zero’. There are cases in Lombardy that could not be placed in an infection chain, and this must also be true for other areas. (see below) Given that the virus broke out separately in disparate regions of Italy, we can expect the identification of independent infectious clusters in those regions as well. That would mean Italy was hit by at least several individual ‘seedings’ of the virus.
China’s outbreak of consequence was primarily in the city of Wuhan but with multiple sources in the city and multiple patients zero, with a minor outbreak in Guangdong that was easily contained. China had multiple clusters in Wuhan. There was no single source, and no patient zero has been identified which is similar to those of Italy.
The mystery of Italy’s “Patient No. 4”
Was the Italian outbreak caused by infections from China? Yes, and no.
Before February 20, 2020, there were only three cases of coronavirus infection in Italy, two tourists from Wuhan, China, confirmed on January 30th, and an Italian man who returned to Rome from Wuhan on February 6th. These were clearly imported cases with Italy experiencing no new infections during the next two weeks.
Then suddenly there appeared new infections that were unrelated to China. On February 19, the Lombardy Health Region issued a statement that a 38-year-old Italian man was diagnosed with the new coronavirus, becoming the fourth confirmed case in Italy. The man had never traveled to China and had no contact with the confirmed Chinese patients.
Immediately after this patient was diagnosed, Italy experienced a major outbreak. In one day, the number of confirmed cases increased to 20 and, after little more than three weeks, Italy had 17,660 confirmed cases.
The Italians were not idle in searching for their patient zero. They renamed the “patient 4” “Italian No. 1”, and attempted to learn how he became infected. The search was apparently fruitless, the article stating that “America’s pandemic of the century has become the subject of suspicion by Italians“.(4)
The mystery of South Korea’s “Patient No. 31”
South Korea’s experience was eerily similar to that of Italy, and also to that of China. The country had experienced 30 imported cases which began on January 20, I believe all of which were traceable to contact with Hubei and/or Wuhan.
But then South Korea discovered a “Patient No. 31”, a 61 year-old South Korean woman diagnosed with the new coronavirus on February 18. This ‘local’ patient had no ties to China, had had no contact with any Chinese, and no contact whatever with any of the infected South Koreans. Her infection was a South Korean source.
Just as with Italy, the outbreak in South Korea exploded rapidly after the discovery of Patient 31. By the next day, February 19 (Italy was February 21, for comparison), there were 58 confirmed cases in South Korea, reaching 1,000 in less than a week. After little more than three weeks, South Korea had 8,086 confirmed cases. It would now seem likely (yet to corroborated) that South Korea and Italy could have been ‘seeded’ at approximately the same time.
Like the Italians, South Korea performed a massive hunt for the source of the infection of their “Korean No. 1”, combing the country for evidence, but without success. They discovered the confirmed cases in South Korea were mainly concentrated in two separate clusters in Daegu and Gyeongsang North Road, most of which – but not all – could be related to “Patient 31”. As with Italy, multiple clusters and multiple simultaneous infections spreading like wildfire – and without the assistance of a seafood market selling bats and pangolins.
For both Italy and South Korea, I could also add that there is no supposed “bio-weapons lab” anywhere within reach (as was claimed for China), but that wouldn’t be accurate. There are indeed bio-weapons labs easily within reach of the stricken areas in both Italy and South Korea – but they belong to the US Military.
Korea is particularly notable in this regard because it was proven likely that MERS resulted from a leak at the American military base at Osan. The official Western narrative for the MERS outbreak in South Korea was that a Korean businessman became infected in the Middle East then returned to his home in Gyeonggi Province and spread the infection. But there was never any documentation or evidence to support that claim, and to my best knowledge it was never verified by the South Korean Government.
Pertinent to this story is that according to the Korean Yonhap News Service, at the onset of the outbreak about 100 South Korean military personnel were suddenly quarantined at the USAF Osan Air Base. The Osan base is home to the JUPITR ATD military biological program that is closely related to the lab at Fort Detrick, MD, both being US military bio-weapons research labs.
There is also a (very secretive) WHO-sponsored International Vaccine Institute nearby, which is (or at least was) managed by US military biological weapons personnel. At the time, and given the quarantine mentioned above, the event sequence accepted as most likely was that of a leak from a JUPITR biowarfare project. (5) (6)
The Korean path is similar with that of Italy. If we look at a map of the virus-stricken areas of Italy, there is a US military base within almost a stone’s throw of all of them. This is of course merely a case of circumstance arousing suspicion, and by no means constitutes proof of anything at all.
However, there is a major point here which cannot be overlooked, namely the fact of simultaneous eruptions of a new virus in three different countries, and in all three cases no clear epidemiology, and an inability to identify either the original source or a patient zero
Multiple experts on biological weapons are in unanimous agreement that eruptions in a human population of a new and unusual pathogen in multiple locations simultaneously, with no clear idea of source and cases with no proven links, is virtually prima facie evidence of a pathogen deliberately released, since natural outbreaks can almost always be resolved to one location and one patient zero. The possibility of a deliberate leak is as strong in Italy and South Korea as in China, all three nations apparently sharing the same suspicions.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West.He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Notes
(A) This is an aside, but Italy has experienced a fatality rate nearly twice that of Wuhan, but there may be an external contributing factor. Observations were made that, in most cases especially among the elderly in Italy, ibuprophen was widely used as a painkiller. The Lancet published an article demonstrating that the use of ibuprophen can markedly facilitate the ability of the virus to infect and therefore to increase the risk of serious and fatal infection. (YY)
(B) “The mean age of those who died in Italy was 81 years and more than two-thirds of these patients had . . . underlying health conditions, but it is also worth noting that they had acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) caused by . . . SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia, needed respiratory support, and “would not have died otherwise.”
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020
This article appeared first at
Global Research, March 21, 2020
The doctor stated that Italian physicians now recall having seen:
Then suddenly there appeared new infections that were unrelated to China. On February 19, the Lombardy Health Region issued a statement that a 38-year-old Italian man was diagnosed with the new coronavirus, becoming the fourth confirmed case in Italy. The man had never traveled to China and had no contact with the confirmed Chinese patients.
Immediately after this patient was diagnosed, Italy experienced a major outbreak. In one day, the number of confirmed cases increased to 20 and, after little more than three weeks, Italy had 17,660 confirmed cases.
The Italians were not idle in searching for their patient zero. They renamed the “patient 4” “Italian No. 1”, and attempted to learn how he became infected. The search was apparently fruitless, the article stating that “America’s pandemic of the century has become the subject of suspicion by Italians“.(4)
The mystery of South Korea’s “Patient No. 31”
South Korea’s experience was eerily similar to that of Italy, and also to that of China. The country had experienced 30 imported cases which began on January 20, I believe all of which were traceable to contact with Hubei and/or Wuhan.
But then South Korea discovered a “Patient No. 31”, a 61 year-old South Korean woman diagnosed with the new coronavirus on February 18. This ‘local’ patient had no ties to China, had had no contact with any Chinese, and no contact whatever with any of the infected South Koreans. Her infection was a South Korean source.
Just as with Italy, the outbreak in South Korea exploded rapidly after the discovery of Patient 31. By the next day, February 19 (Italy was February 21, for comparison), there were 58 confirmed cases in South Korea, reaching 1,000 in less than a week. After little more than three weeks, South Korea had 8,086 confirmed cases. It would now seem likely (yet to corroborated) that South Korea and Italy could have been ‘seeded’ at approximately the same time.
Like the Italians, South Korea performed a massive hunt for the source of the infection of their “Korean No. 1”, combing the country for evidence, but without success. They discovered the confirmed cases in South Korea were mainly concentrated in two separate clusters in Daegu and Gyeongsang North Road, most of which – but not all – could be related to “Patient 31”. As with Italy, multiple clusters and multiple simultaneous infections spreading like wildfire – and without the assistance of a seafood market selling bats and pangolins.
For both Italy and South Korea, I could also add that there is no supposed “bio-weapons lab” anywhere within reach (as was claimed for China), but that wouldn’t be accurate. There are indeed bio-weapons labs easily within reach of the stricken areas in both Italy and South Korea – but they belong to the US Military.
Korea is particularly notable in this regard because it was proven likely that MERS resulted from a leak at the American military base at Osan. The official Western narrative for the MERS outbreak in South Korea was that a Korean businessman became infected in the Middle East then returned to his home in Gyeonggi Province and spread the infection. But there was never any documentation or evidence to support that claim, and to my best knowledge it was never verified by the South Korean Government.
Pertinent to this story is that according to the Korean Yonhap News Service, at the onset of the outbreak about 100 South Korean military personnel were suddenly quarantined at the USAF Osan Air Base. The Osan base is home to the JUPITR ATD military biological program that is closely related to the lab at Fort Detrick, MD, both being US military bio-weapons research labs.
The Korean path is similar with that of Italy. If we look at a map of the virus-stricken areas of Italy, there is a US military base within almost a stone’s throw of all of them. This is of course merely a case of circumstance arousing suspicion, and by no means constitutes proof of anything at all.
However, there is a major point here which cannot be overlooked, namely the fact of simultaneous eruptions of a new virus in three different countries, and in all three cases no clear epidemiology, and an inability to identify either the original source or a patient zero
Multiple experts on biological weapons are in unanimous agreement that eruptions in a human population of a new and unusual pathogen in multiple locations simultaneously, with no clear idea of source and cases with no proven links, is virtually prima facie evidence of a pathogen deliberately released, since natural outbreaks can almost always be resolved to one location and one patient zero. The possibility of a deliberate leak is as strong in Italy and South Korea as in China, all three nations apparently sharing the same suspicions.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West.He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Notes
(A) This is an aside, but Italy has experienced a fatality rate nearly twice that of Wuhan, but there may be an external contributing factor. Observations were made that, in most cases especially among the elderly in Italy, ibuprophen was widely used as a painkiller. The Lancet published an article demonstrating that the use of ibuprophen can markedly facilitate the ability of the virus to infect and therefore to increase the risk of serious and fatal infection. (YY)
(B) “The mean age of those who died in Italy was 81 years and more than two-thirds of these patients had . . . underlying health conditions, but it is also worth noting that they had acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) caused by . . . SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia, needed respiratory support, and “would not have died otherwise.”
Global Research, March 21, 2020
A high-level Italian virologist, Giuseppe Remuzzi, has published papers in the Lancet and other articles in which he states facts not hitherto known. (1)
The doctor stated that Italian physicians now recall having seen:
“a very strange and very severe pneumonia, particularly in old people in December and even November [2019]. This suggests that the virus was circulating, at least in Lombardy, and before we were aware of this outbreak occurring in China.“(2)
Chinese medical authorities have determined the same underlying phenomenon, that the virus had been circulating among the population for perhaps two months before it finally broke out into the open.
Further, according to the Italian National Health Service (ISS):
“It is not possible to reconstruct, for all patients, the chain of transmission of infection. Most cases reported in Italy report an epidemiological link with other cases diagnosed in Lombardy, Emilia Romagna and Veneto, the areas most affected by the epidemic.” [translation from Italian] (3)
The above statement is of crucial importance since it supports in itself the assertion of several simultaneous infection clusters and several ‘patients zero’. There are cases in Lombardy that could not be placed in an infection chain, and this must also be true for other areas. (see below) Given that the virus broke out separately in disparate regions of Italy, we can expect the identification of independent infectious clusters in those regions as well. That would mean Italy was hit by at least several individual ‘seedings’ of the virus.
China’s outbreak of consequence was primarily in the city of Wuhan but with multiple sources in the city and multiple patients zero, with a minor outbreak in Guangdong that was easily contained. China had multiple clusters in Wuhan. There was no single source, and no patient zero has been identified which is similar to those of Italy.
The mystery of Italy’s “Patient No. 4”
Was the Italian outbreak caused by infections from China? Yes, and no.
Before February 20, 2020, there were only three cases of coronavirus infection in Italy, two tourists from Wuhan, China, confirmed on January 30th, and an Italian man who returned to Rome from Wuhan on February 6th. These were clearly imported cases with Italy experiencing no new infections during the next two weeks.
Then suddenly there appeared new infections that were unrelated to China. On February 19, the Lombardy Health Region issued a statement that a 38-year-old Italian man was diagnosed with the new coronavirus, becoming the fourth confirmed case in Italy. The man had never traveled to China and had no contact with the confirmed Chinese patients.
Immediately after this patient was diagnosed, Italy experienced a major outbreak. In one day, the number of confirmed cases increased to 20 and, after little more than three weeks, Italy had 17,660 confirmed cases.
The Italians were not idle in searching for their patient zero. They renamed the “patient 4” “Italian No. 1”, and attempted to learn how he became infected. The search was apparently fruitless, the article stating that “America’s pandemic of the century has become the subject of suspicion by Italians“.(4)
The mystery of South Korea’s “Patient No. 31”
South Korea’s experience was eerily similar to that of Italy, and also to that of China. The country had experienced 30 imported cases which began on January 20, I believe all of which were traceable to contact with Hubei and/or Wuhan.
But then South Korea discovered a “Patient No. 31”, a 61 year-old South Korean woman diagnosed with the new coronavirus on February 18. This ‘local’ patient had no ties to China, had had no contact with any Chinese, and no contact whatever with any of the infected South Koreans. Her infection was a South Korean source.
Just as with Italy, the outbreak in South Korea exploded rapidly after the discovery of Patient 31. By the next day, February 19 (Italy was February 21, for comparison), there were 58 confirmed cases in South Korea, reaching 1,000 in less than a week. After little more than three weeks, South Korea had 8,086 confirmed cases. It would now seem likely (yet to corroborated) that South Korea and Italy could have been ‘seeded’ at approximately the same time.
Like the Italians, South Korea performed a massive hunt for the source of the infection of their “Korean No. 1”, combing the country for evidence, but without success. They discovered the confirmed cases in South Korea were mainly concentrated in two separate clusters in Daegu and Gyeongsang North Road, most of which – but not all – could be related to “Patient 31”. As with Italy, multiple clusters and multiple simultaneous infections spreading like wildfire – and without the assistance of a seafood market selling bats and pangolins.
For both Italy and South Korea, I could also add that there is no supposed “bio-weapons lab” anywhere within reach (as was claimed for China), but that wouldn’t be accurate. There are indeed bio-weapons labs easily within reach of the stricken areas in both Italy and South Korea – but they belong to the US Military.
Korea is particularly notable in this regard because it was proven likely that MERS resulted from a leak at the American military base at Osan. The official Western narrative for the MERS outbreak in South Korea was that a Korean businessman became infected in the Middle East then returned to his home in Gyeonggi Province and spread the infection. But there was never any documentation or evidence to support that claim, and to my best knowledge it was never verified by the South Korean Government.
Pertinent to this story is that according to the Korean Yonhap News Service, at the onset of the outbreak about 100 South Korean military personnel were suddenly quarantined at the USAF Osan Air Base. The Osan base is home to the JUPITR ATD military biological program that is closely related to the lab at Fort Detrick, MD, both being US military bio-weapons research labs.
There is also a (very secretive) WHO-sponsored International Vaccine Institute nearby, which is (or at least was) managed by US military biological weapons personnel. At the time, and given the quarantine mentioned above, the event sequence accepted as most likely was that of a leak from a JUPITR biowarfare project. (5) (6)
The Korean path is similar with that of Italy. If we look at a map of the virus-stricken areas of Italy, there is a US military base within almost a stone’s throw of all of them. This is of course merely a case of circumstance arousing suspicion, and by no means constitutes proof of anything at all.
However, there is a major point here which cannot be overlooked, namely the fact of simultaneous eruptions of a new virus in three different countries, and in all three cases no clear epidemiology, and an inability to identify either the original source or a patient zero
Multiple experts on biological weapons are in unanimous agreement that eruptions in a human population of a new and unusual pathogen in multiple locations simultaneously, with no clear idea of source and cases with no proven links, is virtually prima facie evidence of a pathogen deliberately released, since natural outbreaks can almost always be resolved to one location and one patient zero. The possibility of a deliberate leak is as strong in Italy and South Korea as in China, all three nations apparently sharing the same suspicions.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West.He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Notes
(A) This is an aside, but Italy has experienced a fatality rate nearly twice that of Wuhan, but there may be an external contributing factor. Observations were made that, in most cases especially among the elderly in Italy, ibuprophen was widely used as a painkiller. The Lancet published an article demonstrating that the use of ibuprophen can markedly facilitate the ability of the virus to infect and therefore to increase the risk of serious and fatal infection. (YY)
(B) “The mean age of those who died in Italy was 81 years and more than two-thirds of these patients had . . . underlying health conditions, but it is also worth noting that they had acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) caused by . . . SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia, needed respiratory support, and “would not have died otherwise.”
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020
This article appeared first at
Global Research, March 19, 2020
First, it is ignored.
This article appeared first at https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-all-truth-three-stages/5706329
This article appeared first at https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-all-truth-three-stages/5706329
US Action in Addressing COVID-19. “Attributing Virus Deaths to the Flu”
Global Research, March 16, 2020
The US is following the same pattern with COVID-19 as with prior virus outbreaks. Downplay and understate initially, cover up the truth, flood the media with misinformation, then slowly release the true facts as necessary to maintain the narrative.
”Health authorities have warned that the outbreak is already well-entrenched in the US: The state of Ohio likely has more than 100,000 people carrying the virus, its health department says.” (1) [This Ohio assessment is in sharp contrast to official CDC figures].
If Ohio has 100,000 infections, New York and California have ten times that number.
The latest media reports point to approximately 3000 cases (March 15). The total number of cases for March 13 recorded by the CDC is 1629. The latest CDC breakdown (March 13) indicates the following
It is now apparent the CDC is not producing its own tests, but waiting for private enterprise to learn how to do it, in the meantime burying the statistics by attributing virus deaths to the flu.
Also, the CDC is still ”strongly” recommending that hospitals test first for the flu and all other possible conditions, applying virus tests only to those from ”heavily-infected” regions, and only If they appear very ill. ”We are testing only the sickest people”. This policy is insane by any standard.
Robert Redfield, the head of the CDC has as much as admitted all this. It now appears more certain that the brief epidemic of vaping deaths was not due to e-cigarettes as claimed, but was the first outbreak, shortly after Fort Detrick was shut down. This was the testimony of the virologist from Taiwan.
Then, having two years ago eviscerated the health care system, forcing all communication to be made through the White House, and declaring all such information as classified.
This is a cover-up on a large scale, supported by secrecy and a massive misinformation campaign directed against the American public.
The media still attempt to ignore the rising groundswell of opinion and fact that the virus originated in the US, although the UK Guardian broke new ground in an article claiming China was ”pushing propaganda” that the virus began in the US, adding that the theory that this is ”an ‘American virus”’ ‘was ”gaining traction” in China. (2)
Nevertheless, the Washington Post, Reuters, and several others have been attempting contact since a spokesman from the Chinese Foreign Ministry posted links to one of my prior articles on Twitter and asked everyone to forward it as much as possible because it was of ”the greatest interest” to all the Chinese people.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Notes
Featured image is from Getty Images
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020
This article appeared first at https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-further-evidence-virus-originated-us/5706078
Global Research, March 13, 2020
The US has been lying all along.
Robert Redfield, CDC director, testifying to Congress, today admitted that virus deaths have been miscategorised as the flu.
He also stated that the standard practice has been to first test people for the flu and, if the test is positive, they stop there. They don’t test for the coronavirus.
So Japan and Taiwan were correct. Many of the US deaths attributed to the flu were actually from the coronavirus.
One Senator asked Redfield if post-mortems were performed to learn the cause of death, and he stated that such were done, and they revealed mis-diagnoses.
CDC director Robert Redfield admitted some Americans who seemingly died from influenza were tested positive for novel #coronavirus in the posthumous diagnosis, during the House Oversight Committee Wednesday. #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/kk7q0bKE6p
— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) March 12, 2020
CDC director Robert Redfield admitted some Americans who seemingly died from influenza were tested positive for novel #coronavirus in the posthumous diagnosis, during the House Oversight Committee Wednesday. #COVID19
https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1237974799999062016?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The infections and deaths have been knowingly mis-categorised for months, and the CDC ‘strongly’ recommended that hospitals not test for the virus except as a last resort. It is not an accident that the US has no reliable tests. They don’t want to test. Blame everything on the flu.
And now all meetings and discussions on the virus are classified, and all public information must be first cleared through the White House
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Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The original source of this article is Global Research
COVID-19 Marketing in the USA: Misinformation, Incompetence and Buffoonery
The content of this article will make little sense to you. The purpose in your reading it is to appreciate how little sense it makes.
The WHO described worldwide virus cases passing the 100,000-mark as a “somber moment”.
The AFP screamed “Quarter of Italians on lockdown as virus sweeps globe.” (1)
South Korea urges cooperation as epidemic rages across region. (2)
“France inexorably heading toward a coronavirus epidemic” (after 3 deaths). (3)
“Don’t travel on cruise ships due to coronavirus risk, State Department urges”. (4)
Nearly 300 million students worldwide face home quarantine, UNESCO claiming “the global scale and speed of the current educational disruption is unparalleled and, if prolonged, could threaten the right to education.” (5)
A new “Pandemic Projection Model” has predicted 2.16 Million Deaths in the US, stating that “emergency measures must take place to avoid catastrophe”. (6)
A study by The Australian National University in the “best case scenario”, coronavirus will claim 15 million lives and shave $2.4 trillion off the global GDP. Under the worst case scenario, it would kill more than 68 million people and slash $9 trillion from the global GDP. (7)
The World Health Organization raised its global risk assessment from “high” to “very high”, stating, “This virus may be on its way and you need to be ready. You have a duty to your citizens, you have a duty to the world to be ready. Wake up. Get ready.”
The World Bank announced a financial package of up to US$12 billion to assist countries with the health and economic impact, this coming one day after the IMF and the World Bank stood ready to help member countries address “the human tragedy and economic challenge posed by COVID-19”. (8)
US National Health Care Departments: Purification by Purging
“About 2 years ago when he was still in the White House as national security advisor, John Bolton abruptly disbanded the government officials responsible for dealing with pandemics, global health security and bioterrorism. Apparently the health security bureaucracy is fragmented across various agencies, which means the White House has significant control over national health security.This would explain the strange behavior and response of the CDC and other ostensibly independent government agencies. They’re fragmented and dependent on White House direction. This also seems like it would be a ripe environment for funny business by elements of the national security state. If health security is fragmented across various agencies and subject to White House control and can be easily kept out of the loop of things, there’s a greater probability that black ops could be implemented without worry of whistleblowers and the like.” (9)
The Washington Post said this
“comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic . . . “, and quoted an official as saying, “Health security is very fragmented, with many different agencies. It means coordination and direction from the White House is terribly important”. The point was that Bolton’s stated plans to “streamline the NSC” really amounted to a serious “downgrading of global health security”. (10)The US government’s strategy is to control information, transparency and freedom of speech. The White House has directed health officials and scientists to coordinate all statements and public appearances with the office of Vice President Mike Pence, according to the NYT. (11)There are more signs of disorganization as officials debate how to handle the cruise ship off the coast of California carrying 3,500 people . . . “We shouldn’t have 16 people saying what the plan is … particularly when it hasn’t been fully formulated,” coronavirus task force member Dr. Ben Carson said on ABC’s “This Week.” (12)
Confusion
On March 7, Wired ran a story titled,
“Trump’s Coronavirus Press Event Was Even Worse Than It Looked”, a reporter stating Trump’s “remarks at the CDC . . . were misguided, misleading, and show how misinformation could hamper Covid-19 containment efforts. . . . The president’s statements to the press were terrifying. It was full of Dear Leader-ish compliments, non-sequitorial defenses of unrelated matters, and – most importantly – misinformation about the virus and the US response. That’s particularly painful coming from inside the CDC, a longtime powerhouse in global public health now reduced to being a backdrop for grubby politics.” (13)
In the opinion of the New York Times,
“the confusion typified the struggle by the Trump administration to project confidence and progress without misleading the public about the virus’s spread.”
These statements would appear abject failures in ‘projecting confidence’ but succeeding admirably in “misleading the public”. (14)
The Global Times said the US have messed this up but won’t admit it. They aren’t ready to face any emergency, revealed in the confusion of contradictory official statements, delayed announcements and a lack of transparency. (15)
In March, media reports that the White House is confusing the country with multiple mixed messages about all aspects of the coronavirus, especially with the testing. The Trump administration claimed 1 million tests would be available within a week, but White House officials then stated the number could be much lower, and Dr. Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the FDA, said at a Senate hearing that he was “hearing from private manufacturers” that 2,500 test kits might be available . . .” But according to the same report, these private-sector test kits “would not increase the capacity of individual labs to perform the tests”, meaning that even if tests are available, the private labs haven’t the staff or expertise to perform the tests, even assuming the quality is of acceptable standard. (16)
To further confuse the public, the number of available test kits and of people tested, varies according to the health official asked, from several hundred to tens of thousands to millions. Secretary of Health & Public Services Alex Azar added further to the confusion by saying it was unclear which states and/or facilities would receive the new tests, stating, “Right now… it is a challenge if you are a doctor wanting to get somebody tested.” (17) On one day, the White House promised 4 million coronavirus test kits “by next week”, but on the same day, US Vice-President Mike Pence said (a) “any American would be able to be tested for the coronavirus” but (b) “acknowledged . . . the capacity wasn’t there yet.” The meaning? There is no meaning. (18)
Then, the CDC “strongly” encouraged doctors to “test for other causes of respiratory illness such as the flu, before . . . a coronavirus test.” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, chief of Infectious Disease at Massachusetts General Hospital, said helpfully that “someone could potentially have the coronavirus and the flu at the same time”. In other words, don’t test for the coronavirus. Blame deaths on the flu.
The CDC set strict criteria on who can receive the tests, and even critically-ill patients have remained untested because the CDC refused to test those not fitting the criteria – which included anyone not having traveled to a “highly-infected area” like Wuhan or South Korea. As I noted in an earlier article, a California hospital was refused a test even for a patient who had been on a respirator in ICU for five days – because she didn’t fit the CDC ‘criteria’.
Dr. Sarah Turbett, a microbiologist and infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, said “We’re only testing people who are the sickest . . .” The CDC said on one day that 472 tests (in total) had been conducted, but the figure was removed from the CDC’s website the next day. Admiral Brett Giroir, the US Assistant Secretary of Health, said the mortality rate was far lower than previous estimates because “there had been a significant underreporting of cases”.
On March 4, the NYT claimed that the coronavirus “could have been spreading [in Washington State] for as long as six weeks before the first case was detected”, and that the CDC appears to not have been prepared for the outbreak. Not only not prepared, but, as the Global Times pointed out, “Washington has been focusing more on minimizing the influence of the virus on stock market confidence” than on public health. (15) US policymakers are giving the economy priority, and believe that Americans should endure the emergency on their own.
To further confuse the public, the CDC stated that California has only a handful of labs competent to administer the test, but that this would be increased to perhaps 20 “in the coming weeks”. It was reported that only the CDC had the capacity to administer these tests but apparently – and inexplicably – was not doing so. The media reports stated the CDC “sends kits to laboratories ‘designated as qualified’ by the CDC, which included only a few local laboratories – and the Department of Defense.
Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, downplaying the threat, said,
“This is not Ebola. It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS. It’s not a death sentence.”(11)
But then, adding measurably to the confusion, was Trump’s request for $1.25 billion in funds for this crisis, with Congress within two days instead volunteering $8 billion, passed with “sweeping bipartisan support” – for a supposedly non-existent virus that represents “no threat” (according to Trump), and which requires no face masks nor even testing. (19)
National Nurses United Director Bonnie Castillo denounced what she called the “disturbing” lack of preparation, claiming that nurses had no necessary protective equipment and no education or training for dealing with the virus. In startling contradiction, The CDC continued to stress that the overall risk to the public was low and are urging people not to buy masks. (19)
Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the FDA, said at a Senate hearing that the CDC was working with a private manufacturer to drastically increase the testing capacity of US laboratories. Hahn claimed that “a million coronavirus tests should be available” within a week, stating that he was speaking to some company who was “scaling up” their production, this claim progressively deteriorating until Hahn finally admitted that perhaps only 2,500 test kits might be available within that time.
The NYT revealed that an official Public Health source claimed American labs would be able to conduct “about 10,000 tests a day when all of its 100 members [were fully operational]. But China is able to conduct nearly 1.5 million such tests, and at an undisputedly world-renowned level of accuracy, but the US has – in three months – tested somewhere between 300 and 3,000 people, and even small countries many tens of thousands per week. (20)
Medical authorities said China could provide about 350,000 nucleic acid reagent test kits every day, which could fully meet the US demand. The director of Beijing Zhimed Medical Science said that although ordinary Americans “cried out for Chinese test kits”, . . . US politicians have heavily politicised the virus and were reluctant to introduce Chinese test kits in part “to save face”, as well as hoping to reduce the strategic rivalry from the more competent Chinese bio-tech sectors. (15)
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said the Trump administration was “closely monitoring the coronavirus and its effect on . . . markets and the broader economy”. However, Mr. Mnuchin was quick to add that Trump was not considering rolling back or suspending its tariffs on Chinese imports to mitigate the economic effects of the coronavirus, however serious they might be. Representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said that “any stimulus package should be centered around infrastructure investment . . .”, failing to explain how repairing a collapsing bridge would lessen the effects of a virus infection. (21) (22)
That means the US government and the CDC are abandoning their responsibility to the public, waiting for private firms to learn how to manufacture a reliable test kit from which they can reap the insurance rewards. It is an almost inescapable conclusion that, since the first test versions were unreliable, the CDC is biding its time until American manufacturers can finally produce profitable and reliable tests.
Face Masks
The CDC’s policy and its flawed response, conflicting recommendations, and allocation of materials for epidemic prevention, have sparked controversy on US social media.
Various media articles detailed the growing anger over the CDC’s recommendation to not wear masks and the US politicising of the coronavirus. On Feb. 28, the CDC released a video on its official Twitter account entitled “COVID-19: Should I wear a mask?”, in which the CDC discouraged people from using face masks. “The CDC’s recommendations were immediately questioned or slammed by the American public on social media, with many claiming that the irresponsible remarks [were] risking people’s life by not encouraging basic protection.” (23)
Many raised doubts about the credibility of the CDC, stating that “the organization is no longer worth their trust”. One person posted, “Everybody I know that works in healthcare is taking some home for their families and stashing some away. I trust the healthcare workers and their instincts over the agency who refused an infected citizen a test”. Another wrote, “Isn’t it what you say with flu shots? Surgical masks can filter out up to 80%, N95 up to 95% or even more of viruses. Flu shots are 50% effective this year, but you still push for it. Isn’t it contradictory, everyone?”
Monitoring Flights
California Governor Gavin Newsom announced the state is monitoring 8,400 people who arrived on commercial flights. According to Newsome, “We’re not just preparing – we’ve been actively participating in addressing this issue for many months, aggressively.” (24)
But at the same time, an American journalist, Julia Lindau expressed her shock that there were no checks whatsoever for coronavirus after she landed at JFK airport having returned from Italy. She posted the following:
“I just landed at JFK after reporting on coronavirus in Milan and Lombardy – the epicenter of Italy’s outbreak . . . I walked right through US customs. They didn’t ask me where in Italy I went or if I came into contact with sick people. They didn’t ask me anything.”
Presidential Buffoonery
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar stated that more test kits would be produced – pending quality control, at which point Trump cut off Azar to say,
“But I think, importantly, anybody, right now and yesterday, that needs a test gets a test. They’re there, they have the tests, and the tests are beautiful. Anybody that needs a test gets a test. The tests are all perfect. And you know what? The whole world is relying on us.” (25)
When a reporter began a question, Trump cut her off to say,
“I like this stuff [the virus]. You know my uncle was a great person. He was at MIT. He taught at MIT for, I think, like, a record number of years. He was a great supergenius, Dr. John Trump. I understand that whole world. I love that world. I really do. I love that world. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, “How do you know so much about this?” Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”“We have a perfectly coordinated and fine-tuned plan at the White House for our attack on Coronavirus. We moved VERY early to close borders to certain areas, which was a Godsend. V.P. is doing a great job. The Fake News Media is doing everything possible to make us look bad. Sad!” (26)“It seems unlikely that every scientist at the CDC marveled at the president’s scientific acumen. Earlier in the very same press conference, the president admitted that he didn’t know that people died of the flu. At a meeting at the White House, people had to explain to Trump that a flu vaccine wouldn’t also work against SARS-CoV-2.”
On March 6, facing sharp questions about the lack of test kits and the CDC’s admission that its initial test kits were flawed, Trump inexplicably blamed decisions by former President Obama for the problems.
“The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing. And we undid that decision . . . so that the testing can take place in a much more accurate and rapid fashion.”
But in fact Obama did nothing, all regulatory changes being left for Trump’s administration. (27)
Trump’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, told an audience that the coronavirus was the “hoax of the day”, a comment which Pompeo refused to deny. At a campaign rally Trump described the virus as Democrats’ “new hoax” after the Russian investigation and his impeachment trial, then criticised the media for exaggerating the danger.
CNN published a blistering criticism of Trump and his misinformation policies in dealing with this virus.
“President Donald Trump’s trusted method for winning his battles – flinging disinformation, alternative facts and biting attacks at his enemies – is being exposed . . . The President’s confidence . . . contrasts sharply with increasing anxiety being expressed by top public health experts in his administration. It also raises questions about his capacity to lead in a time of crisis . . .” (28)
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(16) Chigago Tribune – Confusion emerges over US coronavirus testing capacity, Mar 03, 2020 (AP); New York Times
http://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-nyt-coronavirus-testing-trump-20200303-4hzdbjuh5jhctirrr7imywbipu-story.html
http://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-nyt-coronavirus-testing-trump-20200303-4hzdbjuh5jhctirrr7imywbipu-story.html
(28) https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/09/politics/coronavirus-donald-trump-health-politics/index.html
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020
COVID-19 “Worldwide Epidemic of Biblical Proportions”
This is becoming increasingly crazy. The Western media hype is intolerable with its fear-mongering. What is driving this?
In most countries, a few people or a few hundred people have been infected with this virus, and a dozen or so countries have seen a handful of deaths. Many more people die each year from simple influenza.
Two years ago, the US had 45 million flu infections, more than 300,000 thousands hospitalised, and 61,000 deaths. Why wasn’t that considered an epidemic? All those infections and deaths weren’t even noticed by the media. But 100 infections and 10 deaths from a coronavirus is sufficient to request $8 billion in funds and curtail air transport. This year in the US, more than 10,000 have died of the flu, but ten people out of 330 million have died from the coronavirus and we have a pandemic.
In most infected countries the statistics are quite similar: about one person will die of each million of population.
Iran, with 80 million people, has less than 100 deaths, roughly one out of each million of population. Statistically, this is nothing. The only curiosity about Iran is that the virus seems to attack primarily the political leaders of their Parliament.
Italy has roughly 50 deaths out of 50 million of population, roughly one in a million. So what? More people die from from eating bad pizza or falling off bridges, but all the schools and universities are closed.
Korea is similar. Out of 50 million people, 40 deaths. Roughly one in a million. Where is the pandemic?
On this basis, China appears to be the worst with about two people dying out of each million. (3,000 deaths from 1.5 billion population). Probably more mothers-in-law are strangled each year.
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020
Why Is the US Apparently Not Testing for the COVID-19 Coronavirus?
"Testing for coronavirus is not available yet in New York City."
All reports are that the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is not testing for the new coronavirus COVID-19, and that reliable tests in any case do not exist in the US. This is an area bereft of rational explanation.
The US may have many thousands of coronavirus infections, but no one knows because the CDC are not testing for them.
The CDC produced a series of test kits that produced wildly random results, positive or negative, followed by instructions to discard the test kits as unreliable. (1) Several U.S. states said the new coronavirus test kits did not work, while others said they were totally unreliable. (2) New York City reported the government-issued tests are faulty and “cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate result”. Those faulty kits were also shipped all over the world, but to my knowledge the CDC have relayed that information to no one outside the US.
Further, American hospitals have been discharging infected patients on the basis of these faulty tests, the CDC explaining that there have been many situations where test results alternate between negative and positive on the same patients. (3)
One US media source said California had only 200 proper testing kits in the entire state, and very few anywhere in the country, but I could find no evidence the CDC is preparing new test kits, apparently doing nothing. It seems the reason the CDC can claim no COVID-19 infections is because they are not testing, and are unable in any case to perform reliable tests. It might be amusing to mock the US for being unable to produce a reliable test, but the Americans are not incompetent, which unfortunately raises many questions.
It seems bizarre that while the CDC could quickly develop and apply reliable tests nationwide, they apparently prefer to not do that, at a time when California and other states have already declared an emergency, and the White House canceled flights to China and requested $2 billion in virus funding.
According to media reports, the US has done only around 450 tests while even much smaller nations have tested many tens of thousands. (4) Even more surprising is that the CDC is apparently refusing to test for COVID-19 infections. The first such US infection from unknown sources wasn’t tested until after the patient had been on a ventilator in the ICU for nearly one week. The hospital claimed they “were unable to get her tested for five days, claiming the CDC refused to test victims who had not traveled to outbreak-hit regions”. It appears The CDC simply refused to administer a test even though the patient was in critical condition. (5)
In the meantime, a Chinese firm has put into mass production a highly-accurate test for COVID-19 that has received the highest level of European certification and that is now being marketed worldwide. China’s genomics sequencing company BGI has received international recognition and vast orders for its detection kits for the novel coronavirus. It has already shipped many hundreds of thousands to more than 25 countries and is in the order process with another 25 nations. For one, if the CDC wanted reliable tests, they could simply order from China. (6)
The CDC estimates that this flu season has seen at least 29 million illnesses, 280,000 hospitalisations and 16,000 deaths (16), but Japan and Taiwan both stated that American coronavirus deaths (potentially in the thousands) are being buried in untested infections, and in fatalities blamed on the seasonal flu. If those deaths were tested, the results are not being made public. (7) (8)
Chinese news website Huanqiu (9) related one case in the US where a woman’s relative was told by physicians he died of the flu, but where the death certificate listed the coronavirus as the cause of death. On February 26, ABC News affiliate KJCT8 News Network reported that a woman recently told the media that her sister died on from coronavirus infection. Montrose, Colorado resident Almeta Stone said,
“They (the medical staff) kept us informed that it was the flu, and when I got the death certificate, there was a coronavirus in the cause of death.” (10)
We cannot ascertain the number of such cases in the US but since the CDC apparently has no reliable test kits and is conducting little or no testing for the virus, there may be others. As I stated in an earlier article (11), virologists from Japan and Taiwan both came to the conclusion that this might indicate the coronavirus had already spread in the US but where the symptoms were being officially attributed to other diseases, and thus possibly masked.
The following was reported in detail in prominent Chinese media, who don’t normally publish anything speculative. An American, Dr. Paul Cottrell says he was sent a copy of a message between an employee of the US CDC and a listener to his channel.
According to the CDC official webpage, the number of total confirmed coronavirus cases in the US was 35 at the time (February 21, 2020), but the message copied to Cottrell read
“There have already been over 1,000 cases in the US, although on the news, they are just keeping things quiet for now and reporting far less to the public.”
In the message, the alleged CDC source stated the “CDC suspects cases in over 32 states at this point”. Cottrell says he has been unable so far to obtain confirmation from the CDC of the message or its contents, but no denials either. Cottrell is a Ph.D, has completed pre-med studies and is currently enrolled in a Biology Master’s program at Harvard. (12)
Further, a senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is now seeking federal protection from attempts to silence him after alleging that the US government was not taking adequate precautions against the COVID-19 outbreak. The complaint alleged that federal health employees were “improperly deployed” to assist the quarantined Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, and were “not properly trained or equipped to operate in a public health emergency situation”, according to a Washington Post report and portions of the complaint filing obtained by other media. (13)
There is another very curious part of this apparent puzzle. In August of 2019, the CDC completely shut down the US Military bio-weapons lab at Fort Detrick (USAMRIID) for “bio-safety hazards”. They issued a cease-and-desist order and all research was ordered to be immediately suspended until further notice but, interestingly, the US media took almost no note of this event. One would imagine that in light of such a drastic measure, rampant testing would be obligatory, but in this case apparently not. Yet Taiwan media reported COVID-19 infections of Taiwanese residents originating from the US (Hawaii) in September of 2019. The World Military Games were held in Wuhan during the last two weeks of October. (14) (15) (16)
It may be worth mentioning that this wasn’t the first time such concerns have arisen. Between 2005 and 2012, the latest date for which I have accurate figures, the US CDC received 1,059 “release reports” – an average of an incident every few days involving “theft, loss, release causing an occupational exposure, or release outside of primary biocontainment barriers” of dangerous pathogens. The NYT and Western media pilloried China for several small leaks of a virus ten years ago, but the Americans have had 1,057 more serious releases than did China during the same period, many of these involving deadly pathogens. (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) (22)
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(19) http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2842494-CDC-2008-Autoclave-Potential-Exposure-Incident.html
(22) http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2842405-CDC-Email-13May2011-Re-Tech-Leaving-Lab-Without.html
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020
Japan, China and Taiwan Reports on the Origin of the Virus
Global Research, March 04, 2020
The Western media quickly took the stage and laid out the official narrative for the outbreak of the new coronavirus which appeared to have begun in China, claiming it to have originated with animals at a wet market in Wuhan.
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- February 15, 2018: H7N4 bird flu. Sickened at least 1,600 people in China and killed more than 600. Many chickens killed. China needs to purchase US poultry products.
- June, 2018: H7N9 bird flu. Many chickens killed. China needs to purchase US poultry products.
- August, 2018: outbreak of African swine flu. Same strain as Russia, from Georgia. Millions of pigs killed. China needs to purchase US pork products.
- May 24, 2019: massive infestation of armyworms in 14 province-level regions in China, which destroy most food crops. Quickly spread to more than 8,500 hectares of China’s grain production. They produce astonishing numbers of eggs. China needs to purchase US agricultural products – corn, soybeans.
- December, 2019: Coronavirus appearance puts China’s economy on hold.
- January, 2020: China is hit by a “highly pathogenic” strain of bird flu in Hunan province. Many chickens died, many others killed. China needs to purchase US poultry products.
The standard adage is that bad luck happens in threes, not sixes.
This article appeared first at https://www.globalresearch.ca/china-coronavirus-shocking-update/5705196
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Reporting from Shanghai
A news broadcast in Japan stirred up a hornet’s nest not only in Japan but also in China.
A Japanese TV news report said that some of the 14,000 Americans who died of influenza may have in fact died from the coronavirus.
This immediately went viral on Chinese social media, with speculation that the coronavirus may have originated in the US. It had already been widely discussed that the virus may have been released at the time of the Military World Games.“Perhaps the US delegates brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, and some mutation occurred to the virus, making it more deadly and contagious, and causing a widespread outbreak this year.”
In the same article, a professor at Fudan University stated that global virologists were working to track the origin of the virus, “including the intelligence agencies”.
And perhaps most interesting of all, the Chinese government has not shut the door on this. The news report stated,
“Netizens are encouraged to actively partake in discussions, but preferably in a rational fashion.”
In China, that is meaningful. If the reports were rubbish, the government would clearly state that, and tell people to not spread false rumors.
It’s necessary to read between the lines, but uncertain how much to read into this.
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Source
See the article here: http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0223/c90000-9661026.html
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020
China’s Coronavirus. “We Cannot Rule Out Man Made Origin of these Infections”
A Russian Appraisal
Introductory Note
In earlier articles I related the opinions of biochemists and bio-warfare specialists on the circumstances justifying suspicion of a virus being created in a lab and deliberately released in a foreign country as a means of either low- or high-intensity warfare, or as merely a means of destabilising a nation and perhaps severely damaging its economy, with the loss of life being an added plus. The US is the country that appears most devoted to biological warfare, though a number of other nations are eager participants, including the UK and Israel.
I would remind readers here of the statement from PNAC, in a report titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, that
“Advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare … to a politically useful tool.” (1)
This subject is difficult to discuss openly in a nation of people, or even within international bodies like the UN. The infliction of such a pathogen onto a nation is clearly an act of war. However, if the leaders have not irrefutable proof of a bio-weapon and its source, and are not prepared for a military response, the only solution is to remain silent and emphasise research on defensive measures in the event of a recurrence. Even with overwhelming circumstantial evidence, a public statement or an accusation would likely be derided as yet another unfounded conspiracy theory. This is essentially the same with disclosure to the UN General Assembly or other such body; an accusation lacking conclusive proof would merely be derided and embarrassing.
This is similarly true with destabilization and violence, as China has very recently experienced in Hong Kong (and which has not yet stabilized), and the violence in Tibet and Xinjiang. The American ‘black hand’ (from the American consulate) was caught red-handed in Hong Kong and sources of funding the HK terrorists are now being identified. There is no dispute anywhere that the violence and terrorism in both Tibet and Xinjiang were American-inspired and funded, but absolute irrefutable proof is lacking. All of these are clearly acts of war but, lacking final proof, responses are limited to defensive measures.
In a previous article on China’s new coronavirus, I referred to a thesis on Biological Weapons by Leonard Horowitz and Zygmunt Dembek who stated that clear signs of a genetically-engineered bio-warfare agent were (a) a disease caused by an uncommon (unusual, rare, or unique) agent, with (b) lack of an epidemiological explanation, i.e. no clear idea of source; (c) An “unusual manifestation and/or geographic distribution”, such as race-specificity; and (d) multiple sources of infection. (2)
China’s coronavirus appears to satisfy all four criteria. This is especially true since it appears that only one Caucasian (and some Japanese) has been infected to date, with the virus so far appearing to be tightly focused to Chinese.
Also the statement by Dr. Leonard Horowitz who quoted one military expert as saying “Even if you suspect biological terrorism, it’s hard to prove. It’s equally hard to disprove . . . You can trace an arms shipment, but it’s almost impossible to trace the origins of a virus that comes from a bug.” Another expert stated that a properly-done release of an infectious agent cannot be traced to its source and might be considered an “act of God”.
In 2003, many Russian medical experts voiced the opinion that the SARS virus was most likely man-made and deliberately released as a weapon. Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, said the propagation of the SARS virus might well have been caused by leaking a combat virus grown in bacteriological weapons labs because the natural compound [of contained virus genome sections] was impossible, that the mix could never appear in nature, but could be done only in a laboratory. (3)
At the same time, Nikolai Filatov, the head of Moscow’s epidemiological services, stated he believed SARS was man-made because “there is no vaccine for this virus, its make-up is unclear, it has not been very widespread and the population is not immune to it.” (4) (5)
It appears the Russians may be arriving at the same conclusion for China’s new virus in 2020. The text below consists of a condensed version of an interview conducted by the Russian news portal mk.ru, on January 27, 2020, with Igor Nikulin, a former member of the UN Commission on Biological and Chemical Weapons (1998-2003). (6)
The article begins by noting that the prevalence of the coronavirus in China is increasing, while Beijing takes extraordinary measures to reduce the impact of this disaster. It further states that a number of experts “note strange coincidences in the circumstances” of the emergence of this new infection and are reluctant to exclude an “artificial origin”. Mr. Nikulin was asked to comment on the situation.
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With regard to the interview, we should emphasize that at this juncture of the coronavirus pandemic there is no firm evidence of the use of biological weapons against the People’s Republic of China. This Russian viewpoint is not fully corroborated. Translated from Russian.
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Russian Expert: “We Cannot Rule Out Man Made Origin of these Infections”
Interviewer: in recent years dangerous for humans coronaviruses appear more and more often. What does this have to do with anything?
Nikulin: With these coronaviruses, the situation is really very strange. Until 2000, none of them “jumped on a person.” They have been living next to humans for millions of years, but always only on some animals parasitized. For example, on camels, as in the case of [MERS]. Or on bats, birds, anyone, but this infection did not pass on to a person. And there are already 8 deadly viruses in 20 years. It’s obviously too much.
Interviewer: So we can’t rule out the man-made origin of these infections?
Nikulin: If it was the first outbreak, you’d think it was a natural mutation. But it is hardly natural, because every few years such incidents are repeated. It’s atypical pneumonia, it’s avian flu, it’s swine flu, it’s something else.
Interviewer: Some experts note that the time of the outbreak in China seems to be chosen specifically to cause maximum harm. Just on the eve of the New Year on the Eastern calendar, when in China mass internal migration for the holidays, as well as events with the participation of a large number of people. And the place seemed to be specially [selected]. Historically and geographically, all roads in China lead to Wuhan. It is the largest transport hub, the largest international airport. Through it [planes] fly to the States, Australia, Japan, the Middle East, Paris, London, Moscow. Besides these coincidences, what can prove the artificial origin of the virus?”
Nikulin: Just deciphering the genome. Its results may show if it is a virus of natural origin, or laboratory, when some recombinant “piece” is inserted into the gene . . . there are modern computer programs [that] allow you to read all this, decipher and compare with the samples available in databases.
Interviewer: Is it possible that the new coronavirus only affects people of Chinese nationality? So it’s set on certain features of the human gene?
Nikulin: If it turns out that this is indeed the case, then such a natural mutation cannot be accurate. It’s mathematical proof that it’s an artificially created virus.
Interviewer: In which labs can it appear?
Nikulin: I can only assume. But look: China, like Russia, is surrounded by American research biolaboratories. They are in different countries along the perimeter of China’s borders – in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Taiwan, Philippines, South Korea, Japan. They were in Indonesia, but they closed them. And wherever there are these American biolaboratories, or near them, there are outbreaks of new diseases, often unknown. Threats to the local population are simply ignored by Americans. The main thing is that it was away from the territory of the United States.
Interviewer: How many foreign biolaboratories do the U.S. have?
Nikulin: It’s 400.
Interviewer: They are overseen by the Pentagon?
Nikulin: Of course. It’s all funded from the Pentagon budget. Therefore, it is not necessary to say that peaceful humanitarian research is being carried out there. Do you think the Pentagon’s money is being spent on peaceful research? No one is allowed in. These are military labs. When more than a hundred people died in Georgia near such a laboratory within one month, do you think someone was allowed to go there? No one was allowed into the American laboratory at all.
Those countries that consider themselves victims of bioterrorism should investigate all these cases and bring them up for international discussion. For example, to the UN Security Council. To raise the issue of the activities of American biolaboratories outside the United States. We have to do something. Because a lot of people are already suffering from it. And in general, it is necessary to strengthen the biosecurity of the country.
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(3) Alexander Batalin,RIA Novosti https://rense.com/general37/manmade.htm
(5) News 24,
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Romanoff and Igor Nikulin, Global Research, 2020
China’s Coronavirus – How the Western Media Spin the News
Reporting from Shanghai
It is not possible to understand the situation of China’s new coronavirus infections without some context. Let’s place ourselves in the position of patient and physician. If you develop a headache, what is your first thought? Do you say to yourself, “My god, I have a brain tumor and I will die”? Not likely. Similarly, if you report your headache to a doctor, his range of thoughts is unlikely to involve your immediate demise. Both parties assume the event is merely one more common and typical occurrence and, barring unusual symptoms that indicate additional testing, the physician’s advice would most likely be to “take two aspirins and call me tomorrow”.
This was essentially the circumstance in China with the new coronavirus. The initial symptoms of the first patients were quite mild, seemingly no more than a typical winter flu and thus of no special concern. It was only after about two weeks, when the symptoms became more severe and patients required hospitalisation, that medical experts realised they were dealing with a new contagion.
After that, things happened very quickly with extensive tests and investigation, the discovery of the new coronavirus, the decoding of its entire genome and the distribution of that genome to the WHO and other authorities, all accomplished within about two weeks. China’s quick reaction and solid results generated worldwide praise from officials. Public announcements were made at the same time, revealing the facts available to date.
Chinese medical authorities took great comfort initially from the fact the infections at the outset showed no tendency to spread between humans, a blessing which was dutifully reported. No secondary infections had been identified, and no medical staff had become infected. Then suddenly, during that initial two weeks, perhaps due to adaptation or mutation, the virus began exhibiting contagious tendencies and about a dozen medical staff became suddenly infected, apparently from a single patient.
This constituted a material change in the circumstances, since a freely-contagious coronavirus could run rampant through the population. It was at this point that the authorities immediately instituted the effective quarantine first of Wuhan then of most of Hubei Province, a quarantine that has now expanded to several other cities in other provinces in an attempt to corral the virus and prevent wider contagion. And again, China’s quick reaction and solid results generated worldwide praise from officials.
I want to create some further necessary context by imagining a hypothetical situation. A major pharmaceutical company discovers that some batches of a frequently-prescribed medication may have been contaminated. At the beginning, there are still few facts and little is known about the extent or the severity of the contamination. How would a responsible corporation deal with this?
This may be counter-intuitive, but making an immediate public announcement would be reckless, potentially creating needless public alarm and even panic, as well as damaging public confidence and the company as well. Of course, the prime concern is the public welfare, but the company must first (admittedly very quickly) gather sufficient facts and information to understand the scope of the problem and the gravity of the overall situation. This fact-gathering process should require only a few days or perhaps a week or two at most, depending on circumstances. Public announcements in the absence of facts would be premature and even irresponsible.
If the contamination is discovered to be limited to one small batch which can be identified and recalled before use, the problem is solved. If the evidence is that many or an unknown number of batches may have been contaminated and locations are unknown, the problem and the danger to the public clearly become greater. An additional concern is the nature of the contamination and the degree of danger it presents to the public health, whether the effects of ingesting a contaminated medication would be minor or potentially lethal.
If the facts indicate that the contamination could have major negative consequences to the public and that the scope is unknown or not easily determinable, meaning the contamination cannot be easily contained, then an immediate public announcement is warranted, and indeed mandatory. However, none of this happens in a vacuum. National health authorities must first be advised and their opinion and guidance sought as to the content and timing of the public announcement as well as instructions on appropriate methods of solution.
The decisions of timing and content of a public announcement are made by the management of both the company and the national health authority. Rank and file staff of either group are not involved in this process since they haven’t the knowledge or experience. Typically, executives of both groups will decide on content and appoint a spokesperson to convey the necessary information to the public, done in a manner to inform but not alarm or panic the public.
But what happens if someone short-circuits this process? What if a low-level staff member at the pharmaceutical company learns of a possible contamination, assumes incorrectly the contamination involves HIV or the Bubonic Plague, and posts messages on social media to this effect?
This is precisely what happened in China with the new coronavirus. Li Wenliang, a low-level physician at a hospital in Wuhan, learned at the end of that initial two weeks that some patients had been hospitalised with a coronavirus infection, impetuously presumed that virus to be SARS, then posted announcements on Chinese social media that SARS had returned to China with people in Wuhan already hospitalised. No one in China has forgotten SARS, these messages sparking alarm and panic, especially since they were forwarded in volume to many other recipients.
Li was picked up and questioned by the police, reprimanded, and released after an hour. This was when the Western media began their circus. According to CNN,
“Li was accused of rumor-mongering by the Wuhan police. He was one of several medics targeted by police for trying to blow the whistle on the deadly virus in the early weeks of the outbreak.” Further, “Li was called to a local police station and reprimanded for “spreading rumors online” and “severely disrupting social order” over the message he sent in the chat group. Li had to sign a statement – which CNN has seen a photograph of – acknowledging his “misdemeanor” and promising not to commit further “unlawful acts”.”
The above statements are essentially correct though tilted, but are misleading without context. First, it is a crime in China to fabricate and spread rumors that disrupt the social order, a portion of Chinese culture that Westerners either cannot understand or refuse to accept.
Li stated “I only wanted to remind my university classmates to be careful”, but when his startling messages went viral, he then admitted, “When I saw them circulating online, I realised that it was out of my control and I would probably be punished.” Hardly a surprise. If Li’s concern were for a few friends he would have called them or sent private messages. Li is not a child, and he was fully aware of the virility of online posts as well as the protocols for dealing with potential epidemics. To have posted his claims openly on social media could obtain only one possible result – in fact the result it did obtain, which was to alarm and panic countless thousands of citizens.
Li was not reprimanded for “telling the truth” or for being a “whistleblower”, as CNN, CBS and the BBC tell us. Rather, he was reprimanded for reckless public behavior and for presuming authority he did not possess. No one appointed him the spokesman for either the national health authorities or the hospital. Li had no authority to make such premature public announcements, and he would know very well the result of a WeChat post with such content.
From the same CNN article, Li wrote, “I was wondering why (the government’s) official notices were still saying there was no human-to-human transmission, and there were no healthcare workers infected.” The medical authorities released that information as soon as it was verified and public notification became necessary, but Li appears determined to denigrate them with backhanded insinuations of lying to the public. At first I felt some sympathy for this man but I must say that after investigating all the available facts, including his apparently eager and repeated accessibility to CNN, I find myself tempted to conclude Li had had prior contact with someone outside the medical circle. His entire case has developed an aroma of Liu Xiaobo, a gullible Western puppet useful for sowing mild unrest and providing the Western media with ammunition for trashing his own country.
CBS News, in an article by someone named ‘Tucker Reals’, is equally as dishonest, claiming Li “was threatened by his government” when he “tried to raise the alarm about the new coronavirus”, again totally misrepresenting the facts. If Li’s intention were to “raise an alarm”, there were multiple official channels within which to do that. WeChat is not the first choice, neither for a medical emergency nor for a typhoon. (2)
In terms of social media disclosure, there was a second group of eight people, not medical practitioners but merely civilians, who also made similar posts on WeChat, but whose purpose was more clearly a reflection of concern for public well-being. These people were also questioned by the police, but released, and were later praised for their actions. In fact, in a big surprise, the Chinese Supreme Court made a public statement on this case, stating that these individuals did not fabricate a false story but presented largely factual news (though they mis-identified the virus). The Court statement defended their actions, specifically stating they should not be reprimanded. The Western media either ignore this event or conflate the two events to twist the context, since it firmly contradicts the narrative of the Chinese government censoring and silencing those who tell the truth.
CNN tells us, “From the start, the Chinese authorities wanted to control information about the outbreak, silencing any voices that differed with their narrative — regardless of whether they were telling the truth.” That is a twisted and very dirty statement, maligning China with no justification whatever. Of course the Chinese authorities wanted to control information about this outbreak, to prevent precisely the situation that arose with Li. CNN’s reporters on this, Yong Xiong and Nectar Gan, are dishonest in the extreme in stating that the authorities’ purpose was to silence “voices that differed”. In fact, their purpose was to silence voices that were incorrect and speaking without authority. This would not be different in any nation. The suggestion by Xiong and Gan that the Chinese health authorities were lying and suppressing others who told the truth, is sufficiently slanderous to justify a defamation lawsuit against CNN and both reporters. And deportation. (1)
Wuhan’s mayor Zhou Xianwang admitted his government did not immediately disclose information on the coronavirus. As he stated in an interview with CCTV,
“under Chinese law on infectious diseases, the local government first needs to report the outbreak to national health authorities, and then get approval from the State Council before making an announcement. For the late disclosure, I hope everyone can understand that this is an infectious disease, and relevant information has special channels to be disclosed in accordance with law.” There is nothing sinister here.
There is another aspect to the Western reporting of events in China, relating specifically to the use of Chinese social media. I won’t dwell on the details here but it is well-documented that various American government agencies, most particularly the CIA and NED have created thousands of accounts on Weibo and WeChat, purporting to belong to native Chinese resident in China but which are mostly managed out of Langley, Virginia, and which they use in attempts to promote disaffection in China. This so-called “sock puppet” software permits one single individual to create and manage as many as 1,000 of these individual accounts at one time, with such realism of detail as to appear to be physically on the scene at any event.
There is thus a problem in knowing which posts on Chinese social media are legitimate and which are by Americans seeking to cause unrest in China. It was primarily for this reason the Chinese government initiated a requirement for personal ID for maintenance of these accounts.
One post claimed, “Dr Li Wenliang is a hero”, and pretended to express concern that the government’s “criticism of his honesty” would frighten all Chinese health professionals. The post continued, “In the future, doctors will be more afraid to issue early warnings when they find signs of infectious diseases.” This post is almost certainly false, since the Chinese understand their system very well, and no Chinese would be likely to express this sentiment. And, if doctors are more afraid to issue uninformed and incorrect ‘early warnings’ on the social media instead of through proper channels, well and good.
According to CNN, “On Li’s Weibo, tens of thousands have left comments thanking him for speaking out and wishing him a speedy discovery.” Dr Li, you’re a good doctor with conscience. I hope you stay safe and sound,” read one of the top-rated comments.” “If Wuhan had paid attention to [his warning] back then and taken active preventive measures,” wrote another Weibo user, “where we stand now a month later could be a completely different picture.” Comments like these are at variance with the facts and are almost certainly fake, originating outside China.
In fact, the Chinese have been overwhelmingly supportive of their government’s handling of this medical crisis, but it seems the Americans will never miss an opportunity to denigrate China nor to stir unrest and instability wherever an opportunity appears to present itself.
Li has since been diagnosed with the new coronavirus, CNN claiming “His diagnosis has sparked outrage across China, where a backlash is growing against state censorship around the illness and an initial delay in warning the public about the deadly virus.” But in fact his diagnosis sparked nothing in China, except perhaps sympathy, and there is no evidence of any nature to suggest a backlash against “growing against state censorship around the illness”, which censorship does not in fact exist, all evidence being very much to the contrary. Statements such as these, presented entirely without support, are merely Xiong and Gan trashing their own people to please their handlers at CNN.
Lastly, it would seem appropriate to recall the many instances where the US government and health authorities committed their own crimes against disclosure and timeliness, in many cases taking months to reveal information or to formulate a plan of action, and in some cases never acting. We shouldn’t forget too soon that Vioxx was killing perhaps hundreds of thousands of Americans over ten years while all were afraid to blow the whistle, nor should we forget that hundreds of millions of Americans have been injected with monkey viruses from contaminated vaccines, but that the whistle was never blown. In the US, many people die every year from contaminated vaccinations, most of which were unnecessary in any case, but those attempting to ‘blow the whistle’ are threatened, harassed, and ridiculed. A mere listing of the significant instances of American failure to act, to disclose pertinent information, even to simply tell the truth, would be much too long to be included here.
I would suggest that Americans and their media concern themselves primarily with American problems. Since they’ve demonstrated little ability to discover viable solutions for their own Pandora’s Box of critical issues, perhaps they should refrain from either scolding or pretending to advise the rest of the world on items which are much smaller. It is unfortunate that the Western media have so little independence, their reporters little or no real-world experience on issues they discuss, view China in particular through blinding ideological lenses, display a strong tendency to extremism on every foreign issue, and are inevitably working to satisfy a hidden political agenda. Nothing here to justify even a mild thought of trust.
*
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
Featured image is from EPA/STRINGER CHINA OUT
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020
Reporting from Shanghai
It is not possible to understand the situation of China’s new coronavirus infections without some context. Let’s place ourselves in the position of patient and physician. If you develop a headache, what is your first thought? Do you say to yourself, “My god, I have a brain tumor and I will die”? Not likely. Similarly, if you report your headache to a doctor, his range of thoughts is unlikely to involve your immediate demise. Both parties assume the event is merely one more common and typical occurrence and, barring unusual symptoms that indicate additional testing, the physician’s advice would most likely be to “take two aspirins and call me tomorrow”.
This was essentially the circumstance in China with the new coronavirus. The initial symptoms of the first patients were quite mild, seemingly no more than a typical winter flu and thus of no special concern. It was only after about two weeks, when the symptoms became more severe and patients required hospitalisation, that medical experts realised they were dealing with a new contagion.
After that, things happened very quickly with extensive tests and investigation, the discovery of the new coronavirus, the decoding of its entire genome and the distribution of that genome to the WHO and other authorities, all accomplished within about two weeks. China’s quick reaction and solid results generated worldwide praise from officials. Public announcements were made at the same time, revealing the facts available to date.
Chinese medical authorities took great comfort initially from the fact the infections at the outset showed no tendency to spread between humans, a blessing which was dutifully reported. No secondary infections had been identified, and no medical staff had become infected. Then suddenly, during that initial two weeks, perhaps due to adaptation or mutation, the virus began exhibiting contagious tendencies and about a dozen medical staff became suddenly infected, apparently from a single patient.
This constituted a material change in the circumstances, since a freely-contagious coronavirus could run rampant through the population. It was at this point that the authorities immediately instituted the effective quarantine first of Wuhan then of most of Hubei Province, a quarantine that has now expanded to several other cities in other provinces in an attempt to corral the virus and prevent wider contagion. And again, China’s quick reaction and solid results generated worldwide praise from officials.
I want to create some further necessary context by imagining a hypothetical situation. A major pharmaceutical company discovers that some batches of a frequently-prescribed medication may have been contaminated. At the beginning, there are still few facts and little is known about the extent or the severity of the contamination. How would a responsible corporation deal with this?
This may be counter-intuitive, but making an immediate public announcement would be reckless, potentially creating needless public alarm and even panic, as well as damaging public confidence and the company as well. Of course, the prime concern is the public welfare, but the company must first (admittedly very quickly) gather sufficient facts and information to understand the scope of the problem and the gravity of the overall situation. This fact-gathering process should require only a few days or perhaps a week or two at most, depending on circumstances. Public announcements in the absence of facts would be premature and even irresponsible.
If the contamination is discovered to be limited to one small batch which can be identified and recalled before use, the problem is solved. If the evidence is that many or an unknown number of batches may have been contaminated and locations are unknown, the problem and the danger to the public clearly become greater. An additional concern is the nature of the contamination and the degree of danger it presents to the public health, whether the effects of ingesting a contaminated medication would be minor or potentially lethal.
If the facts indicate that the contamination could have major negative consequences to the public and that the scope is unknown or not easily determinable, meaning the contamination cannot be easily contained, then an immediate public announcement is warranted, and indeed mandatory. However, none of this happens in a vacuum. National health authorities must first be advised and their opinion and guidance sought as to the content and timing of the public announcement as well as instructions on appropriate methods of solution.
The decisions of timing and content of a public announcement are made by the management of both the company and the national health authority. Rank and file staff of either group are not involved in this process since they haven’t the knowledge or experience. Typically, executives of both groups will decide on content and appoint a spokesperson to convey the necessary information to the public, done in a manner to inform but not alarm or panic the public.
But what happens if someone short-circuits this process? What if a low-level staff member at the pharmaceutical company learns of a possible contamination, assumes incorrectly the contamination involves HIV or the Bubonic Plague, and posts messages on social media to this effect?
This is precisely what happened in China with the new coronavirus. Li Wenliang, a low-level physician at a hospital in Wuhan, learned at the end of that initial two weeks that some patients had been hospitalised with a coronavirus infection, impetuously presumed that virus to be SARS, then posted announcements on Chinese social media that SARS had returned to China with people in Wuhan already hospitalised. No one in China has forgotten SARS, these messages sparking alarm and panic, especially since they were forwarded in volume to many other recipients.
Li was picked up and questioned by the police, reprimanded, and released after an hour. This was when the Western media began their circus. According to CNN,
“Li was accused of rumor-mongering by the Wuhan police. He was one of several medics targeted by police for trying to blow the whistle on the deadly virus in the early weeks of the outbreak.” Further, “Li was called to a local police station and reprimanded for “spreading rumors online” and “severely disrupting social order” over the message he sent in the chat group. Li had to sign a statement – which CNN has seen a photograph of – acknowledging his “misdemeanor” and promising not to commit further “unlawful acts”.”
The above statements are essentially correct though tilted, but are misleading without context. First, it is a crime in China to fabricate and spread rumors that disrupt the social order, a portion of Chinese culture that Westerners either cannot understand or refuse to accept.
Li stated “I only wanted to remind my university classmates to be careful”, but when his startling messages went viral, he then admitted, “When I saw them circulating online, I realised that it was out of my control and I would probably be punished.” Hardly a surprise. If Li’s concern were for a few friends he would have called them or sent private messages. Li is not a child, and he was fully aware of the virility of online posts as well as the protocols for dealing with potential epidemics. To have posted his claims openly on social media could obtain only one possible result – in fact the result it did obtain, which was to alarm and panic countless thousands of citizens.
Li was not reprimanded for “telling the truth” or for being a “whistleblower”, as CNN, CBS and the BBC tell us. Rather, he was reprimanded for reckless public behavior and for presuming authority he did not possess. No one appointed him the spokesman for either the national health authorities or the hospital. Li had no authority to make such premature public announcements, and he would know very well the result of a WeChat post with such content.
From the same CNN article, Li wrote, “I was wondering why (the government’s) official notices were still saying there was no human-to-human transmission, and there were no healthcare workers infected.” The medical authorities released that information as soon as it was verified and public notification became necessary, but Li appears determined to denigrate them with backhanded insinuations of lying to the public. At first I felt some sympathy for this man but I must say that after investigating all the available facts, including his apparently eager and repeated accessibility to CNN, I find myself tempted to conclude Li had had prior contact with someone outside the medical circle. His entire case has developed an aroma of Liu Xiaobo, a gullible Western puppet useful for sowing mild unrest and providing the Western media with ammunition for trashing his own country.
CBS News, in an article by someone named ‘Tucker Reals’, is equally as dishonest, claiming Li “was threatened by his government” when he “tried to raise the alarm about the new coronavirus”, again totally misrepresenting the facts. If Li’s intention were to “raise an alarm”, there were multiple official channels within which to do that. WeChat is not the first choice, neither for a medical emergency nor for a typhoon. (2)
In terms of social media disclosure, there was a second group of eight people, not medical practitioners but merely civilians, who also made similar posts on WeChat, but whose purpose was more clearly a reflection of concern for public well-being. These people were also questioned by the police, but released, and were later praised for their actions. In fact, in a big surprise, the Chinese Supreme Court made a public statement on this case, stating that these individuals did not fabricate a false story but presented largely factual news (though they mis-identified the virus). The Court statement defended their actions, specifically stating they should not be reprimanded. The Western media either ignore this event or conflate the two events to twist the context, since it firmly contradicts the narrative of the Chinese government censoring and silencing those who tell the truth.
CNN tells us, “From the start, the Chinese authorities wanted to control information about the outbreak, silencing any voices that differed with their narrative — regardless of whether they were telling the truth.” That is a twisted and very dirty statement, maligning China with no justification whatever. Of course the Chinese authorities wanted to control information about this outbreak, to prevent precisely the situation that arose with Li. CNN’s reporters on this, Yong Xiong and Nectar Gan, are dishonest in the extreme in stating that the authorities’ purpose was to silence “voices that differed”. In fact, their purpose was to silence voices that were incorrect and speaking without authority. This would not be different in any nation. The suggestion by Xiong and Gan that the Chinese health authorities were lying and suppressing others who told the truth, is sufficiently slanderous to justify a defamation lawsuit against CNN and both reporters. And deportation. (1)
Wuhan’s mayor Zhou Xianwang admitted his government did not immediately disclose information on the coronavirus. As he stated in an interview with CCTV,
“under Chinese law on infectious diseases, the local government first needs to report the outbreak to national health authorities, and then get approval from the State Council before making an announcement. For the late disclosure, I hope everyone can understand that this is an infectious disease, and relevant information has special channels to be disclosed in accordance with law.” There is nothing sinister here.
There is another aspect to the Western reporting of events in China, relating specifically to the use of Chinese social media. I won’t dwell on the details here but it is well-documented that various American government agencies, most particularly the CIA and NED have created thousands of accounts on Weibo and WeChat, purporting to belong to native Chinese resident in China but which are mostly managed out of Langley, Virginia, and which they use in attempts to promote disaffection in China. This so-called “sock puppet” software permits one single individual to create and manage as many as 1,000 of these individual accounts at one time, with such realism of detail as to appear to be physically on the scene at any event.
There is thus a problem in knowing which posts on Chinese social media are legitimate and which are by Americans seeking to cause unrest in China. It was primarily for this reason the Chinese government initiated a requirement for personal ID for maintenance of these accounts.
One post claimed, “Dr Li Wenliang is a hero”, and pretended to express concern that the government’s “criticism of his honesty” would frighten all Chinese health professionals. The post continued, “In the future, doctors will be more afraid to issue early warnings when they find signs of infectious diseases.” This post is almost certainly false, since the Chinese understand their system very well, and no Chinese would be likely to express this sentiment. And, if doctors are more afraid to issue uninformed and incorrect ‘early warnings’ on the social media instead of through proper channels, well and good.
According to CNN, “On Li’s Weibo, tens of thousands have left comments thanking him for speaking out and wishing him a speedy discovery.” Dr Li, you’re a good doctor with conscience. I hope you stay safe and sound,” read one of the top-rated comments.” “If Wuhan had paid attention to [his warning] back then and taken active preventive measures,” wrote another Weibo user, “where we stand now a month later could be a completely different picture.” Comments like these are at variance with the facts and are almost certainly fake, originating outside China.
In fact, the Chinese have been overwhelmingly supportive of their government’s handling of this medical crisis, but it seems the Americans will never miss an opportunity to denigrate China nor to stir unrest and instability wherever an opportunity appears to present itself.
Li has since been diagnosed with the new coronavirus, CNN claiming “His diagnosis has sparked outrage across China, where a backlash is growing against state censorship around the illness and an initial delay in warning the public about the deadly virus.” But in fact his diagnosis sparked nothing in China, except perhaps sympathy, and there is no evidence of any nature to suggest a backlash against “growing against state censorship around the illness”, which censorship does not in fact exist, all evidence being very much to the contrary. Statements such as these, presented entirely without support, are merely Xiong and Gan trashing their own people to please their handlers at CNN.
Lastly, it would seem appropriate to recall the many instances where the US government and health authorities committed their own crimes against disclosure and timeliness, in many cases taking months to reveal information or to formulate a plan of action, and in some cases never acting. We shouldn’t forget too soon that Vioxx was killing perhaps hundreds of thousands of Americans over ten years while all were afraid to blow the whistle, nor should we forget that hundreds of millions of Americans have been injected with monkey viruses from contaminated vaccines, but that the whistle was never blown. In the US, many people die every year from contaminated vaccinations, most of which were unnecessary in any case, but those attempting to ‘blow the whistle’ are threatened, harassed, and ridiculed. A mere listing of the significant instances of American failure to act, to disclose pertinent information, even to simply tell the truth, would be much too long to be included here.
I would suggest that Americans and their media concern themselves primarily with American problems. Since they’ve demonstrated little ability to discover viable solutions for their own Pandora’s Box of critical issues, perhaps they should refrain from either scolding or pretending to advise the rest of the world on items which are much smaller. It is unfortunate that the Western media have so little independence, their reporters little or no real-world experience on issues they discuss, view China in particular through blinding ideological lenses, display a strong tendency to extremism on every foreign issue, and are inevitably working to satisfy a hidden political agenda. Nothing here to justify even a mild thought of trust.
*
Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
Featured image is from EPA/STRINGER CHINA OUT
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020
Global Research, January 25, 2020
The Western mass media have discussed the new corona virus that began in the city of Wuhan in Central China but, apart from repetitive small details and the inevitable China-bashing, not much light has been shed on the circumstances. My initial commentary here is composed from a medley of nearly 100 Western news reports, primarily ABC, CBS, CNN, AFP, and from some Chinese media. Officially called the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), the contagion is a respiratory illness, a new type of viral pneumonia, in the same family of infections as SARS and MERS.
At the time of writing, Chinese health authorities announced 830 confirmed cases caused by this virus in 29 provincial-level regions in the country, resulting so far in 25 deaths primarily among the elderly who had been suffering serious prior medical conditions and were perhaps in weakened physical states. A few cases have been reported in other countries, Thailand, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, the US, Japan, all of which involved ethnic Chinese who had traveled to Wuhan. The virus initially showed no signs of spreading between humans, but then may have mutated with 15 medical workers in Wuhan apparently contracting the pathogen from other victims. It still remains unclear how easy it is to contract it from another infected individual.
The initial symptoms were mild, which permitted many people to travel before stronger symptoms were detected. The first occurrences in December thus appeared to be of minor concern. The incubation period has not been definitively stated but, once infections began, the spread was surprisingly rapid after the first case was confirmed on December 31: on January 3, 44 cases; January 21, 225 cases, January 24, 830 cases. Local medical authorities have said the true extent of the Wuhan coronavirus is unclear, and the early official figures may have been an underestimation since the mild symptoms and delayed onset meant infections may have been undetected.
All the evidence suggests the Chinese authorities acted effectively as soon as they realised the danger they might be facing. Medical authorities immediately declared the outbreak, and within a week they had identified the pathogen and also determined and shared the genome sequence with the WHO and other parties, a sufficiently speedy response that earned praise from the WHO and scientists around the world.
Remembering the SARS troubles, they did much more. In most large centers in the country, all sports venues, theaters, museums, tourist attractions, all locations that attract crowds, have been closed, as have all schools. All group tours have been cancelled. Not only the city of Wuhan but virtually the entire province of Hubei has been locked down, with all trains, aircraft, buses, subways, ferries, grounded and all major highways and toll booths closed. Thousands of flights and train trips have been cancelled until further notice. Some cities like Shanghai and Beijing are conducting temperature tests on all roadways leading into the cities. In addition, Wuhan is building (in five days) a portable hospital of 25,000 square meters to deal with the infected patients. As well, Wuhan has asked citizens to neither leave nor enter the city without a compelling reason, and all are wearing face masks.
The scale of the challenge of implementing such a blockade is immense, comparable to closing down all transport links for a city 5 times the size of Toronto or Chicago, two days before Christmas. These decisions are unprecedented, but testify to the determination of the authorities to limit the spread and damage of this new pathogen. They not only address the gravity of the situation but also the seriousness of consideration for the public health, unfortunate and difficult decisions since the holiday is being destroyed for hundreds of millions of people. Most public entertainment has been cancelled, as have tours, and many weddings as well. The damage to the economy during this most festive of all periods, will also be enormous. Hong Kong will suffer severely in addition to all its other troubles, since visits from Mainland Chinese typically support much of its retail economy during this period.
The Chinese New Year is the most important festival for Chinese. Saturday, January 25, is the first day of the Lunar New Year, a festive period that typically sees the largest mass-movement of people on the planet as Chinese flock back to their hometowns to be with relatives. No health authority has ever tackled the challenge currently faced by China, as the country grapples with a new coronavirus just as hundreds of millions prepare to travel.
And of course the Western media had a field day of schadenfreude. CNN published a report – a bit too gleefully, I thought – on the potential damage to China’s economy: (1)
“China’s economy is slumping and the country is still suffering the effects of the trade war with America. An outbreak of a new and deadly virus is the last thing it needs. The Wuhan coronavirus has already roiled Chinese markets and thrown plans for the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday into chaos for millions of people. The world’s second biggest economy grew at its slowest pace in nearly three decades last year as it contended with rising debt, cooling domestic demand and US tariffs, many of which remain in place despite a recent truce. Beijing is worried about unemployment, too, and has announced a wave of stimulus measures in recent weeks aimed at preventing mass layoffs. . . The Wuhan coronavirus outbreak could spark widespread fear and spur people to hunker down and avoid going outside. That kind of behavior would deal a huge blow to the service sector, which now accounts for about 52% of the Chinese economy.” [And so on . . .]
The Western media have already staked out their claim to the fundamentals, all media sources claiming the virus was transferred to humans from animals or seafood. The media have added fuel to the fire by claiming the virus emerged from “illegally traded wildlife” in a market “where offerings reportedly include wild animals that can carry viruses dangerous to humans”, and that this virus “jumped into the human population from an infected animal”. Chinese officials stated that the virus appears to have originated at a seafood market in Wuhan, though the actual origin has not been determined nor stated by the authorities, and is still an open question perhaps primarily since viruses seldom jump species barriers without human assistance.
While there is no evidence of biowarfare, a virus outbreak in the city of Wuhan immediately prior to the Chinese New Year migration could potentially have dramatic social and economic repercussions. Wuhan, with a population of about 12 million, is a major transport hub in Central China, particularly for the high-speed train network, and with more than 60 air routes with direct flights to most of the world’s major cities, as well as more than 100 internal flights to major Chinese cities. When we add this to the Spring Festival travel rush during which many hundreds of millions of people travel across the country to be with their families, the potential consequences for the entire country are far-reaching.
Comparison with SARS
This is a novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), an entirely new strain related to the MERS (MERS-CoV) and the SARS (SARS-CoV) viruses, though early evidence suggests it is not as dangerous.
SARS was proven to be caused by a strain of the coronavirus, a large family of mostly harmless viruses also responsible for the common cold, but SARS exhibited characteristics never before observed in any animal or human virus, did not by any means fully match the animal viruses mentioned above, and contained genetic material that still remains unidentified – similar to this new corona virus in 2019.
Virologist Dr. Alan Cantwell wrote at the time that “the mysterious SARS virus is a new virus never before seen by virologists. This is an entirely new illness with devastating effects on the immune system, and there is no known treatment.” Dr. Cantwell also noted that the genetic engineering of coronaviruses has been occurring in both medical and military labs for decades. He wrote that when he searched in PubMed for the phrase “coronavirus genetic engineering”, he was referred to 107 scientific experiments dating back to 1987. To quote Dr. Cantwell:
“I quickly confirmed scientists have been genetically engineering animal and human coronaviruses to make disease-producing mutant and recombinant viruses for over a decade. No wonder WHO scientists identified the SARS/coronavirus so quickly. Never emphasised by medical news writers is the fact that for over forty years scientists have been “jumping species” with all sorts of animal and human viruses and creating chimera viruses (viruses composed from viruses of two different species). This unsupervised research produces dangerous man-made viruses, many of which have potential as bioweapons. Certainly SARS has the hallmarks of a bioweapon. After all, aren’t new biological warfare agents designed to produce a new disease with a new infectious agent? As in prior military experiments, all it might take … to spread SARS is an aerosol can . . .” (2) (3) (4)
Almost immediately upon receiving the genome sequence, several Russian scientists suggested a link between SARS and biowarfare. Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, said the propagation of the SARS virus might well have been caused by leaking a combat virus grown in bacteriological weapons labs. According to a number of news reports, Kolesnikov claimed that the virus of atypical pneumonia (SARS) was a synthesis of two viruses (of measles and infectious parotiditis or mumps), the natural compound of which was impossible, that this mix could never appear in nature, stating, “This can be done only in a laboratory.” (5) And Nikolai Filatov, the head of Moscow’s epidemiological services, was quoted in the Gazeta daily as stating he believed SARS was man-made because “there is no vaccine for this virus, its make-up is unclear, it has not been very widespread and the population is not immune to it.” (6) (7)
It wasn’t widely reported, but it seems the final conclusion of the Chinese biochemists was the same, that the SARS virus was man-made. This conclusion wasn’t a secret, but neither was it promoted to the international media since they would simply have used the claim to heap scorn on China, dismissing this as a paranoid conspiracy theory. The Western media totally ignored this aspect, except for ABC news who reported that the SARS “Mystery Virus” was possibly “a Chinese bio-weapon that accidentally escaped the laboratory”. Nice of ABC to notice, but their story, if true, would be the first example of a nation creating and releasing a race-specific biological weapon designed to attack exclusively itself.
Notable is that while SARS spread to about 40 countries, the infections in most countries were few and deaths almost zero, and it was exclusively (or almost exclusively) Chinese who were infected, those in Hong Kong most seriously, with Mainland China suffering little by comparison.
This appears to be precisely the case with this new virus, in that most of the infected persons (sofar) are Chinese. News reports speak of infections appearing in Thailand or the US, but those (at least to date of writing) were all Chinese who had been to Wuhan. There have been no cases so far of infected Caucasians.
As with SARS, this new virus appears to be tightly-focused to Chinese. At this stage it is too early to draw specific conclusions.
We might in other circumstances pass this off as an unfortunate coincidence but for some major circumstantial events that serve to alter our focus. One of these is the history of American universities and NGOs having come into China in recent years to conduct biological experiments that were so illegal as to leave the Chinese authorities enraged. This was particularly true when it became known that Harvard University had surreptitiously proceeded with experiments in China that had been forbidden by the authorities years earlier, where they collected many hundreds of thousands of Chinese DNA samples and then left the country. (8) (9) (10) (11) (12)
The Chinese were furious to learn that Americans were collecting Chinese DNA. The government intervened and prohibited the further export of any of the data. The conclusion at the time was that the ‘research’ had been commissioned by the US military with the DNA samples destined for race-specific bio-weapons research.
In a thesis on Biological Weapons, Leonard Horowitz and Zygmunt Dembek stated that one clear sign of a genetically-engineered bio-warfare agent was a disease caused by an uncommon (unusual, rare, or unique) agent, with lack of an epidemiological explanation. I.e. no clear idea of source. They also mentioned an “unusual manifestation and/or geographic distribution”, of which race-specificity would be one. (13)
Recent disease outbreaks that would seem to possibly qualify as potential bio-warfare agents are AIDS, SARS, MERS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Hantavirus, Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, Ebola, Polio (Syria), Foot and Mouth Disease, the Gulf War Syndrome and ZIKA. And in fact thousands of prominent scientists, physicians, virologists and epidemiologists on many continents have concurred that all these viruses were lab-created and their release deliberate. The recent swine flu epidemic in China has the hallmarks as well, with circumstantial evidence of the outbreak raising only questions.
There was another curiosity in this case, in that additional to the usual criticisms of China being inactive or secretive, several US media replicated accusations from “a senior US State Department official” claiming Washington was “still concerned” about transparency in the Chinese government on the Wuhan coronavirus. Other articles claimed the US CDC was “concerned that Chinese health officials have still not released basic epidemiological data about the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, making it more difficult to contain the outbreak.” There is no substantial reason that officials at any level of the US State Department should concern themselves with a virus outbreak in a foreign country.
Their criticisms were surprisingly detailed, demanding specifics on the number of infections directly from contact with the Wuhan market, the number of person-to-person infections, the precise incubation period from exposure to the onset of symptoms, the point at which persons become contagious. The questions were presented in benevolent terms of helping the Chinese medical authorities deal with the virus, though it was already self-evident China had no need to be lectured on such basics.
As of the date of writing, details are still too scarce to form definitive conclusions but, in every such case, once the smoke clears there are many unanswered questions that challenge the official Western narrative, but it’s old news and the media have already staked out their ground so the matter dies in the Western public mind, but not in China.
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(1) The Wuhan virus is the last thing China’s economy needs …
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/23/economy/wuhan-coronavirus-china-economy/index.html
(2) u2.lege.net/whale.to/c/cantwell_alan.html
(3) https://medicalveritas.org/rigged-science-man-made-aids
(4) https://www.amazon.com/AIDS-Doctors-Death-Inquiry-Epidemic/dp/0917211251
(5) https://rense.com/general37/manmade.htm
(6) https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/21/new-improved-sars-bioweapon-tested-in-china
(7) https://rense.com/general37/bio.htm
(8) The Harvard case of Xu Xiping: exploitation of the people, scientific advance, or genetic theft?
Margaret Sleeboom; Amsterdam School of Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam and International Institute for Asian Studies, University of Leiden, The Netherlands; Routlege; Taylor & Francis group; New Genetics and Society, Vol. 24, No. 1, April 2005
(9) http://ahrp.org/article-30/
(10) http://www1.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-09/25/content_267233.htm
(11) http://www.ahrp.org/ethical/ChinaDaily092503.php
(12) http://www1.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-09/25/content_267233.htm
(13) Medical Aspects of Biological Warfare
This article appeared first at https://www.globalresearch.ca/chinas-new-coronavirus-an-examination-of-the-facts/5701662
Also available at https://l-hora.org/?p=12777&lang=en
While this coronavirus is indeed serious and is causing deaths, one wonders if the responses, especially in the West, are reaching out of control.
Canada, with a population about the same as Shanghai, has so far this flu season had more than 20,000 confirmed cases, 2,200 hospitalisations, and 85 deaths, roughly the same as all of China with the new corona virus at the same time. But there is no panic in Canada about the flu, and United Airlines isn’t cancelling all flights to Canada.
By the same token for the US in this flu season, there have been 140,000 hospitalisations and about 8,500 deaths.
But the flu barely rates a mention in the US media and the government is not shuttering cities or air travel. Even more, in 2017, the US recorded 61,000 fatalities from the flu with 45 million becoming very ill, yet there was no national emergency cited and life remained normal. (1)
Infection History (December 31, 2019 – January 31, 2019
- December 31 – 1
- January 03 – 44
- January 21 – 225
- January 23 – 830
- January 24 – 1,295
- January 25 – 1,950
- January 26 – 2,744 infections, 80 deaths
- January 27 – 4,515 infections, 105 deaths
- January 28 – 5,974 infections, 132 deaths
- January 29 – 7,711 infections, 170 deaths
- January 30 – 9,692 infections, 216 deaths
- January 31 – 9,800 infections, 216 deaths
Source: Chinese Government and World Health Organization data
See Map Below
scan of NYT map, January 31st
Approximately 150 infections have been recorded outside China in 20-21 countries out of a total of recorded infections of the order of 10,000 (January 31st).
Sofar all recorded deaths are in mainland China. Not a single death has been recorded outside China.
These numbers are low when compared to those pertaining to the common seasonal virus flu outbreak.
According to WHO data, there were 5 million infections and 650,000 deaths Worldwide associated with the common seasonal flu virus. (2017 figures)
In Hong Kong, there are more deaths every two weeks from the regular flu each year (and this year) than occurred with SARS in total, but with only 6 confirmed coronavirus cases, Hong Kong is shutting down most flights and trains between the Mainland and has closed many of its border ports of entry.
In Mainland China, the new virus has now caused more infections than did SARS during 2002-2003, although the death rate is much lower, but 200 or 300 deaths in a population of nearly 1.4 billion is not immediately reminiscent of the plague or the Spanish flu, both of which caused millions of deaths around the world.
And indeed China as well experiences many more deaths from the simple flu each year, yet China has allocated nearly 30 billion RMB (about US$4 billion) to support the battle against this novel coronavirus. The fear and the over-reaction (if indeed it is such) appear to stem simply from the fact that this pathogen is new.
Train travel during this holiday was down by about 75% from the same period last year. China extended the country’s New Year holiday in an attempt to permit citizens to remain isolated at their homes for a longer period, but there will soon be a large wave of travelers returning to their place of residence or work, with the dangers of further infections.
Airlines from numerous countries announced the reduction or full cancellation of all flights to China, and Russia, Mongolia and North Korea blocked all crossings into China until March 1, Russia effectively closing its 4,200 Km border. The US and many other nations have recommended the avoidance of any travel to China. As well, many businesses in China have elected to temporarily close their doors, including Starbucks and McDonald’s, IKEA and others. (2)
The Italian government declared a state of emergency in an effort to “allegedly” prevent the spread of the coronavirus strain after two cases were confirmed in Rome. Italy, Air France, Delta Airlines, Air Canada, British Airways, Lion Air and Seoul Air, Finnair, Cathay Pacific and Jetstar Asia have suspended all flights to and from China. Several other airlines including were reducing the number of flights to the country as demand for travel drops.
Many nations have now evacuated most of their diplomatic staff from China, including the US, France and Japan.
Australia said it would quarantine suspected infections for two weeks on a small island about 1,600 Kms from its mainland, and Singapore has barred all travelers who have visited mainland China during the past two weeks. (3) Elsewhere, more than 6,000 tourists were under lockdown aboard a cruise ship at an Italian port on Thursday after two Chinese passengers from Macao were isolated over fears they could be carrying the coronavirus. (4)
The WHO Declared a Global Emergency
On January 30, the WHO declared the virus outbreak as a global emergency, an “extraordinary event” that constitutes a risk to other countries and requires a coordinated international response. This was prompted by the rapid rise in reported infections, especially having spread to 18 other nations where there were cases of human-to-human transmission. France confirmed that a doctor who was in contact with a patient with the new virus later became infected himself, and medical specialists worry that the spread of new viruses from patients to health workers can signal the virus is becoming adapted to human transmission and thus become much more infectious. (5)
The WHO Director-General said the declaration was not a vote of non-confidence in China, nor what was happening in China, but because of what is happening in other countries, and that “Our greatest concern is the potential for this virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems which are ill-prepared to deal with it.”
Marion Koopmans, an infectious diseases specialist at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands and a member of WHO’s emergency committee wondered if the virus was “more infectious than previously thought or if there was something unusual in those circumstances”. Another virologist suggested the transmission was easier than initially assumed, stating that “If transmission between humans was difficult, then the numbers would have plateaued”. Another medical officer stated that this new virus “has spread at unprecedented scale and speed, with cases passing between people in multiple countries across the world.”
There were Western media reports that Wuhan medical authorities had been arrested for breaking the news about the virus, but those claims were not true. What did happen was that some unrelated individuals circulated online comments that SARS had returned to China and had been detected in Wuhan’s hospitals, which claim rattled a great many people. The police did interview them because spreading unfounded or false rumors that upset public stability is a crime in China. However these 8 individuals were released and later commended because their evidence proved to be essentially correct even though, as the chief epidemiologist at the CCDC stated, they “lacked scientific evidence”. In fact, China’s Supreme Court issued a statement on this, saying “Facts show that, although the novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia was not SARS, information released by the eight people was not entirely fabricated.” (6)
In a surprising move, the mayor of Wuhan, Zhou Xianwang said that the public were initially unsatisfied with the speed of information disclosure, and that the rapid effective lockdown of the city was upsetting to many people. He said,
“I hope the public can understand that it’s an infectious disease, and . . . It’s unprecedented to lockdown a city with more than 10 million people. However, faced with the current situation, we’ve closed the city gate and possibly besieged the virus within the city. We might leave a bad name in history.”
He then stated “But if it’s conducive to the control of the virus and the protection of the safety of the people”, both he and the party chief in Wuhan would resign if that would appease any existing indignation. (7) Typically, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (an anti-Mainland publication) twisted the story to read “Wuhan mayor under pressure to resign over response to virus”, when in fact there was no outside pressure. (8)
It was heartwarming that privately-owned Chinese hotels in Wuhan voluntarily provided free rooms for medical staff needing rest. Xiao Yaxing, the private owner of a four-star hotel in the city, opened a discussion group on Chinese social media platform WeChat where he appealed to his peers from more than 40 hotels to offer rooms for doctors and nurses who were working day and night to save lives. He said that since nearly all transportation had ceased in the large city, it was difficult for the medical staff to get to hospitals from home and needed rest places as well. Xiao said “Many hotels in Wuhan are shut down for travelers, leaving a lot of empty rooms that we can offer for free.” (9)
China’s state-owned enterprises also mobilised their resources to combat the outbreak of pneumonia caused by the novel coronavirus. The nation’s major telecom operators initiated emergency responses to ensure effective communications in Hubei Province, and SOE pharma companies have made extreme efforts to accelerate production of test kits and medical appliances, as well as working around the clock to develop vaccines against the virus. (10)
And of course, every silver lining has a cloud. Retail giants Carrefour and Wal-Mart are being fined millions of RMB for illegal price-gouging, profiteering frauds, and “otherwise cheating” their customers during this crisis, both having apparently been warned in advance only a few days prior by the authorities and both firms ignoring the warnings. It must be said that both Carrefour and especially Wal-Mart have a long history in China of various kinds of fraudulent practices. A few years ago, all the Wal-Mart stores in Chongqing Province were shuttered and six top executives arrested for a massive public fraud, with the company receiving a heavy fine. (11)
As an example in this instance, one branch alone of Carrefour in Shanghai had taken advantage of the public anxiety to mark up their regular vegetable prices from (for example) 2.5 RMB to 19.8, from 3.87 to 19.55, and from 4.26 to 18.33, while their procurement costs had remained stable. The authorities discovered that both Carrefour and Wal-Mart had been further cheating customers with false prices or misleading tags but charging 30% to 50% more at the check-out. These price frauds occurred in many stores in many provinces by both firms. (12)
Carrefour China apologized for any pricing irregularities and said the company would establish “a special control group to conduct internal price quality inspections”. Wal-Mart for its part also issued a statement saying it would “strengthen efforts on price inspections and treat any problems extremely seriously”. However, these are the same statements these two companies make each time they are caught and fined for fraudulent practices. (13)
Some Troubling Background
Each of these items below, and indeed all of them together, might be dismissed as mere coincidences. It is too early to form conclusions, but these facts and events have startled and alarmed some people from their topical relevance and their correspondence in terms of time.
Part of the unsettling nature of these events is that many tragedies in the world in recent times have had ‘trial runs’, with the authorities conducting simulated events that uncannily resembled the real event which took place shortly afterward. The Boston Marathon bombing in the US a few years ago was one such event, where hundreds of citizens testified that what appeared to be FBI agents carried out precisely such a simulation only days before the actual bombing took place. There are many such, and all well-documented, though the mass media avoided all discussion of them.
Chinese officials initially believed the virus originated at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, but say it now appears now that there were multiple sources of the infection. Huang Chaolin, a Chinese pulmonary disease specialist, vice director of Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, revealed some early findings on the clinical data of the first 41 novel coronavirus cases. In a new published paper in the Lancet, he said that four of the first five cases had no contact with the seafood market and that only 27 of the first 41 cases had such exposure. “Judging from the whole situation, the seafood market may not be the only source. The origin of the novel coronavirus might be multi-source.” (14)
While a few Caucasians and other Asians have been infected to date, the virus so far appears to still be tightly focused to Chinese. In my previous article on this virus, I referred to a thesis on Biological Weapons by Leonard Horowitz and Zygmunt Dembek who stated that clear signs of a genetically-engineered bio-warfare agent were (1) a disease caused by an uncommon (unusual, rare, or unique) agent, with (2) lack of an epidemiological explanation, i.e. no clear idea of source; (3) An “unusual manifestation and/or geographic distribution”, such as race-specificity; and (4) “multiple sources” of infection. This case now has all four. (15)
There is another matter involving racial susceptibility to this 2019-nCov infection disease. A group of Chinese virologists discovered that at least some Chinese have an extremely large number of a particular kind of cell in their lungs, which relate to regulating both viral reproduction and transmission. They claimed this as the appropriate “biological background for the epidemic investigation of the 2019-nCov.” (16) (17)
Another strange occurrence was around two years ago when the US Air Force placed a listing on the Federal Business Opportunities website asking for at least 12 RNA samples from Russian people of a European ancestry, as well as 27 samples of Russian synovial fluid. The contract stated that all samples must be “collected from Russia and must be Caucasian. The Government will not consider tissue samples from Ukraine”. (18)
Igor Nikulin, a former member of the UN commission on biological weapons, noted that the RNA samples can be used to develop viruses.
“New types of biological weapons are being developed. There’s nothing else that could possibly interest the military department. Most likely, they are weaponised viruses. The US is trying to develop various types of biological weapons specifically for specific carriers of this gene pool, and Caucasoids are needed since they constitute the majority of the population of our country. This is the same focus group for which they are trying to find the samples. It’s necessary for the viruses to act selectively on one or another ethnic group.”
Wuhan was holding the World Military Games just a few weeks prior to the outbreak of the virus, with a huge foreign contingent present. 300 US military personnel arrived in Wuhan for these Games which lasted into November, not long before the infections began. There is no proven link between these two, but merely questions which arise from the timing. (19) (20)
In October of 2019, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation co-hosted a pandemic exercise with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in conjunction with the UK’s Pirbright Institute, using precisely such a novel corona virus outbreak. It was called “Event 201”, and was a simulation exercise that envisioned a fast-spreading coronavirus with a devastating impact. In their simulation, the coronavirus resulted in a death toll of 65 million people within 18 months – surpassing the deadliest pandemic in history, the 1918 Spanish flu. (21)
The organisers were saying,
“Efforts to prevent such consequences or respond to them as they unfold will require unprecedented levels of collaboration between governments, international organizations, and the private sector.”
In their narrative,
“the immune-resistant virus was crippling trade and travel, sending the global economy into freefall. Social media was rampant with rumors and misinformation, governments were collapsing, and citizens were revolting.” They claimed this scenario was “utterly realistic”.
Aside from the coincidence with a virtually identical breakout in China, perhaps the most revealing part was the group’s focus on the necessity of “deep coordination with the ‘private’ sector” because, in their words, “vaccine development is slow and difficult if there isn’t an immediate market for it.” Comments of this kind unfortunately raise immediate questions.
Another serious matter is the Pirbright Institute itself which assisted in the above simulation. The Pirbright Institute is one of the UK’s two major bio-weapons labs, the other being Porton Down. It was from Pirbright that foot and mouth disease viruses “escaped” twice in recent years, devastating the small farmers by killing all the cattle and that resulted in UK farming suddenly being taken over by big agra.
This so-called institute has what must surely be the worst record of safety, of ethics, and of story-telling ability among the entire world’s Level 4 biolabs. For background, a Level 4 lab is perhaps the most secure place on earth. No unauthorised person can even approach, much less enter, and an exit requires, among other things, stripping naked for decontamination. Nothing, no materials can be removed from the site, for obvious reasons, without a police or military escort. However, when the foot and mouth disease ravaged England and the source was definitively traced to Pirbright, their response was that “animal activists” had entered the lab and stolen some vials of pathogens and released them. The great majority of English, unfamiliar with the technical features of biolabs, probably believed the story which was pure fantasy.
A related issue is that Pirbright’s presence at the simulation was no doubt due to the fact that they have created and patented several (five, I believe) coronaviruses, one of which was used in the simulation – US Patent # 10,130,701 issued November 20, 2018. It is curious that Pirbright is partially funded by the Gates Foundation (a “primary funder”), leading one to wonder why Bill Gates would be financing a UK bioweapons lab. We are told the interest is in vaccines, but a biolab that creates and patents lethal pathogens could avoid the cost of vaccine research by not creating the pathogens in the first instance. Pirbright own the patents for five different new kinds of corona viruses, but have also created and patented a wide range of other pathogens, including (with funding from Gates) “engineered Mosquito Genes” (weaponising insects, in fact), which some believe was the original source of Oxytech’s mosquitoes that released the Zika virus. (22) (23)
Then in late January, Netflix released a new documentary called ‘Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak’, which alarmed many people with the coincidence of it being released just as the coronavirus is spreading worldwide.
Some dismissed this as an elaborate publicity stunt, but its contents are too detailed and too linked to China’s coronavirus to be an accident. The series examines the worldwide healthcare system, discussed possible sources of viruses that could cause a worldwide pandemic, and examines humanity’s ability to cope. Given that the documentary required some time for production, many worried citizens on the Internet are asking if Netflix had prior knowledge. It is an alarmist documentary, encouraging the public to be “most scared of influenza and respiratory (corona) viruses, with phrases like “Pandemic Is Now”, “Seek Don’t Hide”, “Prayers Might Work”. It too focuses on the ‘private sector’ as the world’s savior with privately-produced (and for-profit) vaccines. (24) (25) (26)
In another disparaging article, CNN claims, “historically a mass quarantine is an aggressive response that’s far from perfect. In the past it has led to political, financial and social consequences.”
Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University and director of the WHO’s Center on Global Health Law, said the move was “unprecedented,” and, he thought, “very unwise.” “Nothing on this scale has ever been tried,” he told CNN. “There’s very little evidence of its effectiveness. And I think there’s good reason to think that it could backfire, from a public health, social, human rights perspective.”
CNN claims they can lead to “logistical issues”, that merely the word “quarantine” will cause panic and hysteria. Apparently there are also “human rights implications”, one US expert stating, “I don’t think you can enforce a mass quarantine of 30 million people without violating human rights.” The same expert claimed it could easily spur public violence and a distrust of health authorities, and that there will be broad “financial and social consequences” and will “hinder local economic activity”. Gostin then claimed that “Getting the buy-in from the people you’re protecting is essential,” he said, “and always better than ordering people to do stuff.”
It would seem that, for China, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. (27)
Other media and internet posters regularly insinuate or claim that the new coronavirus “leaked from the Wuhan bio-weapons lab”, yet another example of writers making claims while lacking any close personal acquaintance with the facts. The University of Wuhan contains The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is one of the country’s premier biosafety laboratories which works with the WHO and other international groups as part of a large network studying pathogens from all over the world, as do all other such institutes. I have seen many insinuations or accusations of the Institute being a bio-weapons lab, but those are claims made with no supporting evidence. I am generally aware of the Institute, and it is purely a civilian operation. It has never been associated with biological military or combat research.
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(4) https://www.afp.com/en/news/15/thousands-held-liner-italy-over-virus-fears-china-couple-doc-1oj72z2
(6) http://english.www.gov.cn/statecouncil/ministries/202001/30/content_WS5e327e60c6d019625c604324.html
(9) en.people.cn/n3/2020/0125/c90000-9651777.html
(10) https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202001/25/WS5e2b76faa3101282172732ab.html
(14) Shanghai Daily, Wednesday, January 29, 2020; https://www.shine.cn/news/nation/2001290806/
(15) Medical Aspects of Biological Warfare; https://repository.netecweb.org/items/show/325
(21) http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/newsroom/center-news/2020-01-17-Event201-recommendations.html
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2020
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