What really happened in.., p.33
What Really Happened In Wuhan, page 33
German volleyball player Linda Bock told the Daily Mail that many in her team were sick and even her father fell ill a few weeks after her return to Germany. “I got sick in the last two days,” she said. “I have never felt so sick. Either it was a very bad cold or Covid-19. I think it was Covid-19.” Italian fencer Matteo Tagliariol also told the Daily Mail that everybody in his Wuhan apartment became sick with symptoms similar to Covid-19. His son and girlfriend later got sick.
Another athlete, Luxembourg swimmer Julien Henx claims that when he landed in Wuhan there was a non-contact body-temperature scanner at the airport. He told media that two of his teammates were sick during the competition. Another in the Luxembourg team, triathlete Oliver Gorges, who also fell sick, claimed Wuhan was a “ghost town” when he went for a cycle in the city, and also said his temperature was recorded on arrival at the airport. Luxembourg swimmers Raphaël Stacchiotti and Pit Brandenburger also fell ill, while their teammate Michel Erpelding, a boxer, said a cafe owner had been advised to keep track of who had visited his house. When journalists jumped on the story, they found many athletes had been gagged from speaking to the media about the illness.
As already noted, the Military World Games finished just 20 days before the first recorded case of Covid-19 in Wuhan. “If more evidence were discovered, it would add to the growing body of evidence that the virus was circulating in Wuhan as early as October 2019, months before the Chinese government acknowledged it to the rest of the world,” Josh Rogin wrote in a June 2021 column, revealing US politician Mike Gallagher was demanding an official investigation.
Even when news broke of a new coronavirus in Wuhan, no government officials thought to test the athletes who had participated in the games for antibodies. It may have very well been a super-spreader event, taking Covid-19 around the globe.
The Pentagon told news outlet The American Prospect in June 2020 that there was no reason to test or screen the 300 Americans who had travelled to Wuhan for the Military World Games, returning home to 25 states because it “was prior to the reported outbreak”.
If the virus was circulating at this time, Miles Yu said it explains why the Chinese Communist Party tried to keep it under wraps. “The Military [World] Games were so important for the CCP so if there was an outbreak there is motive for them to cover-up,” he says. Yu was the only United States Government official who tried to investigate why the athletes had fallen sick. He looked at the traffic patterns via the Wuhan Traffic Control Bureau, and noticed certain roads were closed around the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He also noticed how close the athletes’ village was to the Institute. “There was something weird going on, but my investigations were not conclusive enough,” he says.
In the weeks after the military games, a British schoolteacher Connor Reed, who was working in Wuhan at the time, fell ill with what he later suspected was Covid-19. From November 25, 2020 he became extremely sick with a fever, cough and pneumonia, giving an account of his symptoms to multiple media outlets after he recovered. Tragically, he died just under a year later while in lockdown in Britain. His parents in Queensland, Australia watched his funeral remotely via a live-feed.
The illness during the Military World Games gave rise to conspiracies in China that America was responsible for the outbreak. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director claimed that it could have been the US Army who brought the virus into Wuhan. “When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected?” he asked on Twitter on March 13, 2020. “What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”
Meanwhile, other conspiracy theories claiming the virus was released during the Military World Games point to YouTube footage where Xi Jinping gives a speech at the opening ceremony. It does not include a wide shot to place him in the city or at the venue. Instead he is speaking against a red screen. The broadcast then flashes to photographs of the crowd. Conspiracy theorists say perhaps he wasn’t actually at the Military World Games and this is when the virus was released. Of course, there is no evidence for this.
David Asher, who has had experience leading task forces into North Korea and Iran to investigate nuclear weapons programs, retains an open mind that the virus potentially could have been deliberately released. But he thinks it’s extremely likely it was an accidental release based on the fact that “Beijing authorities seemed surprised in the fall of 2019 and totally caught off-guard.” Even with an accidental release, Asher says the possibility could not be ruled out that the “Wuhan Institute of Virology coronavirus super-virus research” was directly related to vaccine research done by a laboratory on the same compound called the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products. “That pan betacoronavirus vaccine may have been developed as ‘antidote’ to a future bioweapon including involving Covid-19,” Asher hypothesises. Asher says one theory on the table is that Covid-19 actually leaked during vaccine development. This may explain, he says, “how on earth Major General Chen Wei, the PLA leader who took over the Wuhan Institute of Virology on January 23, and six military scientist on her team stood in front of a Chinese Communist Party flag in March and received injections of an experimental Covid-19 vaccine. There’s also some published evidence certain scientists have found that there was adenovirus present in the sequences posted publicly,” Mr Asher said. “Adenovirus means that there was a vaccine present for Covid-19; that could indicate that this was a bio-defence project putting a vaccine together. People don’t normally develop a vaccine for something they are working on that is many evolutionary turns away from a naturally occurring virus. That doesn’t make any sense, to develop a vaccine in advance for something that would never see the light of day makes it sort of ridiculous, but is totally consistent with a biological weapons program. An offensive biological weapons program would logically have to develop an antidote.”
In two of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s earliest samples from Covid-19 patients, the raw-reads (basic sequencing output) of deep sequences (multiple sequences of the same genetic region) showed extensive contamination. This could indicate a dirty laboratory environment, Dr Steven Quay says. “The one thing other than SARS-CoV-2 that stands out is an influenza vaccine that’s never been published,” he said. “In one sample, it’s even higher than the SARS-CoV-2 level.” This could potentially indicate that while the patient was sick in hospital with Covid-19 they were given a flu vaccine. This would be unusual.
US physicist Professor Richard Muller has another theory. Professor Muller is a brilliant scientist. He has published more than 120 scientific papers including on the origin of comets and the nature of time, and written 10 books, including one called Now: The Physics of Time. Famous for his work in astrophysics and geophysics, he founded and led two major projects for which Nobel Prizes were awarded, and has won a dozen other awards and prizes. He’s the principal author of the Nemesis theory, which postulates that there is a distant dwarf star orbiting the sun.
Over three decades, Professor Muller has been a high-level advisor to the US government, including the Department of Energy, NASA, Department of Defense and other bodies, on science and technology issues relating to energy, intelligence analysis, counterterrorism and national security. He holds the highest level of security clearance and has advised on such top-secret issues as weapons of mass destruction.
He points to the first coronavirus samples taken at the end of December, which arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on December 30 for analysis. The genetic sequence of these earliest samples were then published by Nature magazine, “so the Chinese scientists could not pull them back,” Muller says. “Virologists can see that two samples measured were heavily contaminated and may actually have a vaccine in them,” he said. Muller says it’s possible the sample was contaminated, “But to me, as someone who has worked in national security for a long time, the more obvious explanation is someone in the Wuhan laboratory was a whistleblower,” he says.
Muller then pauses. “Have you read The Da Vinci Code?” he asks. Who hasn’t? “In it, someone leaves a clue behind that can only be read by the right expert. Here’s my fantasy. Someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was really upset they were developing a bioweapon. They went into virology because they wanted to save lives, to stop pandemics, but now the military had taken control of part of the laboratory and they were weaponising viruses. That person has no direct way to get the word out. If you have a sample of the vaccine and you happen just for 10 seconds to get access to the patient’s sample, you put a little bit of the vaccine in there hoping that someone in the West will notice. It went unnoticed until Steven Quay looked for it. If a vaccine was in there it indicates this was being weaponised. It’s a great way to spike the sample in a way the process of publication would bring the message to the West but it would only be read by the right person. That someone would say, ‘Oh my god, there’s a vaccine in there.’”
It’s a wonderful fantasy. Dr Quay says he hadn’t considered the possibility of a whistleblower contaminating the sample until Professor Muller raised it. He says the vaccine appears to be for an unpublished influenza virus. This could simply indicate the laboratory was working on a vaccine unrelated to Covid-19, which you would expect it to do. He said he is still analysing the virus samples in collaboration with other scientists.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A Latent Threat to Mankind
One discovery Miles Yu made while investigating the Wuhan laboratories was more eye-opening than any other. Hard at work preparing his report for Pompeo, he happened upon documents relating to the United Nations Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. It’s a conference held every five years, dating back to the 1980s, to ensure the international biological weapons treaty is upheld globally.
Yu stumbled across a document that had some details from China’s submission to the 2011 Convention. It wasn’t China’s entire submission but it included the research fields China had featured in it. They were “Creation of Man-Made Pathogens”, “Population-specific Genetic Markers” and, astonishingly, “Targeted Drug-delivery Technology Making it Easier to Spread Pathogens”, among others.
That the Chinese government included, in an official submission, research in the field of “man-made pathogens” was exceptional, Yu thought. It was disconcerting that the gain-of-function research underway at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell under a category China was disclosing at a biological weapons convention. Shocked, Yu reached out to Ottawa, the host, to try to obtain China’s official submission. He never received it, but he felt the fields of research alone were damning enough and he included them in his report, marked “Sensitive but unclassified”, for Pompeo and others at the White House to read.
“China has been conducting research on dangerous dual-use biological and genetic technologies that are prone to causing global pandemics,” his internal State Department report stated. “China’s submissions are a chilling display of what its scientists are doing.” The Wall Street Journal op-ed he co-authored with Pompeo in February 2021 featured a line summarising the research fields as well.
Yu mentioned the document to Asher and the AVC team in December 2020, but they were unable to locate it before the unit was disbanded with the incoming Biden administration. The investigation for this book led to the discovery of China’s original and full submission. The document raises terrifying areas of viral research. It cannot be explained away by CCP defenders – this is the official Chinese government submission to the United Nations Biological Weapons convention. It is their last detailed submission, with China only providing a scaled-back document at the next conference five years later.
It starts by noting that modern biological sciences play an “important role in helping mankind combat disease”. In the sentences that follow, China makes two unnerving admissions. Firstly, that it can’t comply with the international treaty and secondly, that new biological technology poses a threat to the very existence of mankind. “At the same time, the use of new kinds of biotechnology for hostile purposes, posing a latent threat to human society, is also growing,” it states. “The ‘dual use’ nature of biotechnology enables it, on the one hand, to pose many challenges to full and strict compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention.”
In its submission, the Chinese government says that since the sixth conference, held five years earlier in 2006, “there have been almost daily developments in biotechnology – rapid advances in synthetic biology, genomics, systems biology, drug targeting technology and microbial forensics, for instance – throwing up fresh challenges and opportunities for compliance with the Convention”.
The document then discusses “synthetic biology enabling the creation of man-made pathogens”. Man-made pathogens are created through gain-of-function research, in which the Wuhan Institute of Virology was engaging in and the United States was at times funding. The document states that these “have the potential to be used for evil ends”. “Theoretically speaking, synthetic biotechnology poses a huge latent threat to mankind, as it could be used in the future to create pathogens of even greater toxicity and infectiousness than those currently known, and which are resistant to traditional vaccines and drugs as well as hard to isolate and identify with present day technology,” it states.
In another section, it speaks about how the sequencing of pathogen DNA has helped develop new drugs and vaccines. But the same data can also be used to synthesise new pathogens and modify pathogen antigenicity, infection specificity, toxicity, and resistance to drugs, causing traditional means of dealing with infectious disease to fail and rendering the prevention and control of such disease even harder,” it states.
China’s submission to the convention then gets even more terrifying. Its third subheading is “Systems biology further revealing population-specific genetic markers”. This is about targeting viruses to specific races as weapons. A shocking and grotesque area of bio-research. It states that the Human Genome Project has helped “to reveal population-specific genetic variations across the genome”. “Genome-wide association studies have found variations in the genes for susceptibility to infectious diseases among different populations; epigenetic studies further indicate the existence of population-specific genetic markers of susceptibility to disease,” it states.
Then, alarmingly, “It can also create the potential for biological weapons based on genetic differences between races. Once hostile elements grasp that different ethnic groups harbour intrinsically different genetic susceptibilities to particular pathogens, they can put that knowledge into practice and create genetic weapons targeted at a racial group with a particular susceptibility.” If this is what the Chinese government was prepared to raise in a public forum, to the United Nations, we can only imagine what race-specific virus experiments they’ve been conducting in their top-secret, classified defence laboratories.
Retired PLA General Zhang Shibo also made reference to “racial-specific genetic attacks” in his 2017 book discussing seven new domains of warfare. Zhang Shibo, the former President of the National Defence University, concludes “modern biotechnology development is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability”, including the possibility that “racial-specific genetic attacks” could be deployed. This reference was uncovered by China analysts Elsa B. Kania and Wilson VornDick. They also found a textbook published by PLA National Defence University in 2017 that included a section about biology as a domain of military struggle. Kania and VornDick write that the textbook is “considered to be relatively authoritative” and mentions “the potential for new kinds of biological warfare to include specific ethnic genetic attacks”.
China’s Biological Weapons Convention submission then discusses the potential for bioweapons to be released as aerosols under the heading: “Targeted Drug-delivery Technology Making it Easier to Spread Pathogens”. Yes, “easier to spread pathogens”. The Chinese submission states: “Thanks to incessant advances in pharmaceutical technology, targeted drug-delivery techniques such as aerosols and viral vectors have also made substantial progress. These two targeted drug-delivery technologies can also be used to spread biological agents. Aerosol technology can be used effectively to spread pathogenic microbes, infecting humans through the respiratory tract. And viral vectors can very easily carry special genes into the body, thereby causing damage. Further, there is potential for the effects of aerosol delivery, specifically targeted viral vectors, transfection and gene expression to combine, greatly increasing the overall effect. Both technologies can be used by certain States and terrorist groups for malicious purposes, efficiently spreading pathogens and disease-causing genes.”
China’s submission states there is an “increased threat of biological weapons” and that the “rapid development” of biological sciences may “significantly increase the destructiveness of biological weapons”. “One way it may do so is by increasing the virulence of pathogenic micro-organisms. Microbial genomic research can enhance the virulence or pathogenicity of a pathogen by modifying its antigenic properties,” it states. “Another way is by rendering traditional medicines and vaccines ineffective. Supergenes conferring resistance to antibiotics can be synthesised by DNA recombination technology, making pathogens highly drug-resistant. Pathogens with detoxifying genes can also be produced, as can pathogens that can evade recognition and attack by the immune system, rendering vaccines and medicines useless.
“A third way is by making the target population more susceptible to pathogenic microbes. RNA interference can inactivate specific genes in the body, inhibit expression of important bodily proteins, disrupt physiological function and heighten the effects of a bioweapon attack. And a fourth way is by making biological attacks more stealthy. Foreign genes or viruses can be introduced into the target population asymptomatically by means of gene-therapy vectors, enabling a biological weapon attack to be mounted covertly.”
