February 7, 2022
Is the Coronavirus the Greatest Crime Against Humanity?
By Janet Levy
China hid the outbreak of Covid-19 from the world for months[i]. Brave Chinese citizens had been sending out smoke signals, but governments did not take notice. Now, there is reason to suspect that some scientists in the U.S. were aware of (if not complicit in) a cover-up that began as soon as the pandemic started.
It wasn’t until December 31, 2019, that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) acknowledged that a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic had broken out in Hubei province, where the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is located. But Beck says there’s substantial evidence of it having begun much earlier. Let’s look at the events chronologically.
Months before the official acknowledgment, photographs and videos of empty streets, closed businesses, and the enforcement of precautionary measures in Hubei had been appearing on social media. Beijing’s denials of a pandemic were disproved by posts from medical professionals showing hospitals overflowing with sick and dying patients. Videos showed officials dragging away infected people from their homes, even welding doors shut to confine people to their buildings.
More to lend credence to retrospective theories of wrong-doing came from a September 12, 2019 event – the WIV database on coronaviruses was taken down. Research organizations freely share such databases with scientists, but WIV alleged that hackers were targeting it. The institute requisitioned additional security. Some days later, the institute updated its air-handling system, an unusual activity to prioritize during a data breach. Experts believe the lab was probably rectifying its biosafety ventilation – but after the virus had escaped.
In October of the same year, Wuhan hosted the Military World Games, attended by more than 10,000 athletes from 100 countries. Participants remarked that the streets were empty; Wuhan seemed like “a ghost town.” They spoke of rumors that the government had warned Chinese citizens not to venture out. On arrival, athletes were required to have their temperature taken and to wash their hands before entering any building. When American athletes returned home, according to information released by the Pentagon, infections occurred at 63 military facilities. In addition, athletes from other countries reported falling ill at the games and later infecting their families. Military and medical experts were already suspecting that China was hiding a medical emergency.
On December 3, 2019, following reports of researchers getting sick, the WIV requested an air- curtain incinerator, a device used to control air emissions during burning. While it’s not unusual for labs to use it to prevent airborne pathogens from spreading, the timing – and China’s stonewalling of international efforts to investigate the institute – have made scientists wonder what was amiss.
Later in December, an intriguing high-level intervention took place. On President Xi Jinping’s orders, access was blocked to some abandoned mines in Yunnan province. Officials confiscated bat samples taken from the site by a visiting team. Chinese coronavirus specialists were warned not to speak to the press.
Dr. Zhengli Shi of the WIV, the ‘Batwoman’ at the center of the suspicions about the origin of the virus, had ostensibly been extracting viruses from bat guano obtained in those mines. Genetic analysis reveals that it cannot be ruled out that the Covid-19 virus was engineered using viruses from bats. Scientists like Prof. Angus Dalgleish and Dr. Birger Sorensen claim they have prima facie evidence of “retro-engineering in China” to make the virus seem to have emerged naturally in bats.
In 2020, Dr. Shi and Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina published a paper on the pathogenesis of COVID-19 in humanized mice that referenced lab work done by the WIV researcher in the summer of 2019. In retrospect, this might be the work that resulted in the outbreak. Or the paper could be part of a deception. It’s difficult to tell, even for scientists.
In his book Uncontrolled Spread, Dr. Scott Gottlieb reports on the Chinese crackdown on labs, which were ordered to stop testing, destroy samples and suppress information related to the virus. Social media postings were expunged and Chinese officials were reticent to share samples of the novel coronavirus for the development of tests and therapeutics. China restricted domestic travel but allowed international travel. It denied human-to-human transmission.
When a team from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) visited on January 8, 2020, the Chinese government withheld information about hospital workers who had been infected by patients. News of the contagious nature of the virus and a subsequent quarantine became public three days later. Despite that, the WHO tweeted on January 14 that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission.
Part One